Recorded on the Chiming Frontier Conducted by an unnamed scholar My own notes, made at the time, are in brackets.

Opening Remarks

Scholar: I have read the public doctrine. What does Ironvale not publish?

(He never sat down, and he did not offer me a seat either. I do not think it occurred to him. He walked the length of the hall while he talked and came back, and on each pass his hand went out to the same rail without his looking at it.)

Stonemantle: You've read the doctrine, good, that saves us an hour. Then you know we don't hide what we are, which is the part everyone quotes at me, usually to suggest I've been indiscreet about something.

We don't publish everything, that's true. Hollowglass lock theirs in a chamber where you need three signatures and a good reason. Ours is different. Some of it will kill you if you learn it in the wrong order, and there's no way to write "learn this in the right order" on a page that survives contact with an eighteen-year-old.

Scholar: Why does the order matter so much out here?

Stonemantle: Because out here the Deepening pools in the deep places. The void's in everything, the snow, the rock, the water if you're careless about where you get it. And you learn very fast that external power draws attention. Radiation at Presence? You're a bonfire. Every corrupted thing inside ten miles knows exactly where you are and roughly how good a meal you'd be.

So we built something the other Houses don't teach. Ember Core.

Technique One: Ember Core

Scholar: What is Ember Core?

(He tapped his sternum twice as he answered.)

Stonemantle: Most practitioners at Intent or Mastery let power move through them when they draw. Open the connection, channel and release, like water through a pipe. It's fast, it works, and it's about as subtle as shouting.

Ember Core is drawing power and then keeping it, compressed and held inside you. The glimmers don't only connect you to your source, they hold a reserve inside your body. Not much of one, but enough.

Scholar: At what cost?

Stonemantle: It hurts, and not only in a fight, where you'd expect it. It hurts all the time. Sitting down, eating, trying to sleep, there's a weight in your chest that is on and stays on.

And if you lose control while you're holding reserve, if the Deepening gets to you with a full core, it doesn't sever your glimmers the way it does with everyone else. It sets off what you've stored.

Scholar: Have you seen that happen?

Stonemantle: Once. Mastery, earth-touched, good man, held too much for too long because he was covering a withdrawal and wouldn't dump it. When the corruption found him he left a crater, and we buried what we could identify, which was not a great deal.

So we don't publish it. It's hardly a secret, half the frontier could guess we do something like it. We keep it back because you don't teach a person to carry that in their chest until you've had years to find out whether they'll put it down when they're told to.

Technique Two: Sunder Strike

Scholar: The doctrine emphasises internal enhancement over external manifestation. Does that hold for offence as well?

(He laughed at this, loudly, and it took a moment to subside.)

Stonemantle: You mean do we just punch harder with fire in our fists. That's what the Saltmarch couriers think, and I'd like it on your record that they're only about half wrong, which is more credit than they usually give us.

Throwing fire, shaping earth, all the external work, it's loud. It announces you. Out here that gets you killed, because the void-touched things feel Aura the way you feel a fire in a cold room. They come toward it. They don't think about it, they just come.

So, Sunder Strike.

(He showed me on a training dummy in the corner, which had been scorched, dented and patched many times over. He laid his palm flat on its chest and left it there while he explained.)

Stonemantle: You channel into the strike, and you don't release it at the target. You release it through. Push past the surface, past skin or armour or shell, and let it go inside.

Scholar: What does that do?

Stonemantle: Fire-touched using Sunder Strike, the impact looks ordinary. There's no flame or glow, nothing to see at all. Inside, the organs cook and the blood boils. They go down without a mark.

Earth-touched, the vibration carries through bone and fractures it from within. The skeleton breaks before the body's registered a hit.

Scholar: Could any practitioner learn it?

Stonemantle: It needs Ember Core underneath it, because you have to hold power compressed and then thread it through a point of contact without losing it on the way. Most practitioners can't. They've been trained to channel and release, and this is the opposite of that.

The other Houses have us down as straightforward. Honest and direct, no surprises. And we are. We've also got this.

Scholar: Is it taught to everyone in the House?

Stonemantle: We're careful who gets it. On a living target it's an ugly thing. No external wound means nobody can prove Aura was used, and that kind of invisibility attracts a sort of thinking I'd rather not have in my hall. It goes to the ones who've shown us they'll use it to protect somebody.

Sablemire would be delighted to learn we have it. They'd call it operationally elegant. We call it a last resort.

Technique Three: Shuttering

Scholar: You patrol where the Deepening pools. It severs glimmers on contact. How does anyone survive being that close to it?

(He stopped walking. It was the first time he had stopped since we began.)

Stonemantle: Now that's the question.

