Excerpt: Gabriel's War

Gabriel Reynolds adjusted the buttons on his waistcoat and checked his cuffs once more for any sign of chemical to have spilled. He had already lost two of his best shirts this year that way, and despite Master Larrington’s constant warnings, Gabriel managed to spill, drip, and drop his way to becoming an alchemist. He assured himself once more that his clothes were clean, and he sidled his way out of the back door of Larrington’s Alchemical Emporium and on to the sooty streets of Smoketown. Gabriel hated Smoketown – it was the dirtiest, grimiest, seediest district of Castlemount, and he wished Master Larrington would move to, say, the Bazaar or the Metallurgy district.

“Master Larrington, remind me again why you don’t move to a more productive part of town,” he’d asked earlier that day. Larrington sighed and put his beakers down, as though it took his entire concentration to explain the answer – though, knowing him, it likely did.

“Foot traffic makes no difference, Gabriel. A quality product is what brings in the masses. I have the highest quality product in town, and so it should matter little where I set up shop. As it stands, my longstanding agreements with the factories down the way have come up for renewal just recently, and they have offered a generous sum if I remain in close proximity for regular deliveries.” He was often the one who ended up making the deliveries anyhow; why should it have mattered?

He was no businessman. He was an alchemist’s apprentice. Perhaps he didn’t fully understand the high importance of the factory contribution to Larrington’s “very important research.”

Gabriel knew he didn’t fully understand the consequences of his father’s own work. Cornelius Q. Reynolds, steamsmith extraordinaire, was renowned for his work in the field of engineering. Just six months prior, Paravera had finished up the project that had shocked the world: it had carved itself away from the continent using a device Cornelius himself had devised and prototyped. The “Full Bore” was a modern marvel of machinery, capable of holding a three man crew and churning solid rock away to leave behind gaping holes where solid stone once held firm. Few could believe such a feat was possible.

Fewer grasped its monstrous applications.

Gabriel found himself in awe of what his father’s contraptions could accomplish. At one time, he had even wished to follow in his father’s footsteps someday as an apprentice steamsmith. Days and days he’d lay in bed as a child, dreaming of the day he’d put together his own steam man and ride it around the Paraveran countryside. And then his father forbade him from ever entering his workshop or taking up his profession, lest he would choose to live on the streets. If he was going to fund Gabriel’s education, Gabriel could elect any other profession. And so, Gabriel elected alchemy, due to some of the striking similarities that mixing chemicals bore to mixing parts of steel and brass, but a piece of his heart remained in the steam shop that he was never allowed to enter.