Secrets of Ashenmoor:

  An Artificer’s Tale, Voyage

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  Like many a great tale—which is to say, every tale that someone survives long enough to call great—mine begins with sails billowing majestically in the wind, a daring voyage across endless seas, and the sort of horizon that makes poets either swoon or drown themselves for material.

  That’s the official version. The unofficial version (the one with fewer violins playing in the background) involves long evenings of cold tea with my teacher, a mother that insistently believed alchemy was just a phase, and a great many nights in the workshop producing absolutely nothing of consequence.

  But that's the benefit of hindsight, you see: you can skip the tedious bits.

  No one ever tells stories that start with “I spent three years hammering copper plates into the wrong shape while crying,” but I did. And not even dramatically—just... quietly. The sort of sobbing that upsets the cat and corrodes your tools.

  But then came the voyage. Oh yes, the big voyage, full of wind and purpose and other people’s romantic notions of destiny. And like many young fools with more ambition than sense and more tools than talent, I left behind everything I knew in favour of somewhere that sounded promising, mysterious, and—most importantly—far away.

  Ashenmoor.

  You hear that name now and think of weathered buildings, salty air, and silence, but back then? Back then it was different—and not just different in the way age make all things different. No, in those days, Ashenmoor was promise incarnate. I can still see her white spires, reaching out of the city like the world’s most expensive picket fence. Grand towers, markets so wide they seemed to never end, and streets so clean you could eat off them—and people did, though mostly because there were never enough tables to seat the never-ending stream of fortune seekers.

  I remember standing on the deck of that creaking old sky-barge, staring at the city as it shimmered in the heat, thinking: This is it. This is where I become someone.

  And, gods help me, I did. Just not the someone I expected.

  None of that remain, of course. It has all been swallowed by the mist now or drifted away upon cold waves. Back then, though? The mere name of Ashenmoor could lure scholars, dreamers, thieves, and kings alike—often all in the same person.

  She was one of the first Great Cities in a world that hadn’t yet figured out how to be properly civilised. And had she endured—had greed not outpaced wisdom and had the foundations not been built upon grave mistakes—well, she might have been the greatest still.

  But she didn’t. And this story—my story—begins before the fall.

  Back when hope was cheap, mistakes were expensive, and no one really understood what we were building.

  Least of all me.

  ***

  “Quite something, isn’t it?”

  The young artificer nearly dropped his belongings—which would have been a shame, since he’d only just gathered them from the last time he nearly dropped them—when a voice spoke from far too close. Over the clatter of deckhands, sailors, and people shouting nautical things like “Belay that!” he hadn’t heard the woman sidle up beside him.

  Edrik Kain managed to catch his papers and his jaw at roughly the same time. His eyes tore from the sprawling metropolis looming on the horizon, and he made a noise that might, with charity, be translated as “words.”

  He’d thought he knew cities. But cities, it turned out, came in sizes.

  “Captain?” he stuttered, hurriedly stuffing the fugitive papers back into his bag before the wind could hire them for another adventure. “I, uh… good morning?”

  The older woman chuckled—the sort of chuckle that suggested she’d seen all this before and rather enjoyed watching people flounder in it. She leaned on the railing, eyes lost in the City of Endless Promise.

  “You’re not the first to lose his words seeing her, Mister Kain,” she said, watching a frigate the size of a cathedral muscle into the waters below them. A man on a nearby barque shouted something cheerful and nautical. The wind stole it, shredded it, and carried it off to confuse some poor fisherman on the far coast. She waved anyway.

  Some thirty minutes ago, the sea had been vast, empty, and serene. Now it was a pilgrimage for ships. Dozens—no, hundreds—of vessels from an equal amount of worlds were closing in, each one carrying wide eyes, big dreams, and at least one apprentice deckhand being sick over the railing.

