THE RISE OF THE TECHNOMANCER
Volume 1: The Fugitive Heir
Chapter 1: The Workshop Prince
The hum was a living thing. A steady, resonant C-sharp that vibrated in Prince Kaelen's teeth and synced with his heartbeat. Before him, cradled in a nest of copper wiring and etched mana-conducting crystal, the palm-sized reactor glowed with a soft, blue-white light. It was his third iteration this week, each one 0.5% more efficient than the last. Such marginal gains were the bedrock of his art.
Name: Kaelen of House Lionhelm
Age: 20
Class: Tecnomancer
Rank: Expert (7)
Level: 3
Attributes:
· Physique: 42 (Adept) - Forged by hauling metal, surviving minor reactor feedback, and precise manual labor.
· Mind: 67 (Expert) - Capable of holding complex multi-variable schematics in active memory, performing rapid structural calculations.
· Arcane: 58 (Expert) - Not for flashy evocation, but for the delicate, millimeter-precise infusion of mana into inert materials.
He wiped a smear of phosphorescent gel on his leather apron. Around him, the royal workshop was a cathedral of controlled chaos. Sunlight streamed through high, crystalline windows, illuminating drifting motes of dust and metallic shimmer. Shelves bowed under the weight of raw materials: ingots of sky-iron, bundles of wyrm-gut wiring, jars of powdered elemental cores. Workbenches were landscapes of half-born ideas—a mechanical hand articulated with silver tendons, a series of interlocking gears designed to calculate stellar movements, a small, spider-like automaton currently polishing a section of floor with diligent, silent sweeps.
This was his true inheritance. Not the gilded throne in the Sunstone Hall, nor the armies that marched under the Lion banner. His legacy was here, in the logic of a well-made joint, the elegance of a solved equation given physical form.
A distant echo of laughter and music drifted from the palace proper. The Coronation Anniversary. His father, King Borin, would be holding court, accepting tributes. His eldest brother, Corvan, the Crown Prince, would be at his right hand, a pillar of martial strength. His second brother, Elyas, would be charming the foreign emissaries with his silver tongue and knowledge of trade routes. His sister, Lyra… his chest tightened slightly. Lyra would likely be in the royal gardens, trying to explain the principles of floral biomancy to annoyed, but captivated, nobles.
And he, the third son, was here. Where he belonged.
A soft chime emanated from a brass disc on the wall—the communication array. He tapped it, and a familiar, gruff voice filled the air.
"Your Highness. The King requests your presence at the evening banquet." It was Captain Rel of the Royal Guard, his appointed minder and, though Kaelen was loath to admit he needed one, his friend.
"Rel, tell him I'm on the verge of a breakthrough with the harmonic resonator for the eastern valley's irrigation pumps. The drought…"
"Is being handled by the court hydromancers, Prince," Rel's voice was patient, long-suffering. "Your presence is 'requested' with a capital R. Duke Valerius has brought a gift from the northern marches. The King wishes you to see it."
Duke Valerius. The Silver Hawk. His father's oldest friend, the kingdom's foremost general. A man whose laughter was always a beat too loud, whose claps on the shoulder were always a pound too heavy. Kaelen felt an inexplicable chill.
"What manner of gift?"
"Some kind of… animated statue. A marvel, they say. Moves with uncanny grace. The court is abuzz."
An animated statue. Not magic, but mechanics? Interest, against his will, was piqued. Valerius had never shown an interest in artifice before. "Very well. I'll be there for the toast."
He returned to his resonator. The principle was simple: attune a crystal to the specific vibration of flowing water, then use a minor mana pulse to amplify that vibration, breaking up silt and encouraging flow. But the tuning… it was fiendishly delicate. He reached for his infusion stylus, a rod of clear crystal with a silver tip, to make a microscopic adjustment to the core matrix.
The explosion, when it came, was not magic.
It was a sharp, concussive WHUMP that hit the workshop like a physical blow. The windows didn't shatter; they imploded, showering the room with diamond dust. The steady C-sharp of the reactor spiked into a scream before safeties he'd built years ago slammed it into shutdown. The music from the palace was replaced by a chorus of distant, panicked screams, and closer, the unmistakable metallic ring of steel on steel.
