The Path of Steam - Part II
Posted: Wed Nov 27, 2024 8:49 pm
45 Searing 123
There is a silence that comes after an explosion. The sudden, massive concussive force is so destructive that it takes away your ability to hear anything else. It rings inside you, high-pitched like a scream, while blocking out all else. A sound so overwhelming that it shatters the part of you that took it in and you bleed from the inside.
Sometimes a person encounters a situation that is so fundamentally destructive to their inner world that it causes their body to mimic the sensation of an explosion. The world goes quiet except for that high wail, you grow dizzy and your vision narrows to encompass only the thing that is breaking you.
The difference between a physical explosion and an emotional one is that, if the physical one doesn't kill you initially the body will heal. When it is your understanding of self that is blown out of you, the damage remains. Sometimes something can be found to cover the holes, or fill them, but what was lost never grows back, never heals over. It can be lived, or it can kill you, but you'll never be what you were before.
Stefan Dornkirk did not hear himself in his name as he once had. The name had become a symbol of Zaichaeri resilience and indefatigability. It was something he wore on his shoulders, on his face; he wore it in his voice and carried it in his stride. The person who had worn that name before had died, taken three bullets to the pillars of what had created his identity. The name remained, but the person had changed. The clockwork mechanism that had created the first Stefan Dornkirk still operated however, ticking away to create a man based on what he was supposed to be. The ones who had once decided what he was supposed to be were gone, taken away in an explosion that had hollowed out what they had wrought in him, but there were new pillars to stand in their place.
These new pillars were concepts though, not people. Zaichaer itself was one, the idea of it and the reality of it. His family was another, the citizens of his nation a third. There were more, dozens, a forest of ideation used as a blueprint to pave over and recreate the figurehead from the remains of the man.
The problem with all of this mechanized restructuring is that, when the explosion happened, it created shrapnel, scraps of metal and bone that stuck in the gears. This meant that the machine was not perfect, that while it had mostly been able to grind down the soft human parts that had made up the man that Stefan Dornkirk had been, some of them remained. There were globs of pink and white flesh still clinging on between the metallic teeth of cogs that could not turn far enough to obliterate them. And, like all living tissue, these remains tried to heal themselves, tried to grow back what had been lost.
So, there was a cycle now. Flesh versus metal; the first growing and healing but only up to the point that the second could reach it, crush it. There were days when he felt like a person, when he held his children, kissed his wife, drank with his brother-in-law, that he believed he was a person. But then came the teeth, inevitable as they were unstoppable, turning on their wheels and scraping off any scrap of meat that came within their reach. These were the days when reports of new illnesses sweeping through the population came across his desk, the days when whole villages of people had to be isolated and put down because the mists had corrupted them beyond redemption. When Kalzasi celebrated the coronation of their new king, or the Imperium sent another letter in which italicized congratulations barely masked threats of invasion should the new government show any sign of weakness.
Some days it felt like Stefan Dornkirk had died with his parents and brother and what had risen in his place was a physical embodiment of Zaichaer without the need for a person inside. When this feeling got strong enough to overwhelm him, he retreated to his laboratory deep in the bowels of the Sky Island that held the Windworks. Slipping into protective clothing and magnifying spectacles allowed him to become something that embodied, and therefore did not provoke, both of the forces that drove him.
There had been no time for engineering and invention for the majority of the time since the sky had opened to swallow his life, but there was now. His job had been divided between nearly a dozen people, who each had teams of dozens of people working under them. He still read all the reports, but now there was a conclusion or a decision that he had not had to make tacked onto the end of most of them. The careful balance of being First Minister and cabinet ministers was still being worked out. Where he could, or should, step in to question or take matters into his own hands was an unknown. In time, precedents would be determined and traditions be dictated, but he was the one who would set them and that weight pressed on his mind. But there in his workshops, the pressure eased. There was work to be done that was important to Zaichaer that did not require any thought to long term ramifications or consideration for how it might affect every citizen. Science did not care about his feelings, and in performing it, neither did he.
