Dawn and Reincarnation part 5 (Patreon)

Dawn focused on the image in the mirror and jumped, slipping between the farm and the Tower’s storeroom as easily as someone else might open a door. She glanced around the small room dusty room, a touch surprised that she hadn’t triggered some ancient ward slipping into the Tower. ‘Ah well, your loss is my gain.’ 

She turned her attention toward the ornate wooden box sitting on the carved wooden table that would likely feed a family for a year if sold. She studied the glowing threads floating over the box, curious if she could duplicate this particular ter’angreal.

Dawn’s hands absently moved to point at various sections of the box as she studied the flowing threads, trying to understand how the box created fancloth. “So many secrets and it never occured to you to write them down or maybe the records were lost.”

She spent a couple of minutes studying the threads from start to finish then opened the door and walked into a larger room filled with a complicated tapestry of colors and threads floating over dusty tables filled with figurines and odd pieces of artwork on dusty tables. Some of the figurines were clustered together but most of them were scattered around the tables so that they had a decent amount of clear space around them. “This could take a while.”

Dawn walked to the closest table and carefully reached out and touched a bracelet made of glass rings. She blinked as she got a sense of sleep and spirit. “Sleep and spirit?” She picked up the bracelet, trying to get a better feel for what it did. She giggled as she realized the Tower had the means to get to the World of Dreams locked up in a dusty storeroom. ‘Yeah, I’m never going to tell them about this.’

Dawn stepped back into the smaller storeroom and studied the bracelet, trying to figure out how they’d turned the glass impossibly hard. “I’m guessing the threads with spirit are for the actual dream function and the fire and earth are for the hardness. I’m going to have way too much fun with this. Sadly I doubt this would let you actually enter the dream physically.”

She walked back over to the table and dropped the glass bracelet on the table then looked at the pair of large metal gauntlets with firedrops on the cuffs. She carefully reached out and touched the gauntlets, trying to get a sense for their function. “I wouldn’t have guessed they made pulling metal out of the ground easier.”

Dawn looked at the next item on the table, a dusty carved ivory rose about as large around as her palm. She carefully reached out and touched it with a finger then yanked her hand back as illusionary flowers appeared over the rose and the sound of music echoed through the previously silent room. “Oh, that could be useful,” she mused as she studied the threads dancing in the air above the carved rose.

“You’d think they’d have used these weaves to record weaves and messages for the survivors, short sighted idiots,” Dawn grumbled as she moved to the next ter’angreal. The next couple of ter’angreal she touched were less useful as they required stuff that wasn’t present to function, mostly machines or other objects though they were certainly interesting.

Dawn smiled as she found a jade bird figurine that would allow someone holding it to talk to the matched figurine. She took particular glee in memorizing the threads required to make a matching set of communication ter’angreal, rather amused that the Tower hadn’t figured out what they did or maybe they had but hadn’t figured out where the other figurine was. She spent the next fifteen to twenty minutes studying the various ter’angreal then sighed as she realized this particular storeroom didn’t have any armor in it. “Plenty of ways to get to ter’angreal but no magical armor.”

Dawn frowned slightly as she turned toward the wall and created her scrying mirror. “Where is the other half of the jade figurine?” She smiled as the image in the mirror changed and revealed another dusty room filled with boxes and crates. Unlike the Tower, the storeroom in the mirror looked wooden which meant it probably wasn’t in the Tower or the Stone of Tear. “Defensive magical items?” She grinned slightly as the mirror lurched slightly shifting to focus on one of the other crates rather than jumping elsewhere. “Jackpot!”

She giggled as she jumped to the location in the mirror then blinked in surprise as she saw a sea of threads over the crates and boxes which meant there were a lot more ter’angreal in a simple attic than she’d expected to find. She walked over to the dusty window and looked out on a port city she didn’t recognize from the various stories she’d heard over the years which wasn’t all that surprising. “Interesting.”

Dawn stepped over to the crate that should have the jade figurine and dug through the junk until she found it. She smiled as she compared the threads floating over the figurine to the ones she remembered from the other bird. “Okay, if I line everything up, I should be able to make communication stones, probably.”