  “But you’re in luck,” she continued. “The city keeps growing faster than barnacles on a burr-whale. There’s plenty of work for anyone who can hammer, sketch, weld, summon, or hold a spanner. Shipwrights, architects, engineers... I’ve carried them all from distant lands to make their future here. But an artificer?” She gave him a sidelong look. “That’s rare coin, that is.”

  Kain coloured slightly, which was a feat given the wind had already turned his face the exact shade of embarrassment. “My master’s the only artificer I know,” he said, fiddling with the strap of his bag. “I’m just... well, I’m just an apprentice, really. Nothing to show for it.”

  The captain raised a weathered brow, then nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “Means you’ve still got plenty of room to make new mistakes. The city’s full of people who think they’ve already made all of theirs.

  “Just don’t be too humble. If you don’t know your own worth, someone else will, and it’ll usually be ‘cheap and comes with a free hat.’ Mark me, Mister Kain: this is a city where even shit is turned into gold. And if you fancy yourself a little above that—” she gave him a hearty pat on the back “—you’ll be soaring high before long.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Her assurance was, strictly speaking, only words. And words, as everyone knows, are lighter than feathers and considerably easier to stuff yourself full of.

  But Edrik Kain still felt his heart thump a little faster. A name of his own. Soaring high. These were the exact reasons he’d left behind his old life (and, less poetically, three unpaid bills and an annoyed landlord).

  He drew in a deep breath as the ship neared the city.

  The skyline was littered with scaffolding—houses, warehouses, temples, and taverns all sprouting with cheerful disregard for urban planning. The streets below teemed with life, energy, and opportunity.

  “I heard this was just another port town a few years ago,” Kain said, glancing at the woman beside him. “That it rose from nothing—as if by magic…”

  The words lingered, hanging in the air long enough to collect dust.

  “Magic?” the captain echoed, shaking her head with a chuckle sharp enough to shave with. “Is that what they tell you back home? Not the worst theory I’ve heard. But no. The truth is simpler.”

  She leaned in, voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “The rulers of this city made a deal with the Devil.”

  ***

  I can still remember the way the captain’s lips curled that day. The sort of grin adults wear when they lean down to a child and say, “Yes, of course there’s a monster under your bed, and it will nibble your toes if you don’t eat your vegetables.” The grin that says this will be funny later.

  None of us realized how distressingly accurate those words would turn out to be.

  Still, my arrival in Ashenmoor went about as well as could be expected, which is to say: nobody died, nothing exploded (permanently), and I didn’t immediately go bankrupt. I found a cheap enough place to stay, and within the year I’d managed to set up a small shop of my own. Not quite the Clatterwane you know, but respectable enough that people stopped mistaking me for a squatter.

  And business? Business was even better than the captain had promised.

  An artificer in those days—and I mean proper Artificers, not back-street dabblers with a screwdriver in one hand and a candle in the other—was rare. And while I wasn’t my master, I was my master’s student, and that’s more than most people can say.

  As time flowed by and the passing of seasons didn’t feel so shocking anymore, word of my work began to spread across the city. Which was wonderful, in a way. Right up until precisely the wrong—or, depending on your perspective, catastrophically right—sort of person heard of me.

  ***

  “Yes, Miss Gunniver,” Kain repeated, carefully enunciating each word as though talking to a particularly stubborn kettle. “I promise the Ice Box will work even without you putting any actual ice inside it. It’s just… branding. People understand ice. They don’t understand ‘self-sustaining rune-cooled containment units.’”

  He offered a smile, which looked as though it had been borrowed from someone who didn’t know how to use it properly.

  “But…” Miss Gunniver drew the word out, her eyes flicking to the box—currently being wrestled by her servant in the dignified manner of someone trying, very hard, not to drop something very heavy in front of their employer. “Even the mage boxes need crystals, or are hooked into those, ah, lulines, or… something. Lady Milliner got one last spring and hasn’t stopped raving about it.”

  “No need for any of that either,” Kain said. It was his third attempt at sounding reassuring, and by this point his tone carried all the conviction of a wet sponge.

