Warsinger by James Baldwin (most important books of all time txt) 📕

– uhh… Liquid Azurine-Emeraldine Hybrid engines – you have two types of mana of different densities agitating each other as they try to expand at different speeds. If you can imagine two teams playing tug of war, and the rope is wrapped around a crankshaft that’s connected to a simple engine, the back-and-forth motion agitates the crankshaft and turns the rotors. You follow?”

“Surprisingly, yes.” I looked to Suri and Karalti. Karalti was scratching her head, but Suri seemed to be following along.

“That’s like a super-simple and not completely accurate breakdown of it. But anyway, what I think the Warsingers had was like a more extreme version of a mana transmutation-exchange system that used the negative draw of a Void creature’s essence to release huge amounts of energy,” Rin continued. “We don’t know how it would work in practice, but it looks like this place you found is where they might have made the cores. That would be SUPER exciting. If we could figure out that technology…”

“We could make our own Warsingers,” I finished. “Hell yeah.”

To my right, Suri approached the monolithic metal doors that led into the complex. It was inset with a double pair of handprints. The larger of the two was the four-fingered print of a dragon’s hand. Each one was half again as big as Karalti's full-sized hands, and had been made by a dragon with no claws on the end of their fingers. The second set, contained within the first, were human. Hesitantly, Suri placed her hands into them. They were a perfect fit.

“You have to bleed,” Karalti said. “This is a Solonkratsu temple. The Words of Power enchanted into that door were written in blood.”

“Right. You dragons sure love blood, don’t you?” Suri pulled her gloves off and tucked them through her belt, then took a knife. To my great relief, she didn't dramatically slash her palms open. She pricked the pads of her fingers, then pressed her hands back into the locks.

A series of unseen tumblers unlocked. Suri stepped back, and the doors crunched and rumbled their way open, sliding back into the walls with a rolling boom.

[You have discovered a new location: The Shrine of the Anvil]

Chapter 48

The entry to the Shrine was not really the entrance. By the size of the doors, the way they opened, and the cavernous, oil-stained warehouse that lay beyond, it was pretty clear that this was the back of the temple complex: the space in which the priest-smiths and their helpers quite possibly assembled the Warsinger we hoped to find.

Temples of Khors had some parts that were more archetypally temple-y, but Khors the Maker was the god of the forge and the easel and people worshipped him by making stuff. This ancient place was no exception. There were two long, narrow pits on the floor, deep enough for a human to stand upright and work over their heads. Stone benches and broken scaffolding surrounded a big empty area in the middle of the workspace. There was a second-floor catwalk around the edge, and a ramp leading out into the middle of the room like a diving board.

“Ugh.” Karalti shivered. “Feels haunted.”

“Haunted?” Suri strode ahead of us, craning her head to look around. “I dunno... feels kind of peaceful to me.”

“Don't you sense that? It's like we're being watched.” Karalti stuck close to my side, her shoulders hunched. It was dark inside, so we had to pull out our torches again.

I eyed the dead mage lights that lined the walls. “We might be. I mean... these guys were pretty advanced in the magitech department. They could have cameras of some kind.”

There was a corridor beyond the big room, with small storage rooms offside. We knew they were storage, because some of them had shelves - but other than some small [Aurum Gears] and [Greencrystal Mana Shards], the place was disturbingly empty and tidy.

“Why is there nothing here?” I found a single stone chest, and kicked it open with my weapon levelled in case it was some kind of mimic. The lid slid off to reveal a disappointingly empty container. “There should be tons of treasure in a place like this.”

“It's like they packed everything up and abandoned this place.” Karalti sniffed. “You know what's weird?”

“Hmm?”

“No mana smell,” Karalti said. “Temples of Khors always smell like mana - to me, at least. And this place really should, if it was used to make Warsingers.”

“Huh.” She had a point there.

“Hey, guys. Check this out. Rin'll lose her mind,” Suri called from the next room.

We found her looking at a metal plate fixed to the wall. It was engraved with three rows of script. I couldn’t read any of them, but one of the language forms was recognizable.

“That’s the Mercurion language.” I took a screenshot and sent it to Rin. “Here – this might help you work out the languages we’ve been seeing. It’s like… uhh… what’s that IRL thing called? The big stone that helped archaeologists figure out Ancient Egyptian?”

“The Rosetta Stone,” Rin replied. “Okay, I’ve been working on the languages anyway while you guys have been exploring, and I’m about ninety percent sure that right-to-left alphabetic script is a language called ‘Old Aga’.”

“Aga? Didn’t Davri say that the proper name for the Fireblooded was ‘Aga’?” I asked Suri.

She nodded. “Yeah. What does this say?”

“Let me see…” she went quiet for a few minutes, then started to giggle.

“What?” Suri and I glanced at each other.

“It’s a safety sign! The Tlaxik script reads: ‘Danger – High Concentrations of Mana in the Heart of Knives construction chamber. You must wear proper equipment’.”

“Heart of Knives? That sounds ominous and kind of… pointy.” I scratched my head. “Alright, well, if we find anything else, we’ll run it by you. Other than stuff like this, we haven’t seen anything so far. I think they abandoned ship.”

“They probably ran out of mana. Can you imagine how much mana it'd take to build this stuff, let alone fuel machines like that?”

“Yeah. I've been wondering about how