The convoy followed the road. The wheels and hooves clacked on the stones of the pavement. It was a calming rhythm that invited you to doze. You made progress, but not so fast that you reached your destination straight away. The city guards used the time for a chat. Apparently the young man had recently met a woman and was getting advice. Meia wasn't interested in that. She looked around. The surroundings had changed slightly again. There were more fields between the meadows. There still weren't many. Puffy clouds cast shadows on a landscape of green and gold. As the commander had said, it didn't look like rain. There were only white clouds looming on the horizon.

The second city wall reached far on both sides and then even further in arches until it was barely visible. Along the wall were footpaths that followed it. The road snaked forward and at the very end, behind fields and roofs, there was a third wall and many towers. This was the third and last city wall of Aoka. Strictly speaking, it was the first city wall of Aoka. The official numbering always went from the inside to the outside. In any case, this wall was higher than the second and it looked as if the sides were further away than the center. You could see that the city had a circular shape. The city was also much smaller than the other walls made it seem. Up to the wall, the road hardly diverged. Only occasionally did narrow paths branch off, which sooner or later led to detached houses. The paths were often plain earth, but the road was gray throughout.

A river came from far to the left. There were windmills in that direction and some with water wheels. At one place there were fenced-in sheep, although Meia actually only recognized white spots on green. The river was like a blue brushstroke across the landscape. It was the same one Meia had seen outside the second city wall. It came in through a gate on the left, crossed the road at a bridge and winded on and on until it eventually disappeared between fields on the right. Since it was a river there was probably another gate somewhere.

The houses here were either made of wood or stone or half-timbered houses made of both. Nevertheless, all the houses and the windmills looked very similar. None of the houses looked like the houses in Wiestahl. In Wiestahl, the stone walls between the beams of the half-timbered houses were almost always plastered and painted. Every house had a different color. Here, all the houses had the same colors. It was always the same wood and always the same stone. None of the houses had plaster. The stone was always gray.

The road was lined with black lanterns at fixed intervals. It seemed a little exaggerated for this road, which was currently only used by the convoy. The surroundings were reflected in the lanterns. There was a shine, as if freshly polished. As the wagon passed close to a lantern, Meia stretched out her arm and let her fingers glide over the material.

~This isn't real?~ She thought to herself. It didn't feel as she had expected. The difference was certainly not too great, but it was softer and rougher.

The commander had probably seen what she had done. "That's not black steel. It's just good varnish." He explained to her.

"What do you mean by good varnish?"

"It's not black steel, but there's fernium in the varnish."

That was a disappointment. However, the lanterns didn't look cheap, so Meia had another question.

"Is that expensive?"

"Yeah, but it's cheaper than black steel."

"That's krystafei up there. In Kiras, the lanterns are only with oil. Is Aoka richer than Kiras?"

"Well, maybe per capita..."

The tall man cast a quick glance at her. "But then Aoka isn't that rich. This is the only street in the outer ring that has lanterns."

"Hey, don't badmouth our city." The commander made it sound as if he didn't really take offense. "That's on purpose, since this is also the only street in the outer ring road that's used at night. If it were up to me, there wouldn't be any lanterns here either, but then you couldn't see from the main gate what kind of thugs are trying to get into the city."

"What do you have against light?"

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"I had my first in-depth experience with a girl in a meadow. It wouldn't have worked in a different city."

Now the young man turned around. "That's a public offense, commander."

"It's not like anyone saw it."

"You don't want light so you don't get caught?"

"Nonsense, that's not why. It worked because she was from Primas and had never seen the night before."

The commander then suggested to his recruit that he should take his new girlfriend to one of the meadows and show her the stars. Meia stayed out of it.

