Chương 213: Chapter 70: When Destiny Catches Up to You

One day, a quick fluttering of wings and a soft squawk announced the arrival of an aqualmuss. It carried a thick envelope of letters tied to its leg. Among the routine reports and sealed orders, Selena found one with the seal of Solendra: Valerius, her uncle. The Grand Duke wrote with a mixture of affection and gentle reproach, his handwriting as always elegant and firm.

"To my beloved Marchioness. In the long time that we have been separated, I have remembered you with all the love that a father can have for his daughter. My dear niece, since your birthday in calcar I know nothing about you. Thaerón mentioned your whereabouts, but it was more out of a mixture of my concern and my power as constable of the realm. I deeply regret not being able to offer you a gift to match, but as you know tradition dictates it so.

One year is celebrated with family, another with friends and acquaintances, but I have already reserved the next one, one that belonged to Iris your mother, I am sure that you will love it. As for my little daughter of blood, Iris grows strong it is incredible how much she advances in her path of growth, walking since six months, crawling through the world and since she turned one year old with her independent steps.

She reminds me of a certain girl with the confidence she looks at the world, she asks about her aunt, and I remind you now that our house awaits you. With love, Valerius Theronius of Solendra, your dear father" Selena, as she went through the letters, could not help but feel increasingly uncomfortable; the detachment of feelings, the affection with which the man spoke, all of that hurt her in the deepest secret she held.

Valerius held memories of an entire lifetime with Isabella, with the girl she had been before the transmigration. She, on the other hand, only had the body and a second-hand affection that did not quite fit in her chest. The surprise was what sprang next; behind Valerius's letter, carefully folded and fastened with a thin thread, there was another. It bore no heraldic seal, only a "K" drawn in blue ink in the bottom corner. Selena recognized it instantly. Her heart leaped with joy, with urgency, with longing.

The Path of the Inner Voice had intercepted the grand duke's mail to get it to her. She unfolded the parchment, thinner, more intimate, and Kaela's handwriting filled her vision like a face she loved with all her heart emerging from the fog of so many months of separation.

"To my dear Selena, I am sending you this letter because, since you did not answer those I sent to the Terracanto cave, I assumed something had happened to you. The sources of the Path directed us to your new location at the Fort of the Dawn, but we sent a courier there and they did not find you. So, we intercepted the grand duke's mail to be able to communicate. Corren informed me what you wanted, what had happened with the Omnipresent Shadow. Now I understand everything.

Selena, you are a pillar for me, but I inform you of this because you seek it, though if it were only as a friend, I would never tell you. The Path knows that Baron Scargoth has dealings with slavers, but his coffers do not show that his profits are what he declares. That clue led us to observe him. One of our infiltrators discovered that the man holds a letter with the seal of House Solendra.

Furthermore, we know that next year he plans to move to Theosyra; he was offered a quiet life, suspiciously with nothing else. Official sources say it is because he is a great connoisseur of the "Church of the Pure Flow." You must hurry if you want answers. With love, and hoping you do not go, K." Blood burned in her veins, a sudden fire that dried her mouth and clouded her vision for an instant.

There she was, stuck in this camp of mud and monsters, wasting time with the chain of the Hammerer Project, while the truth, the only one that mattered to her, the reason for her transmigration, the thread connecting her soul to this world was slipping from her hands. Scargoth, the baron who had been behind the Omnipresent Shadow, who possessed a letter with the seal of House Solendra… and now he would flee to Theosyra, protected by treaties and distances, erasing the clues forever.

She could no longer afford the luxury of failing slowly. She could no longer keep playing passive resistance, waiting for the realm to tire of her. Time, now, had the edge of a knife. She sighed, and the air tasted to her like ash, like the cursed phrase echoing in her memory like a funeral toll:"Correct and immutable." The halom did not lie. The destiny she had seen in dreams, giant beetles, men under her command, the impenetrable forest, was unfolding before her eyes with the precision of clockwork.

Now, another piece fell: the urgency, the countdown. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. She closed her eyes, squeezing Kaela's letter between her fingers until the parchment creaked. Her mouth tasted like trash, of the bitter certainty that there was no escape. She was obligated to solve the problem of the Hammerer, and fast. Not for the realm, not for the greater good, but for herself.

For the truth that lay waiting in a sealed letter, in a cowardly baron, in the name of a house that was as much hers as it was alien. When she opened her eyes, her gaze was no longer that of the colonel procrastinating. It was that of the resonant who had survived a dungeon, that of the woman who had named her rings and made a princess cry with a painting of the sea. The river flowed, yes; but she was not just a log drifting along. She had hands. She had will.

