She lit the fuse, and the spark crawled around the corner towards the explosive charge. Dagna and Valir had already pressed their hands on the ear, and Kraghtol was about to do the same, when he heardsomething. There were voices coming from the foundry behind them, talking and laughing. The workers had returned! In panic, he lunged forward, planning to extinguish the fuse, but felt a pull on his clothes, holding him back. It was Dagna.
“What are you doing?! It’s going to explode any moment —”
The explosion wasn’t loud at first. Instead, it was as if someone had hit him with both fists on the ears. He didn’t hear the bang as much as he felt it in his whole body. A shockwave made him stumble back two steps, fighting for his balance. Smoke filled the tunnel, just as dull silence filled his head, interrupted only by a ringing and whistling sound in his ears. Valir was shouting something, but he didn’t understand a word. Meanwhile, the dwarf had already put on a pair of goggles from somewhere deep within her pockets and was approaching the source of the smoke.
Kraghtol had trouble staying upright, and Valir was gesturing wildly at him. The noble was probably urging him to leave immediately, but even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, as the world was still spinning. He took a few steps towards the smoke and wondered why his feet and legs were getting wet. Cool water and hot steam mixed into the smoke in front of him, and only after a few more steps, Kraghtol realized why.
His concoction had worked. Too well. There wasn’t just a hole in the tunnel wall, but a huge rift. A good six meters of the wall were just gone, along with the floor and part of the opposing wall as well. And the ceiling. The ceiling, with the pipes running under it, transporting water and steam. Frayed metal ends were all that remained, and the pipes’ contents poured out into the tunnel.
Did he do that? He had not known the alchemical effect would be so enormous. Was the tunnel stable? Did he have to get Valir out of here? Where was Dagna?
He saw something moving in the smoke in front of him and took more steps. The hot steam was burning, and he quickly lost all sense of direction. Soot clang to his wet clothes and skin, and was constantly getting in his eyes. Where was that fey-cursed dwarf? Blinking rapidly, he thought he recognized movement straight ahead, and then, a heartbeat later, to his right. He wasn’t sure on both accounts but went right. It was the right direction. He stumbled and fell into the water-filled blast crater when his feet didn’t find solid ground anymore, and bumped his head afterwards as he climbed up into another tunnel with a lower ceiling. At least the smoke and steam were thinner here, and after rubbing his burning eyes a few times, he could see better.
Dagna was a few steps ahead of him, just about to open a door. Kraghtol called her name without hearing himself, but she didn’t react. Perhaps the bang had deafened her as well, temporarily, as Kraghtol hoped.
He took the last few steps, and Dagna flinched in surprise as he touched her shoulder but gestured excitedly at the door in front of her. Even without hearing a word, Kraghtol understood. This had to be her idol’s workshop. The door was stuck, but that was nothing his half-Orcish strength could not handle. Inside, it was dark and dusty, and it took Dagna a while to ignite a lantern. Kraghtol had expected the workshop to look much like Dagna’s: dominated by creative chaos and crammed full of half-finished projects. The opposite was true. There was a workbench with some single cogs lying around on it, butaside from that, the room was large and empty. No, not entirely empty. On the large desk — made of wood, as he noticed — was a stack of dusty paper. And on the walls hung several large sheets as well. Dagna immediately made a beeline for the desk, leaving the walls for Kraghtol to inspect.
Carefully, he wiped his hands on his pants before removing the patina of dust from the paper. It felt old and brittle, but the dryness of the room had preserved it well. Slowly, the ringing and whistling in his ears subsided, leaving only the heavy feeling of silence, which, too, was getting lighter by the minute.
It was a map. As he uncovered more and more of it, he realized it was a map of the entirety of Wardenreach: from the frosty reaches around the northern villages all the way down to the hotter southern part of the country, divided by a central mountain range aptly named the Sword. The map wasn’t very detailed and only noted the bigger cities of the country: Ironwatch, Bronzebreak, Winterstone, Crossroads and Greylune. The roads connecting them as well as smaller towns were on it but had no name label, and villages like Mistpine were entirely absent. But since it showed the Frostwater as a side arm of the Bronzerun River, he could guess where it should be. The longer he looked at the map, the less sense it made. According to this, the place he suspected his home village to be was right south of the country border. But he knew for a fact that the border was many kilometers north of it, almost as far away as Winterstone.
He shook his head. Perhaps the map was flawed, even though it seemed too intricate in other places to get the shape of the country wrong like that. He carefully blew more dust away around the cityof Winterstone and was surprised to find something written on the map. Thin lines adorned the region, carefully drawn but clearly not from the same hand as the rest of the map. The lines went horizontally and parallel to the thicker blue line of the Bronzerun River and were almost straight, just slightly curving downward to the left. They had tiny arrows on them, and right next to the city, the same pen had written the words “Fall Winds”, “West” and “Ideal”.
Similar lines adorned other places on the map, but most were less straight, squigglier and sometimes labeled with question marks.
He removed the dust from the other hanging papers as well, expecting to see similar maps, but instead found intricate drawings depicting a large mechanical device with leathery wings from different angles. These were no blueprints, and at least to him didn’t appear to serve a technical purpose. He turned around and almost bumped into Dagna, who had also taken an interest in the drawings. Clutched in her hand, she gripped a stack of paper covered with complicated schematics.
“This. Is. Amazing.”
Kraghtol was glad he could hear well enough again to make out the exclaimed words. He had no idea how loud he had to speak to reach her, so he talked like he used to address Mrs. Brott.
“What is all that?”
“I don’t know!” she exclaimed as if she were happy about it. “But it has to be somethingbigandimportant. Voldrik’s last invention!”
She took a long look at the drawings, running from one to the next, getting more out of breath by the minute.
“Wow. I wonder — no! That can’t be! But it must; that’s the only explanation for all this. Kragh, I think my uncle was trying tofly!”
“Your uncle… flew? You mean like a… bird?”
“Bird? Ah, right, you have those. Yes! Look at the drawings! He was inventing a machine to fly through the air, like a bird. And these,” she waved with the papers in her hand, “are his schematics. Perhaps earlier revisions that he left here.”
Suddenly, Kraghtol got an idea.
“Oh! If that’s true, then these lines on the map… Perhaps they represent the wind?”
Dagna inspected the map that she had all but ignored until now.
“Yes! That makes sense! That must be why he left for Winterstone: because of the ideal winds.”
Her short finger pointed at the words. Kraghtol remembered the forceful gales going through the streets of Winterstone himself.
“Oh, Kragh, do you think he actually made it? Has he completed this wondrous machine?”
“I don’t —” he began apologetically but stopped when he remembered a peculiar expression the old Torven Hawke had used when he talked about the dwarf. “Actually… yes. I know. I met his… student in the city, and he said that ‘the wings of his dream carried him away’. Perhaps he is even still alive! Dwarves get pretty old, right?”
It was hard not to get infected by Dagna’s enthusiasm, who now almost pressed her nose to the map.
