Chương 95: Ferris Einion

Karesk was like any Shorinu town in the Third Ring - bent entirely to industry. Ferris's childhood was an ongoing cacophony of gongs - metal striking metal, intercut with disturbing moments of silence only in those rare days when the forges went cold. Even years later in a completely different Ring, he could still hear the peals of those strikes in his ears when trying to find ways to sleep in the silence of quieter camps.

His father was a bronze smith, and Ferris had no greater ambition than to follow in his footsteps - though he considered that on its own a great ambition. His father was a tireless worker with a mountainous arm. He could work the metal twelve hours a day and still come home to eat a heart meal and tell ribald jokes with his friends over slabs of barbequed meat he would insist to cook himself. It was as if he didn't know who he was without fire in his life.

Ferris couldn't remember a time when he didn't help in the forge, first as a cleaner, then a runner, then as an apprentice. Everyone told him he bore a striking resemblance to the elder Mr. Einion, and Ferris personally agreed. But still even as he rounded the corner into adulthood his arm couldn't match his father's. Time, his father would rumble. The same thing that breaks down mountains will break your arm into what it was meant to be. Time and work. But it never did.

Time didn't give him the gifts it had bequeathed to his father's family - oh, Ferris was strong. Stronger even than his father - in one strike Ferris could bend metal far beyond what his father could do. But he tired so easily in comparison. But by hour eight Ferris was done for, while his father just starting to enjoy a second wind. Ferris blamed his mother. Her people were of beefier stock - well-made for the sort of tasks Ferris excelled at. Quick bursts of power.

They were soldiers, to a man, and to all but one woman - Ferris's mother. She valued the power of the mind more than the body, and the business of the forge that kept his father busy was borne almost entirely by her sharp bookkeeping. Never in Karesk was there a deal-maker like his mother. Ferris was also quick like she was - if not quite as facile with numbers. In Ferris, they had forged an alloy. Not any one metal, but a mixture of the two.

And when he made that realization, he turned his attention to newer endeavors. What could he do to match his father, if his arm was not up to the task? He turned his attention to the science his father largely balked at - the creation of new alloys. What materials could he mix with the bronze to strengthen it? To soften it? To give it strange new properties? Bronze itself was an alloy, but the mixture his father used had been tested by time and tradition.

He thought his son foolish to go mucking about with new formulas when he should be putting in the time with the hammer. The relationships between his family members did not improve after that. He made Phospor Bronze, ideal for elasticity - wagon springs, bushings - even metal lute strings! His father called it a novelty. Aluminum Bronze! Resisted seawater corrosion! To his father, just trying to do the work that wood could do better. Manganese Bronze - metal so strong it could be made into giant, sturdy gears!

Not really even bronze, his father complained. Too much zinc. His mother was no help. He tried to pitch her on the incredible new product lines they could sell, but she would have none of it. Orders on the scale of Karesk came in bulk. How many minstrels would order new strings every month to make the forging of these alloys profitable? Millers who might have use of such sturdy gears would not be able to afford the cost.

Shipbuilders had no need for bronze that would resist corrosion - they had found cheap alternatives long ago. The numbers just didn't add up. Things got even worse when he discovered his Adept class. The forge had spent an entire day cold as his father stared mournfully into the ashes of his barbeque pit. An Alloy adept was ruined for the forge, as far as his father was concerned. Years of bad blood followed. Ferris took up drinking like some took up knitting or sport - a passionately pursued hobby.

His early adulthood was lost to fights in taverns and mornings of regret. The morning his mother came to him in tears he was waking up after five full days of a drunken stupor. The world was swimming so fast he didn't comprehend the news she had for him. His father had died at the forge - his arm stronger than his heart, it seemed. The time was now to take up his father's mantle. He quit drinking altogether and never again touched a drop.

He worked his arms numb, but he couldn't match what his father's output had been. The forge fell behind on orders. The verve his mother had for the business seemed to die with his father and it soon was either feast or famine. Too many orders - or not enough. She seemed to be much less effective at drumming up business as once she was. And then she was gone.

She had decided that Karesk was too lonely a town without her husband in it and she couldn't go through the motions any more, so she moved back to her family's home three towns away. Ferris was alone trying to manage both sides of the forge. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. He made it work more years than he thought he would.

He took out loans to hire new staff, and that seemed like it was working, but he found that whatever part of the business he didn't have time to focus on sagged. They rotated between poor sales and poor quality work, depending on where he spent his time - and he spent it more and more trying to manage his employees than get any work done. By the time the debtholders came knocking Ferris was done.

The next few years he drifted around the Third Ring and was surprised to learn that in all his struggles to save the forge with his Adept class he'd actually ascended to a weak Fourth. He ventured into that Ring on briefly, but he found it far too dangerous for someone who only barely made it in with no passion to strengthen themselves further to thrive. He barely managed to escape conscription into the war effort there. Five years after his forge had been repossessed, he found himself sunk to a new low.

