i can just imagine the planning meeting
"if we want eston to be on the lightning rail we should put a junction at kalazart"
"sure boss but what if we made it a junction and an ampitheater and a giant summoning circle all at the same time"
"that doesn't sound very practical so why would we do that"
"because it's really impressive"
"i can't argue with that logic so you get a promotion and now you're the boss"
i bet it went exactly like that
to be fair it is an impressive feat of engineering but it takes dangerous amounts of raw magical energy to operate
fortunately we had plenty of dangerously overcharged mana reservoirs
of course the sockets for them were spread across eight towers so we split up and each of us got to carry a hot potato but once we got them in the whole place became a brightly shining beacon of hope and wonder
i guess that's what woke up the dormant mechanical combat zombies
at first i thought they were forged but a closer look revealed them to be less like intelligent beings and more like automatic self-aiming weaponry
they only seemed interested in the energy sources we brought but it's not like we had all that many to spare and the zombies had no problem attacking us to get to them so we had to fight
i may not be keen on combat in general but when i don't have to worry about whether i'm hurting living things i manage well enough
at one point i had to run back to the inspector cart to retrieve more mana reservoirs
imagine carrying a pressure cooker that you know is severely past its limits and could rupture and maim or kill you at any moment
now imagine it's a pressure cooker the size of a grasshopper but could turn a city block into light then ash
i carried two at once and didn't even complain about it
i was such a good pony
medya's crossbow wasn't working right so when she got cornered she had to resort to biting through one of the combat machines
i want to emphasize that this was a really unsettling act of desperation that she's still shaken by but do feel free to reflect on the fact that gryphons are capable of breaching solid metal armor with their beaks
yet another reason i'm glad she's on my side
anyhow we survived and got the junction working enough to continue on to eston
eston got hit pretty hard in the war which is no surprise because that's where house cannith was centered
now it's mainly rubble and sinkholes and roaming spells and ... corpses just as fresh as they day they fell
i promised myself that i wouldn't think about it until after the task was accomplished but that meant being in a state of mild shock while we made our way to the cannith ancestral home to pick through ruins
we found some interesting stuff including a book that held records of six generations of that family minus two redacted names
i already knew about "morran" but i'll get to the other name in a bit
the really big find wasn't at the house but up the road a bit in a huge building that was used to assemble parts made elsewhere into forged
we found two sets of troubleshooting and repair references that were complete except for their indices
i'm not even exaggerating when i say that those references alone justify all the misery it took to get to them
of course they'll jump my own personal mission ahead by a significant amount
even more importantly they'll enable the forged to heal in ways they were unable to for years including full replacement of parts
the only catch is that it's really difficult to find anything specific in them without an index
as we were packing up the books to take with us we were surprised by a mysterious forged nearly bell's size who pointed out the shelf the index was on (although we were only able to find one copy)
he said something about bell being "not one of father's" but before we could ask what he meant he chided zer' for trying to read his mind
now i want to know how he could tell because i still can't figure out the first thing about zer's abilities but that's for later
so "dowser" was a bit surprised that we were able to make our way there via rail
he explained that he crossed the "azul river" to look for some components which i suppose isn't much of a challenge when you don't breathe and can just walk across
anyhow he had to leave before we could ask much more and he suggested we not linger too long ourselves
good advice which i'm glad we took because i didn't want to wait one more second before digging through those books
after that we loaded up the cart and started back home without any other interruptions or crises
i'll be spending my time reading through those books and thinking about everything that's happened and also the name zer' got when he read dowser's mind about his father
"aaren"
the other name redacted from the cannith family record
it's looking more and more like the story of the forged is also a story of cannith family strife and that's not my area of expertise