The Owner sits on the heartstone in her workshop's attached living quarters, neatly lotused atop its sacred regularity. Precisely as high as it is wide, precisely twice as long. Its angles are perfectly orthogonal; its edges sharp and straight.
The elves do not precisely worship. Their god is far too closely interested in them for the concept to quite apply; faith and obeisance are for lesser peoples. Elves exist, their god's will made manifest, and fractally manifesting his principles. They know so; he speaks to them.
There is no doubt that Mikki's Owner is a genius in her own right. There is also no doubt that elvendom's best vessels naturally attract their god's propensity to pour them brimful with the subtlest, most shining ideas.
The elf sits in silent communion with her kind's divine sponsor, inspiration whispered into her fertile brain through the walls of the world.
To those humans who accede to the yoke, there is no greater argument for the innate superiority of the elf than the personal hand of the divine in their affairs.
Mikki kneels, as her parents knelt; scribe's bundle and clay cup of tea at her knees, her foolish body preferring sleep.
The frailties of the human are never more evident than in the face of sickness. Their design — in the elf perfected and exempted — succumbs to agues and fluxes, pains and fevers, the leak and spew of unpleasant fluids. The elf could catalogue the illnesses of the human, and take ages of the world to do it, so myriad are its weaknesses; and it would profit the elf nothing. There are simply more humans, where any given one fell.
The human labour force of the Owner's workshop suffers from the presence of the stinking earth in which the enemy's weapon came interred. Coughs and sniffles stretch to weeks, mild fevers abound, efficiency suffers — and therefore, so do they, elven displeasure being swift and merciless and without dispensation for the frailty of their inferiority. The sickness carried in the black soil is minor, thankfully, but the Owner's temper with its sufferers is of decreasing flexibility.
The mystery remains unexplicated.
Investigation has gone from hours to days to weeks, and the Owner's genius is hurling itself against the walls of the mystery's invisible prison in search of the exit and truth outside, and is constantly thwarted. The weapon is large and stony and lumpy and it lies still and does nothing which the elves can discern. The sight of it does nothing except, by now, vex the Owner. Its touch does nothing. It makes no noise, it smells of nothing, its texture is stony. Sawn into, it reveals a long-since mineralised rind of some kind, over a porous interior. Mikki's immediate intuition of biology seems correct; but the thing appears to be fossilised, time out of mind. How can a thing dead for so long be the enemy's weapon now? And yet, they are assured that it is, that the forces of the Black Banner fought like madness to keep it, that their intercepted messages and laughable ciphers speak of it reverently, fearfully; that its capture is a coup of military might and intelligence which is only to be expected of the Empire of Light, but nonetheless a triumph.
And now it defies the Owner's genius by simply lying there. It does nothing. It is nothing, nothing but a strange rock. The foremost mind of the Empire, increasingly frustrated, frantically coming up with brilliant new ways to test the malevolent properties of a rock, and concluding, day after day after, that it is a rock.
The Owner is livid.
Priests and sorcerors are called for; they come, they circle the weapon with evidently greater fear than the Owner's, they try their prognostications and rituals, their communions and meditations, apply the tools of their own trades, order the Owner's workforce through whatever tests they can devise.
They reach the same fruitless lack of conclusion, and she sends them away again, fuming. The soldiers come and go, eager to enjoy the fruits of a city after so long on campaign against the Darkness; the Owner remains, week after week, scowling and pacing and writing and prodding at the rock in any way she can think.
The black earth dries out into powdery black dust; everything is underlaid with constant human coughing. The workshop floor is divided into small cells with long chalk slashes, each an experiment site; in each, in parallel, crushed and powdered weapon-rock simmers in many different chemical concoctions, each staffed by a human or two, sweltering by the braziers and wheezing in the fumes. The Owner herself, swooping to check on the results of one such test, accidentally kicks up a patch of soil-powder, inhales a noseful, and sneezes. Mikki is unsure she's ever heard such a sound from the elf before; certainly the look of disgusted surprise and insult on her face suggests she's not accustomed.
Mikki swiftly, grovelling, offers her handkerchief. The Owner gingerly blows her nose on it, as if working out how from first principles as she goes, and keeps hold of the crumpled cloth in her fist; it silently reappears atop Mikki's scribe's bundle in the morning, laundered.
It's that day that Mikki sees the soldiers, moving some of the Owner's heavier equipment under her direction; sees them, with the bright elven grins she associates with violence, flinging handfuls of powder at one another with simple glee.
One coughs, and his fellows cheerily mock him for being weak as a human; the rattling sound sinks to the pit of Mikki's stomach.
