Revelation

After moving into the small, neglected cottage, Elric found that the level of development was perhaps even lower than he had previously thought. Supported by neither cobbled stone nor even properly cut wood, the house was held together by the sheer stubbornness of hardened clay and plaited straw.

It certainly didn't seem habitable during particularly harsh or cold weather, but Elric supposed that was why the hut was abandoned in the first place. For now, though, it was well suited for Elric's purposes.

The one benefit, however, was the isolated location of the house, being closer to the eastern woodlands than any other building in the village.

Elric's recent experiments had required, after all, required some suitably large targets and a bit of privacy, especially considering the embarrassingly low success rate... of 0%.

"Blast it all! Another dud."

After waiting another awkward couple minutes with his body prone behind his crudely built dirt barricade, Elric stood up from his position to observe his latest piece of garbage he called Model III.

By all accounts, Elric was not an incompetent alchemist. His former work had a success rate of over 80%, a significant lead over the average success rate of 50% for alchemical explosives. Mana-infused explosives were always a tricky sort of weapon to create and even trickier to handle.

Hence, Elric found it especially concerning that he had produced eight, no, nine consecutive failures in the span of three days of constant crafting and testing.

"It's the ignition system again... what good is an explosive if I can't damn well safely detonate it!"

Alchemic grenades weren't exactly hard to craft. All they required were a ceramic or metal outer casing, an explosive charge, and an ignition system.

The crudely refined copper was an inferior material, but it was the most readily available material that Elric could find in the small village. Elric had bought it from the miners themselves. Although he could not help but feel a bit undeserving of it, Thane had forced a sum of money to Elric, quoting his help in the bandit attack.

The ingredients for an alchemic explosive charge, too, were not hard to find. Although black powder was always a decent substitute, it was the additional properties of alchemic solutions, such as incendiary adhesion or poisonous fusion, that made such grenades incredibly lethal and, well, alchemical.

All alchemists had different recipes for their persona explosive serums, but Elric's favorite mixture was that of sulfur, bone powder, and flour. Combined with drop of his blood and a tiny infusion of mana, it was a highly reliable and easily craftable solution. The addition of blood and mana was vital to the activation of any alchemic explosive but ultimately did limit the production of alchemic grenades to anywhere from eight to twelve a day for the average alchemist.

Elric had not yet tested the full extent of his new mana reserves, but he could instinctively feel that he could perform far more mana infusions than he could in his past life.

In the end, the issue was with the internal clock of the ignition system, or, rather, the lack of one.

Despite his best efforts describing gear systems to the local smithy, there was simply no way to produce the intricate cogs and chains that were integral to the actual detonation of a grenade.

If Elric could just get his hands on a proper mage, he wouldn't have any trouble at all... but, clearly, there wasn't a single magic-user in the village. He actually found that fact quite odd, though.

Although properly educated and skilled mages were rare, the Empire often reported that approximately one out of every hundred individuals had the potential to become a mage. Sorcerers were far rarer, with reports of one out of every ten mages.

Still, in a village of nearly three hundred, there should have been at least one man or woman with the mana reserves to manipulate, what the Imperial mages often called, the Nature of Order.

In any case, Elric had resorted to using a slow-burning wick for ignition, a far cry away from the ideal chain and clock mechanism. The wick proved hopelessly unreliable.

In his first few grenades, Model I, he called them, the wick simply wouldn't stay lit after being thrown and smothered in the forest grass. Model II experiments had had the wick soaked in alcohol. There were only two tests of the Model II grenades. The first one stayed lit but didn't ignite the solution properly. The second one detonated prematurely, exploding before it even hit the ground. 

On one hand, Elric was able to confirm the special quality of his grenade, which produced a blindingly bright source of light at the origin of the explosion. Unfortunately, Elric had been looking right in the direction of the grenade.

Elric took a day off after that specific test to be a bit more careful about his experiments, realizing that there were no surgical mages that could save him if he really did blow himself up. Model III was a testing of a wick made of cotton, rather than wood. The wicks would stay lit but, in all four trials, had not properly ignited the explosive solution a single time.

Sighing heavily and at his wits end, Elric gathered today's failed experiments and headed back to his cottage, hoping he could figure something out during his lunch meal.

On his way back to his house, though, he was intercepted by a relatively new... motivational challenge he had discovered in the village.

"Hey, Mr. Wizard! Are you able to do some magic for me now?"

Elric continued to walk, pretending to not hear the twelve-year old child who had been stalking him for the past few days. Elric had first encountered the young Almer during his time in the smithy, Almer being the son of one of the local village smiths.

Elric was on good terms with the smith known simply as John, Almer's father, having received free wares from the man for Elric's apparent saving of his life during the bandit attack. Almer and John looked very much alike, having black hair and similarly rough, roundish facial features. However, Almer had distinctive bright green eyes unlike his father's brown ones, a feature the boy had inherited from his mother.

Unfortunately, Almer's mother had passed during childbirth, a concerningly common occurrence in the village. Elric wondered just how many mothers could have been saved if there had simply been a single surgical mage present. It was a tragic situation.

The boy's lonely upbringing, though, had left him to look for other, unique ways to entertain himself. And, at the moment, the green-eyed child could not get enough of the young wizard's, or, as Chief Thane had been addressing Sir Elric as of late, sorcerer's mysterious nature.

"Come on! How is it that you could do real magic last time? Do you need something for it? Where did you get your wand? Could I get one too?"