There were many problems that needed solving, and Science held the answers. Finding those answers had always fascinated him, the more complicated and important the problem but deeper he sunk into it. So it was that he was drawn, more and more, to the deepest and most secret place that was his. Within lay his two secrets, though one was less so now than it had been. The Demon Stone, as it was unaffectionately referred to, was known because he had not been able to and thought it would have been unwise to, conceal the means by which he had powered a great deal of the mechanism that had been used to restore Zaichaer city. It was not perfect still, but the efforts were nearing completion. Keeping the Demon Stone drained as near to empty as they could get it at all times had been recommended to him and he had been fully onboard with the plan. Members of the Order had requested, and in very limited numbers been granted, the right to examine the Stone to determine its properties and liabilities. Stefan was no mage, no Sembler, and the safety of Zaichaer was paramount always.
His other secret was also not fully so, a handful of people knew of its existence but he had allowed no one except Eitan to examine it, him, Brenner. Since discovering that running an aetheric current through the remains had caused a reaction his quiet obsession had become loud, in his own head at least. He still didn't talk about it, had not told anyone of his experiment, now thrice repeated, of bleeding some power from the Demon Stone and using it to power the remains. That the remains could be powered was something that he had both spent a great deal of time studying the concept of, and no time at all thinking about. In fact, while his engineer's mind dug at the fascinating problem more or less continuously, the rest of his mind kept carefully away from it.
With auraglass spectacles he had carefully examined and noted down the difference between the energy of the Demon Stone when it was drawn directly, and when it was drawn from an aether battery in which it had been stored. Because there was a difference. His longtime study of aetheric theory led him to postulate several different reasons for this. The most likely, and most disturbing, was that the difference was because the Demon Stone, unlike other dragonshards, was being fueled by the life force of a living being. Life force was a form of energy, like electrical energy, with its own properties. After nearly a month of careful study and experimentation, he had found a way to isolate this energy. This had been complicated by the fact that it dissipated more quickly than other forms of aether and he couldn't discover a way to force it to remain for more than a few minutes in a non-living object. He had not attempted to infuse a living creature with the power. Considering its source, this had seemed too dangerous, particularly without anyone else knowing what he was attempting. He would turn his findings over to the Order and if they decided there was a safe way to contain the experiment, they could do so.
Rather than allowing the stored life force energy to dissipate, he had used it, as often as he had been able. Channeling it into different parts of the remains, seeing how they reacted. Always isolated, each piece of the form that he had channeled the fuel into, hand, foot, arm, leg, had moved and reacted in ways that had been as disturbing as they were fascinating. The movements had not been random or spasmodic, rather familiarly normal. Stefan might have made the calculated assumption that the movements were memories stored in the muscles, but there were no muscles, no flesh of any kind. Were movement memories also stored in bones? He was not a medical doctor, though he had some training, so one would have to be asked.
In time he had ignited each of the major body parts except one and the results had remained consistent, they would act as though attached to a living being in so much as bones could, until the power ran out. When the power was used up they would return to a dormant state. There was only one thing left to try and it was something that Stefan had been avoiding. The only thing left was to power the head. The problem with this was that, unlike a normal human skull, there was no opening in this one that allowed him to see what was inside the cavity. metal had fused over the eye sockets, the mouth was fused closed and the place where the spine met the base of the skull had been covered over as well. Whether this had happened before death or as a result of it, he did not know. For reasons he refused to explore he had an unholy dread of attempting to drill through any part of the skull to attempt to discover what lay within. A part of him had known, from the moment he had seen the hand moving the first time he had tried the power of the Demon Stone on it, that this was where the experiment was leading. Yet, he had delayed, done all the preliminary work, tried everything else. A part of him, a large part, was worried that nothing would happen, or that the head would move as all the other parts had and then fall back into death as soon as the power was gone. Another part, small but stubborn, believed that something else would happen, something miraculous and terrible and Stefan Dornkirk was deeply afraid of either outcome.
