The first thing that struck me is just how much stuff we had to bring. The second thing was how peaceful the forest we entered was, other than the lack of leaves, this Greenwood was exactly how I remembered it from four months ago. The third thing, however, I only noticed when we reached a hill that was also a clearing. The peak of the mountain in front of us had seemed tall from back in Kruth, but now as we approached their bases they seemed to be dominating more and more of what had before been the sky.

The horse drawn wagons struggled with the dirt roads, but I’d found the craftsmen riding in the heaviest wagons were all very thankful when I’d lift a wheel off the ground so they could fix an axle, or simply to get them out of the occasional spring washout. Most of them seemed to be carpenters or shipwrights, but there were also plenty of metalsmiths. Keith seemed to spend most of his time with them, perhaps because there were a few other dwarves there. I like to think he was getting them ready for the unorthodox work we had to do when we reached the top.

The Cloven Peaks meant something like Carved Mountain’s Top, and it seemed fitting for where dwarves would make their home. During our planning, I had also learned there was a volcano somewhere in the nearby range, but while Keith had said it was one of the tallest ones, everyone else had pointed to a smaller one, closer to the coast. I was familiar with tectonic shifts, but for all I know volcanoes here could just be wherever lava spirits are currently living.

Cole was looking over my shoulder as I cut through a tree that had fallen in our way. He was quite interested in my modern tool, but when I simply handed the silver chainsaw over to him it just seemed to creep him out. He got like this whenever I handed part of myself to someone else, despite how I showed him that I was keeping a line of light, dark and balance mana running through the air to keep it together. Before we’d left, he’d made me test how long my tools would function without the threads, and had seemed absolutely floored when they lasted ten minutes.

I won’t tell you it wasn’t weird, but I see that part of myself as simple mana, just in the form of a chainsaw. Unlike Cole, Keith had been especially happy with my rivet gun while we’d been constructing the boiler. It was proving to be by far the most difficult thing to get up the mountain trail, and after the third day we moved our carriage to be right in front of it, so when it would get stuck I could immediately get out and push.

We were approaching a high cliff, but apparently there was a cave around here somewhere that would lead us to a valley on the inside of the mountain range where the going was far easier. We reached the entrance on the third day after leaving Kruth. Most of the mountain’s slope was lightly forested, and after we’d left the Greenwood we didn’t see any more druids.

The road turned sharply and headed into the cave, and before we entered a lot of the wagons had to take down their canvas coverings that were used to keep the rain off the seasoned wood. It was all lashed together in bulk, but inside the caves weather wasn’t going to be a problem. I had expected the horses to balk at the dark and narrow caverns, but honestly they seemed far more relaxed when we got inside.

It was during our first rest after entering the caves that Keith pointed out to me how the fork we were about to take wasn’t natural, it was hand hewn. I’d checked if explosives were a thing yet, and while I didn’t know formulas or anything, I was tempted to try and work through it with Cole and Tommen, but I had to focus on something, and learning Wernst was currently my highest priority. I was approaching what I would guess is a highschool level understanding of the local language, but I had been bogged down in how exactly to string them together so that it was understandable to them. Whenever I ask them how their morning is going they look at me like I am crazy. I think it has something to do with it coming across as them owning the morning, but I’m not sure.

The natural looking cave had rounded edges, even during previous forks. This man made tunnel we were moving into had a hard transition where the floor went from smooth and rounded to flat, wavy pattern. The walls and ceiling were also just as flat, but they didn’t have any pattern on them. The ceiling’s corners were rounded, but obvious gutters ran along the edges of the roadbed. The center of the road came to a point in the direction we were taking, perhaps it’s a kind of road sign.

~~~

When Eugene’s father had told him he was going on the expedition, he had been certain the old Baron was actually just trying to kill him. No matter how special the soulsteel was, or how ingenious the design of their flying deathtrap, he was not going to participate. His mother had started on his side, arguing it was far too reckless to send the heir apparent out on an expedition for the Lost Continent. However, she had begrudgingly swapped sides when his father had shown the letter from Duke Drake. His father thought the world of the previous duke, but Eugene hadn’t known him, and the only opinion he had about the current duke was that he hadn’t let his father start a war with the gap, specifically by landing him here, against the Western Ridges.

It wasn’t until he saw the Soulsteel again that it sunk in what the Duke had meant when he said ‘like nothing he’d seen before’. When he’d last seen it, it had appeared as a living dog statue, and he’d watched as his younger sister had pet it during its audience with his father. Eugene only wanted to apologize for his family’s disrespect, not to follow it to a watery grave in the Roiling Sea. This hadn’t been quite enough to convince him to go, but it had been enough for him to commit to looking over the designs and following them to the Lake of Stars were they would launch it.

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On the first couple days of the trip up, he’d been frustrated with how often they’d stop for apparently simple problems. They’d stop the whole column for five minutes or less at a time. It wasn’t until the third such stop that he got out to see what was holding them up for himself. He had to walk the whole length of the caravan, but he’d never skipped out on his father’s training, so he power walked his way down the steep road. He was rendered speechless when he got to the offending cart, and found the soulsteel was laying underneath it, the whole cart held up off the ground. It held the cart only by its knees and hands, while two of the craftsmen removed the broken axle, and then replaced it with a new one. When the soulsteel rolled out from under the cart, it caught his gaze and walked up to him. There was mud stuck to its clothing, but the marble skin didn’t have a smudge on it.

“Creighton.”

“Rawphor, Eugene Rawphor.”

“Meeting you took longer.”

He remembered now how the letter from the Duke had informed him that the soulsteel was well on its way to learning Wernst, even if it was still having trouble with full sentences.