The child had additionally questioned Elric about his clothes, his pocket watch, and his apparent strange way of speaking in the past few days. Elric, of course, not wishing for the child to think of him as a crazed man or tired of his incessant questioning, did not tell him the truth of the situation, simply stating that he had come from a land far from this one. So far, though, such vague answers had not deterred the child from making any further inquiries into his origins.

The child was particularly adamant on one subject. Almer wanted to see more magic from the sorcerer, specifically "real magic" as the child would complain whenever Elric tried to show the boy an mana-infused alchemical explosion. He seemed to think of Elric's past life's work as rather... boring.

Nevertheless, it wasn't as if Elric outright hated the child's curiosity. He simply had not been able to replicate the results of that initial show of sorcery from a few days ago.

Elric had tried to replicate his initial act of sorcery before, but, no matter how much mana he poured into the twenty-five centimeter long wand of blackstone and ivory, he could not conjure even a spark. He was still missing something in the theory, something fundamentally important in the act of sorcery. 

In fact, it was this inability to perform sorcery that he had become so invested in trying to craft working alchemic grenades. With neither sorcery nor a firearm, Elric deeply worried that he would effectively useless in the next defense against bandit raids. If he could create some working models of an alchemic grenade, he would at least be able to stall the attacks for some time so that he could fully understood the properties of sorcery.

Of course, he had little success in even that, leaving him feeling quite anxious as of late. His mood had not been helped either by Almer's constant presence.

"Almer... If you could perhaps limit your inquiries and comments to a reasonable level on a daily basis, I would be so very pleased."

"You're talking strange again, Mr. Sorcerer."

Elric simply sighed and continued to walk to his cottage, grasping for a cane that he did not possess. He really did need to have one made soon. It felt wrong to walk without one, especially on the uneven dirt paths of the village.

"Are you annoyed with me again? You know, it's funny how you react. The other adults just whack me across my forehead once they get tired of me. They say I chatter like a chipmunk. I like to watch the smokestacks of the smithy rise up from the village. I wonder if the smoke keeps going up until it hits the stars?"

"Of course it doesn't. The smoke is only visible, in the first place, because the combustion of material leaves tiny bits of substances mixed in with the hot gases that are produced. The heat and lighter nature of the smoke is what then allows it to rise, but that heat eventually dissipates and the bits of substances dispersed. A smithy's visible smoke wouldn't even reach the stratosphere."

Somehow, Elric found himself answering Almer's questions again. But something about his own response irked him, as if he was missing some very important piece of vocabulary.

"What's a stratosphere?"

"It's the second layer of the atmosphere."

"Layers? You sure have a weird view of the word, Mr. Sorcerer. Where'd you learn that?"

Elric had, of course, learned of meteorology in Vi-.

He paused, standing still in the middle of the worn-down dirt path. Almer stopped as well, wondering why the eccentric wizard had stopped so suddenly.

"Mr. Sorcerer?"

Elric had not learned of meteorological processes in Victoria. Nor at any time in his past life.

Elric looked up at the sky and could recognize cirrocumulus clouds from their smaller, rippling appearance. He knew that they were not typically much smaller than altocumulus clouds, but their distance from the surface created the illusion of size. But how did he know?

How did he know what cirrocumulus clouds were? How did he understand energy transfer and atmospheric composition? What was radiation? Convection?

Pressure. Mass. Momentum. Energy. Violence.

"I have found it."

Almer did not respond for a few moments, thinking the man would explain further. He received no such follow-up, however.

"Are you okay, sir? Should I go get the herbalist?"

The sorcerer turned towards the child.

"I have found it Almer! I understand! I have achieved Revelation!"

He began to shake the boy's shoulders back and forth in a frenzy. Almer was now certain. He had finally drove the sorcerer insane.

"What i-is it you u-understand!?"

Elric stopped shaking the boy and looked him dead in the eyes. Almer saw not a mad look, however. But rather one of deep understanding.

"I. I am awake! I am not simply Elric Thorndrake, alchemist and Victorian, grateful yet confused, human yet reborn. Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am! We are! There is no difference between you and I but the perspective sum of our minds. The Shroud of the universe, vast and infinite, has lifted!"

Elric pulled his wand from his overcoat and pointed it towards the sky, eyes full of determination. Almer watched silently.

"I, not the wand, am a conduit of energy, a vessel of knowledge and power! "

The familiar scribblings of mysterious and undecipherable formulae began to writhe around Elric's hand and wrist, wrapping into the point of the wand. Unlike before, however, the script was not in black; rather, a glowing silver began to emanate from the formulae being written.

"Behold, for I am Elric Thorndrake, dead and alive, and I shall subdue reality with my sheer will! Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I AM!"

The blast, although originating from the tip of the wand, could be clearly heard from the bandit camps kilometers away.

In clear weather, Elric had produced a continuous beam of blisteringly hot and violently trembling steam, the thunderous wrath of pressurized gas and water vapor hitting the ceiling of the troposphere and reverberating in sound throughout the valley. Electricity and heat formed along the edges of the beam, creating cracks of vicious thunder. Hurricane-like winds quickly pushed all cloud formations aside, seemingly leaving a hole in the atmosphere.

When the beam of seemingly divine wrath finally concluded, Elric watched closely as the silver formulae faded back into the Shroud. This time, he did not faint.

"I am Elric Thorndrake, former alchemist and Victorian. Now, child of the Peculiar God and sorcerer of these lands. My will shall not be quite so silent in this reality!"

Elric could feel something in the Shroud tug at his shadow, something familiar. A familiar hand from the abyss.

"I shall save You, as You saved me. May the forefathers and false gods look upon me, for I am Revolution. I am Progress. I am the Primal Sorcerer of Steam."