  Dealing with customers was, without a doubt, the least interesting part of invention. It was like building a magnificent flying machine and then being forced to explain to every passerby that yes, the wings are supposed to be attached.

  “My work,” he went on, “is self-contained. Unless it suffers major damage, it will run quite happily until the runes fade—which shouldn’t happen for another three to five years, provided you don’t keep it in a swamp, a fire, or anywhere else damp and catastrophic. At which point, you bring it back, and I can refresh the runes at a discount.”

  Miss Gunniver’s expression suggested she had only heard the word discount. She studied the box as though it might confess something if stared at hard enough. Finally, she asked, “But how does it work?”

  Kain drew a deep breath, opened his mouth, and began: “Well, you see—”

  Many a tired sighs later, Kain scratched another note in his journal: They don’t care about the intricacies. Just tell them the temperature can be adjusted by sliding the plates, assure them it’s perfectly normal if the outer shell gets a bit warm, and remind them not to hide it in a cupboard unless they enjoy fire hazards.

  He added: Perhaps also invent a better name. Something reassuring. ‘The Food-Not-Rotter.’ Or ‘The Fresh-Keeper.’ Anything but Ice Box.

  He let the quill dangle for a moment, staring across at his workbench. A dozen unfinished projects were spread along its surface, though… Calling them “unfinished” was perhaps generous; most hadn’t advanced beyond the glorious idea stage, with only a few having earned a half-soldered plate or a rune sketched at three in the morning when sensible people were asleep.

  “No time for you today either…” he murmured at the collection, shutting his journal. The book was so bloated with papers, notes, and folded corners it had begun to resemble a very gluttonous, very informed rodent. Work wasn’t a problem. Work, there was plenty of. Excitement, on the other hand, was rather more elusive.

  As the sun painted the windows gold, the bell over the shop door gave its usual weary chime.

  “Sorry, we’re closed. I just haven’t had time to put up the—”

  His words faltered.

  Two knights in full armor had just stepped inside to flank either side of the door, visors hiding any traces of human feeling. A fact which Kain found himself oddly envious of.

  He could feel the expression that passed across his face as he eyed the heavy metal plating and the swords at their hips-—outdated. Any self-respecting artificer could peel that sort of armor open like a tin of sardines, given the right tools and five minutes to laugh about it.

  Should have been able to, at least.

  But outdated didn’t mean the same thing in this city as it did everywhere else. Here, “outdated” simply meant “a different kind of lethal.” Here, even dull blades cut further, faster, and altogether more decisively than anything Kain had seen back home.

  And none more efficiently than the Ashen Knights.

  Even so, the two figures that’d flanked the door couldn’t hold a candle to the third that now stepped across the threshold.

  Kain scrambled to his feet with such haste his journal was sent skidding across the floor. His back bent once, then again, in something approximating a bow—if entirely too stiff and shaking. The pale lady didn’t seem to mind his rusty manners.

  Leisurely, she let her gaze drink in the room.

  She wasn’t tall, nor particularly beautiful. In fact, some might have gone so far as to call her ugly—though never to her face, and never within earshot of anyone with an unhealthy interest in relaying gossip. Her nose was flat, her eyes were sunken, but her skin gleamed like the winter’s first snowfall and her irises burned the red of freshly spilled blood.

  “Edrik Kain,” she said, and though her voice was nothing out of the ordinary—save a faint rasp, perhaps—Kain found himself clinging to each word as if it were a rope dangling above a cliff. “The artificer noteworthy enough that even we have heard the name?”

  “Y-yes, ma’am?”

  “Your talents are required,” she spoke the words as if his fate had already been decided, written down, and signed in triplicate. Which, in a sense, it had. “You have been summoned.”

  Less than three years after I arrived in Ashenmoor, I learned that I hadn’t appreciated the comfortable life I’d lived nearly enough. The day they came for me was the day my innocence died.