Like Clockwork

Ermhan knelt in the sand to collect the last piece of salvageable metal scrap, stowing it in the canvas sack he carried before hefting the lot over his shoulder and starting back the way he’d come. With the sun blazing overhead he’d spent the better part of an hour cleaning up his mistake and his body was starting to feel the exhaustion. His gait took on a strange limp as his aging right leg struggled to keep up with the aluminium and steel that made up his left.

      Ermhan had replaced several of his body parts with mechanical upgrades during his lifetime; mostly out of necessity when he lost something as a result of his work but occasionally out of sheer frustration with how inadequate the body he was born with could be. The leg had been the first thing to go; blown off in his teenage years during his first attempt at making a Class Z explosive. He’d lived as a cripple for years before managing to fix himself. An incident involving a quartz rifle marked the end of his right shoulder. His hands had been done on a whim and in such haste that the contraption designed to slice off his hands and fit the mechanical claws onto his wrists malfunctioned in its second stage, leaving him with nothing but cauterized stumps. It was three incredibly frustrating weeks before he was able to talk his apprentice through the numerous and intricate steps required to repair the machine but when at last his claws were attached he felt only elation.

      As Ermhan reached the point where the great desert met the rocky bank he addressed the assembled group of terrified first years who seemed to shrink at his gaze. “Ok Class,” Ermhan scratched his chin with a claw blazing hot from the sun’s rays. “who can tell me what went wrong there?”

•

Erael’s unbuttoned smock billowed out behind her as she dashed through the halls of the western wing like a cloaked hero of the wild age, clutching the satchel hanging from her shoulder tightly to keep the glassware inside from clinking. She was going to be late to class but she didn’t care; something had been stolen from her and nothing else mattered until she had it back. She found the boy she was looking for standing amongst a group of his fellow tinkers at the western entrance, waiting for their instructor to take them out to the desert to practice their loud and filthy arts. If one could even call what they did ‘art’.

      “Harkus.” She hissed at a large, thick young man at the centre of the pack who turned to meet her gaze with an ugly, ive expression.

      “What do you want now?” Harkus’s oafish demeanour had always frustrated Erael. Even when they were nowhere near one another—which was most of the time—she found herself feeling irritated at how thick-headed he could be.

      Her reply came in the form of two large vials drawn from the satchel and held in either hand. A dark purple, sludge-like liquid shifted inside. Erael threw the bottles at Harkus’s feet and the glass shattered around him, leaving a small cut on his right ankle. The dark liquid immediately began to bubble furiously, each burst sending large amounts of purple smoke into the air. In seconds, all five of the tinkers dropped hard to the floor, unconscious.

      Reaching into her satchel once again, Erael withdrew a breather she’d stolen from Harkus himself some years earlier. After strapping it over her mouth and nose she took a test breath and upon seeing the circular filters at her cheeks spinning she stepped quickly forward into the thickening smoke. She knelt down and started patting the various pockets in Harkus’s long maroon coat. Growing more and more frustrated with each empty pocket. Her hand stopped over his heart, tracing the shape of something long and thin that seemed to be stitched into his coat’s inside pocket. It couldn’t be what she was looking for, yet she was intrigued. Without thinking, she reached inside and found the nastiest shock of her life.

      A metal bar, sewn into the fabric around the lip of Harkus’s pocket had wrapped itself tightly around her wrist. She tried to wrench it free but to no avail. Her fingers grazed a small piece of parchment but she had no time to wonder what it was as the contraption around her wrist began to release sparks of lightning that ricocheted back and forth around the inside of his sealed pocket, scorching the flesh of her palm and fingers. Erael screamed and desperately tried again to tear her hand free, matching the yanks of her arms with stomps to Harkus’s chest. As she struggled, she imagined the five unconscious bodies being discovered by other students. They would be eventually, and though they would have no idea who attacked them, the abundant evidence of alchemy would make it the obvious work of a mixer. Guardians would be called and an investigation would be started. She barely even felt the last few bursts of lightning.