And she had a hammer that, perhaps, she could use to forge her own way out. She stood up, carefully folding the letter and stowing it in the inner pocket of her uniform, right over her heart. Outside, the eternal mud of winter waited. Beyond the shadows of Theosyra, and the truth she could not allow to vanish. Then she set to work in earnest, with the concentration of a surgeon before an open body. Upon the titarde desk, under the pale light of the oil lamps, she unrolled a sheet of virgin parchment.

Her quill, loaded with thick black ink, paused for an instant in the air, as if hesitating to betray the secrets of another world.

Then, with her elegant and precise handwriting, she wrote a title that on Earth would have been a matter of bureaucratic obviousness, but here, in this medieval world crossed by biological divergence, sounded like technological heresy, like a madman's dream:"LOGISTICAL FAST-TRANSPORT RAILWAY" She sighed, a long and heavy sound, as if the very air of the room were demanding from her the weight of what she was about to unleash; but she knew it, there was no turning back.

Using the same meticulousness of someone drawing an anatomy manual, she broke down the project step by step. She started with the basics: the leveling off the ground, the base of compacted gravel. Then, the sleepers of titarde wood, the only one dense enough and resistant to decay, laid out in parallel at exact intervals. Upon them, wooden rails coated with a strip of wrought iron, ensuring a uniform, millimeter-precise distance, the key to it all.

She described the chassis of the handcar: a simple but robust frame, with tempered iron axles and conical-designed wheels, featuring an internal flange to guide itself along the rails. She drew schematics of the lever and crankshaft mechanism that would allow a crew of men, or perhaps even domesticated animals, to propel the vehicle over the rails with an efficiency impossible for a wagon on uneven terrain. She detailed the necessary lubricants, the motion tests, the maintenance protocols.

So, with everything already prepared in the necessary engineering treatise, she only needed to get up to speed with the technology of this world to use the equivalent components. Her routine changed abruptly; she went religiously every day to the alchemy laboratory, far from remaining merely an observer, she began to carefully meddle. She would ask Gerald, the chief of alchemists, about the properties of metals, dedicating herself to taking notes, one after another, day after day.

The man had a trembling voice and often stumbled over his words, but the efficiency of his work spoke louder than anything. —Steel we can manufacture, unfortunately we have not been able to find a method of sustained improvement —he sighed loudly, running his hand through his hair with an old issue on his mind— the blacksmiths and metallurgists do it with animal bones, but outside of that…

Other days, alongside the head of distillers, Catherine was a woman advanced in years, her peace and methodology permeated everyone in her area. —The best would be the distillations of amber drupe oil, but it works only better under certain conditions and can be flammable at a certain temperature, you must keep it cool —she looked at the ceiling of the cave for a few seconds and continued— the best resin I think could be Ferulon, a very uncommon tree where we are, but easy to obtain on the coast.

As for anti-corrosive properties, it will serve you well, many tanners use them for the same reason. To the engineers working under her command she asked biased questions, presenting them with problems of friction and load as if they were theoretical exercises. They, impressed by the colonel's sudden fervor, collaborated without suspecting they were giving shape to a logistical revolution whose design came from a mind that had seen worlds were electricity and steel crossed continents.

Remembering that afternoon with Maya, her mind brought her to the head of the path of sciences, and with time ahead of her, she exchanged a flurry of correspondence with Bramis, the man of heavy-hearted eyes and deep knowledge. Up to four letters crossed the skies in a week, carried by aqualmuss with fluttered plumage.

In them, Selena unwrapped the idea of the railway with a precision bordering on obsequious: she presented him with solutions to problems he had not even formulated, leaving only small gaps, calculated errors, material limitations, so that the professor could "correct" her and feel like a participant. Bramis, from his academic ivory tower, responded with growing enthusiasm, adding marginal notes about lighter alloys, braking systems with tempered steel springs, improvements in the crankshaft design.

Selena read his corrections and smiled, a cold and satisfied gesture. Each contribution from Bramis was one more nail in the coffin of her own stagnation, one step closer to freedom. When at last the theoretical project was complete, a thick volume of parchments, schematics, and calculations, endorsed by the signatures of the camp's alchemists and backed by the epistolary authority of Bramis, one late winter morning she brought it with her outside.

Outside, in the forest near the perimeter wall, the test explosions of the adult hammerers thundered. The air smelled of burnt ozone and vaporized vegetation.