The forging god's alchemy

Welcome to Divine Tyranny! In a world where all-powerful gods live among mortals and play with their life for their own entertainment, Archivist Cécile is doing her best to go unnoticed. Unfortunately, the warring water and forging gods are now interested in the archives... Come read about Cécile and the world in which she lives!
Introduction to the story | Cécile | The Archivists | Novel upcoming

The industrial revolution started 300 years ago. In essence, it is a competition between gods to see who can train their followers the best so that they are able to reproduce high levels of magic and boost the economy of their respective countries. The forging god is one of the founder of our capital and still one of our major patron gods. He is also one of the main initiators of the industrial revolution.   Since he started his patronage of our people, he has taught us how to forge many objects, particularly farming tools and weapons. It took times for him and us to learn how to invent the best technique so that mere mortals would be able to reproduce the wonderful artefact he can easily create with his magic. Our progress was slow until the forging god understood how best to transform the matter itself with which we were working.   Thanks to his forays into alchemy and his sharing with us of his discovery, we are now able to create a whole range of metal alloys that are unknown to the rest of the world. Each of those alloys has unique properties on their own, and the magic of alchemy can further bend those properties to accommodate us. All of this has allowed us to develop amazingly small and delicate instruments able to work with a precision completely unequalled by anything else.   We are no world renown for many of those, such as our stopwatches, telescopes, microscopes, magical lenses, weights, and all the gears and other parts that go into the making of the many machines at the heart of the industrial revolution. Of course, this has led to an extraordinary high number of attempts of stealing those secrets from us so as to deprive us of these advantages. However, the forging god is keeping his secrets very close, and even his mortal followers are extremely tight-lipped, no matter how much or how little they know of what they are doing. Because of this, even us, archivists at the royal archives, have no access to this information! A true scandal!
     
Related articles


Cover image: Instrument created thanks to the forging god's guidance by serikbaib on DepositPhotos

Comments

Please Login in order to comment!
Aug 20, 2022 10:27

I like the concept of patron gods taking such an involved role in their society's success. I guess given the setting name (and the secrecy), it's mostly about the god's ego. :P

Aug 21, 2022 11:57 by Amélie I. S. Debruyne

The gods are so implicated mostly because they are very bored XD And yes, once they start setting up a country or organisation and nurture it for several centuries, they become very emotionally attached to it and want to control every aspect of it, whether directly or indirectly. They justify it by thinking that they obviously have the most wisdom and knowledge to make the best decision, but that is rather doubtful XD

To see what I am up to: my Summer Camp 2024.
Aug 27, 2022 13:22 by Peter

As it just me, or is the archivist writing this, not very respectable to the Forging God. Clearly they should use capital letters (also for the pronouns). Then again, the Forging God should know the difference between "magic of alchemy" and "chemistry, right? Outrageous! Scandalous indeed.   If it's a competition started by the Gods, is stealing each others secrets part of the game or are there rules against it?

Aug 31, 2022 09:32 by Amélie I. S. Debruyne

Thanks for your comment :D   Cécile, the narrator of these articles, doesn't respect the gods a lot indeed. Her family main patron god is the water god, who is the rival of the forging god, so she is naturally on the opposite side.   I'm using the term alchemy to imply that it's not just plain chemistry but that there is also magic involved in the process of creation of those alloys and in the properties they have in the end.   Stealing each other's secret is definitely part of the competition, although, here, the gods interesting in stealing those secrets would mostly be rival forging gods from other countries.

To see what I am up to: my Summer Camp 2024.
Powered by World Anvil