Michael Manning - The God-Stone War

He spoke again, “You never told me where you got the iron for this thing. It must have cost a fortune.”

I smiled. “It didn’t cost a thing. The earth itself provided the materials.” By that, I meant that I had used my abilities as an archmage to coax the earth into providing the raw iron. I had brought the metal up from the hot mantle miles below us. In a very similar manner to the way a bubble of air rises in water, my iron bubble had arisen through earth and stone before settling here.

Shaking his head in disbelief, Dorian replied, “You could be the richest man in Lothion, no, in the world, if you used that trick to your advantage.”

I didn’t bother telling him it would be almost as simple to bring up vast quantities of other metals. Though iron was the most common metal, I could easily have produced enough silver and gold to destroy the economy and render the precious metals much less precious. “There comes a point my friend, when money is no longer a goal, just another tool, another means to an end. Besides, my wife and children, and friends like you… I am already the richest man in the world.”

“Ha!” he exclaimed, which I took to mean Dorian couldn’t think of a good reply… either that or he was simply too embarrassed. After a moment he changed the subject. “You never explained the full reasoning for this massive underground chamber. Will all this iron really protect the ‘God-Stone’ from the other gods?” God-Stone was the name we had taken to using for Celior’s jewel-like prison.

I stared hard at my friend, considering how much I should tell him. I had hidden my true reason for constructing the ‘Ironheart’ chamber. That was the name I had given the room when I first demonstrated it to the Knights of Stone. Standing at the exact center of the room, on a small pedestal, was a large pulsing yellow gem. The light shining from it was so brilliant that it was difficult to look at without shading your eyes. It was encased within another stone; an orange citrine colored stone that I had convinced the earth to grow around it. The light emanating from the stone within was so great that it was impossible to tell that it was actually a stone within a stone just by looking at it.

The outer gem collected the excess power from the stone inside it. It also provided the means for siphoning off that power and using it productively. I had broken pieces of it off and mounted them in many items; particularly in the newer swords I had crafted for the Knights of Stone. I had designed those swords to channel the energy they received, producing great gouts of flame upon command of the user. The blades themselves were designed to serve as rune channels. Thus the magical flame they produced could be used to reduce any shiggreth unfortunate enough to encounter them to cinders within seconds.

All of my knights bore the ‘sun-swords’ now, well… all except for Dorian. His unusual nature, as a stoic, prevented him from activating the enchantment that released the divine fire. In order to prevent the swords being stolen and used against us, I had keyed each one to its owner and it relied upon a tiny amount of the wielder’s aythar to activate the enchantment. Because of Dorian’s special nature, he was utterly unable to channel even the tiniest amount of aythar.

Returning my thoughts to his question, I considered the iron walls around us. I had told no one of their secret purpose; not for lack of trust, but for fear of discovery. I could not be entirely certain how great the shining gods’ information gathering skills were. I believed that they were limited to knowledge gathered by their followers, either directly or indirectly, but I couldn’t be perfectly sure. “I thought I explained it all to you previously,” I said at last.

He shook his head, “No, you went on and on about the stone and those fancy swords that won’t work for me.”

“This chamber is completely undetectable when the door is closed. Even the gods could not find it. It serves to protect the hiding place of our divine prison,” I said, pointing at the glowing rock in the middle of the room.

Dorian grunted, “I can think of at least nineteen other people who know where it is located.” He was referring of course to his fellow knights. I had brought each of them down to see the source of power for their swords.

I smiled, “I trust them implicitly.”

“As do I,” he replied, “but men are men and tongues will wag.”

“It has already been several years, and still they have not come. Either our secret is safe, or the gods fear to confront me,” I argued.

“You have me there,” said Dorian. “But if they do come for it, do you really want the confrontation to happen here, beneath your very home?”

“I cannot keep a close eye on it if it is kept far away. And I have made preparations to protect our families, you know that.”

“Aye, but I just want to make sure you’ve still got it in mind,” he answered, and then his expression changed. “I’ve been meaning to ask you but I never seem to get around to it.” His eyes drifted to the stone again.

“What?”

“Why does it look different?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He pointed, as if that would make his meaning clearer. “The stone; it looks different than it did when you first defeated him.”

I sighed. “That’s easy enough, depending on exactly what difference you are referring to… either the encasing stone, or the overall glow.”

Dorian waved his hand, “Nah, I understand about the stone that encases it. You explained that already, but the glow does seem different.”

“Look here,” I said, gesturing to a small crystalline arrangement of stones that rested beside the central pedestal. There were ten thumb sized stones in a row and each of them had a column of nine small stones beneath it. Currently nine of the large stones glowed with a yellow light. Beneath those nine stones the smaller stones also glowed. The tenth stone was unlit, as were all but one of the small stones.

“You showed me the gauge thing before,” he said, dismissing it.

“Then pay closer attention this time,” I said with some irritation. “When I first created this device, all ten stones were lit. I call that value ‘1 Celior’.”

“I still don’t understand why you measure a god’s power using his own name,” said my friend grumpily.

“He was the first thing I tried to measure, so I used his name… now listen. The power the stone contained at that point in time I have labeled, ‘1 Celior’. I don’t want the stone to contain more than that, because I don’t know for certain how much it will hold before it breaks. So, I use one Celior as the limit beyond which we know that things are no longer safe,” I told him.

“So exactly what does it mean, when it looks like this?”

“Nine large stones being lit denote nine-tenths of one Celior in charge. The extra small stone there shows another one-hundredth. That means the total power stored within the God-Stone is currently at ninety-one-hundredths of a Celior, or you could say it is at ninety one percent,” I explained.

Dorian smirked, “He’s not going to be happy when he finds out you’ve turned his name into a unit of measure. What does all that have to do with the stone looking different?”

“Well… it changes the brightness and color slightly, though I’m amazed you can see the difference. Most people are so dazzled by the light, that they have trouble seeing small differences,” I replied.

Dorian made an odd noise, a sort of ‘harrumph’, which indicated he wasn’t that impressed. “It has never looked particularly bright to me.”

He can’t see the magical light, I realized. Over time I had learned that some things which were visible to me were difficult for normal people to see, and other things were downright invisible to them. What I hadn’t considered, was the fact that because Dorian was a stoic, there might be some things that even normal people could see that he could not. In this case, his utter inability to see any magic at all left him seeing only the most mundane light, produced as a side effect of the concentration of Celior’s power. In other words, the stone only appeared to glow moderately to his eyes. As a result, he could see the actual physical stone, while most people couldn’t see past the intense glare; even worse he had noticed a difference.