She had a feeling it would take a bit of trial and error before she got the stones to work but it would let her communicate with her friends and brother at a distance which would be useful. She blinked as the stuff she’d pulled out of the box vanished, returning to the box. “That makes studying things a bit harder.”

She tipped over the create the mirror had indicated had the magical armor in it and looked over the mess. “Nothing, nothing, more nothing…” she trailed off as her fingers touched an amber broach in the shape of a turtle and realized it was an angreal. “You’re not as good as my bracelet but you’d be useful.”

Dawn sighed as she pulled her hand away from the turtle and opened the jewelry box that had fallen out of the crate. “Enough gold and gems to buy out half of Teran Ferry and that’s before you consider the magic.” She sighed as she saw several empty spaces which meant that some of the set had been lost. “I guess it has been three thousand years. Which one of these makes armor?” 

She grinned as she touched the golden bracelet linked with fine chains to four gold rings. “Damn, that’s a nice angreal, yeah, I’m going to have to steal these.” She felt a touch of unease at the idea of stealing stuff from people that might not deserve it. ‘I can always put it back once I’m done studying it. Yeah, now you sound like someone from Teran Ferry, I’m just borrowing the sheep, I was planning on giving it back, yeah right.’

Dawn stared in shock as she touched a long gold and ruby necklace and realized that it blocked direct magic. “Yeah, sorry, you’re mine.” She touched the gold belt with rubies and smiled as she realized that it would let her use a small amount of magic even while shielded or somewhere she couldn’t touch the source. “This was obviously made for someone that expected to see battle.”

Her grin turned into a large smile as her fingers touched the other gold bracelet and realized that it created armor out of hardened air which was exactly what she was looking for. “I shall be unstoppable!” Dawn laughed for several seconds until the contents of the box appeared in the crate including the jewelry box. “Yeah, I’m going to have to grab the box and I’m going to need gold and gems to create more.”

She walked over to the door and unlocked it then walked out into the hallway to try to figure out where she was. Ten or twenty minutes of breaking down doors and looking around showed her that she was in a mostly abandoned building in a rather poor section of a port city which made no sense as there should be people living in the top part of the building and yet there weren’t any signs of people living on the top floor and hadn’t been for some time unless she was very much mistaken. 

“Okay, someone or something is keeping people from coming up here which means someone probably knows about the stuff but that doesn’t make any sense, even discounting the fact that there are far too many magical items in the collection to be random chance, there is also a lot of crap which means their methods for detecting magical items suck,” Dawn mused as she headed back to the storeroom. She spent a couple minutes studying the stuff in the jewelry box then walked around behind the crate and focused on bringing herself physically into the dream world.

‘Okay, better hurry before someone notices you’re missing.’ She slipped back into the physical world and looked around the storeroom, happy that no one was waiting to jump out at her. She carefully searched through the crate, doing her best to keep everything looking the same or at least mostly the same as she stole the amber turtle broach and the jewelry box. She slipped the broach and her jewelry box into her bag then looked at the rest of the crates. ‘Not worth the time right now.’

She slipped back into the dream world. “Okay, I’m going to need enough gold and gems to make some duplicates or at least practice. I need someone I can steal from without feeling guilty about it, yeah Whitecloaks, they stole most of it anyways.”

She focused on the wall, bringing up her magic mirror. “Children of Light’s vault.” She smirked as the mirror changed to show the vault. She jumped to the vault and glanced around at the piles of gold coins and trade bars mixed in with chests of gems and other valuables including bolts of silk and ornate tables that looked insanely expensive to just be stuffed in a vault out of the way. “Yeah, fucking bastards.” She walked between the mounds of gold coins, trying to find a place she could steal coins from without anyone noticing. She grinned as she saw a chest filled with bags of various gems. “Yoink, they might notice but I don’t care.” She crouched down and slipped back into the real world.

She glanced around carefully, slightly relieved that no one was actually in the vault guarding it. ‘Okay, let’s have some fun.’ She picked up the chest of gems and carefully walked over to a solid looking chest containing a decent number of gold bars and slipped back to the dream world with the chests. ‘No point in getting greedy, I can always come back.’

