Ravenclaw found the word "ordinary" difficult to associate with Tom in any meaningful way. His endurance, his intellect, that perpetually clear-eyed composure of his, all of it pointed in the exact opposite direction. But everyone carried secrets of their own, and Tom more than most, particularly given the staggering ability he possessed, that power to summon great wizards across the ages as his allies and absorb their talents as his own. Ravenclaw let the subject rest there and asked nothing further.
Tom saw that she had gone quiet. He smiled faintly and turned back to his work.
...
For a thing to possess memory, the most fundamental prerequisite was not intelligence but consciousness. Many animals had no recognisable intelligence whatsoever, yet they retained the instinct to survive, to remember what threatened them, to avoid predators and danger without ever reasoning through it. Memory did not require wisdom. It required awareness.
What Tom was attempting now was to give a thing that had no consciousness one of its own. In Eastern philosophy, this was called spirit-binding, the act of imbuing an object with a spirit. And what that spirit actually was, stripped to its essence, was a thought.
Thoughts could only be drawn from within a soul, and the extraction was difficult. The nature of each thought varied depending on the soul it came from, every soul carrying its own distinct qualities and composition.
The pure-blood wizards who had been caught hiring assassins against him had since become invaluable experimental material. Tom had burned through several of them before managing to extract anything usable. But then something remarkable had happened.
When a wizard's soul was separated from its body, it could be materialised directly inside the learning space. This not only saved an enormous amount of time, it also provided an effectively unlimited supply of practice material, with no need to worry about waste.
When Ravenclaw learned of this, she had gone very quiet for a long time. The envy in her eyes had been unmistakable.
If she'd had access to conditions like these in her own lifetime, she thought, she could have refined her work far beyond what she'd managed. She could have pushed her ideas to entirely new heights.
But the one who had been favoured by fortune was not her.
...
Half an hour later, a pinprick of starlight appeared at the tip of Tom's wand. Viewed from different angles, it shifted through entirely different colours, like a prism catching light it had no business catching.
Under his direction, the starlight drifted like a firefly, unhurried and softly glowing, and settled into the body of a small toy bear.
Tom channelled magic into it. Golden threads moved through the runic circuits woven into the construct, tracing their paths with quiet deliberation. About half an hour later, the bear opened its eyes and spoke in a small, sweet voice.
"Master!"
"What is your name?" Tom asked.
"Tybonny!" the bear answered brightly.
"Tybonny, do you know what your purpose is?"
"To keep Miss Ariana company and help her pass the time!"
Tom asked several more questions in succession. When every answer came back exactly as he'd intended, he looked up at Ravenclaw with a satisfied expression that was very close to a grin. "That counts as a success, doesn't it?"
Ravenclaw was smiling too. "Congratulations, Tom. You've created a true alchemical being."
What was the difference between an alchemical being and an alchemical construct?
The most fundamental distinction was the capacity for development. An alchemical construct had its functions, capabilities, and responses fixed at the moment of its creation. Whatever it was when it first came into existence, it would remain exactly that until the day it was destroyed.
An alchemical being, by contrast, could learn. It could grow. Drawing on its own accumulated memory and capacity for thought, it could unfold into possibilities that nobody could predict at the outset.
Tybonny knew only her purpose for now, and the barest foundation of common knowledge. What she would become over time, even Tom couldn't say.
The system chimed at an appropriate moment.
[Host has advanced the development of Alchemy. Reward: 1,000 Study Points, 200 Achievement Points, and one Advanced Draw opportunity.]
[Ravenclaw's approval of Host has reached 25. Reward: one Talent Draw opportunity. Drawing talent... Congratulations, Host has obtained "Torrent of Thought."]
[Torrent of Thought: Mental activity is significantly heightened. The user is capable of perceiving all inconsistencies and blind spots, and naturally approaches problems from multiple simultaneous angles, yielding answers that are both more comprehensive and closer to the essential truth.]
In an instant, Tom's mind felt as though an extraordinarily curious and hyperactive creature had taken up permanent residence inside it, bombarding him from every direction with questions, useful ones, useless ones, profound ones, absurd ones, a relentless tide that showed absolutely no signs of stopping.
He pressed a hand to his temple and squeezed his eyes shut.
"Tom, what's wrong?" Ravenclaw asked, watching him with a puzzled frown.
"I..." Tom kept his hand at his head. "I think I finally understand why you chose to seal away your own mental abilities."
Ravenclaw blinked. Then understanding arrived, and her eyes widened. "You drew a talent from me?"
"Yes. I am currently overflowing with inspiration, and simultaneously drowning in a flood of completely pointless questions. Please teach me how to control this before it gets any worse."
"Don't panic. Draw your thoughts inward. Narrow your focus, little by little..." Ravenclaw slipped into the role of a patient older sister without seeming to try, guiding Tom gently through the process of reining in the scattered currents of his mind, letting the useless questions fall away like sediment.
It took some time before Tom surfaced. He still felt like he was perpetually on the verge of being distracted by something, as though every moment carried a dozen competing threads tugging for attention. But at least the agitation had eased. He could be still. He could be calm.
When calm returned, Tom looked at Ravenclaw with something that approached compassion. Ravenclaw looked back at him with the expression of someone who had been living with the same condition for a very long time.
For a moment, neither of them said anything. Then they both smiled at exactly the same instant, and the look they shared said everything that words would have been inadequate for anyway.
"Intelligence," Tom said at last, with the tone of someone who had only just genuinely understood something, "can be its own kind of burden."
Ravenclaw agreed without reservation. "The more you know, the more there is to trouble you. In that sense, ignorance and a quiet mind are perhaps the greatest blessings available to any living person."
There was a reason, she reflected, that she had spent her life consuming knowledge with the hunger of a starving creature. It had never been purely ambition. In some deep and quiet way, it had always been a form of rescue, keeping the questions at bay by answering enough of them to outpace the ones that couldn't be answered at all.