Chapter Two Hundred Sixty-Three: 'Bright steward, flash and burn...'

Abbas couldn't even remember the last time he'd slept. Physical exhaustion just seemed like a way of life at this point. His body protested every movement he took, but he was barely even aware of it.

Mental exhaustion was not his problem. His mind was constantly racing. New ideas, old idea in a new context, new problems, old problems. This could be fixed. That could be attempted.

A working Fusion Forge at his disposal. It was truly magnificent.

There was so much to learn and do. The potential spurred him on. He'd have to rest at some point. Probably. But for now, he was entirely consumed.

And loving every minute of it.

In here, the outside world mattered so much less. He was still aware of the urgency of his tasks, of course--they were perhaps the largest aspect of his motivation. But it was a process. It couldn't really be rushed. Urgency had no real weight.

He'd had to test the Forge's capabilities, first and foremost. Barring an imminent attack from Abolish, nothing else could have possibly pried his attention away from this place.

It began with merely trying to fuse simple materials together. Small, molecular bonds. Could the Forge create water from hydrogen and oxygen, for example?

And the answer to that was yes, though it had taken a few tries for him to get the hang of it. But that was a relief. He'd had a feeling since the beginning that this Forge specialized in organics, so it would have been quite the problem if it couldn't even synthesize water. Sure, he could've just synthesized it himself--a trivial task for even a mildly experienced integration user--but it wouldn't have boded well for the Forge's more advanced capabilities.

Which he was finally beginning to get glimpses of.

The giant glass globe was apparently an all-purpose chamber. Everything happened in there. Collection, analysis, breakdown, fusion, refinement--and perhaps more that he hadn't yet discovered.

Even now, a month later and with a whole host of assistants at his beck and call, Abbas felt like he'd only scratched the surface of what this thing could do. Half the time, he didn't know whether he was frustrated or excited beyond words.

Thus far, his actual creations were quite modest things.

And yet, not at all. Depending on how one looked at them, they could have been regarded as remarkable accomplishments.

He made a plant. It was just a tiny sprout, but still. It was an organism. Life. Created from nothing but raw elements and his own imagination.

On a technical level, it was incredible. Not something an integration user could do unaided, certainly. But on a pragmatic level... maybe not so much. That tiny sprout wasn't about to help them retake their homeland from Abolish, now was it?

He knew he had to be patient, but it was difficult when there was so much at stake. This pressure that he felt weighing on him in the back of his mind--it was nothing new. He'd felt it for years. But never before had it been quite so intense.

A constant reminder of just how much everyone was relying on him.

Hence the lack of sleep.

Thankfully, he'd also been able to make other, non-organic things. The sprout was arguably the most impressive creation, but only as a proof of concept. The most useful creation thus far was undoubtedly the enhanced shield that he had crafted for Hector.

The Amir-9 prototype shield that Hector had gifted back to him at Warrenhold was the ideal material for testing the Forge in this early stage. It was sophisticated enough that unaided integration on it was unfeasible, but it was also easily replaceable if the testing process proved too stressful and destroyed it. The young Lord Goffe had a whole room full of them, and Abbas didn't hesitate to help himself. He was reasonably certain that Hector wouldn't mind.

As a result, he'd been able to develop the Amir-10 prototype. Though perhaps it was deserving of an entirely new naming scheme, now.

The Amir-9 had featured four vertical lines of tungsten carbide while the rest of it had been composed of steel and titanium. The Amir-10 now boasted four more lines that crossed those horizontally, creating a checkerboard effect.

It may have been wiser to simply replace everything with tungsten carbide due its remarkable strength, but Abbas believed that alternating the chosen materials might one prove helpful against violent chemical reactions. Hydroflouric acid, for example, would eat through tungsten carbide more quickly than it would through steel.

Plus, there was the weight to consider. The shield was already quite heavy, thanks to tungsten being so much heavier than steel. The titanium was meant to counterbalance that, as it was lighter than steel, so it was tricky change to make. While weight wasn't necessarily an issue for the superhuman strength of a servant in battle, there was still the matter of lugging the thing around outside of combat.

Abbas doubted that Hector would be able to annihilate and rematerialize the Amir-10 at will like he could with the Amir-9. In fact, a part of him didn't want Hector to even try. It was entirely possible that Hector might simply annihilate the part of the Amir-10 and then simply rematerialize an Amir-9 as normal, rendering all his hard work useless.