There is a silence that comes after an explosion. The sudden, massive concussive force is so destructive that it takes away your ability to hear anything else. It rings inside you, high-pitched like a scream, while blocking out all else. A sound so overwhelming that it shatters the part of you that took it in and you bleed from the inside.
Sometimes a person encounters a situation that is so fundamentally destructive to their inner world that it causes their body to mimic the sensation of an explosion. The world goes quiet except for that high wail, you grow dizzy and your vision narrows to encompass only the thing that is breaking you.
The difference between a physical explosion and an emotional one is that, if the physical one doesn't kill you initially the body will heal. When it is your understanding of self that is blown out of you, the damage remains. Sometimes something can be found to cover the holes, or fill them, but what was lost never grows back, never heals over. It can be lived, or it can kill you, but you'll never be what you were before.
Stefan Dornkirk did not hear himself in his name as he once had. The name had become a symbol of Zaichaeri resilience and indefatigability. It was something he wore on his shoulders, on his face; he wore it in his voice and carried it in his stride. The person who had worn that name before had died, taken three bullets to the pillars of what had created his identity. The name remained, but the person had changed. The clockwork mechanism that had created the first Stefan Dornkirk still operated however, ticking away to create a man based on what he was supposed to be. The ones who had once decided what he was supposed to be were gone, taken away in an explosion that had hollowed out what they had wrought in him, but there were new pillars to stand in their place.
These new pillars were concepts though, not people. Zaichaer itself was one, the idea of it and the reality of it. His family was another, the citizens of his nation a third. There were more, dozens, a forest of ideation used as a blueprint to pave over and recreate the figurehead from the remains of the man.
The problem with all of this mechanized restructuring is that, when the explosion happened, it created shrapnel, scraps of metal and bone that stuck in the gears. This meant that the machine was not perfect, that while it had mostly been able to grind down the soft human parts that had made up the man that Stefan Dornkirk had been, some of them remained. There were globs of pink and white flesh still clinging on between the metallic teeth of cogs that could not turn far enough to obliterate them. And, like all living tissue, these remains tried to heal themselves, tried to grow back what had been lost.
So, there was a cycle now. Flesh versus metal; the first growing and healing but only up to the point that the second could reach it, crush it. There were days when he felt like a person, when he held his children, kissed his wife, drank with his brother-in-law, that he believed he was a person. But then came the teeth, inevitable as they were unstoppable, turning on their wheels and scraping off any scrap of meat that came within their reach. These were the days when reports of new illnesses sweeping through the population came across his desk, the days when whole villages of people had to be isolated and put down because the mists had corrupted them beyond redemption. When Kalzasi celebrated the coronation of their new king, or the Imperium sent another letter in which italicized congratulations barely masked threats of invasion should the new government show any sign of weakness.
Some days it felt like Stefan Dornkirk had died with his parents and brother and what had risen in his place was a physical embodiment of Zaichaer without the need for a person inside. When this feeling got strong enough to overwhelm him, he retreated to his laboratory deep in the bowels of the Sky Island that held the Windworks. Slipping into protective clothing and magnifying spectacles allowed him to become something that embodied, and therefore did not provoke, both of the forces that drove him.
There had been no time for engineering and invention for the majority of the time since the sky had opened to swallow his life, but there was now. His job had been divided between nearly a dozen people, who each had teams of dozens of people working under them. He still read all the reports, but now there was a conclusion or a decision that he had not had to make tacked onto the end of most of them. The careful balance of being First Minister and cabinet ministers was still being worked out. Where he could, or should, step in to question or take matters into his own hands was an unknown. In time, precedents would be determined and traditions be dictated, but he was the one who would set them and that weight pressed on his mind. But there in his workshops, the pressure eased. There was work to be done that was important to Zaichaer that did not require any thought to long term ramifications or consideration for how it might affect every citizen. Science did not care about his feelings, and in performing it, neither did he.