Manual labor in Teilgcheárta. As a Fourth, he was welcomed with open arms and put to work quickly. He found the iron ore fascinating, and though working too long with the substance made him want to vomit, he found so many different alloys he could create with it, even as it rendered its component materials inert. He found friends in his fellow miners. He went home each day exhausted enough to sleep dreamless, which was enough for him. It would be a lie to say he was happy - but he had been worse.

Perhaps his flaw was the one he shared with his mother. Even stuck here at rock bottom, in a job only the desperate usually take, he found his ambition come creeping back. His supervisor saw how clever he was and saw endless potential in the countless alloys Ferris was constantly playing with. He made Ferris his assistant in his second year there. The years that followed saw him ascend to Supervisor himself. Then Deputy Overseer. The Overseer was a thin, nervous man.

He barely had an eye for the mines themselves, his eyes glued forever on the paper which described the mines' output. Report after report after report. The Regent was making bold moves in negotiations with Shorinu and he needed iron output to be increasing steadily. Rival nations kept the pulse of the market and any sign of weakness there would spell doom for the Regent's plans. The problem was, weakness was all the Overseer could find. For the first time in thousands of years, iron output was decreasing.

That never happened. Never. In fact, it had been a worry by some of Teilgcheárta's finest minds for centuries that the iron might one day grow too fast, that the Heart that made it would just keep building, like an uncontrollable cancer, killing the land around it beyond anyone's ability to manage. The Overseer had been to visit the Heart of Iron many times, and for all that he spent hours squinting at it, the gem had seemed no different than it had in all the many years he had run the mine.

A dozen times he resolved to be patient, only to end up back at the altar, staring at it as soon as his weekly reports came in. We must do something, he would grumble to Ferris. The Regent's attention was beginning to turn from his dealings with Shorinu to the Overseer, and there were no good answers to be had. The Regent didn't want explanations.

He wanted the inevitable and eternal power of the Teilgcheárta Heart of Iron at his back as he played politics with a nation that seemed all too eager to turn to violence to solve its political disputes. So the Overseer did what the Overseer almost never did. He got creative. He made a trip to Shirren. He returned with a Banshee in a blindfold. Onóra Síle was a gemsmith from the seedier parts of the city. He barked at Ferris to mind his own damn business when he asked where he had found her.

She seemed absolutely tickled to be in the bowels of Teilgcheárta, even if she remained blindfolded until being presented the Heart of Iron in its altar. All the Overseer would say was that she came highly recommended - and that she had an impressive pedigree. Onóra spent a month studying the Heart. She took measurements. She built tools to do further measurements. She brought in beakers and burners. Lenses and chemicals.

She even slept in the Heart's Grotto, wasting not a moment of wakefulness that could be bent towards more fully understanding the Heart. By the end of that month, she had a recommendation for the Overseer.

"The Heart is beyond a masterwork, but even a masterwork will degrade over time. Like a pipe that has become clogged, you must clear the way for the power to resume its flow. Just a crack. A tiny crack will set the power back on its irrevocable course." Then the Banshee had vanished into mist, claiming that her curiosity had been slaked. After that day not a single soul laid eyes on Onóra Síle again in Teilgcheárta. It no longer mattered anyway. The Overseer had a plan. Ferris had enormous misgivings.

He had been one of the few assigned to stand guard over Onóra, and while he was no gem master, he knew enough about the blending of fórsa to think that something was wrong with her advice. He had learned that the Heart had the capacity to be controlled - this even the Overseer knew, as he had been increasing the requested output from the Heart for years now. It only required a simple fórsa connection. But… damaging it could not be the right answer. What alloy was ever made stronger by wounding it?

Regardless, the day came when the Overseer, trusting no one else to this delicate task, took the tiny chisel and hammer with him to the Heart's Grotto. Ferris accompanied him, his heart full of dread. The crack was small, but it broke the world in two. As soon as the temperature of the ambient fórsa changed Ferris wrapped himself in steel. He had developed this particular alloy while watching Onóra work. He did not trust her, but he could not deny her genius. Her methods had given him ideas.

He found that steel allowed for direct handling of iron for short periods - a momentous discovery that could have increased mining speed tenfold. Instead, the chainmail links he had forged whirled all around his body and he watched through the tiny gaps in the rings as the Overseer burned alive, the wave of power released by the chisel encasing him instantly in iron. All around him, Crockern by the dozen all fell, iron shrapnel growing in their bodies like fungus.

Ferris knew he had to do something, but the power radiating from the Heart was pushing him away in pulses. He rushed forward as best he could and held his ground when the pulse hit. He could feel the steel rings of his chainmail beginning to melt. Finally, perhaps thirty pulses after the start of the tragedy, he reached out one hand towards the Heart. The chainmail fully melted, the steel etching trenches into his flesh as it was pushed away from the Heart.

That was why when he closed his hand around the gem, it was his flesh that grabbed it, the steel all but gone. Stop, he commanded. He had never been taught that the Heart would respond to such a command, but it did anyway. Ferris felt the pulses ebb and he stumbled, like when the water receded after a big wave on the beach. Holding the gem in one smoking hand, Ferris looked out over the Grotto. Dozens of Crockern lay seemingly lifeless - but still twitching.

Please get up, he said to himself, unwilling to believe the carnage before him. To his horror, they obeyed.