But admittedly, another part of him was curious to see what would happen. Theoretically, the Forge's transmutation of the Amir could have made it so that Hector was no longer capable of annihilating it at all. Fusion Forge's were unique in that ability, but it was impossible to be sure without testing the shield directly.

This exact problem was one of the major reasons why the use of materialized elements in construction was a historically contested subject. The idea that someone might materialize an enormous amount of something, sell it all off for a tidy profit, and then be able to go around sabotaging projects as they pleased--that had caused considerable problems in the past.

The worst instances, naturally, had come from Abolish. Instances of dematerializing elements that belonged to critical infrastructure. Power plants. Farming equipment. Water pumps. All bringing terrible consequences with relatively minor effort on the saboteur's part.

There were more terror-striking examples, too. Bringing down a skyscraper with people still inside had been a popular one when Abbas was a child.

And that was just Abolish. There were economically motivated saboteurs to worry about, too. More than once, someone had flooded the continental market with a precious metal. They'd made a killing on their initial sales, which drove down the price as supply shot up. Then they waited, and after a sufficiently inconspicuous amount of time had past, all that supply would begin to mysteriously disappear, which would drive the price back up again. And the cycle would repeat, to the detriment of millions of people.

The Vanguard and others had long since formed various watchdog organizations to help prevent such crises, but even to this day, it would occasionally still happen. It certainly didn't help that materialized elements were indistinguishable from naturally occurring ones.

Abbas recalled hearing about some of the more authoritarian members of the Vanguard who wanted all materialization users in the world to be placed on a registry. That way, if any element was suspected of being used to manipulate the market, they would know who to investigate. And of course, any materializer who did not register would be subject to criminal prosecution in an international court.

Some countries had even agreed, Jesbol and Melmoore being among the early adopters. And Intar had hotly debated it a number of times. Perhaps in the future, a comprehensive registry of Eloan materializers would come to fruition.

For his part, however, Abbas had no intention of going along with such an idea.

Not that it mattered very much at the moment. He wasn't ruling Sair, right now. He was barely ruling his own Hahl.

But still. As long as he lived, Sairi independence was a priority, and submitting his country's citizens to the will of any international court system--much less one presided over by the Vanguard--was not going to happen.

If anything, recent events had only made his feelings about that even stronger.

And besides, he didn't believe that such a registry would even work. In the long-term, all it would do is give the government another means of persecuting law-abiding citizens. Anyone crazy enough to abuse the continental market or conduct acts of terror was not going to be deterred by a simple list. The only thing that would stop maniacs like that was real, attentive watchmen. Actual detective work.

But politicians didn't want to hear that. Or they thought that the public didn't want to hear it. Either way, the outcome was the same.

Plus, as far as Abbas was concerned, a registry like that would go entirely against the Vanguard's purported belief that it should not involve itself in politics. Increasingly, that seemed more and more like lip service than a deeply held ideal. He did not wish to contribute to that trend.

Regarding the Amir-10, however, he had managed to make additional improvements to it. Its self-repairing mechanism now worked more quickly. About fifty percent faster, in fact. Quite a shocking gain, he felt. Most likely, it was due not just to the Forge facilitating the process but also because it had been a few years since he and Haqq had last worked on the Amir-9. The progression in their skill was undoubtedly a factor.

Abbas had also wanted to reactivate the Amir-10 with the soul-enhancing property that the Amir-9 used to have, but that wasn't to be, apparently. Whatever Rasalased had done to the Amir-9 had well and truly removed that ability.

Technically, it would have been possible to just give the Amir-10 that property again simply by starting over from scratch, but that would have required months and months of work. There was an incredibly slow "leeching and baking" process that would need to be done in conjunction with his own soul, and he just couldn't spare that amount of time, right now.

It was disappointing, to be sure, and in order to help compensate for that loss, Abbas had decided to work extra hard and give the Amir-10 an entirely new feature.

A transforming property.

He'd gotten the idea from observing Morgunov's death machines, though this wasn't nearly as crazy. And still quite different, as well. Those were entire machines reorganizing themselves into different, still-operational designs. This was a reorganizing of the shield's physical structure, controlled by the wielder.

