The sun was setting on the horizon, casting warm red light over the tower, a fading glow ready to turn into twilight. Magnar was scrubbing his hands, yet the fine coke dust wasn’t so easy to remove. It caused a deep, stubborn black stain, that persisted around the nails and lines of the hand. It wasn’t going to be removed that easily.

  I looked down at my own hand and sighed. It would have been comical if I hadn’t got my hand in coke as well. I shook my head. Vex came looking for me.

  “So, when will it be ready to take out of the mold? Hargrave is wrapping things up, ready to leave.” He asked, his eyes darting to my blackened hand.

  “Don’t worry about it, you can go, I can handle the rest by myself… I think…”

  “When will it be ready?”

  “After the sun sets entirely. About another hour or so, to be more precise.” I said after taking a moment to think.

  “You’re sure you can manage on your own?”

  “The only issue I have is related to the bores. Those will be hard to clean of sand, but I’ll manage.”

  “Good then, have a nice evening.”

  The two left one after the other, walking through the door. Magnar wasted some more water trying to wash off the coke dust, until I intervened.

  “Go back to the dorms and use the bath of the nobles, you got soap there, right?”

  “Yes! I’ll go now then, have a nice evening, don’t stay too long working on the generator.”

  I waved my hand. “I won’t, I won’t. See you tomorrow.”

  After Magnar left, I quickly checked the blast furnace. It was still burning fiercely, baking its inner lining. Small pops could be heard, probably coming from the refractory mud. After finishing the checkups, I took a shower.

  One last thing needed before all light was gone. That was a torch. I went in the back and took one from the small stash bought as a precaution. I went back to the grinding area. I made a deep groove in the floor and inserted the torch, getting a fixed source of light as a result.

  ‘Working with torch light is definitely not the best way to go, but I can’t wait to see if it works.’ As the sun completely set and darkness descended, I lit up the torch. It cast a flickering light that danced in all directions. As the flames moved, they cast shadows, tricking my eyes and making it hard to cut where I wanted.

  Taking the electricity conducting spider leg I sat down on the cinder stone floor. I needed to cut this leg, and that meant figuring out the best distance between the two poles to work at. In order to determine the length at which to cut, I had to check out the silk threads.

  I started to experiment with the spider silk threads from the basket. I poured aether at a constant rate through the thread, observing the flow of aether with my shen. In the end I settled for a silk thread length of three marks or about ten centimeters, this length fully converted an aether flow with the strength of the one created by the gathering array.

  Any shorter and the aether flow escaped in a glimmering purplish light from the end of the thread, any longer and the threads hum would fade. To dispose of the charge created during testing I connected the thread to an electricity conducting leg with its tip in the ground.

  The threads numbed my fingers as I cut them, buzzing like trapped insects against my fingers, constantly converting the natural flow of aether into electric charge. The hair on my arms stood up. The air around the silk smelled sharp and metallic — ozone.

  The hour I needed to wait was up. Finally, I could take a look at the cast parts. I grabbed a hammer and went to the sand cast. I turned it upside down, shaking it out of the volcanic tuff holder. Grains of sand spilled on the ground, rustling and rolling all over.

  I took the hammer and started beating the solid mold left, striking sand and the vitrified parts off. Each hammer fall brought sharp cracking sounds and deeper hums made by the silver. Soon the mold was removed, and my two hemispheres were out.

  The matte grey of their bump filled surface filled me with excitement. The casting was successful! There were no gross errors. All I had to do was to give it a good polish and I could assemble my generator. But first.

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  I lit up the forge and started pumping the bellows to heat up the aether pole of the generator. The reason was that while it was in the sand I could not pour aether in to refine its structure. It took me half an hour of work to heat, cool, and reheat the silver several times before I was satisfied with the refinement.

  I had created branching veins of aether conducting material. These were getting narrower towards the tip, ensuring they would accelerate the flow of aether from the array, making for a possible higher voltage.

  By the end the pole was blackened with soot. I carefully took it to the grinding section. Polishing the two hemispheres was the hard part. They were slippery and, under the friction with the grinding wheels, they shook and vibrated, slipping out of my hand. I carefully went through all four of the wheels, leaving behind only a small section unpolished.

  Before assembling everything together, I cut and built a support. The unpolished parts were placed on the support and provided the friction necessary for the two poles to stay fixed. I took the slats that resulted from the spreading of the silver over the upper part of the mold and cut them.