~~~

Cole was using the travel time to catch up on his record keeping. He didn’t manage to keep full notes during the rush job they’d spent the winter trying to complete, and when he got there they would have less time. The skyship was planned to be finished in six months, less time if they could get the dwarves full support. Officially, they were bringing Creighton up to present him to the high king as a magical marvel. Unofficially, the original intention had been to search for records of the Conclave among the Cloven Stacks. When they had received confirmation of records indicating their entrance into the forbidden lands before the calamity, and that they hadn't escaped before it was lost, the plan changed.

Cole hadn’t initially been able to wrap his head around what Keith had sent that got the stubborn old dwarves to send them an actual answer, rather than just inviting them up to look for themselves. It hadn’t been until he received revisions of his designs from Keith that he realized the dwarf had sent the plans to his kin. While that wasn’t the difficult part to wrap his head around, the Duke was normally against giving away cutting edge artificary, even that meant giving up on the dwarves’ valuable perspectives.

It had been Archibald’s idea. He claimed that the best way to get the dwarves on board, while not completely showing their hand, was to let Coldera’s Gap and the Queen only hear rumors of the fantastical artifice they’d invented. This wouldn’t sound like a great upset if it had come from Archibald, and by the time all the facts made their way back down the mountains, and into The Kingdom of Ridgewern or The Gap, they’d already be back.

They were going to spend about a month doing endurance tests of Advanced Levitate once it was actually engraved into the copper band. The spell used lightning mana instead of the traditional choice of wind mana, as Archibald’s Mana Source could produce Lightning Mana from Creighton’s engine. He claimed it had been a coincidence, but Cole thought he’d stumbled into far too many coincidences in his long career.

Tommen was focusing on catching up on his studies, he’d not had time to instruct him on new spells, but that wasn’t a massive problem, as the hands on work Tommen had been doing made as good a foundation as practicing spells. He had also noticed Tommen’s mana control was growing remarkably faster ever since he’d started emulating Creighton. Soulsteel was known for not just its physical strength but also its ability to manipulate mana, and Creighton was in a league of his own, even for Soulsteel.

~~~

Natasha had been afraid when they left the capital, as she wasn’t sure Archibald would let her go, or if Master Cole had truly forgiven her for endangering Tommen just to try and show off. Now that she was here, and they were making their way up the Western Ridges, she could finally relax. That didn’t last long though, as she was soon swept up in excitement. She was not just going to get to fly higher than Lesser Levitate had let her float, but she was going to be going faster and farther than her wildest dreams.

The Lake of Stars had been chosen because it was on the far side of the mountains, so they could constantly descend most of the way into the Roiling Sea. Her dreams of flight hadn’t included an adventure to the Lost Continent to try and find a spell to translate for Creighton, so she was conflicted. On one hand, it was the adventure almost every person on Trezemek would dream of at least once, but on the other hand, she knew that the translation spell was a convenient excuse. It would be nice to hear Creighton speak fluently, but it paled in comparison to many of the other spells rumored to have been created by the Conclave of Gormtra. Gormtra had been legendary, and his children had formed the Conclave to continue his legacy.

Gormtra had been the most vocal of ancient sorcerers who claimed that magic was the only way to stop the First Calamity from ruining the whole world. The Forbidden lands had been forbidden because that was thought to be where the Calamity would occur. Gormtra had been of the firm belief that if they didn’t intervene to stop it, the Calamity would spread through the Ridges and first threaten the lands of Ridgewern, and then the rest of Mindyke. No one knew if he had been wrong, or if he’d been right and succeeded in containing the disasters spread. Many had died trying to find out, though, and if the fact that the Conclave was on the Lost Continent during the Calamity, and didn't escape, got out there would be many more.