The greatest assistance in accomplishing this new development, however, was actually Garovel. One day, when Abbas allowed the reaper to observe his work and listen to his intentions, Garovel revealed that he and Hector had discovered an ancient item that was already capable of such a thing.

The Shifting Spear of Logante.

One of Hector's subordinates was holding onto it, and with a bit of polite asking, Abbas had been able to borrow it.

And what a boon it had been. The "Spear" could transform itself into a sword, an axe, a staff, a dagger, and perhaps others that had been lost to time. All via voice commands. Truly any incredible feat of craftsmanship.

Garovel mentioned that the weapon had failed to impress Hector, though. Which was not particularly surprising for a materialization user. Hector could simply use his own ability to achieve the same effects. But for Abbas' purposes, the Spear was ideal. A magnificent blueprint, of sorts.

It still amazed him, sometimes, the fact that integrators of old could have created such things. Going by conventional wisdom, the knowledge that integrators possessed should have progressed in the same manner that normal technological innovation did.

But it didn't.

And precisely why that was... remained unclear, even to a rather old integrator like Abbas.

There were various theories, of course. One of the biggest was that it was simply a problem with integrators themselves--that as a group, they tended to jealously guard their secrets, lest that knowledge be used against them one day. Or alternatively, because they were too self-absorbed with their inventing to bother with things like teaching.

That explanation seemed the most plausible to Abbas. Integrators were infamous for their various eccentricities. In fact, a part of him felt that he himself was far too boring to be one.

Perhaps he would become a better inventor if he went mad.

Another popular theory for why so much integration knowledge seemed to have been lost was that someone--an organization of some kind--was actively suppressing it. That was a bit too conspiratorial for Abbas' taste, but he'd met quite a few people who believed it over the years. The motive, they usually said, was to keep humanity itself in a kind of perpetual darkness. To prevent them from solving essential problems via technology.

Heh. And if that was true, then the conspirators must have been quite frustrated over the last few centuries. Comparatively speaking, technology had surged forward by leaps and bounds, thanks in no small part to the work of integrators. Abbas had little doubt it would continue this way, as well. The compounding nature of technological progression meant that--at least in theory--it would only accelerate over time.

But it still begged the question. How much knowledge had been lost over the many long years? And how much of it might yet be rediscovered?

He supposed that the Amir-10 was now an example of this.

Abbas was able to use the Forge to help him examine the Shifting Spear of Logante, and as a result, he discovered the key factor to its voice-activated transformation commands.

That being, a pseudo-consciousness.

The Spear held within it a kind of semi-aware cluster of soul power. On its own, it could do nothing, but when it connected with a living body, it gained a reactive property. In a sense, the soul of the wielder was like a switch that completed the circuit of the Spear's soul power.

Abbas had never seen a pseudo-consciousness quite like this one before, able to recognize and react to auditory stimuli. It was quite advanced. The tricky part was that the voice commands had to be stored somewhere in order for the Spear to recognize them in the first place.

But where would that be? The Spear didn't have a computer built into it like his powered armor did. It was just metal.

And that, perhaps, was the greatest revelation of all.

The information was being stored within the Spear's soul. Or its "half-soul," such as it was. It wasn't alive. The pseudo-consciousness had a memory structure built into it for the purpose of holding the commands.

Abbas had no idea that such a thing was even possible. The ability to store data within a constructed pocket of soul power?

The implications were mind-boggling. With that alone, he could completely redesign his powered armor. And countless other inventions from over the years.

It was an overwhelming realization. Like he'd been overlooking something that should've been painfully obvious for the past fifty years. Or perhaps longer.

Of course souls could be used as memory. Reapers were living proof of it. Their immaculate memories were perhaps the best example imaginable. He had just never thought of that concept as comparable with more modern ideas of data storage.

Which was not to say that it had all been smooth sailing since having that epiphany.

He had not had an easy time trying to create a memory structure out of nothing but soul power. Even with the Spear as a blueprint, the task proved incredibly difficult. Several long sessions of meditative construction were required before even a glimmer of progress had been made with the Amir-10.

As a new prototype, he wanted its transformations to be simple yet still useful. He knew only too well about how easily a project could spiral out of control when pursuing an overly ambitious goal. Countless "inventions" from his youth had failed before even reaching the testing phase because of that very problem.

