The smithing vents and lesser furnaces are used as inspection accessways when the Heartstone is periodically put into a resting mode, generally at the height of summer. The Great Furnace slowly cools, and Adepts, architects and hertasi go inside every furnace in turn to check and repair any structural problems, replace any damaged slider valves, and seal water tunnel cracks. This is also a time for surface-level celebrations, feasting, and rest.
You can picture a functioning Vale in its simplest form as making order out of a badly jumbled vector field (and it can be seen more complexly as a tensor field, with the control and tuning rods, stones and spells acting upon magical-string factors of stress, strain and elasticity). The area of that vector field increases, over the years, as the Adepts “reach out” farther from their Vale, until ultimately the vectors within the Vale’s reach are judged adequately aligned---and the wild magic has been calmed. Time to move on. Fight monsters, survive, scout. Build another Vale. That’s how it was for centuries.
The thing is, now the Hawkbrothers don’t have to. They have whole new problems, though.
The Mage Storms of around 1,100 years later were ripple effects of the Cataclysm disjunction literally traveling around the planet and returning to their points of origin. The Mage Storms were not “echoed through time,” as some have said. It simply took that long for the waves to travel that distance, and by then they had changed from being disjunction disruptions into more like a “strain” or “sieve” effect. You already know the story of how the Mage Storms were handled and some of the aftereffects. The Storms left “available” magic in a much different state than before. For example, gryphons, whose wingbeats filter ambient magic to be absorbed and processed by their bone linings to produce the lift for their heavy bodies to fly, now have an easier time than ever achieving flight since the ambient magic was now more evenly spread out and “particulate.” Just the same, it created a “fog effect” for anything long-distance, returning magework to a very personal level rather than world-ranging. This really annoyed a lot of people who depended heavily upon long-distance spell effects, most notably the Eastern Empire, and they were already pretty cranky.
It is vital to remember that unlike many religions of Velgarth that have religious faith, the Tayledras and hertasi have absolutely zero doubt—not just that there is a goddess, but that this goddess takes an active interest in them on a personal level. There is no more crisis of faith in Tayledras life that a deity is involved in what you do than there is a crisis that water is wet or that fire is hot. Every Tayledras has a personal encounter with an aspect or representative of the goddess no less than once in their lives, and usually, much more often than that.
Tayledras have stupendously difficult lives in some regards, and while they train and strive to fend for themgelves, sometimes it just isn’t enough. Spirits of ancestors and fellow Tayledras work in the goddess’ service. These spirits—souls detached from physical bodies, incarnated into spirit beings—are each assigned to multiple Tayledras to watch over and help them through things they can not handle on their own. However, a direct intervention takes a lot out of them, so they’ll usually depend upon affecting something small in the physical world. If a Hawkbrother is drowning in a river, they’ll nudge over a weakened branch to clamber onto, rather than teleport the person to dry land. It’s also important to remember that while these guardians have otherworldly insights, they are not omniscient and ideal, and they can screw up.
To be utterly blunt, at present the Goddess Kal’enel concentrates most of her attention on the Shin’a’in because the Tayledras have their magic thing way more together than their Plains brethren, and they don’t usually need her help. In fact, by the time of the Storms, thanks to sixty-some extant Heartstone Vales and near-thousand Adepts, the Tayledras have collectively become the equal in power of any of the Velgarthian deities, though (fortunately?) they don’t realize it.
So, after almost a millenium of continuous hard work to bring order to the wild magic of the Pelagirs, do the Hawkbrothers feel as if their efforts were wasted now that the Storms came along and scraped away what they did to tame it all? Not at all, because they know that they pretty much saved everybody. If the Tayledras had not actively pulled the wild magic into order, the dangers of the Pelagirs would have overrun the whole of the known world.
The Hawkbrothers feel kind of satisfied knowing that. The goddess is pleased.
******
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Under The Vale And Other Tales Of Valdemar v(-105 Page 32