Alchemical blast. Military grade.
Kaelen's mind, trained for crisis in the sterile environment of engineering failure, short-circuited. This was not a ruptured mana line. This was an attack. In the heart of the palace.
The double-reinforced oak door of the workshop blew inward, splintering off its hinges. Not from outside, but from a force within the room—Captain Rel, hurled backwards like a ragdoll. He crashed into a rack of glass alembics, which detonated in a cascade of shards and acrid smoke. Rel's breastplate was dented, scorched black. A deep gash wept blood down the side of his face.
"Prince!" he choked, scrambling up, his eyes wide with a fury and fear Kaelen had never seen in the veteran guard. "Betrayal! It's Valerius! The Hawk Guard has turned! They're slaughtering the Lion Guard! The King… the Queen… they're gone! You must flee!"
The words were stones, each one smashing a part of Kaelen's world.
"Gone? What do you mean gone? My father—?"
"Cut down in the Sunstone Hall! The Queen… the nursery…" Rel's voice broke. He surged forward, grabbing Kaelen by the shoulders. The smell of blood and smoke was overwhelming. "Your brothers are dead in the courtyard! I saw Elyas fall! Lyra… we can't reach her chambers. You are the last. They are hunting for you. The Duke claims the throne!"
The numbness of shock was pierced by a white-hot spike of agony. Lyra. His brilliant, kind sister who loved sun-dappled gardens. Gone. The world narrowed to the pain in Rel's eyes, the coppery taste of terror in his own mouth.
Rel shoved a small, heavy leather bag into Kaelen's hands—the Workshop's emergency kit. Rations, gold, basic tools, and the foundational crystals for a portable reactor. "The southeastern servant's passage. Behind the tapestry of the Founding. It leads to the river docks. Go! Now!"
Another explosion, closer this time. The floor shook. Dust rained from the ceiling.
"Come with me," Kaelen begged, his voice a stranger's.
"My duty is to buy you time." Rel drew his sword, its edge already notched and bloodied. He offered a grim, final smile. "Create wonders, my Prince. Survive."
He turned and charged back into the hellish corridor, bellowing a challenge that was swallowed by the chaos.
Kaelen stood frozen for a heartbeat, the bag heavy in his hand. The spider automaton, oblivious, continued to polish a spot on the floor now covered in glass and blood. The sight broke his paralysis.
He moved. He snatched his infusion stylus, a few pre-charged mana batteries, and the small, dormant spider-bot from the bench. He didn't look back at the workshop, his sanctuary, his world. He plunged into the smoke-filled corridor.
The palace was a tapestry of horror. The elegant tapestries were ablaze. Statues of his ancestors lay shattered. Bodies in the blue and gold of the Lion Guard were strewn like discarded toys, intermingled with fewer in the silver and grey of the Hawks. The air thrummed with hostile magic and the screams of the dying.
He kept to the shadows, his soft-soled workshop boots silent on the marble. He passed the entrance to the Sunstone Hall. The great doors were blasted open. Inside, through the haze, he could see the silhouette of the Lion Throne. And a figure standing before it, holding something that caught the firelight—the Crown of Aethelgard.
Duke Valerius. His father's friend. His own godfather.
The Duke's voice, magically amplified, boomed through the palace, dripping with false grief and triumphant authority. "...a tragic day! The mad prince, Kaelen, in his unnatural experiments, has unleashed chaos! He has murdered his family and brought doom upon us! But fear not! House Valerius will restore order! The Hawk will protect the flock!"
The lie was so vast, so audacious, it stole the breath from Kaelen's lungs. He was the patsy. The unnatural tinkerer, the convenient monster.
Rage, cold and sharp, cut through the grief and terror. It was a new feeling, one that had no place in a workshop. He clutched the infusion stylus like a dagger.
A squad of Hawk Guards rounded the corner, their silver armor spattered red. Their leader spotted him. "There! The third son! Take him alive! The Duke wants him alive!"
