ATLOP: Trial by Fire

Family of Walls and Secrets

One more chapter after this and we hit canon timeline!

4/2/2022

OO OO OO OO

Making Sand Dollars was a lot harder than one might think.

Real sand dollars were alive at one point, skeletons of living beings. But Purifying Sand Dollars? Those were hand created with magic. The process was not simple either.

First you had to gather the sand, a very important component in Sand Dollars.

The sand had to be clean, naturally formed sand. It needed to be free of imperfections, and could not have dirt, glass shards, or any other materials in it. Gathering the sand took ages, Percy had to carefully filter it a dozen times to be sure it was clean.

Once the sand was gathered, filtered, and triple checked, you needed to compress and shape it.

If gathering the sand was time consuming, compressing and shaping it took an eternity.

Compressing it wasn't hard , it took a few tries to figure out but with water the process was fairly simple. Just press it, use water to make it stick better, add pressure with water and his own hands, boom done. But to compress and shape it?

The inside was not solid, it was a delicate framework with an intricate array of interior ivuisav, the sea runes that aided its power. Each part had to be compressed to the full extent while being shaped properly. And that wasn't even including shaping the outside with the proper star to stabilize the magic and allow the flow of energy in and out of the Sand Dollar, which let the purification inside the Sand Dollar grow over time.

If you made it properly the energy within should be stable and steadily raise in power over time. The ivuisav, if done properly, would be able to handle a slow influx of power that could grow for as long as the Sand Dollar was intact. The longer it was unbroken, the more power it had, and the more it would cleanse.

Breaking the sand dollar would allow the purification energy to surge out all at once and clean the area.

Unfortunately, Percy's weren't that good.

He could do the outer shape just fine, it was the easiest part. But the inside was so complicated– He'd spent weeks carefully trying to match the diagrams he had in his books. There were several ways of doing it, just one of them would work.

Percy could sorta make the inside, but it wasn't compressed enough, it wasn't smooth enough, wasn't shaped right, and the ivuisav not detailed enough. If it absorbed the purification energy at all then it wasn't able to hold it well, causing it to leak without drawing any in.

He broke his attempts quickly so that they could at least give some benefit.

After weeks of practice he managed to get one that didn't seem to leak at all... or if it did it leaked too slowly for Percy to notice. It had the basic inside shape, carefully balanced. He was afraid to even move it too fast for fear of it breaking.

But it was there , and that was his best result yet. Nothing compared to the two Triton gave him, but it was a start.

Triton's Sand Dollars were carefully locked up so they could build power, he'd use them one day when they were needed.

In the meantime, he'd keep working on making his own Sand Dollars.

OO OO OO OO

Triton had given Percy a lot of books, and he was still working through them, but this one was making him a bit confused.