She jumped to her father’s cellar with the chests, knowing it would be safe enough behind the behind casks of cider and food at least until she had a better place to store it. She used threads of air to move the chest filled with gold behind the casks then walked over and set her hand on the chest and slipped back into the real world with the chests. She carefully set the chest of gems on a cask then opened the chest of gold and grabbed a finger thick bar. ‘Damn thing is heavier than it looks.’ 

She carefully closed the chest of gold then grabbed a couple bags of gems and stuck the box behind another cask where her father shouldn’t find it, at least before she collected it. She draped a bag over the chests that would hopefully keep her father from noticing the chests then slipped back into the world of dreams.

Dawn put the gems in her bag and the bar of gold in her empty leather belt pouch then jumped back to where they’d made camp and slipped back into the real world, a touch relieved to find the group sleeping and no one running around looking for her, at least until Moiraine’s whispered, “We need to talk.”

“About?“ Dawn asked, trying to pretend that she hadn’t been missing for at least a couple minutes.

“Your disappearing act, if I hadn’t seen you vanish, we might have had people out looking for you,” Moiraine said in a whisper.

Dawn winced as she realized that Moiraine had a point. “Sorry about that, I needed to check on some things,” she said in a whisper.

“What did you you need to check on?” Moiraine asked, a bit curious where Dawn had wandered off to.

“I wanted to check on the Whitecloaks, they had some interesting things in their vault,” Dawn said as she pulled out the amber turtle and tossed it to her.

Moiraine raised her eyebrows as she realized what the broach was. “You found an angreal in the Whitecloak’s vault, in Amadicia?”

“I’m pretty good at finding things,” Dawn replied with a grin. “Actually, I should make some magical armor now that I have an example.”

“You have an example of magical armor?” Moiraine asked in surprise.

“It’s a bracelet that basically uses hardened air to create armor. It seems more reasonable than trying to walk around in plate mail though I wouldn’t mind a nice suit of lightweight indestructible armor if I could get it. Still, having a copy of the bracelet would be better than what we have currently which is nothing.”

“How long would it take to make more bracelets and what do you need?” Moiraine asked thinking about the material that normally went into ter’angreal.

“I should have enough supplies to make bracelets for the group, at least in theory. It’s more art than science right now.”

Moiraine frowned as she considered the risks. “While I can’t stop you, I’d be happier if someone was around to keep an eye on you while you work and I’d rather not risk any of the myrddraal sensing us if we can help it. We should be safe enough until morning and we have a long day ahead of us.”

“Fair enough, I’ll grab some sleep, we can worry about it in the morning,” Dawn agreed softly, wanting some real sleep. “You should get some sleep as well.”

“True,” Moiraine agreed as she closed her eyes, not sure what to make of Dawn’s strange abilities or impossible strength.

0o0o0

Rand rubbed at his arms as he watched Dawn do something that caused a slice of a gold bar that Moiraine must have given her to melt then drip into an invisible bracelet shaped mold floating in the air. “That’s more than a little creepy.”

Tara did her best to ignore the goosebumps on her arms she got every time someone channeled and watched the threads Dawn was using. ‘That looks easy enough, a twist here and there would make it harder than steel.’

Mat shivered as he watched Dawn work, it was hard to wrap his head around Dawn and Egwene being able to channel, he’d known them his whole life. He glanced over at Lan who was watching the entrance to their secluded clearing like a hawk watching for mice. ‘We should have stayed in the village.’ He glanced at Moiraine who was watching the process like a hawk. ‘Hopefully, it’s not too late to escape once we get somewhere safer.’

Egwene felt like giggling as she watched Dawn manipulate the metal in ways that made it stronger and more durable. “At least that doesn’t look too complicated.”

“If you think you can duplicate it, go for it,” Dawn said as she directed the heat from the bracelet into the ground. “Now comes the fun part.” She let go of the threads of air holding up the bracelet and caught it. “Hopefully the bracelet doesn’t actually need the rubies to function.” She reached out with threads of air, spirit and earth and wove the threads into her bracelet.

Egwene watched, a bit unnerved at how easy Dawn made the complicated weave look. “That’s the fun part?” she asked in disbelief.

Moiraine studied Dawn’s complicated weave, rather impressed with the girl’s dexterity and precision. She doubted half the sisters in the tower could have done as well on a first try which would probably piss her teachers off. She waited until Dawn tied off the weave before she asked, “Did it work?”

