Describing something as âindescribableâ is, at best, lazy. The sentient capacity for imagination and sympathy is practically endless, and similarly tends towards extremes, so if you can find any way of putting something into words, peopleâs minds will leap to a worst-case scenario and fill in any of the blanks left by your wording. If I was to say âimagine your eye being stabbed by a needleâ, I have a strong suspicion many people would flinch reflexively, even though I bet you have never experienced it. Most of us are blessed with an amazing capacity for feeling things that arenât really there, or ignoring things that are (which is, in my humble opinion, the best way through life). This is all just a very long-winded way of saying that I am about to describe something quite horrific, and even though I could just say âit was indescribableâ, that would be an insult to both my own ability to describe things (I have long been blessed with an overactive imagination) and your ability to picture things. Therefore, imagine the following:
Imagine you are at your job, doing something you consider yourself very good at. You are faced with a particularly difficult task, but after considering it briefly, and applying your expertise in the matter, you realise that the problem is not as difficult as you thought. In fact, the answer is staring you in the face. You go to apply the solution, and after you do, you realise that in fact you got it wrong. You donât know what the solution was, but because you got it wrong, you will not get the opportunity to try again.
I donât know what most of you are picturing at this point, but given what I said before that, you probably know Iâm not talking about anything very mundane. Iâll go back a bit, and describe things a bit more literally.
By trade, Iâm a freelance archaeologist. Itâs a niche field, but I work as part of a crew, and weâre generally very good at what we do. Some people might call it âgrave robbingâ, but frankly Iâm of the opinion that the living might appreciate a magic sword more than the dead would. The fact that people build such elaborate tombs with all sorts of crazy, nonsense defences only proves my point as far as Iâm concerned â they know how cool the stuff theyâre hoarding is. I can barely even swing a sword myself, so Iâm not stealing these for me by the way. We tended to work on contracts, or sell whatever we recovered. Often though we would just wander the wild places of Midgard, finding all the places that had been lost to time and bringing them back into the light.
When this all happened, we had found somewhere truly special. An ancient Gnomish tomb, definitely from at least pre the last War of Light and Dark. 750 years old, maybe more. The Gnomes have always been at the absolute forefront of Arcanomechanics, and in fact are pretty much the only race in Midgard that care about it at all. In short, itâs the field of using magic to power various constructs, and itâs something of a lost art. The Gnomes became pretty isolationist after the end of that war, but so did a lot of people. These pre-war sites though, that still remained outside of their territories, could be untapped goldmines of leftover research. They could also be incredibly dangerous, built by a society at its height that led the world in magic.
Weâd found a similar site to this once, although it had already been cracked by someone else. Interestingly, theyâd chosen to seal it back up after they left, but we could still tell on account of the fact that it was completely empty. Theyâd even made off with every piece of wall carving they could find in there. It had been the equivalent of going into someoneâs house and finding the curtains had been stolen.
This one, though, was a pristine, virgin tomb, and I was excited to investigate it, as we all were. Given where weâd found it, we had to spend a while first clearing away all the overgrowth from the entrance, but once we had, we all knew weâd found something special. It was sealed up tight, but we were professionals, and used to dealing with things like this, so we were well equipped. Iâm regretting some of my word choices here, but itâs only weird if you make it weird. Iâll spare you any description of the dark passage we found behind it.
The point, though, is that we did in fact get it open, and it was pretty much what we expected. There were those familiar signs of age, a layer of dust and vines that had worked into the scant few cracks in the walls, but on the whole it was almost untouched by time. The construction was practically impeccable, and the dark and dry conditions had meant that even the organic fixtures had survived remarkably well. Ornate tapestries dotted the walls, varnished wooden doors led from one chamber to the next, and we even found a gnome-sized mannequin dressed up in what looked like some ceremonial form of armour, leather straps still intact. That was swiftly liberated.