Brainstorming was arguably the most fun part, which was also why it was the most developmentally dangerous. Without the self-discipline to know when to stop fiddling with ideas and start actually getting the work done, an inventor was doomed to a career of disappointment.

So the Amir-10's transformations were primarily just in terms of size. Its default state was no different from the Amir-9, but it had three more variants--one smaller and two larger. Plus, there was an additional code word that would toggle a deeper curve in the face of the shield.

The smaller variant was primarily just to aid in portability, but it was limited by the fact that the weight of the shield would remain the same no matter what size it transformed into. The smallest variant was the thickest, while the larger ones were progressively thinner.

Abbas figured that if Hector's soul could not be enhanced directly by the shield, then the next best thing was to make it so the shield could protect his entire body--or one side of it, at least.

The curved variable was meant to help with that, as well. At the largest size with the curve toggled on, the Amir-10 would be like a half-cocoon, of sorts. Its thinner structure would also mean that it wasn't quite as durable as the smaller versions, but given Hector's deceptively young age, the protection that it provided would still be quite useful to him, Abbas felt.

The boy's comatose state had certainly been a cause for concern. Explaining the situation to the Rainlords had been a total mess.

Abbas could hardly believe how angry they'd gotten. More than once, it seemed like the situation would come to blows, which should've been the absolute last thing on any of their minds after everything else that had happened.

If not for Garovel's calming presence in that conversation, Abbas didn't know what would have happened. It was a marvel how the reaper could sound so self-certain when literally none of them knew what was going on.

But Abbas appreciated the assistance. Clearly, he had underestimated just how much the Rainlords cared for Hector. Which was doubly surprising, because he'd already thought they cared for him quite a bit.

What in the world was happening in this little corner of the world? In the domain of the young Lord Darksteel?

Even Abbas could feel himself being pulled in. He'd barely gotten to know the kid, and yet...

The notion that Hector might not wake up anytime soon... or ever...

Well, it was incredibly distressing. Perhaps a bit more than it should have been. Abbas would've been lying if he said that wasn't a major reason why he'd decided to work on the Amir-10 instead of some other project. He wanted to be able to present Hector with it when he woke up.

In any case, Abbas hoped to use this new understanding of pseudo-consciousness in future projects.

In fact, that might be the exact path he needed to follow in order to bring his dream of a new armored warrior class within the Sandlords into reality. He was very reluctant to get his hopes up too much, but at the same time, the burgeoning ideas in his mind were too tantalizing to the imagination.

The main problem with the prototype suit was that in order for it to be efficient, it needed to drill directly into the brain. Obviously, that wasn't viable for non-servants.

But if the suit could harbor this same kind of reactive pseudo-consciousness? Perhaps more than one, even? The amount of problems that might solve was...

Hmm.

Well, it was still too early to tell how far the idea would take him. He doubted that any single concept would make the dream achievable. But it was a step in the right direction. A big one, potentially.

The suit was a bit of a sensitive issue, though. It was the single most important weapon in his arsenal. In the event of another attack, Abbas needed the suit to be ready for deployment on a moment's notice. And as such, making any major changes to it would make that difficult.

But at the same time, anything he could do to further improve its systems might just be the difference between the survival and extinction of his Hahl.

Especially if the Mad Demon himself showed up.

That was Abbas' single greatest fear, right now. That Morgunov would invade Callum and then Lorent. Or worse, that he'd just skip through Callum entirely in order to attack them first.

Now that the suit was fully functional again, he was confident that it could handle anything short of an emperor.

Well. Mostly confident.

If Bloodeye dared to show his face here without Morgunov at his back, then Abbas would make sure that little monster never bothered anyone ever again. But Bloodeye probably knew better, which would explain why there had been no news of an invasion this past month.

Instead, it seemed that Abolish was trying to solidify its grip on Sair. The Vanguardian forces had apparently just lost Aguarey and were having to retreat ever farther back into the Wetlands.

By all accounts, that should not have happened. Field Marshal Jackson had supposedly survived the disaster at Uego, so in theory, he alone should have been able to hold off the Abolish advance in Morgunov's absence.

