The inside of the home was every bit as beautiful as the outside. Everything was made from wood and stone. The table and chairs in the middle of the room were handcrafted wood. The candle on top of the table even looked hand dipped. Mac was in awe looking around. Every bit of the place warmed Mac. It was comfortable and familiar. It made her happy. As she turned, Devin stood with a smile on his face and pointed over her shoulder. She turned to see several shelves filled with a large variety of books. It was official, if she had any choice in the matter, she was not going to leave this place.
The main room had a fireplace with a large hearth, a kitchen table, and a place to wash dishes alongside of the counters and cupboards. There was a small room with a bed and clothing chest off to one side, and it looked as if there was even a working washroom in the home. She was getting tired of outhouses and trees as her bathroom.
"If you don't bring me any trouble, you're welcome to stay as long as you would like." Devin said. "I imagine it will take you a bit of time to get through my books before you run off anyway." Mac just looked at him with a smile of her own. It was going to take her time to get used to controlling her thoughts around him, but at this moment, time was the last thing on her mind.
15.
Mac lay back into a rocking chair by the fire place. "So, you care to tell me why you pulled me through the forest in such a rush?" Devin's back was turned towards her when he flicked a finger at the fire place then to several candles on the mantle above it. They lit up with each movement from him.
"How much knowledge have you been given about Supharia?" Devin asked still not looking at her.
"Suphar...what?" Mac said head tilted slightly.
"Our world's name is Supharia." Devin said with a sigh. "I can see this will take some time to explain." He turned and sat across from her. "You didn't pick the best tourist destination to come to, ya know."
"When I booked the itinerary with my travel agent, she forgot to mention the war going on and people who would be trying to kill me." Mac said annoyed. Devin looked at her and she could see the look of confusion written on his face. "Never mind, continue."
"First thing." Devin said. "There is a chest of old clothes in the room over there. There should be something more comfortable than that for you to wear." Mac looked at her armor for a minute. It was comfortable and she had forgotten she was wearing it, but she stood and went in to the room to change into regular clothing.
She was met with Devin’s stare when she finally exited the room wearing a thin blue dress that came down mid-calf. "What?" Mac said. "You told me to put on something comfortable. I couldn't find sweats and a wife beater, so this must do." Devin turned away and motioned for her to sit while he stared into the fire.
"Supharia was once a land of peace and prosperity. The people were happy and did everything they could to make our lands better. Everyone worked together and could create great things, amazing technologies, and prosperous cities. Our society worked together not for riches, but to help each other. Everything everyone did was done for the greater good.
"The greater good." Mac snorted out in her best monotone British accent, quoting her favorite movie.
"What?" Devin asked obviously confused again.
"Nothing, please continue."
"As I was saying, the people created great things. They even made Steam City rise to one of the greatest trade ports in the world. Using magic and tinkering skills along with the mining of special ores, stones, and gems, our city ran like a well-oiled machine. We created the giant steam pot at the center and used fire stones from the mines to keep it boiling. With the water recycling units, all over the city we can provide steam to the entire city with a relatively small amount of water. With a solid industry and close working society no one was able to hurt us in any way."
"At the head of this great progression were two men; King Bingly Prichard Weir I and Dr. Edmund Blackburn."
"Oh yeah, Kris said something about Grandpa Blackburn accidentally killing King Weir." Mac said cutting off Devin again.
"I am not so sure I would call it an accident." Devin said with poison in his voice. "Because of the choices of your family, millions of people have perished. Your grandfather is directly responsible for all the blood spilled from the minute he killed the King, to the war that continues today."
"How is that even possible? My grandfather has been dead for years." Devin started laughing as she spoke.
"Do you know how your powers work, Mac?" Devin asked.
"I think it is pretty obvious that if I knew how my powers worked, I wouldn't have been stuck in a tree for hours, now would I? Jerk." Mac spit the words at Devin. He ignored her, a small smile on his face.
"To dumb down the concept, energy flows through everything. It is never created or destroyed. There are certain people in this world that can control that energy. They basically ask a greater amount of the energy to come to them. They pull that energy from the things around them. So, if they pull too much energy the things around them like grass and flowers or even people can die. Then they can mold that energy to benefit them however they see fit. If they are in need for rain on the gardens, they can call to water for help, but that is never necessary because they can just have the crops grow like I did with the apple." Mac scowled. Devin ignored her.
"Since these people have more energy and control over it, they are able to heal with tremendous speed compared to non-magic folk. They can actually live forever if they are not burned."
"What do you mean if they aren't burned? Can't they just heal from the burns?"
"Small burns will heal without issue, but if they are engulfed in flame the body can’t heal fast enough to regenerate. Once the heart is burned all the spirit energy is lost and the person dies. Even if they are able to control fire they don't have the amount of energy to control that much."