The treatises are right. Touch it and your connection to your source is gone, permanently, and a Mastery practitioner is a mundane person in about two seconds. Everything you built gets taken off you.

The other Houses solve this by not going near it. Don't enter corrupted ground, let the Registry handle it, keep your distance. Sensible advice if you have the option.

The Deepening pools here. In the crevasses under the Chiming Snow, in the old mineshafts, in every place the void went too deep and left something that won't close over. So we don't have the option, and we built Shuttering instead.

Scholar: What is Shuttering?

(He held up his hand. The heat-shimmer round it stopped the way a sound stops, without fading first. The room did not get colder, but the sense of him being there went out of it entirely. Then it came back.)

Stonemantle: You close your glimmers. All of them, completely, from your own side rather than the Deepening's.

Scholar: Is that the same as suppressing them?

Stonemantle: No. Vaulin teaches people to quiet their roots, reduce the draw without cutting it, and that's not enough here. The Deepening still senses a thin connection perfectly well. Shuttering is total, with no flow and no channel at all. For those seconds you are mundane, and there's nothing there for it to sever.

Scholar: That sounds dangerous in itself.

(He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the rail.)

Stonemantle: Obvious danger first. You're powerless while you're Shuttered. You've no enhancement and no strength, not even the heat. Something comes at you in that state and you are meat.

Reopening is the part that actually breaks people. Closing the connection deliberately feels like going under water. Everything in you screams to pull, to draw, to get it back. And the moment you re-establish the channel, there's a pain I've never heard anyone describe well. Something in you remembers having been severed and panics about it.

First time a trainee Shutters, they may not get it open again. The glimmers lock shut on their own. We've had people lose access for four days after a first attempt, and one for nine, and she's still serving.

Scholar: How is it trained, then?

Stonemantle: Slowly, indoors, instructor standing there. One second, then two, then five. You learn to close and open without freezing. By the time you're posted to the frontier you can hold it for a minute, which is long enough to walk straight past a pool of corruption, invisible to it, and open up on the far side.

Sablemire would give a great deal for this, operatives who can hide from Aura-sensing wards. We don't teach outsiders. Shutter at the wrong moment, fail to get it open with something already coming, and you die mundane and helpless.

Technique Four: Forge-Linking

Scholar: Everything so far is a technique for one person. Do you have any that need more than one?

(He went to a hand-drawn tactical map on the wall, with the crevasses and corrupted zones inked in dark, and traced a patrol route on it with a finger while he talked.)

Stonemantle: We don't send anybody into the deep places alone, so yes. And out here coordination's a good deal more literal than watching each other's backs.

We link our Ember Cores. Forge-Linking. Stupid name.

Scholar: How many are linked at once?

Stonemantle: Standard patrol is four. Mixed sources, usually two fire-touched, an earth-touched, and a light-touched if there's one to be had. Four practitioners in formation can share reserves. Nobody hands anything over. It works through linked resonance, with the glimmers synchronised, and you feel the others' reserves as though they were your own, which takes about a week to stop being upsetting.

If one of you draws heavy and empties out, the other three feed them. If someone needs to go to full output, a fire-touched purging a pocket with sustained heat, say, the other three carry the endurance for it. And if somebody gets hurt and starts losing hold of their core, the formation steadies them and stops them going off.

Scholar: What does it cost?

(He tapped the map twice and left his hand on it.)

Stonemantle: Linked, you share sensation as well as power. One person takes a wound, everybody feels it. One person panics, that goes through the link as well.

And if somebody dies while linked, their glimmers sever, and the severance goes through the formation. I have seen a three-person team go down because one of them fell and the shock dropped the other two where they stood.

It gets worse than that. If the Deepening reaches one linked practitioner, it doesn't stop at their glimmers. It follows the resonance and tries to take the whole formation.

That's why nobody learns Forge-Linking until they can Shutter reliably. If it comes for you through the link you have about two seconds to cut yourself off so it can't cross.

Scholar: Have you had to do that?

(He took his hand off the map.)

Stonemantle: Three times. Felt a partner's glimmers go while I was closing my own connection to keep it off the other two. Twice it worked and everyone else walked out. Once it worked and I have never been sure it needed to.

You don't forget those. People ask if you get used to it, and I don't think you do.

The other Houses cooperate. Vaulin talks about interconnection, Saltmarch has the courier network, all of it real and all of it useful. They don't link, though. Nobody else puts their soul into somebody else's hands and leaves it there for a six-hour patrol.

We do it because out here one strong person is not enough.

Technique Five: Beacon Protocols

Scholar: The doctrine says a practitioner at Presence walks openly, and calls the radiation a banner. On ground where every corrupted thing feels Aura, that seems less like a banner than a problem. What do yours actually do?