So something was very wrong. Either Morgunov was still in play, or Jackson wasn't. Even with the Rainlords' scouts reporting paying close attention to the conflict, there was just so much misinformation being thrown around.

It would certainly help if they had Sandlord scouts out there, too. But on the subject of reuniting the Hahls, no progress had been made at all. Abbas couldn't really spare the time to reach out to them himself, so he'd left it to his sons, but thus far, they had only received silence or even outright refusal in response.

Abbas didn't blame them for their fear.

This was his fault. As the de facto leader of the Golden Council and the most powerful servant among his kin, it was his responsibility to keep them all safe. If he was in their position, his faith in the Golden Council's ability to protect everyone would be shaken.

The Sandlords had not been ousted from the Drylands in over a millennia. Worwal had mentioned that fact to him multiple times now, and every other Hahl had reapers who had witnessed that time period first hand, too. They would be advising the respective leaders of each Hahl about what kind of situation this was.

About how everything was now in flux. Even the hierarchy of power within the Hahls.

Abbas didn't want to kid himself. His "ascent" within the Sandlords was still relatively recent. Even disregarding the leap in fame he'd gained after defeating Ivan, his leading influence on the Golden Council only went back a mere twenty years or so.

It was tough to pinpoint an exact moment when he'd become the "strongest" among his kin. The nature of his power compared to that of the others was a bit odd. Sure, he'd been the oldest Sandlord since Mahir Dagher died and the oldest servant in all of Sair since Bernardino Blackburn died, but age alone wasn't the determining factor. Increases in soul power had diminishing returns, after all.

Regardless, in the grand scheme of things, twenty years was nothing. The blood of the Sandlords of Sair went back nearly two thousand years--or more, depending on how one was measuring.

Some within the other Hahls would no doubt see this situation as an opportunity to establish an entirely new precedent. The weakness of Abbas Saqqaf had been made plain for all to see. If someone else managed to succeed where he had failed, then why should the Sandlords not follow their new leadership?

The Golden Council itself could be restructured or even discarded totally.

Whoever managed to retake Sair first would have so much leverage over the others that they could do practically whatever they wanted. They could rule. And their children could rule.

In a way, they might see this situation as a gift of the gods.

But of course, actually retaking Sair--or even just the Drylands--was easy to fantasize about but not so much to accomplish. One had to go in prepared for a fight against the Mad Demon of Abolish. And how in the world was that to be done?

Abbas just hoped that none of the other Hahls were foolish enough to try and parley with that lunatic.

That was, perhaps, Abbas' next greatest fear, at the moment. If one of the other Hahls thought they could rule over the Sandlords at the Mad Demon's decree, then the resulting conflict would be just as bad as fighting Abolish directly. Or even worse.

That would, without a doubt, fracture the Hahls irreparably. There was no way in the black hells that Abbas would allow his children to ever be made subservient to the Mad Demon, and he was quite certain that several of his ruling kin felt precisely the same way. Hasan Duxan, Yusef Shihab.

And Asad Najir, of course, if he still counted.

Those men would sooner die than work for Morgunov. Abbas would've liked to say the same about the others, but...

These were trying times. When it came down to it, he honestly didn't know how the remaining four heads might react. Hamza Dagher, Navid Kattan, Tariq Haayen, Rahat Mateen. When so many lives were on the line? When so much power was waiting to be seized?

The War of the Three Sands had certainly proven that the loyalty among the Hahls was not above reproach. That conflict may have been long before his time, but Abbas didn't intend to ignore the lessons from it.

The last thing he wanted was to fight a war for the soul of his kin.

But if that was what had to be done, then he would not back down, either.

Freeing Asad would go a long way toward preventing that, he hoped. The man may have become something of a black sheep in recent years, but Lion of the Desert still meant something to his kin. Even if many of them today did not hold to the old ways very strongly, he suspected that most of them would still not wish to go against such a sacred figure in open war.

But of course, freeing Asad was borderline impossible at this time. It might be even more difficult than taking the whole of Sair back.

If it was to be at all doable, however, then Hector would be key. His connection to Rasalased might be the only way to even discover Asad's current location.

Just another reason why Abbas felt suddenly and inextricably bound to this young lord from Atreya.

He wasn't often given to dwelling on what the gods had in store for him or the world at large. Generally speaking, he saw no value in such questions. Whatever would be, would be. He preferred to focus on the material. On the scientific. On the things he had the power to affect.

