After more than an hour of performing the [Hellfire] equivalent of party tricks for Armond, I went to sleep. He wanted to see how far my control of my Talent had progressed, and he was beyond impressed. I knew that Solana could barely control two sparks at once even though she was seven years older than me. If I wanted to, I could have exerted control on four sparks at once, but the accuracy of my control would deteriorate significantly.
It was a real shame that Solana would be unfavorably compared to me from that point forward, I thought. I had kept my level of mastery over [Hellfire] a secret before then for that reason. Her brother, seven years her junior, had a control over the Feldrast family Talent that was incomparably more advanced than her own.
The only person not impressed by my level of mastery over [Hellfire] was me. It was only natural that a middle-aged academic would reach this level of mastery within nine years. Compared to me, the people of Ferrum were barbarians. They didn’t know about electricity, germ theory, relativity, central plumbing, or a thousand other modern inventions. Their reliance upon magic had stunted their innovative spirit. They could light their streets and heat their homes with magic, so they never needed to truly innovate.
The people of Ferrum would probably never undergo the industrial revolution; at least, not in the same way. Yet, there was a nobility to that. Modern conveniences begot modern problems back on Earth. Would the invention of modern technology truly benefit the world of Ferrum?
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I spent much of the day out doing chores with Solana. Once every month, somebody with the [Hellfire] Talent had to go around and relight any Hellfire sparks that had been extinguished accidentally.
Without outside intervention, Hellfire sparks burned forever, even underwater. If somebody were to strike a spark with some sufficiently sized object, however, it would be extinguished. The millimeter-wide core of the Hellfire spark burnt at a temperature roughly equivalent to that of the sun, so this process invariably destroyed the object. Even I would be lightly burned by touching the core of a Hellfire spark.
Some way or another, sparks were frequently destroyed. Every house in Sableton had at least one spark, and more wealthy domiciles would have two or three. I suspected that there must have been about a thousand Hellfire sparks in town. Inevitably, accidents would happen.
I sat on a bench, trying to catch my breath. There were twelve stops on our route, and we were almost at the last stop. We had been walking off-and-on for about two hours, and I had to sit out one of the stops.
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As I looked up at the clear blue sky and thought about the morbid wheezing sound that I made whenever I inhaled or exhaled, I thought about how the rest of my family was unaware of the full extent of my frailty.
I had been covering up my symptoms with healing magic. Whenever my body ached too much, I would use the [Second Prayer]. Whenever I felt myself start to get sick, I would use the [First Prayer]. Armond was unaware that a minor cold could take me out of commission for a month, and a short walk around town could put me on the verge of asphyxiation.
It was better that way, ultimately. If the fullness of my weakness was revealed, then Armond or Tabitha might limit my ability to leave Feldrast Manor. Though I enjoyed staying cooped up all day from time to time, doing so with regularity would seriously hamper my ability to put my plan into motion. I couldn’t store my transmutation equipment in Feldrast Manor, and I’d need to be alone to handle the more complicated parts of my plan.
While I sat there on that bench, I reached into my pocket and withdrew the reward given to me by Armond the previous night. Holding it up to the light, I held in my hand an Etronian gold coin. Armond gave it to me to “compensate me” for the time I’d waste relighting the sparks around town.
That was the first time I had ever held a gold coin in my hands. The money I borrowed from Eadric was requested in increments measured by silver pieces. The largest amount I had ever asked to borrow at once was thirty silver pieces when I had to pay the local blacksmith for building the superstructure of my transmutation apparatus.
From my modern perspective, the coin looked amateurish, like some hand-made souvenir you’d buy when overseas. It was stamped on each side, and the center of the stamps were slightly misaligned. The coins must have been stamped by hand, giving it a primitive look that didn’t quite fit my idea of a proper currency. Since the machine for automatically stamping coins had not yet been invented, all coins I had seen up to that point had that same imperfection.
On one side of the Etronian gold coin was an image of Azure Palace, the primary seat of governance for the Kingdom of Etronia. The King would deliver declarations from this place, and the House of Lords would gather there whenever matters of finance had to be handled. Officially, Count Armond Feldrast was a member of the House of Lords, but he had handled such matters by proxy ever since I had been born.
On the other side of the coin was a side profile of King Theophrastus III of House Polaris, the current king of Etronia. The image on the coin depicted him as a young man in his early twenties, but the mold had been created long ago. King Theophrastus was almost seventy when I held that coin in my small hand. He had been the king of Etronia for the past fifty years, and he would remain king for another twelve. I would never forget this fact, because I knew his death would be the impetus to start a great and terrible war, the likes of which Ferrum had never seen before.