We pressed on, eager to see what lay at the heart of this place. Scattered throughout was the occasional remnant of an old piece of technology, and we all got the fright of our lives when we entered a room only for the braziers on the wall to flare to life by themselves. There are pieces of magic that we knew of that could do that, but we had checked for that, and so it was a bit of a âlife flashing before your eyesâ sort of moment. We were careful and paranoid people by nature when it came to places like this, at least normally, so feeling like weâd been caught out was a terrible sensation. Still, we were unhurt so we shook it off, laughed at ourselves a bit, and kept exploring.
The place was almost warren-like in its construction. Corridors and staircases branched into new rooms, looped back into themselves, and generally found ways to be confusing to as many of us as possible. We must have unspooled miles of string in our wake as we walked along, and it was always a shock to open a door and find it led back into a passage youâd already walked down. Not having any windows or light to orient yourself by only made it worse. If we found any doors that were locked we left them alone for now, but marked them. We were building a map as we went, and it was a messy thing, full of corrections, errors, and dead-ends, but we were slowly piecing this place together. The constant use of ramps instead of staircases meant you couldnât really tell how far up or down you were going, which was part of what made it worse.
There were 11 of us in our little band, so we were split into a few groups as we roamed. I was with Alfred, who is a gnome himself, and who I could see salivating as we walked around. He was an avid (obsessive) historian, and heâd left home because, in his words âlibraries get boring after 100 yearsâ. His eternal goal has been to learn more about the history of his people, a fair amount of which is kept under wraps in his homeland, and so for him this was like stumbling into Asgard. It helped as well that he could read a lot more of what was on the walls in various places than most of us, but Iâd been learning Gnomish as best I could from him, and was fairly passable. We were also with Flora, certified legend in my opinion.
Again Iâm going to skip over some more of the wandering, but eventually one of us (I donât remember who) found a door. A BIG door. It had all sorts of carvings on it, flecks of paint and gold leaf, and was solid stone. We all gathered around in front of it, to do a bit of examining. There were no obvious locks or keyholes, but on each side, dug into the stone, were cylindrical slots, each of which had a handle inside. As a rule of thumb, I am very impatient, but I am also very good at opening doors, so I was right up looking at these slots.
Both of them were identical. They were smooth-walled, unpainted, about 15 centimetres or 6 inches deep, and with a horizontal iron bar at the back that looked like it could be pulled or turned. A pretty crucial difference though, was that in one of the slots was, quite disturbingly, a severed hand.
I donât mean it was a bloody, stumpy mess, but given the age of the place, it was just a pile of bones. I can recognise fingerbones when I see them though, and it looked like the forearm had been sheared straight through. If there had been clothing, or flesh, or blood, it had long since faded or decayed.
At the very least, that made my decision easier, because Iâm not sticking my arm in the tube of hand-chopping. Doors are made to be opened though, so I was fairly confident that I had the right idea. I went over to the other slot, stuck my arm in, and, if I remember rightly (it gets a bit fraught) turned the bar inside.
This is where Iâm going to put my money where my mouth is in terms of the point I was making earlier, about nothing being âindescribableâ. You can probably imagine that nothing good happens here given what I said before, and youâd be right. Weâre going to be relying on our collective imagination here though, because there is a lot I am putting together that my brain has tried to forget as much of as possible, and obviously itâs (probably) not something youâve been through.
I got my right hand (forearm-down) cut off. I know right. Turning the bar did not open the door. There was a faint click, which I think was a latch being disengaged from a weight or a spring or something, and then a blade slammed down over the entrance to the cylinder, neatly severing hand from arm.
There are a lot of different things that go into processing pain, and a big one is your brain. The sheer extent to which I genuinely disbelieved that it had just happened goes some way to explaining why I just felt nothing at first. I wouldnât have understood it at the time, but the combination of shock and adrenaline kept me on my feet, and kept me numb for probably no more than about 5 seconds, but long enough that it felt like enough time for my life to have ended. In a lot of ways, it had.