(He stopped. He had been in motion for the better part of two hours. He was quiet long enough that I began to think I had ended the interview. When he did speak, his voice was lower than it had been all afternoon, and it stayed low until he had finished this answer.)

Stonemantle: Alright.

You're right about the problem. At Presence you radiate and you cannot stop. Every corrupted thing for miles knows. The other Houses call that a cost, and it is one.

We build on it. Beacon Protocols.

A practitioner at Presence on this frontier does not try to hide the radiation. They use it. They become the thing everything corrupted comes to.

Scholar: In what way?

Stonemantle: When we need to clear a zone, a deep crevasse or an old shaft where the Deepening has pooled, we don't send a team in to hunt every twisted thing in the dark one at a time. We send one Presence in.

They walk to the middle of it and burn bright. They amplify deliberately and make themselves impossible to ignore. And every corrupted thing in that zone comes for them, because it cannot do anything else, the way a moth can't.

The strike team is already round the perimeter. Practitioners at Intent and Mastery, Shuttered, invisible to all of it, positioned and waiting. When the corrupted things have converged and committed, the team opens up from every angle at once. There are Sunder Strikes into backs, earth-touched bringing tunnel sections down, and fire-touched igniting from cover.

And the one in the centre isn't only bait. When they close in, that practitioner goes to full output, and the zone gets scoured.

That's the theory, and it works.

Scholar: And in practice?

Stonemantle: What actually happens is that the practitioner in the centre takes everything. Every strike that lands before the team can intercept, every thing that gets past the perimeter. They stand in the middle of it and hold. If they break, if they run or fall or Shutter to get out, the corrupted things scatter and the ambush fails. Then we come back in a month and do it again with more people.

I've run the protocol twice. Once on the strike team, once as the beacon.

The first time I watched Commander Steelforge stand in the middle of a corrupted mineshaft for eleven minutes while things I have no words for went at her. She held. We cleared it. She lived, and she's retired now, up past the Fifth Ward.

The second time it was me.

(His hand went to his collar. There were old scars underneath it that I had not seen until then.)

Stonemantle: As the beacon, those eleven minutes feel like they'll never end. You can't Shutter, because you need the power to survive the next thirty seconds. You can't move, because the whole thing depends on where you're standing. You stay there.

And all the way through it you know that if the Deepening reaches you, if one of those things is carrying enough of it, you don't only lose your power. You lose it in the middle of them, with the team counting on the beacon holding, and you're Forge-Linked, so it may take them with you.

(A long pause.)

Stonemantle: That's what Presence means here, and it has nothing to do with glory, or with mastery either. You do it because somebody has to and you're the one who can survive being the centre of attention for everything that wants you dead.

(He started walking again, and his voice came back up to its usual volume.)

Stonemantle: Other Houses, their practitioners at Presence are advisors and commanders, and some of them are ornaments. They sit in a good chair and radiate authority at people, while ours go down the shaft.

Closing Remarks

Scholar: Thank you. That is a great deal more than I expected to be told.

Stonemantle: That's the five, scholar. Any one of them could get me a reprimand and I'd survive all five.

You wanted to know what Ironvale keeps to itself, and now you do. What you do with it is your business. Publish it and we'll deny the lot. Try to teach it out of a page without the costs attached and you'll get somebody killed.

You asked plain questions and didn't flatter me, which I notice, so you got straight answers.

Train hard. Burn bright.

And if you're ever on this frontier when the void-snow comes down heavy and the things come up from below, we're the ones between you and it. It wants doing and we're here.

Now get out of my training hall. I've a patrol to prep.

Summary of Techniques Revealed

Set down from memory the same evening, in the order he gave them.

1. Ember Core. Power drawn and held internally rather than channelled through. Constant pain while carried. Detonates if the Deepening reaches a practitioner with a full core. Years of testing before it is taught.

1. Sunder Strike. Power released through a point of contact and let go inside the target. No external wound. Requires Ember Core underneath it. Taught selectively.

1. Shuttering. Voluntary total closure of the glimmers from the practitioner's own side. Invisible to the Deepening, and completely powerless while held. Reopening is the difficult half, and a first attempt can lock the connection shut for days.

1. Forge-Linking. Four practitioners in formation synchronise their Ember Cores and share reserves. Sensation crosses the link as well as power. A death in the formation can drop the rest, and the Deepening will follow the resonance if it can.

1. Beacon Protocols. One practitioner at Presence amplifies deliberately to draw every corrupted thing in a zone, while a Shuttered strike team closes from the perimeter. The beacon is bait and hammer both, and cannot Shutter or withdraw without collapsing the operation.

He gave me all five in a single afternoon without once asking what I intended to do with them. I could not tell whether that was trust or indifference, and I did not ask.