Fool's Silver

This story takes place approximately sixty years before the events of Mage Errant. And fool’s silver is a real substance, though it’s not called fool’s silver in our world. Let's see who can guess what it is first!

-----

Ephesia of Skoura, Librarian Errant of Skyhold, hated auctions. No, she despised them. 

 She despised the constant jockeying for position.  

She despised having to mingle with the ostentatiously wealthy. 

She despised the ostentatiously wealthy themselves, for that matter.

She especially despised the way they pretended as though their intrigues and affairs were different than anyone else’s— as if cheating on one’s spouse were an entirely different beast for the upper crust than it would be for some farmer.

What she despised most, however, was the auction itself. Watching rich idiots waste enough coin to feed a village for a year on frivolous nonsense made her want to cause gratuitous structural damage to the building she was in. 

Attending auctions was a frequent duty for Librarians Errant— High Librarian Kanderon Crux frequently sent them to bid on rare books for the Grand Library. 

Nearly any other Librarian Errant would have been a better choice. Those that hadn’t grown up in Skyhold were by and large from wealthy families that could afford Skyhold’s tuition.

Ephesia, however, had been chosen by Kanderon for this auction for the same reason Kanderon had paid for her tuition at Skyhold.

Her affinity. Well, affinities, but only one of the two was particularly unusual.

And it was, to be sure, exceptionally unusual.

-----

“Do I see a higher bid?” the auctioneer called. “Anyone?”

No one raised their bidding flags. Ephesia sighed and slouched lower in her seat.

“Anyone?” the auctioneer called again. “No? Sold, then, to the representative from Ras Andis!”

The auction porters carefully picked up the massive urn off its steel pedestal and began moving it off-stage. The urn was shaped entirely from huge salt crystals, and had apparently been grown that way. Jagged looking spellforms twisted across its surface. They weren’t carved in, but had been formed by the selective removal of the finger-joint sized cubical salt crystals.

The urn was apparently meant to help purify subterranean aquifers. Ephesia highly doubted, however, that the Kaen Das family meant to use it to make regions safe for farmers to drill wells in.

They probably intended to reverse its function to use against enemy territory. Or maybe use it to do something even nastier, like purify the blood of their enemies of everything except its water.

Ephesia honestly wouldn’t mind doing that to half the rich bastards in this room. 

“Next we have one of the living sculptures Sica is so famed for,” the auctioneer said, as the porters carried a potted plant forwards from the back of the stage, where all the other items up for auction waited. 

Admittedly, it was a potted tree that took the perfect form of a poised dancer, hair made of trailing leaves down her back.

It was pretty, sure, but what a waste of magical talent. 

Ephesia shifted uncomfortably in her gown as she looked around. The gown itself felt fine, but it had lace on it. Ephesia despised lace.

A casual glance around showed her that no one was looking her way, and she carefully removed one of her chunky silver earrings under the guise of fixing a wayward strand of hair. 

Well, the earrings looked like they were made of silver, at least.

She could feel the temperature control spellforms hidden on the earring deactivate as it came loose from her ear and stop drawing from her mana reservoirs.

She clenched the earring tightly in her fist.

The temperature control spellforms were hardly even necessary here in Suriphan. If it had been anywhere else in Ruhn in the heat of summer, they would have needed to draw a lot more heavily on the aether around them, but the city of Suriphan was built to keep cool. The spellforms only needed to protect the earrings from Ephesia’s own body heat.

Which was important, because Ephesia needed to keep her draw on the local aether to a minimum.

As the auctioneer finished extolling the virtues of the stupid potted plant, the molten remains of the earring began to drip out from between Ephesia’s fingers onto the steel floor.

-----

Suriphan wasn’t the largest city in the Kingdom of Ruhn, nor the capital, but it was the most famous. 

Suriphan was built at the eastern edge of the Skyreach Range, a week’s ride on horseback south of the passes that led into the valleys of Highvale. Surprisingly few people lived in Suriphan, and in the winter, only a few caretakers resided there.

That was, most likely, since the whole city was comprised of a cluster of spiraling steel towers, built to keep the upper crust of Ruhn cool during the summers.

The towers gracefully spun up to points, looking like the graceful lovechildren of seashells and spiderwebs. More of the towers were open to the outside than not, and delicate looking bridges arched between the towers. 

Someone else might have felt wonder on first seeing the beauty of Suriphan.

Ephesia only got angrier.

She knew where exactly where much of that steel had come from, after all.

---

Ephesia ignored her idiot neighbor’s newest attempt at conversation as she covertly melted another fool’s silver bracelet in her hand. The rich fop had been trying to flirt with her the entire auction. 