Because the cut was so quick and so clean, it looked like it didnât bleed for a moment, but that was only because my blood was being held in place by the blade. Uncomprehendingly, I lifted my âhandâ, and a river of blood bubbled out of the cut, splattering audibly to the floor. I stared, dumbfoundedly, watching this stream of red welling out of what was my wrist, spilling back down my arm, staining my clothing and the tiles. I staggered like I was drunk, panic setting in little by little. Then the pain hit.
It started as a low, uncomfortable sensation, that tingling, itching feeling that you know scratching will only make worse. I tried clamping my remaining hand over the bleeding stump, to staunch the flow, and although it was probably the right idea, it could hardly have felt worse. Immediately it was like Iâd plunged my wrist into boiling oil. There was a horrifying sensation like burning or stinging, the sensation like skin being ripped from flesh when you freeze it to something. Because of where the cut was though, it was a pain that went bone-deep, and from which it felt like there was no relief. I think I was screaming by this point. Iâm told that at the very least I was completely incoherent.
With each beat of my heart more blood was being pushed out in these disgusting, oozing pulses between my fingertips. Sometimes I still feel like I have blood caked under my fingernails, and the sight of it is something that I have never quite lost my distaste for - too much of it and I get a bit woozy. I tightened my grip as much as I could, but I began to feel myself getting more and more light-headed as my brain was starved of blood. My fingers felt like branding irons against the muscles inside my arm. Iâd never considered how something under my skin could be exposed to pain like this, but having felt it now I can say it is horrific. Like a toothache, it is a pain there is no relief from. There is nothing you can do to alleviate this kind of pain except to ride it out, but I was faintly aware that if I let this endure I would possibly die of blood loss.
There were other people around, people who could have helped me, but my decision making was getting worse and worse with each fresh ounce of blood expelled from my arm. I wasnât exactly medically-trained, and even if I was, it takes two hands for a tourniquet. I was just about with it enough to know that I had to staunch the bleeding somehow, and this led to my next terrible decision.
Short of a way (at least one that I could see) to tourniquet my arm, I remembered the other way of sealing a bleeding wound: cauterisation. If anyone reading this is unaware, cauterisation is the process of burning a part of the body to seal a wound and prevent bleeding. It is normally something of a last resort, but that was all my fevered, delirious mind was providing me with. It is also difficult with wounds this size, but I had a plan.
Thinking no further than the next ten seconds of my life, and certainly not considering any of the ramifications beyond âbleeding to deathâ, I smashed the bloody stump of my arm into the glass of my lantern. Jagged shards carved deep gashes up to my elbow, tearing out bloody chunks of flesh, but I could hardly feel that. It was every bit as painful as youâd expect, but by this point it was only adding a bit more to what I was already feeling. Besides, the sensation in that part of my body was quickly fading anyway.
When I broke the glass, I also managed to smash the oil reservoir underneath the wick. In my defence, this was actually part of the plan, not that that made it a good idea. The oil spilled out over the ruin of my wrist, soaking flesh and bone, and the cuff of my coat. The open flame then did the rest of the work, quickly igniting it all, and turning my right arm into an impromptu torch.
If you havenât smelled burning flesh before, it doesnât take too much imagination to get an understanding of it. In many ways itâs a lot like overcooking any other meat, but in this case much more of the smell was coming from the oil itself, which was producing a thick, dark smoke that stung my tear-filled eyes. I think in my head I had expected the oil to burn out fairly quickly for some reason, but not only is flesh somewhat flammable, so especially was my coat, and the fire was starting to spread.
There it is. I shanât call the pain âindescribableâ, but I will call it âall-consumingâ. It is possible to imagine, I think. To sympathise with the situation, and picture the sensations, wincing appropriately with each new incident I described, but if one has not experienced traumatic injury themselves, then I think it is difficult to truly empathise. To be faced with the kind of pain that cannot be stopped, suppressed or remedied, and to face it all with the bitter understanding that it has fundamentally and permanently altered your life is an experience that I would hardly wish on my worst enemy. That pain can be described and understood, but it is nearly impossible to endure for long. It certainly was for me. By the time the fire was threatening to reach my elbow, all centres of higher thought in my brain had shut off. I remember there being shouting, the sounds of raised voices and sizzling blood. I remember the sight of red flames and red flesh. I remember the smell of smoke, the salty and bitter taste of ash-stained tears, and above it always I will remember the feeling. Pain.
