Briar tested the modified device on the tenth day of break, alone in the workshop, the reworked essence conduit humming faintly with the particular unstable energy of something pushed slightly beyond what it had been properly designed to hold. He had rebuilt the whole approach around Bevan's offhand question, spending three full days reworking the device not to extend the length of his foresight, but to sharpen its precision instead, theorizing that if he could not see further ahead, he might at least learn to see more clearly within the narrow window he already had, extracting more genuine use from the same two minutes rather than fighting to extend them. It was, he'd told himself repeatedly across those three days, a genuinely promising angle.
He activated the conduit, felt the familiar disorienting pull of his ability beginning to answer, his vision starting to blur at its edges the way it always did in the half second before his foresight properly engaged, and then the device's crystal lensing cracked clean down its center with a sharp, sudden report, and the whole careful construction died in his hands. The foresight never engaged at all.
BRR: No. No, no, no!
He said it to the empty workshop, setting the ruined device down with more care than his frustration currently wanted to allow, and pressed both hands against his own face, breathing slowly through the particular hot, climbing anger of ten days' effort collapsing, again, into nothing. He had been so certain. He sat with the ruined prototype for a long while, turning it over in his hands, examining the crack, tracing back through his own calculations searching for wherever the error had crept in, and found, the longer he searched, that he could not locate anything specifically wrong with the theory itself. The theory, as far as he could determine, was sound. The construction simply hadn't been able to hold it.
BRR: I don't have the materials for this. Or the technique. Or possibly both.
He said it slowly, the admission arriving with real difficulty, the particular bitter taste of acknowledging a limitation that had nothing to do with effort or cleverness and everything to do with resources he simply didn't possess, proper crystal lensing beyond what his limited coin could acquire, technique refined through years of formal instruction he hadn't yet received, the whole considerable gap between a scholarship student's improvised workshop and whatever a properly funded Alchemical laboratory might have offered instead. He thought, unwillingly, of Yseult.
He had thought of her several times across the past week, turning the idea over and setting it aside each time, some stubborn, prideful part of him resisting the specific admission that her particular expertise, drawn from an entirely different discipline than his own, might succeed where his own careful, methodical Science had repeatedly failed.
Alchemy bent a person's own soul essence into new shapes, the deliberate manipulation of something already present within them, weaker and cruder for the strain, but immediate, personal, requiring no external materials beyond the practitioner's own will and understanding.
Science, his science, worked differently entirely, harnessing the properties of the natural world itself, crystal and copper and the particular careful physics of essence conduits, elegant when it worked, but dependent, always, on materials and precision that pure willpower alone could never substitute for. He did not know if Yseult's approach could solve what his own had failed to solve.
He suspected, sitting alone in his ruined workshop with a cracked crystal lens and ten days of failed effort scattered across every surface, that his pride had been the only thing actually preventing him from finding out. He did not write to her. Not yet.
He gathered the pieces of the ruined device instead, setting them carefully aside rather than discarding them entirely, some stubborn part of him unwilling to fully abandon the attempt even now, and sat for a long while in the darkening workshop, the winter evening settling early and cold outside the window, turning over, again and again, the particular uncomfortable shape of a problem he suspected he could not solve entirely alone. He would think about it further. He was not yet ready to admit defeat properly, whatever the cracked lens currently sitting in his lap seemed to be telling him about the wisdom of that particular stubbornness.