She’d rather flirt with a giant spider. Besides, she had bracelets to melt.

For every bracelet she removed from her wrist, she could pull another out of the extradimensional storage tattoo just below her elbow. 

She’d long since mastered the art of summoning the bracelets around her arm. It was all in how you moved your shoulder.

Half the day’s items had already been auctioned off already. The rich morons around her had already wasted absurd sums on frivolous paintings, magic tapestries, and other useless trinkets.

Ephesia had her eyes on something more interesting.

As the fool’s silver bracelet dripped onto the floor, Ephesia reached out with her affinity senses. She’d heard of a lot of weird ways affinity senses expressed themselves before, but she was lucky— hers just manifested as sight.

Not, to be sure, through her eyes. It was like she had an entire other set of eyes that could only see fool’s silver. It had taken her quite some time to master the art of overlaying her two means of sight, but it was far more convenient than many other affinity senses she’d heard about.

In her mind’s eye, she began constructing a spellform targeting the fool’s silver pooling on the floor.

Fool’s silver was, according to almost everyone who knew about it, the most worthless metal imaginable. It wasn’t especially strong, and broke like glass. It melted in the palm of the hand. 

In its solid form, it looked like true silver. In its liquid form, it looked like quicksilver. Even with how horribly toxic quicksilver was, however, it still possessed far more uses than fool’s silver, as far as most experts were concerned.

The worst thing about fool’s silver, according to all the experts?

It was what happened when it came in contact with other metal.

-----

Skoura was a mining city in the eastern Skyreach mountains north of Highvale. It had been an unpleasant place to grow up, to say the least. The skies were clogged with smoke from the ore smelters, and everyone had friends and family members who had died young in the mines.

Ephesia had seen quite a few people die up close and personal as a child, since orphans like her were put to work by Essem. She’d ended up as a smelter rather than a miner, but either was a death sentence for most of the children put to work.

Fantasizing about overthrowing the greedy iron lich Essem was a favorite pastime of the children of Skoura. It was just a fantasy, though— Essem was nigh unassailable inside Skoura. All liches were most dangerous inside their domains, but Essem was a step above the rest.

Not one of the Great Powers on the continent were powerful enough to dislodge him, at least not without banding together with others, and even then they’d pay a high cost.

Even as a barely literate, soot stained child worker in Skoura’s smelters, Ephesia had understood that.

It hadn’t stopped her from trying to assassinate him the instant she’d discovered her affinity for fool’s silver, however.

Fool’s silver was fairly common inside the ore of Skoura’s mines, and the smelters had quite a few iron mages on duty just to purify the fool’s silver out from the molten iron. 

The fool’s silver was kept in huge vats that were only rarely emptied. The children working in the smelters, in their rare free time, would often play with it. A favorite activity was carving molds and then melting fool’s silver into them to create fool’s silver toys. 

You couldn’t play too hard with them, however, or they’d melt in your hands.

Ephesia, however, found she could do more with it. She’d only been twelve when she came into her magic, which was exceptionally young. 

Though, if she hadn’t come into her magic that early, it seemed unlikely she would have gotten much older.

It was pure luck that her idiotic attempt to assassinate Essem was aborted so early on. Looking back, she never would have even made it halfway to his hideous, rusted iron slab of a palace.

She’d only busted out of the smelter and into the street when Quen Veil, one of Skyhold’s Librarians Errant, spotted her. He’d abandoned his mission to carry her back to Skyhold.

Ephesia had never learned what that mission was, but her anger at the old gravity mage for stopping her rampage had long since faded. She’d really never had a chance at succeeding— her mana reservoir had already been running dry just busting out of the smelter, trying to manipulate the fool’s silver without knowing a single spellform.

Kanderon, though less than happy with her agent’s assessment, had decided Quen had made a worthwhile choice, and had personally paid for Ephesia’s tuition.

Ephesia had more than proved her worth in the years since.

Generally, though, Kanderon knew better than to send Ephesia on missions that required much social interaction with the wealthy.

This mission was an unfortunate exception.

-----

Ephesia only paused in her melting of fool’s silver and the casting of her spells for two things.

First, to bid on a book that came up for auction— one that Kanderon legitimately desired for the library. The best cover story was always a true one. She made sure, of course, to never show her fool’s silver-stained hand in the process of bidding. Unlike quicksilver, melted fool’s silver did stick to the skin, though it would wash off easily enough. She had a spell that could get it off even easier, but she needed to limit her mana usage as much as possible in the auction room.