As I said, nearly all the parts of my brain that dealt with thinking shut off at about this point, and the pain drew me down into a terrible, restless sleep. This was a sleep in which there were no dreams, but every time I woke up it felt like one; a short period of confusion and delirium, where all I could hope for was that I would fall asleep again soon and be able to escape the pain.
By the time I recovered enough to be able to stay awake and cognisant for any period of time, the wound was hardly any better. A raw, red stump that my friends did their best to dress and keep clean, but which the burn blisters likewise did their best to ruin any dressing. The cloth of the bandages felt like needles scratching on my skin, but being exposed to the air whenever they were changed was hardly better. I consistently felt a dull ache at the site of the cut, and I was constantly feeling the sensation of a phantom hand, occasionally reaching for things with fingers that no longer existed, or if they did, were doomed to rot in a tomb I had made for them.
The rest of the group had abandoned the dig, apparently, when I passed out. It was nice to know they cared, but honestly it made me feel even worse. My stupid mistake had cost everyone else the chance to find something great, and potentially make themselves rich as part of the bargain. There was a bit of discussion about how weâd all go back in once I was âbetterâ. Iâm sure you can imagine my thoughts on that. Iâd be a passenger at best, robbed of the ability to do any of the things that actually made me useful. I had been able to do a tiny bit of magic before, but even that was mostly limited to the party tricks Iâd been taught growing up. Guess what though? Making magical lights takes two fucking hands.
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I moped around in a pretty useless lump of self-pity for a few weeks at that point, probably dragging everyone else around me too. Eventually I was cornered by Anders, our group leader, a man about 60 years old. We all loved him in our own ways, mostly for his temperament, quick wit, and his intelligence. He brought us all together, and even if he was a bit past it physically, he still had the air of cunning and authority that had us all deferring to him no matter what.
Regardless, I got a massive bollocking (lovingly). As he pointed out, he wasnât kept around for his body, but his mind was better than ever. He said I had options, which were to bomb out of the group in disgrace, lamenting the loss of something that was never coming back, or change, and mould myself into something else. It was clear what he wanted of me, and itâs probably clear reading this what I was eventually convinced to do.
Writing about the slow process of coming to terms with my loss, changing my attitude to life and regaining a sense of confidence in myself would be very boring, and you know where itâs all going anyway. I got better. It was tough, and there are still things I miss, but I did eventually find a solution, which in time became my own piece of personal branding.
To be clear, I still spent most of this time being a surly dickhead, but I was co-operative at least, and I was actually learning. I got better at the science and history parts of our job, including learning the theory of magic that underpinned a lot of the traps and doors we encountered. Some of this was Gnomish, but a lot was still in use, a system of inscribing magic into objects to create effects. The big upside for me was: you could do this shit one-handed.
The other part of my study was Arcanomechanics, which was mostly based on the same underlying principles. The only slightly off putting thing about it though, as something to study, was that when the Gnomes had been doing it back in the day, they had been using âsoul energyâ (poor description but the best way to put it) to power these creations. The underlying principle was that theyâd figured out a way of deliberately detaching their souls from their bodies, and then creating âbetterâ bodies made of metal and magic. As a power source, itâs a good choice - souls are hyper-efficient and self-regenerating, so putting them into a body that doesnât age creates a pretty good facsimile of immortality if you donât mind all the other aspects. In every way apart from âviability as fuelâ though, itâs remarkably distressing, for obvious reasons. Itâs not something they actually do anymore, but there were always dark rumours swirling about just how far theyâd pushed it back in the day, like taking the souls from prisoners to power magic, or mixing souls, which functionally kills the person, whilst trapping them on the earth. If you move your own soul into a metallic shell, you still exist, but if your soul is mixed with 3 other people and used to run a vehicle of some kind? Then youâre no better than a magical piece of firewood, set to burn forever.