But sometimes, when events were strange enough, his mind did wander into that realm. Sometimes, he felt like he might've caught a glimpse of what his ancestors called the Great Chain. The invisible bond of Fate. The guiding rope of the gods.

Back when Hector had let go of the Forge, after having been standing there motionless for two entire weeks and just before falling unconscious, the young man had said something that Abbas barely caught.

"Cocora's Candle welcomes you, disciple of the Fury."

The amount of strange things within that statement had only seemed to grow the more he thought about it.

Despite how little sense it made, when Abbas checked, Cocora's Candle did indeed turn out to be the Forge's new name. That was the missing piece he'd needed in order to get it working.

In fact, it had nearly started up all on its own after that. Abbas had insisted on reexamining it several more times first, which turned out to be quite the wise decision, as he discovered several spots in which the flow of ardor needed repairing. Nothing too serious, thankfully, but still. Better to not to take unnecessary risks when dealing with a Fusion Forge.

But there was also the other part of what Hector had said. Disciple of the Fury.

Abbas had been thinking about what that meant over and over again.

Particularly that word. The Fury.

It stuck with him because he'd heard it used in that way once before, many years ago. One of his mentors, Dolf Rachman, had uttered it during one of his many barely-coherent rambles near the end of his life.

The very last time that Abbas had seen him, actually.

Dolf had always been half-crazy. It was part of his charm. And his genius. But on that particular occasion, "half-" had not been the word for it. Abbas remembered listening to him and thinking that the mentor he loved so dearly was all but gone.

"The life, the risk, the time, the shift. Displaced and distraught, the mind wanders and breaks. Words too meager, thoughts too thin, souls too fragile. Chaos cools against the Fury, the Fury. Chaos cools, and the Fury burns. It burns. It rages. It builds with anger and genius. Don't you see, Babo? The Fury is us. It's us. And right now, it is me. I am the Fury, Babo. I am the Fury, and the Fury is me."

Babo had been Dolf's nickname for him. Abbas had hated it, but Dolf never stopped using it, and now, looking back on it all, he kind of missed it.

But that was beside the point, of course. As far as Abbas was aware, no one else had ever heard that conversation. Not even Worwal. Only he and Dolf had been there.

So how in the world could Hector have uttered those words? How could he have possibly known to call him a disciple of the Fury? How could even the Candle have known to call him that?

It beggared belief, quite frankly. Which was why, when he got the news that Hector was finally awake again, Abbas became quite distracted from his work. He needed to talk to him again.

He was so distracted, in fact, that he considered just leaving for Warrenhold. With his suit of armor, it would be a rather quick trip.

But no. He was quite certain that Hector would come to him--and soon. No doubt, the young man would want to check up on the Candle. And Abbas very much wanted him to see it in action, too. That couldn't be done from Warrenhold.

So he waited. And tried to stay on task. Tried to keep his eye from wandering over to the Amir-10 as he again wondered what Hector would think of it.

Not really an adequate gift, Abbas felt. For the man who had almost single-handedly saved his entire Hahl? No. But it was a start, he supposed.

Thankfully, Abbas didn't have long to wait. Perhaps Hector had already been en route to the tree by the time Abbas received word of him waking up, because scarcely two hours passed before the young Lord Goffe arrived. And after so much anticipation, Abbas was more than ready to receive him.

Surprisingly enough, though, it was just him and Garovel. Abbas would've expected a whole host of Rainlords to join him. Instead, Hector landed with only slightly more grace than he had on his last visit. The running crater he left in his wake wasn't quite as deep or long, and if he had broken or dislocated any bones this time, it wasn't obvious.

Abbas and his various assistants merely waited at the tree's entrance as he shuffled quickly over to them, not bothering to dematerialize his armor.

"It is a relief to see you up and moving again, Lord Goffe," Abbas called out. He already had the Amir-10 ready for him. "There is much I would like to show you. Progress has been--"

Hector waved his arms at him in manner that seemed almost dismissive. "No, no, listen, listen. Abbas." His footsteps became more certain as he drew closer, and it didn't appear like he was slowing down, either. The group had to part down the middle for him as he walked through the door and toward the Candle. "I have to show you how to use this thing."