Dawn focused on the bracelet she’d just finished crafting. “I get the same feeling from my bracelet as the original so it should do something. I’m not sure how effective it will be without testing.” She slipped the bracelet on her wrist. “Okay, I need someone to hit me-” she cut off as Mat bounced his staff at her behind. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind but I couldn’t feel it.”

Nynaeve glared at Mat. “That was reckless.”

“I didn’t hit her that hard,” Mat said defensively as Rand glared at him.

Dawn stuck her tongue out at Mat. “Relax, we had to test it,” she pointed out as she bent down and picked up a fist sized rock. She slammed the rock down on her leg, being careful to keep her fingers out of the way and the strike off center.

“Stop that!” Nynaeve snapped.

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Calm down, I’m fine. Even without the armor, I didn’t hit myself hard enough to break anything, just give myself a nasty bruise at worst.” She doubted she’d have been able to give herself a bruise even without the armor as she’d never managed so get so much as a scrap running around with the boys over the years. “It spread the force out and absorbed a decent amount of it, I’m not willing to test it against an arrow right now but it’s certainly better than nothing.”

Moiraine cut in before Nynaeve could complain, “We should test to see if anyone else can duplicate the bracelet.”

“It shouldn’t be that hard,” Nynaeve snapped as she formed a mold out of flows of air, still angry with Dawn for being reckless.

“What do the rest of the pieces of jewelry do?” Mat asked curious what else Dawn had in her bag of tricks.

Dawn gestured at the bracelet and four rings joined by fine golden chains. “The bracelet and rings set is an angreal, the necklace should help protect against magic. The bracelets with emeralds protect against lightning and direct some of the heat from fire away from the wearer or at least that’s the feeling I get,” she explained as she watched Egwene and Nynaeve work on their own bracelets. 

“Any way to test it?” Rand asked.

“I’m not all that anxious to test getting hit by lightning but I’ll probably run some tests on the rest of the set once we’re somewhere safe. The gold and ruby belt is a Well which allows the wearer to store saidar for use in a Stedding which is neat. The ring with the emerald detects channeling at a much greater distance that I’d normally be able to detect and the other emerald ring boosts the wearer’s ability to resist unnatural mental influence which is nice. The sapphire ring grows cold when someone is feeling angry or hostile, sadly it doesn’t let me know which emotion or even who is feeling angry.”

“Not really useful around Nynaeve,” Mat muttered.

Perrin shook his head, a touch surprised that Mat had dared say what they’d probably all been thinking. He glanced over at Giles who was watching the process with more intelligence than a dog should have. ‘A bit unnerving.’

“It might be useful for private meetings,” Thom pointed out. “Aes Sedai and nobles are often skilled at keeping their feelings off their face. What about the last ring?”

“I’m fairly sure the last ring detects poison,” Dawn answered as she closed the jewelry box and put it in her bag.

Nynaeve glared at the bracelet, her weaves fading out as she tried to copy the weaves Dawn had used to turn the bracelet into a ter’angreal. “Why won’t this work?”

Moiraine glanced between the two bracelets. “Not everyone has the same talents, you can heal things with ease that Egwene wouldn’t be able to holding a sa’angreal.”

Dawn frowned slightly as she saw a thread of earth and spirit floating over Nynaeve’s bracelet. ‘Huh, that’s how I delve the metal.’ She wove a thread of earth and spirit and checked Nynaeve’s bracelet. “If it makes you feel better, you managed to make the gold harder than it should be.”

Egwene frowned as she felt the gold growing harder. “Am I supposed to be able to feel the metal?”

Tara spoke up, “I can sense metal, so it’s not out of the question.”

“Most likely a talent,” Moiraine explained, more than a bit surprised to find that all four of the girls were strong in earth, an affinity that was rare in women.

Dawn checked Egwene’s bracelet with her delving. “I could scratch steel with this.”

“At least I found a useful talent,” Egwene muttered as she handed the bracelet to Dawn to work on. “Might as well finish it so we can get started.”

“Pack up while she finishes crafting armor for everyone,” Moiraine ‘suggested’ as she double checked her horse’s saddle.