Lots of this was stuff that I learned later, but the underlying knowledge that you could use a personâs soul for mechanical magic was understood at least, and that gave me an idea. My left hand was getting better and better at working and fine motor skills (because it had to), but lacking two hands was still holding me back. So, it was time to put all that learning to the test.
About a year after âthe incidentâ, I began a new project. You can probably guess: I wanted to build a hand. Specifically I wanted to build a magical hand that I could effectively use my soul to power, without wrenching the whole thing from my body. Weâre still in the prologue here, so I admit Iâm going to skip over a lot of the details because we know where this is going - I succeed (Iâm just that amazing).
Suffice it to say, it was fucking hard. This process hadnât been attempted for centuries, and even when it was fashionable, people just made a whole body, then took their entire soul and dumped it in there. That in itself is a massive oversimplification, but the difficulty I had was trying to get my soul to recognise this new fixture as part of my body, and thus worthy of being suffused with the good stuff. There was a lot of trial and experimentation, but I had at least developed enough of a sense of caution not to jump straight in with each new idea. I was patient, not least because finding enough materials to do this was a chore in itself. I was using whatever scraps I could find or buy, and those were rare.
At one point, we struck what was pretty much gold as far as I was concerned, a small Gnomish burial site that had a complete âAutognomeâ as they were called. He was long-dead, but the materials and the inscriptions were just about intact enough for me to salvage, examine, and subsequently destroy in testing. I learned a lot though. And in much the same way as they say you canât make an omelette without breaking some eggs, the same goes for scientific progress and⦠mechanical arms? Iâm losing it here but Iâm sure itâs fine.
After about a year of study and research, I felt like I was ready to get cracking. Iâd been squirreling away the materials I was going to need, and in the end I also had a lot of latitude for creative flair, so I was working with brass and oak, which was for a few reasons. Firstly, I thought it looked sick, but there were also some practical considerations. Brass was used a lot in the old Gnomish work, and even though I didnât (and donât) entirely know why, it was a material I had in relative abundance. The decision to use wood came from the fact that it is organic, and as a result, can deal with some kinds of magic more than metal or stone. In particular, since it had been alive, itâs a lot easier to convince the soul to latch on to it. Oak was just what I felt looked the nicest, and was a bit more of a premium feel, especially after it had been a bit varnished. The burls and other natural patterns in the wood gave it this beautiful, swirling quality to it that I felt looked a lot more âaliveâ than more uniform materials.
When I set out to build it, I knew Iâd need a bit of help, having only one hand and all that, but I wanted to do as much of it myself as possible - making a hand is a deeply personal process after all. What I had happen initially was a few tracings of my left hand taken onto leather, which we could then cut out and fashion into a few templates, which I could then copy for size and mirror onto my right hand. Matching sizes was a very important thing to me, especially if I was going to get used to having both hands again, I wanted to make sure they were properly synced up.
So once I had these templates set out, I began copying them in the real materials. I worked piece-by-piece, making connections, palm, wrist, and fingers in different bits, so I could test them separately and then slot them all together at the end into a hand. Some of you might have spotted the word âcopyingâ above. Earlier I mentioned that this new hand became a key part of my branding, and there was a very good reason for that. It is that I am very stupid.
I built a left hand.
I was copying the closest reference I had, which was my own left hand, and forgot to mirror the damn thing. Now as stupid as I am, I did notice this before I was finished, but I was far enough in with time, effort, and materials that starting again would have been counterproductive. Once I noticed it and had finished cursing at myself, I decided that this could be a learning experience as much as anything else. If the thing actually worked, I could always change it later in life, build myself a new, cooler right hand. In the end I just got used to it. Funny how that works.