Second, she spent some time observing her target and her target’s target.

Her target’s target was a sword; a rapier crafted fifty years ago by an enchanter named Sothel. 

Sothel had been a sadistic, cruel mage— every item she enchanted was crueler and more vicious than the next. She’d possessed pain, steel, and healing affinities. Pain affinities were rare and generally awful— save for the rare few pain mages that worked as healers, dulling pain— but it was her healing affinity that really gave Sothel her reputation.

A healing affinity turned to do harm was a truly vile thing.

Eventually, the dragon Heliothrax had took umbrage at Sothel’s evil and annihilated her and her workshop, and as many of her enchantments as possible, but a few of her items still surfaced from time to time.

Like this rapier.

It had three enchantments on it. The first was nothing unusual— a simple enchantment that reinforced the strength of the blade and kept the tip and edges sharp.

The second enchantment was much more powerful, and it alone would have made anyone sit up take notice. The blade would rapidly heal its wielder, as well as somewhat dulling the pain of injuries received in battle. This one drew from both Sothel’s healing and pain affinities.

The third enchantment, though— that was what truly set the blade apart. Anyone other than the wielder cut by the blade would die. Not quickly, though. Instead, their body would begin producing tumors within days. Most victims of the sword died in intense pain within a month, riddled with cancer. That alone gave a good idea of what harm a healer turned bad could do.

The sword had slain dragons just by nicking their wings or slipping into a gap between scales before. 

To up the price of the blade even farther, all three enchantments had their own mana reservoirs. An enchanted item with a single mana reservoir would be prodigiously expensive. Three was just absurd.

It was far from the worst item Sothel had created, but Ephesia had no interest in letting it fall into the wrong hands.

In this case, her target’s hands.

Her target was a luxury goods merchant with ties to the Havathi government. He might not wear the pristine white uniform with the brass decorations of a Havathi official, but he shared the same holier-than-thou, self-righteous facial expression they always did.

Over the past couple of years, Havath had been covertly buying up large numbers of enchanted weapons, mostly swords. The only things they all had in common were their great power, unusual enchantments, and the fact that they all had mana reservoirs of their own.

The High Librarian apparently had some suspicions regarding why Havath was buying so many swords, enough that she’d started sending agents out to prevent Havath’s acquisition of particularly powerful weapons.

Of course, Kanderon hadn’t shared her suspicions with any of the Librarians Errant, but that was fairly normal.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t simply bid directly against Havath in the auction. Moving so openly against Havath might tip them off that Skyhold was on to them.

Plus, even as well funded as the Librarians Errant were, their budget hardly compared to Havath’s.

Hence Ephesia.

She maintained her focus on the spellform as the last drops of fool’s silver dripped through her fingers. Rather than pooling up on the floor, it was sucked down into the steel.

It was sped up considerably by her spellform, but it would have happened eventually, regardless.

She could feel the fool’s silver working its way into the structure of the steel around it. Normally, this process would take weeks, and it would just move aimlessly outwards through the metal. Her spellform, however, guided it through pinhole channels down into the depths of the steel floor, then flowed through the channels that she’d worked into the steel.

The channels weren’t holes, they were root-like structures where the fool’s silver had bonded with the steel. The steel inside the channels was incredibly brittle and weak, because that’s what fool’s silver did.

It ruined other metals. 

The damage varied from metal to metal, and quicksilver and some rare metals were immune, but many metals were rendered so soft by fool’s silver that they could be shredded with your bare hands. By a child’s bare hands, for that matter.

What was more, the fool’s silver could easily be recovered from the metal structures they’d ruined as well.

Ephesia could ruin metal much more quickly than this if she wanted to, but that was where the whole minimizing the amount she tapped from the aether came in. There were powerful defensive wards around and inside the auction hall, but they weren’t really a problem for Ephesia.

No, the problem were the spell detection wards. They didn’t actually detect spells, but instead detected higher than normal drain on the aether nearby. Trying to cast most spells would rapidly alert the guards that something was amiss, if not inform them exactly what.

It was an absurdly expensive ward to construct and maintain, but the auction house could certainly afford it.

A fairly reliable heuristic for how efficient a spell was depends on how much the affinity’s focus already wanted to behave in the manner your spell was trying to make it behave in. 

Casting a spell to make water flow a little faster took very little mana compared to making it flow uphill. Casting a spell to strengthen stone required less mana than animating stone.

And casting a spell to accelerate the rate fool’s silver corroded other metals?

As long as you didn’t try to go too crazy with it, it took almost no aether at all.