  After obtaining the required number of silver nails from the slats, I had to give them all a cut down the middle on their length. One hammer strike on my chisel was enough to separate and open the nails into two jaws.

  After processing all eighty nails I had prepared I started the assembly. The process was straightforward. Twisting the silver with tweezers around the silk threads so that the thread was well caught and inseparable from the nails. I repeated this process eighty times, once for each end of a thread as my eyes started to hurt from squinting in the flickering light.

  Then I had to stain the rims of the larger bores with ink. Placing the two hemispheres upside down on paper, I got a very good measure of their size. I cut a section of the leg of about fourteen centimeters in length and using a knife I adjusted the ends to fit. I assembled everything together.

  In order to avoid getting arcs of electricity between the two poles of the generator I smeared the flat faces with resin in multiple layers, drying each one rapidly with aether. Then I took another two legs of the spider.

  One of them, the one that conducted aether away from the base the other that led it towards the base. I connected their bases to the poles, then placed my hand on the aether conducting bore. I poured aether in and the generator hummed to life.

  Each of the threads started crackling with energy. As the charge built, the slack in the silk vanished. The threads snapped taut, humming like guitar strings, glowing with a faint violet aura as they pushed away from the central diode.

  A jagged arc of violet light leaped between the tips of the spider legs. It snapped with a sound like a cracking whip, illuminating the forging area in harsh, strobe-light flashes. The burnt, metallic and addictive smell of ozone spread in the area.

  I smiled widely while my face was lit up by the arcs of lightning and my teeth ached faintly from the charge. “I have power!” I couldn’t help but mutter as my excitement grew at the prospect of all I could do with this power.

  But excitement did not mean I could rest easy now. I stopped fueling the generator with aether. The test run was over, and it was a resounding success. I pressed my hands on the hemispheres. For a generator making over fifteen thousand volts, after running for thirty seconds, to only get the hemispheres to pulse with residual heat spread through the metal was a success in and of itself, but not a sustainable one.

  ‘About forty-five degrees… My generator is like a candle. No… more like a firecracker. It makes a lot of light, but only for a flash.’

  Considering that I was dealing with silk which would burn up before the silver melted, this meant that at most, without a cooling system, this generator could run for only a few minutes at a time. That was not enough if I wanted to use it for forging or perhaps an arc furnace to process metals like tungsten.

  I went up in the tower and sat down, beside my bed to meditate. On my third try at arranging the array, another resonance appeared. It was extremely weak, barely tugging aether towards me, like a weak breeze that barely swayed some curtains. It was more than nothing. I managed to hold it this time, but the effect was worse than when I concentrated.

  Aether wasn’t pouring towards me like it did towards the formation. Still, luck had been on my side that evening, and I decided not to push it anymore. I got up into the bed and lay down, falling asleep as soon as I laid my head on the pillow.

  Next morning I woke up and went through my routine. A day I both dreaded and looked forward to had arrived. The physical training class. Last time I got knocked out by Cassia, I hoped that this time at least I’d get some instructions—something, anything—that would help me get better at fighting.

  The class was however later than usual so I started studying my beast materials. I had the beast bones left, the crystalline antlers, a lizard hide, some scorch-vine viper leather and its fangs. This was not much. I had to prepare to show a crafting process in four days, so I have to pick up the best material and crafting process I knew.

  My eyes kept slipping back to the beast bones, in the end I decided on using them. I laid them before my eyes. Ribs, femurs, tail bones and vertebrae. I picked a few of the tail bones and weighed them in my hand. They held unusual weight for their size.

  They had a structured grain that went along their length and a coldness that reminded me of stone in a deep cave. I tightened my grip on one of them, and the ridges left by the grains sunk in my flesh, locking the bone between my fingers. My eyes flashed. ‘These would make good handles and connectors for a heavy weapon.’

  I knew what I wanted to do! So, I began sketching. If I was going to use the tail bones as a handle, then I needed to ensure they connected securely to the metal, just like the skin on the dagger. Preparing most of the other materials I’d need, I got my mind off the training class.

  Professor Varen won't even remember how to close his mouth by the time I'm done!

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  ?? Author's Question:

  What do you think of the mechanism behind the generator? How do you think he'll solve the overheating problem?