When it was all done, I have to say I was pretty damn proud. Iâd been without a hand for about 18 months, so Iâd definitely got used to it by then, but the thought of having two hands again was intoxicating, tempered slightly by the fact that it wouldnât be exactly like it was, on account of my slight stupidity (Iâm downplaying my stupidity in order to protect my ego).
It was a weird sensation for so many reasons. It was like I could feel my soul stretching out over it, this âtinglingâ sensation that was jarringly at odds with the fact that I had no actual sensation in that hand. There were obviously no nerves there or anything like that, just wood and metal, and even if I could convince my body to use it, I couldnât exactly make it feel. I had to spend a lot of time practicing holding things with it without either dropping or breaking them, because having no feedback means you can hardly tell when youâre squishing something or being equally silly. Itâs a trial and error thing, and I think that the hand being mechanical also meant it was a bit stronger than my last one, which didnât help. I broke a lot of things.
The other super-strange thing as you can probably guess is suddenly having two left hands. I was expecting to be able to go back to normal in terms of my hands, but having two left ones scuppered that fairly quickly. If Iâm being honest, I think that even if Iâd built a right hand, Iâd probably still have ended up staying left-handed, just because having the tactile sensation is such a big part of using a hand. So I had a brain that sort of recognised having a right hand again, but had got used to being left-handed, which created some interesting conflicts. The thumb position was definitely the hardest thing to get used to, since honestly it was the major difference. It was even weirder because I had at least managed to attach it so that the palm faced inwards, meaning that it always looked and felt like I was bending my fingers and my wrists the wrong way. To be blunt, it was a mess.
In spite of all that though, I was, and still am, really fucking proud of myself. I had managed to make something functional out of half-remembered scraps of knowledge and random parts from centuries ago, and turn it into something practical and beautiful. The whole process lit a fire in me ã¼it reminded me that there were things in this world I could still learn, and rekindled my passion for magic. I was discovering that there were ways of doing things that didnât rely on brute force.
The big reveal for me was this whole way of storing magic in wood, or at least using wood and glyphs to âchannelâ magic. Itâs a weird line. In essence, the whole thing wasnât like you were âbankingâ magic, it was more like carving a channel ahead of time, and then pouring water into it later. I wouldnât have been able to draw this comparison at the time, but it was a lot like a type of circuit board. You can make them whenever, and theyâll be able to do different things depending on their layout, but it wonât actually do anything until you turn the power on. The âglyph+woodâ technique was like making a bunch of circuit boards, and I could then choose when and where to use them by âchannellingâ magic into it at the relevant time. The actual number of times you might be able to do this is always going to depend on how much magic the particular glyph required, and how much practice you had, etc., but those were the fundamentals. The magic itself was like a battery - it had potential, and could be run down and recharged, but electricity itself doesnât actually âdoâ anything until you give it a purpose. Other people knew other ways of casting spells and that sort of thing, but a lot of it was either beyond me or not interesting to me.
If youâre wondering, the soul itself is innately magical to some degree, so that was what powered my hand (where I had some of these glyphs hidden) without actually draining me of energy or overall magic. Itâs also the reason that things like animal or human sacrifice work and can do some spectacular (and spectacularly evil) things. Think about how much magic it takes to sustain a living, breathing, thinking thing for decades. Itâs a lot.
This whole âinner fireâ that I mentioned a bit ago didnât disappear either. It grew in some ways, almost compelling me to go out and do something. One of the problems there however is that when it comes down to it, Midgard is a DANGEROUS place. Maybe it wasnât always, but part of the reason isolationism was so in vogue at the time is that travelling between places, if you stepped off certain roads, was practically an invitation for something bad to happen to you.
To that end, I needed to figure out a way to defend myself, especially if I was going to be travelling alone, which I increasingly felt like I wanted to go out and do. I loved my little gang, but I wanted to take some time away and figure things out for myself. I wanted to take on the world on my own terms. To this day, itâs a decision I stand by and encourage. There were, to put it mildly, many âdifficultâ times, but nothing I wish Iâd just turned my back on.