      Finally, the metal band slackened and allowed her to remove what remained of her right hand. She still had most of her ring and little finger but her thumb, index and middle finger were gone. There was no skin at all and the fresh air felt like acid on her exposed flesh. The sight filled her with a manic energy and she sped from one ridiculous thought to the next. She could coat her hand in the Smoking Sludge on the floor. That would surely protect it. Could she flay off some of Harkus’s skin and attach it to herself? She may have to chop off her hand and cauterize the stump.

      That last thought slowed her breathing but she couldn’t quite discern why. Then it came to her. That crazy old coot! His name escaped her mind but that couldn’t be less important, it was his hands that mattered to her. She took off down the halls toward the engineering staff quarters, whipping off her smock as she ran and draping it over her arm.

•

Ermhan had been standing in an endless field of tall snow-white grass, searching for doves camouflaged within the long blades when a loud pounding sound roused him. He wiped the saliva from his jaw with the back of his hand and used his sleeve to mop up the wet patch on his desk. He was just about to stand up to open the door when his visitor’s impatience saved him the trouble. The door swung open and a young woman dashed inside, slamming the door behind her. As she turned, the first thing Ermhan saw was a scorched senior’s badge pinned to her undershirt. He blinked as he took in her apparent state of panic. She was leaning against the door, crying and breathing heavily. She didn’t say a word, seemingly expecting him to burst from his chair and rush to her aid. As she slumped to the floor, Ermhan only looked at her with a single raised brow.

      “Puh-“ She gasped with real fear in her eyes. “lease.”

      With an annoyed sigh, but feeling rather curious, Ermhan got up from his desk and moved to examine the wound. Beautiful pink streaks shaped like the branches of a tree, each with hundreds of tiny offshoots spread up the length of her forearm. She whimpered as Ermhan peeled off the coat that had become stuck to her hand, revealing a blackened band around her wrist from which all the streaks extended.

      “Nasty one alright.” Ermhan mused, squinting at her wounds. “Lightning is fun to work with but it must be respec- Ah, suppose there’s nothing that I could say now that this hasn’t already taught you.” He held the raw stump to his nose and sniffed. “Well and truly seared. You won’t bleed out so infection is the greater danger now. Best be off to class now, if anybody sees you here like this you’ll have failed the year already.”

      “Help.” Her unfocused eyes met his for just a moment. “Help me! Please!”

      These desperate pleas were unbecoming of a sixth-year engineer. She knew he was forbidden from helping. Nothing could be accomplished by this other than the guilt that was even now swelling within him. “You will clean up your own messes.”

      With that Ermhan moved to leave her to it when he noticed her left-hand fiddling with her badge. “Don’t you dare.” He said, kneeling down and taking hold of her wrist. “What is wrong with you woman? A single disaster and you’re ready to quit. How did you even get this far with such an attitude?”

      The girl lost consciousness at that moment, her body relaxing and sliding sideways against the wall. Her badge fell from her undershirt and clinked against the floor. Ermhan picked it up and wiped his thumb over it. The paint was gone but where he expected to feel the letter ‘E’ stamped into the metal he instead felt an ‘A’. He reached for her coat and saw now that it was indeed an alchemist’s smock.

——

I wrote this originally as a free writing exercise and later worked it into something that made some sense. I don’t really know where the story is going, what Erael has lost or why she thought Harkus had stolen it beyond a general hatred of and underlying attraction to him. Yeh that’s cliche but shush you!

I think I will continue this story and try to flesh out the world and how these two arts work within it aswell as their effects upon the culture. I’d also like to introduce a kind of secretly-sadistic teacher’s pet character who uses what they learn for awful purposes; though whether they will be an engineer or alchemist I don’t yet know; both have so much potential for wickedness.

Art Credit

Cover           - Chris Rallis

Background - Clockwork Atomics