Black steel was like silver steel. It was an alloy with a certain metal as the main component that was sold as steel. It was also partly to blame for the term becoming so diluted. When the first of such alloys saw the light of day, it was sold as black steel. At the time, smiths still had their own secret alloy production processes and not all smiths were equally good. The quality varied far more than it did nowadays. Hardened steel was also still the benchmark in many respects. Anything that was steel was easier to sell, so a lot was sold as steel that wasn't. The final nail in the coffin for the definition of steel was black steel. Until then, you could quickly tell from the weaknesses of pseudo-steel that it wasn't genuine steel, but the quality of black steel was always high. It was usually even better than hardened steel. For a long time there was only one supplier of the necessary ore and for a long time only one manufacturer of black steel, so the quality remained high.

Today, manufacturers usually followed fixed definitions of alloys, but the well-known pseudo-steels continued to be sold as such. At the same time, terms such as black steel and silver steel were not defined. All that was known was that they contained the corresponding base metals, but nothing more than that. If you wanted to buy an object made of an alloy, you had to pay attention to the ratio of metals. If you didn't do this, it could happen that the object did not have anywhere near the properties it was supposed to have.

Meia knew all this, but it was more important to understand each other than to be the smartest, and so she also used these questionable terms.

Fernium was the base metal of black steel. It was often referred to as the mother of all metals or sometimes just as mother. The more you knew about fernium, the more you understood why. Fernium was a special element and black steel was superior to many steels in many aspects. Black steel with a high fernium content was incredibly hard and yet almost impossible to break. A stainless steel needed other elements such as chromium, but an alloy with sufficient fernium did not rust even without chromium. Nevertheless, black steel was not necessarily suitable for weapons. Fernium was a heavy metal. It was heavier than lead, heavier than gold, heavier than platinum. It was almost the heaviest element of them all and black steel was even heavier. It was possible to forge a sword from black steel that could cut through granite without damage, but it would be so heavy that it would not be a suitable sword. Meia guessed that the masked woman's sword had a fernium alloy at its core to achieve the weight, however, she didn't understand what the point was.

The ore of fernium was deep black. As the name suggested, black steel was as well, but it had a slight red tinge. Both were extremely reflective. Even in the ore you could see your face and black steel was like a black mirror. It did not need to be polished. It became that way automatically as it cooled during forging. The paint on the lanterns didn't have the typical red tint, but it was as reflective, so Meia had expected it to be some kind of fernium alloy. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

Meia was familiar with metal oxides, such as zinc oxide, which was used for paints and varnishes. A metal oxide was a compound of metal and oxygen. Metal oxides were powders. Zinc oxide was a white powder. When used as a pigment, zinc oxide was referred to as zinc white. This was also the case with other metal oxides. For example, there was titanium oxide and titanium white. There were many different manufacturing processes for metal oxides. At the turn of the century, ground zinc ores were still roasted with coal in Wiestahl to produce zinc oxide, but today pure zinc was evaporated and captured in Wiestahl. The zinc ores that were mined in Wiestahl were mostly lead-zinc ores. Lead was considered a harmful, which is why impure zinc oxide from ores was no longer as competitive at some point. Nowadays, it was possible to produce clean zinc oxide from mixed ores using filter systems or chemical processes, but the company in Wiestahl either had no capital or no interest in doing so. Zinc oxide was no longer so popular anyway. There were other metal oxides that were better. Titanium oxide, for example, was somewhat more expensive, but as a pigment it had a higher covering power and was harmless to health. Unfortunately, Wiestahl did not have titanium.

Meia had not known that fernium could be used for varnish. After all, Meia wasn't a chemist and, based on previous experiences, she wasn't going to become one either.

Fernium had some other interesting properties. For example, it was anything but reactive and its melting point was very high. It needed special blast furnaces to make it forgeable. This was one of the reasons why there was initially only one producer of black steel. Most forges did not have the necessary equipment.

The vernacular attributed to fernium the characteristic qualities of being timeless, indomitable and righteous. In some countries, as in Jena itself, the gavel used to administer justice was always made of a fernium alloy. A man of law, such as Minister Schoppe, had certainly often wielded such a gavel.

.../ End Part