So: defending myself. The obvious solution here was magic. I am not a big person and Iâm not really trained to fight. Iâm quick and Iâm clever, but Iâm slight and I only have one properly functional hand. I already had ways of manipulating magic, so I needed to craft the things that would turn that magic into the sort of effects to keep me safe, either offensively or defensively. I am a firm believer in offence being the best defence as well, so that was where I started. What I created first was what I am going to call here a âPayload Delivery Systemâ. In a few ways, it was like the first firearm, except it was magic.
It was a wooden staff about 1 metre long, and on the end there was a short metal tube of about 30 centimetres. The staff had glyphs all the way up the length that were designed to channel magic into the metal part, whilst that bit was hollow at one end, with a narrow barrel, and Iâd stylised it to look like the maw of a dragon.
Magically-speaking, the idea was pretty straightforward. I could craft ahead of time a bunch of small wooden beads which Iâd put different symbols on corresponding to particular magical effects (mostly destructive). At a time of my choosing, I would drop one of these beads into the barrel, and then pump magic into the shaft. This would travel up the length, into the barrel, and pretty much âset offâ the gun, converting the bead into magic and shooting it out of the end. I swear to all the gods this is not a metaphor itâs just how it worked.
The other upside of having what is essentially a long stick with a chunk of metal on the end is that you can bludgeon people with it.
If a piece of magic didnât need to operate at range I could just activate the bead in my hand, like with barrier spells or ones for healing. The âtubeâ was for destructive magic, and I felt like activating that in a way that kept it away from my extremities and pointed in another direction was a good thing.
The other thing I made was arguably more impressive. The first was just a tool for activating pieces of magic that other people had come up with. As I said before, it was pretty much a tube that I could put magic into so it would help me direct and channel it. My next invention was a bespoke piece of custom magic theory and crafting, and it was fucking sick. A collapsible, portable, hand-held/self-propelled, auto-targeting, friendly-fire avoiding, multi-mode arcane turret. Thatâs right. I built a magic cannon and it was epic.
I absolutely couldnât have done this without all the theory Iâd learned building my hand. It was a hockey-puck sized disk, maybe a bit bigger, made of brass and wood (which was quickly becoming my motif). With the application of magic, it would unfold into a device, the size and shape depending on which bit I chose to activate. The first design had 4 âmodesâ, which were really just 2 different settings of the 2 types of device. One was the cannon, and the other one was a âbarrier projectorâ, which was something that would send out an arcane pulse every few seconds, which applied a thin shield around the people I wanted it to (mostly me). This was pretty flimsy, but normally good for soaking a couple of blows, so in the case of a truly awful fight, it would keep you standing a bit longer. In each case I could have them expand out either so they were small enough to attach to my arm, or make them slightly larger and attach to a surface. It could walk, but not very quickly, so I normally just opted to have it attached to me, and save the effort of keeping an eye, directing it, etc. Easiest to just keep it on me. I managed to incorporate another setting into it later, but thatâs a story for later as well.
For now though, I had two hands, a cannon, and a desire to get back out into the world and prove I was worth a damn, and that I was more than just my mistakes. It was a desire that would lead me down paths I never expected, into a world I had never known, and with people I never thought I would meet, let alone call my friends. You may know much of this story already, pieced together from other sources, other people, history books and TV shows. That is fine. This book isnât to âset the record straightâ or anything like that; Gods know my view on it is at least as biased as anyone else, and probably more so in lots of cases. This is as much a thought exercise as anything, a chance for me to share my opinion, in the arrogant hope people might find it interesting. Iâll be doing my best to keep it all quite light-hearted in my writing, but itâs not a story that can be told without including the darkness. This was a time of horror and death, but it was also a time of joy, finding the little things we could and fighting to protect them. We found the worst the world had to offer, and we faced it, whether by fate or choice or stupidity, and those fights didnât always go our way.
So strap in, enjoy the ride, and try not to judge us too harshly - we may not always have been good people, but I think collectively, we were something great.
Empress Ingrid, 2025 âADâ