The Lens

The lens is a brass instrument recovered from the satchel of the Fixer — the criminal known as Giovanna — after she was taken. It is a circular device: a flat disc set with concentric rings that can rotate, a clouded crystal shaped like a half-sphere at its center, and a band of runic symbols worked around its outer edge. Those runes are cardinal directions — north, south, east, west — written in a very old script of dwarvish, and the device seems to carry some kind of compass element.

Attunement and the Vision

The lens must be attuned before it will do anything, and that seems to require someone of innate magical ability to sit with it for about an hour of focused study. When Aelion attuned to it, the rings began to turn on their own and the clouded crystal cleared, the way fog burns out of a valley at sunrise.

As the crystal cleared, Aelion was drawn into a vision: a field of lavender under a blue moon. Silver lines were burned into the field in an ordered pattern, marking six points. He stood at one of them. Another glowed faintly across the field, and he could feel four more in other directions. A presence whose voice seemed to come from the moon itself spoke a single phrase into his mind — "Not finished" — and he understood, without being told, that the lens is one piece of something made of six, and that someone is gathering them.

Held up toward the moon, the lens gives a fisheye view, sharp enough to pick out the craters and the bluish cast around the moon's edges. At sea it seemed inert.

The Note

Folded into an inner flap of the satchel with the lens was a note, signed only V:

Two of six. The northern site is confirmed. Retrieve the lens and bring it to the waypoint. Do not return to Aristonia.

The "two of six" matches the six points of the vision — meaning at least one of the other pieces is already in someone else's hands.

In the Vex Caves

Carried into the Vex Caves, the lens stirred as it had not before. Amid the brass conduits of the cave's inner corridors — thin channels tuned to draw the ambient weave into a single line — the lens's compass rings woke, and Aelion felt it pull him steadily toward a direction leading deeper in, toward a doorway at the far end. The lens's brass working and its behavior echo the cave's own brass instruments closely enough that the two seem to be kindred craft: the same lost art of gathering and channeling the weave through worked brass.

That pull had a destination. In the caves' great workshop the lens began to hum aloud, loud enough for the whole party to hear, and the sound peaked at the dark metal ring on the central pedestal — the throttle. The lens had been guiding Aelion to it all along, marking it as the single strongest source of the weave in the caves.

When the throttle was finally lifted from its cradle, the lens flared in answer — a burst of light bright enough that the whole party had to shield their eyes, some of them left dazzled for a moment before the humming settled and stopped.

What the Scholars Made of It

Back in Saltmoor the lens was recognized by those who trade in such things. The dwarven scholar Bevin named it precisely: a rare, intact survey instrument of the Second Epoch, dwarven work, the finest example he had ever seen — of the many broken replicas and copies he had studied, none in this condition. Taking a charcoal rubbing of its rim, he confirmed the ring of runes to be the cardinal directions of his people, but found between them a further, more archaic script he could not read at a glance and would need time to decipher.

It is not the only one of its kind moving through the world. Bevin and the fence Octavian Drell had both handled an identical lens roughly a month earlier — bought, it turns out, by the collector known as V.