Science

The fourth of Solmere's specialisations, and the only power system in the saga that lives outside a person entirely.

What it is

Ch. 279 states it by contrast with Alchemy, from Briar Colton's point of view.

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.

So the two disciplines split on where the work happens. Alchemy bends the practitioner. Science builds an object.

The components named so far

• Essence conduits. Purchasable, expensive, and the part that destabilises first. Briar rebuilds his three times.
• Carved crystal lensing. The part that cracks.
• Copper wire.

What it has been used for

One project, unfinished. Briar's device, meant to hold his foresight steady past its natural limits, then redesigned toward precision rather than duration. See soul-abilities.md.

Both versions fail. The second one cracks its lens before the ability engages at all.

Its limits are money and training

Ch. 279 is explicit that the failure is not conceptual.

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.

The gap he names is "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".

This makes Science the least democratic of the four branches. Alchemy opens to anyone with discipline. Science opens to anyone with discipline and funding.

Open questions

• Whether Science is taught formally at Solmere. Nothing so far shows a Science instructor, and Briar works alone in a disused room.
• Whether an Alchemist can do what Briar's device attempts, which is the question ch. 279 leaves him unwilling to ask Yseult.