There were many problems that needed solving, and Science held the answers. Finding those answers had always fascinated him, the more complicated and important the problem but deeper he sunk into it. So it was that he was drawn, more and more, to the deepest and most secret place that was his. Within lay his two secrets, though one was less so now than it had been. The Demon Stone, as it was unaffectionately referred to, was known because he had not been able to and thought it would have been unwise to, conceal the means by which he had powered a great deal of the mechanism that had been used to restore Zaichaer city. It was not perfect still, but the efforts were nearing completion. Keeping the Demon Stone drained as near to empty as they could get it at all times had been recommended to him and he had been fully onboard with the plan. Members of the Order had requested, and in very limited numbers been granted, the right to examine the Stone to determine its properties and liabilities. Stefan was no mage, no Sembler, and the safety of Zaichaer was paramount always.
His other secret was also not fully so, a handful of people knew of its existence but he had allowed no one except Eitan to examine it, him, Brenner. Since discovering that running an aetheric current through the remains had caused a reaction his quiet obsession had become loud, in his own head at least. He still didn't talk about it, had not told anyone of his experiment, now thrice repeated, of bleeding some power from the Demon Stone and using it to power the remains. That the remains could be powered was something that he had both spent a great deal of time studying the concept of, and no time at all thinking about. In fact, while his engineer's mind dug at the fascinating problem more or less continuously, the rest of his mind kept carefully away from it.
With auraglass spectacles he had carefully examined and noted down the difference between the energy of the Demon Stone when it was drawn directly, and when it was drawn from an aether battery in which it had been stored. Because there was a difference. His longtime study of aetheric theory led him to postulate several different reasons for this. The most likely, and most disturbing, was that the difference was because the Demon Stone, unlike other dragonshards, was being fueled by the life force of a living being. Life force was a form of energy, like electrical energy, with its own properties. After nearly a month of careful study and experimentation, he had found a way to isolate this energy. This had been complicated by the fact that it dissipated more quickly than other forms of aether and he couldn't discover a way to force it to remain for more than a few minutes in a non-living object. He had not attempted to infuse a living creature with the power. Considering its source, this had seemed too dangerous, particularly without anyone else knowing what he was attempting. He would turn his findings over to the Order and if they decided there was a safe way to contain the experiment, they could do so.
Rather than allowing the stored life force energy to dissipate, he had used it, as often as he had been able. Channeling it into different parts of the remains, seeing how they reacted. Always isolated, each piece of the form that he had channeled the fuel into, hand, foot, arm, leg, had moved and reacted in ways that had been as disturbing as they were fascinating. The movements had not been random or spasmodic, rather familiarly normal. Stefan might have made the calculated assumption that the movements were memories stored in the muscles, but there were no muscles, no flesh of any kind. Were movement memories also stored in bones? He was not a medical doctor, though he had some training, so one would have to be asked.
In time he had ignited each of the major body parts except one and the results had remained consistent, they would act as though attached to a living being in so much as bones could, until the power ran out. When the power was used up they would return to a dormant state. There was only one thing left to try and it was something that Stefan had been avoiding. The only thing left was to power the head. The problem with this was that, unlike a normal human skull, there was no opening in this one that allowed him to see what was inside the cavity. metal had fused over the eye sockets, the mouth was fused closed and the place where the spine met the base of the skull had been covered over as well. Whether this had happened before death or as a result of it, he did not know. For reasons he refused to explore he had an unholy dread of attempting to drill through any part of the skull to attempt to discover what lay within. A part of him had known, from the moment he had seen the hand moving the first time he had tried the power of the Demon Stone on it, that this was where the experiment was leading. Yet, he had delayed, done all the preliminary work, tried everything else. A part of him, a large part, was worried that nothing would happen, or that the head would move as all the other parts had and then fall back into death as soon as the power was gone. Another part, small but stubborn, believed that something else would happen, something miraculous and terrible and Stefan Dornkirk was deeply afraid of either outcome.