"If one of these people is so hard to kill, then why doesn't one just walk into the city and make it sink completely into the ground?"
"It isn't that simple. A person is not able to yield that amount of magic, but even if there could completely meld themselves with the energy, the human body would never be able to take the amount of strain required to craft that amount of energy. There have been some that can do extraordinary things with amazing amounts of energy, but if that line is crossed then the heart explodes and the spirit energy is lost. It is the spirit energy that allows us to call to the rest of the energy in the first place. The stronger our spirit energy, the more capable we are."
"As a community we are able to move soils and make homes. We can create natural irrigation systems because we don't have the energy to just make things grow all day every day so we let nature work its magic also. In groups, we can work together to survive and prosper. If we aren't burned or overuse our energy, we live."
"That’s all well and good, but what does any of this have to do with my grandfather?" Mac interjected.
"It is the flaw of the human condition to want what others have. The world watched us become a great super power and most worked with us which in turn allowed them to prosper and share our glory, but others didn't understand what we had built. They wanted what we had, but they didn't want to unify and work to make it happen. They felt they could instead just take what we had."
"Armies were forged both from magic and steel. Wars would last from hours to years, but our allies primarily dispatched of our enemies and in turn we shared great wealth and gadgetry with them. Even with the wars that came and went we were at peace and prospered together."
"Over the years an army rose from the fire and ash of our enemies. They were unlike anyone we had encountered before. Their focus was on Steam City and they had the power to take it. Where we need to ask, and form a unified agreement with the energy we want to use, these magic users could simply steal the energy they wanted and could use untold amounts of it without being killed. We called them leeches. They stole the energy from every magic user they came across and with that energy they bur
ned cities whole."
Leeches cut off trade with our city first and watched us suffer, then they came for us. The people panicked, and rightly so, these people were thought to be unstoppable. It was only luck that a few of the hundred or so soldiers were even killed. Lucky shots with balls of fire. The army was small, but lethal. Your grandmother was the one who ended up proving they could be stopped." Mac was hunched forward enthralled in the story, face resting on her hands, and elbows resting on her knees as she sat legs crossed on the floor looking like a child.
"What actually happened we may never know. There are many legends and theories about the battle that ended everything, but the one I like the most is the one involving the most power."
"They say your grandmother was unlike any other and could control more energy than anyone else on the planet. They say the blood that ran through her veins, the same that runs through yours, is the blood of Gods. Many people claim that the blood that ran through the leeches also ran through your grandmothers already powerful blood and that she was able to take others energy as well."
"Your grandfather and King Weir marched armies to the mountains to head the leeches off. Your grandmother beat them there. The only part of history we know to be true is where the final stand took place. Your grandmother was waiting on the Mt. Steele path when the leeches met her. To their surprise, when they went to use their powers, they had none. Your grandmother had taken them. With the energy, she took from them she opened the earth below their feet and dropped them all to their death before closing the earth back onto them. Every leech was killed in minutes by your grandmother’s hand."
"When your grandfather, King Weir, and their army finally caught up, all that remained was the body of your grandmother. She, like many before her, used too much energy and her spirit energy was lost when her heart exploded."
"Your grandfather was unable to bear the thought of living without the woman he loved, so he ran to her trying to use his own energy to heal her. He pulled as much energy as he could from around him, but he was unable to heal what damage had already been done. When he turned to his friend, the King, for support, he had seen what he had done. The King and all the soldiers lay dead. He had pulled such a great amount of energy to save his wife that he killed everything and everyone around him instead."
Mac sat back against her chair dumbstruck at what she had just learned. Her grandfather was a murderer and her grandmother was a martyr. Until coming to this world she had no information about her family and now she was thrown into the fray of what her family had done. She could see the damage and pain caused by the mistakes made, but she also saw people surviving because of the sacrifices her grandmother had made. Did that count for nothing? As the minutes passed she became more and more torn at this discovery.
"What ever happened to my grandfather?" Mac asked in a low tone.
"Again, everything we know is only rumor, but many people say he went mad at the loss of his beloved wife and his best friend, so he set himself ablaze. Others say he was found within the city trying to send word to your father of what happened and the citizens sentenced him to the kessara, but no one alive today really knows what exactly happened."
"What's the kessara?"
"It is a form of torture specifically used on magic users. The head and limbs are severed from the body and buried away from each other so they can't regenerate. Sometimes the body parts are placed in different areas around the world. It is said there was a group of zealots that actually had five temples around the world and they would throw the body parts in piles, so if you did find every part, you wouldn't know what part belonged to the one you were trying to save."