-----

Sothel’s sword was the last item up for bid. Ephesia could see the Havathi merchant perk up as the auctioneer droned on and on about the sword’s virtues.

The porters, at least, seemed to respect the danger. The one chosen to carry it was wearing thick leather gloves with ceramic plates on them.

Ephesia ignored the auctioneer as the porter gingerly reached out to pick up the rapier.

The blade simply crumbled when he tried to lift it.

Some of the audience members gasped when it happened, but it took several seconds for the auctioneer to realize something was wrong and turn around.

No one spoke for what seemed like an eternity. Ephesia tried not to let her satisfaction show on her face as the Havathi merchant turned redder and redder.

The auctioneer eventually found his words, and promptly started apologizing for the obvious fake— he didn’t know how it had gotten in the auction, and someone would surely be punished over that.

The Havathi merchant stormed out of the room without a word.

As Ephesia left to pay for and retrieve the book she’d bid on, she couldn’t help but smirk.

She was sure they’d spend ages inspecting the remains of the blade, and discover the fool’s silver riddling it soon enough, but she highly doubted they’d discover the pinhole-sized weak spot in the top of the steel pedestal. They definitely wouldn’t trace it down through the pedestal, into the steel floor of the stage, through the steel struts rising up from the actual floor, and through the floor to her seat.

Not that they’d be able to.

Ephesia had… well, slightly surpassed the mandate of her mission. Kanderon wouldn’t approve, but Kanderon didn’t need to know.

Ephesia hadn’t even needed to use her second affinity to pull the job off.

-----

Suriphan Auction follow-up report, twenty-three years later:

While at the time Ephesia of Skoura’s mission to destroy Sothel’s nasty little rapier was noted as a success, I should have perhaps followed up on events a little better.

My suspicions were eventually confirmed in regards to Havath’s purpose— they’d been training a division of warlocks, pacting them with various powerful magical weapons. The Sacred Swordsmen of Havath, as they’re now known, are a terrifyingly effective fighting force. 

The covert actions I used the Librarians Errant for during that period did somewhat mitigate the future strength of the Sacred Swordsmen. Many of the weapons we prevented them from claiming, like Sothel’s rapier, would have been terrifying in their hands.

In retrospect, I should have acted faster and harder against Havath’s interests. My failure to predict Havath’s transformation into the Havath Dominion and their subsequent wars of expansion was my greatest failure of the past century. 

Had I struck hard while the Sacred Swordsmen were still forming, the organization would have been stillborn before it could have become Havath’s spearhead. If not for them, the Havath Dominion would have expanded far more slowly.

When the Havath Dominion conquered Ruhn ten years later, the spiraling metal towers of Suriphan were utterly destroyed. The public story revolves around the battle being simply that fierce, and the King of Ruhn and his court destroying them rather than letting them fall into Havathi hands.

The Havathi after-battle reports I’ve acquired over the years seem to indicate that the towers were already near the point of collapse, and it took remarkably damage from the battle magic and siege spells in play before they collapsed in a catastrophic chain reaction. 

The King of Ruhn and his court were killed in the collapse, saving the Havath Dominion considerable effort. 

Though it won’t ever be public knowledge, the King of Ruhn is yet another Great Power killed by Ephesia. The ruins of Suriphan were utterly riddled with veins of fool’s silver. Somehow, Ephesia had constructed a spell to keep the fool’s silver moving steadily through the towers without the damage being visible on the surface.

She, of course, never informed me of any of this.

Even if Havath hadn’t invaded, it seems unlikely the towers would have stayed up more than another couple of years.

For better or worse, we’ll never know Ephesia’s thoughts on the matter. This all occurred five years after the events that made Ephesia so infamous, and earned her the title of Mirror Mage.

If I had to guess, she would have been delighted to have been the downfall of Ruhn’s rich and powerful. Aiding Havath wouldn’t have pleased her, but…

The city of Imperial Havath wasn’t build with iron mined and smelted in Skoura, and none of her friends or family members died so that it might be built. Suriphan, on the other hand, was almost entirely built with Skouran steel.

Given the number of residents of Skoura who lived in misery and died under Essem’s rule, all to fuel the vanity of Ruhn, there’s a certain level of poetic justice in Ephesia’s actions. It wasn’t the last time in her life she’d deliver it, either.

Delight in poetic justice is, unfortunately, a common failing among the Librarians Errant. I’d like to blame them for it, but, quite honestly, it’s almost certainly something they’ve learned in great part from myself.

—From the private journals of Kanderon Crux, High Librarian of Skyhold