"The worst part is the torture takes place in the mind. The energy flowing through a person is only enough to sustain the heart and brain. The limbs essentially mummify themselves in a leathery like state, but the heart and brain must survive, so the energy is focused in those two areas. The problem with this is a person's head is still conscious and aware of what is happening around them. The energy isn't enough to allow them to move, but they can still see and hear what is going on around them. They are non-functional, but alive. Imagine that for a second. This ritual is thousands of years old. Potentially a person could be buried alive and unable to do anything for thousands of years. That is a truly horrifying torture."
"You're telling me my grandfather could be spread out in a bunch of pieces suffering for all these years?" The thought sickened Mac. "No one deserves a torture like that."
"It is certainly possible that he was tortured, but I feel it is less than likely. When the King died, people wanted blood. They wanted him to suffer, but they didn't want him to have any chance of returning. If he was caught, I feel, the people would have burned him. They would have made sure he could not come back to hurt anyone else."
"That makes me feel a whole lot better." Mac said rolling her eyes at him.
"Personally, if I had just killed thousands of people, my best friend, my wife was dead, and the city I loved would likely fall because of my decisions, I would more than welcome a permanent death, wouldn't you?"
The thought sickened Mac even more. There was always something or someone to live for, even if it is to right your wrongs before you die. He had family; a son. How could he just kill himself or want someone to kill him when there was someone to live for? It didn't make any sense.
"No, no I wouldn't." Mac said. "And what does any of this make him the murderer of millions of people?"
"As I said before, people were out for blood. The citizens wouldn't stand for what they considered a blatant attack by magic users. The fighting throughout the city between magic users and non-magic users became common place. It was a common thought that the magic users were hiding your grandfather and wouldn't surrender him. This was obviously ludicrous, but the people weren't thinking clearly. They only wanted blood and at that point, they didn't care where it came from."
"Most of the magic users, tired of the senseless violence, moved away from the city. A large group started a new city, Crystal Well, not far from here. It didn't take long for most of the magic users to follow their lead once Crystal Well had been established. There were some, though, who stayed and were determined to keep the peace and help restore the bond that once existed."
"The bad blood between the two groups lasted for 50 years and the non-magic users taught their children to hate, and those children grew up and spread the hate to their children, until finally the last of the magic users conceded to defeat and abandoned the city. The citizens of Steam City stayed where they were and the magic users continued to build and prosper. They even allowed non-magic folk to live in the city if they didn't bring the feud with them. It was a place of peace."
"Unfortunately, peace and prosperity would not last in Crystal Well. A few years ago death came to collect for the loss at Mt. Steele. A small group of a dozen or so assassins snuck their way into Crystal Well with the intent of reigning fire on the people. They had crates of grim beetles, which poison their victims by exploding and sending nerve agents and shrapnel flying several feet, and fire flies, which are small, but they spit fire onto everything around them. Crates had been placed around the city for weeks and now all the assassins had to do was release the contents while the people slept."
"The plan worked without a hitch. In minutes, tens of thousands of mechanical bugs covered the city, then, all at once they wreaked their havoc. The grim beetles exploded almost all at once stunning most of the people unlucky enough to be next to one and the fire flies set the city ablaze. The shock from the explosions rocked the city to its core. The citizens who managed to escape the grim beetle attack were immediately set on fire. Most of them tried to use wind to blow out the fires which only made them burn harder and spread. Those that tried to control the fire died from their hearts giving out. The magic used and chemicals the assassins had left around made the fire burn at temperatures unnatural. Someone once told me the stone buildings began to melt onto themselves, bu
t again, those are likely just made up stories. What isn't made up is that no one survived the attack. Millions of people died and the cursed city would remain abandoned from that moment on."
"You're telling me the citizens of Steam City murdered everyone from Crystal Well?" Mac said wide eyed.
"Actually, no one knows who ordered and organized the attack. It was a small group of people who carried it out and even in the massive amounts of numbers that were needed, grim beetles and fire flies are some of the easiest war gadgetry to make and they cost next to nothing. The whole attack probably cost twenty-thousand gold coins. That's nothing when you think about the massive destruction caused."
"Even though no one has ever come out to take claim to the attack, prince Weir III or duke Weir III, as you know him, was given all the credit for the attack. The part that always amused me was the prince always gave the magic users his support. He wanted a city of peace and prosperity back instead of blood in the streets, but he was credited for taking Crystal Well down."
"After Crystal Well fell, the prince was given more support than he ever had before and dethroned his father with his new-found powers. With total control of the city he set his eyes on the world outside the city walls. The first thing he did was remove the royal family from the city, which appealed to the people since times were rocky at best and the economy was in a steady dive. The citizens were angry watching the royal family drink the wine of their labor while Crystal Well prospered and they starved. They cheered when the prince banished most of his family and their followers."
City of Steam (Blackburn Chronicles) Page 13