Kaelen didn't think. He acted. He pointed the stylus not at them, but at a grand chandelier above them, a masterpiece of crystal and wrought iron. He didn't try a complex infusion. He simply unleashed a raw, jagged burst of mana into its structural flaw point, a weakness he'd idly calculated one bored afternoon.
The mana hit the flaw. The harmonic resonance shattered. With a shriek of tearing metal, the chandelier plummeted, crushing two guards and showering the rest with shrapnel. In the confusion, Kaelen turned and ran, the image of Valerius holding the crown burning into his mind, a brand of hatred beside the fresh wounds of his loss.
He found the tapestry—a scene of the first King taming a great river. He ripped it aside, found the nearly invisible seam in the wall, and pressed the hidden mechanism. The door swung open into musty darkness. He threw one last look at the burning, bleeding heart of his home.
Then Prince Kaelen of House Lionhelm, last of his line, fled into the dark. The Tecnomancer's first great creation would not be an irrigation pump or a light-giving lamp.
It would be his vengeance.
Chapter 2: A Decade in Shadows
The salt-stink of the Marhaven docks was a far cry from the ozone and rosewater scent of the royal palace. Here, the air was a thick broth of fish, tar, seaweed, and the sweat of a thousand laborers. Kael, as he was known now, breathed it in like a tonic. It was the smell of anonymity.
Ten years.
His workshop, "Kael's Fixings," was a cramped, cluttered hole-in-the-wall wedged between a chandler and a cooper in the warehouse district. Light filtered through a single grimy window, illuminating motes of sawdust and metallic dust dancing in the shafts of sun. The hum here was different—the low groan of ship timbers, the cry of gulls, the distant shouts of stevedores. There was no crystalline C-sharp. His reactor, if he could even call the sad little thing in the corner that, puttered along at a sub-audible drone, powering only his essential tools.
He was bent over a fisherman's winch, its gears clogged with years of salt corrosion. His hands, still calloused but now also marked by burns and old scars from unfamiliar metals, worked with methodical patience. A drop of acidic solvent here, a precise scrape with a finely honed pick there, a gentle infusion of preservation mana into the cleaned gear teeth. It was mundane, repetitive, soothing.
Tecnomancer: Expert (Rank 7, Level 5).
The status was a tombstone. For a decade, it had barely budged. The explosive growth of his youth, fueled by royal resources and boundless curiosity, had stalled. The Tecnomancer class was a ravenous beast. To advance, it demanded concurrent growth in all three pillars: Physique to withstand greater energies and forge denser materials, Mind to design and hold more complex systems, and Arcane to provide the precise, powerful fuel for it all. Hiding, surviving, mending nets and clocks, provided none of that pressure. Only stagnation.
His inventions reflected this stasis. On a shelf sat his proudest public creations: the Ever-Sharp Ploughshare (a simple kinetic-redistribution matrix etched into the metal), the Glimmer-Lamp (a light-absorbing crystal paired with a low-output glow-rune), and the Whisper-Kettle (a basic voice-activated thermal rune). They were clever, useful, and most importantly, harmless. They raised no eyebrows, invited no questions beyond appreciative nods from farmers and housewives. They were the opposite of what had been blamed on him.
The nightmares were his constant companions. Not of the blood and fire, though those came too. The worst one was the silence of his workshop after Rel left. The dying hum of the reactor. The spider-bot, polishing endlessly. The feeling of a world collapsing inwards while he stood, powerless, holding a tool meant for creation.
He was pulling the reassembled winch handle, testing its smooth rotation, when the shop bell jangled. Not its usual cheerful tinkle, but a frantic, repeated crash. He looked up, his customer-service smile dying on his lips.
A man stumbled in, collapsing against the counter. He was dressed in the rough wool of a middling merchant, but his boots were of too-fine make, and his bearing, even in collapse, was too straight. A long, ugly gash marred his temple, and a crossbow bolt was buried deep in his side, the fletching black and brutal. His breath came in wet, ragged gasps.
"Closed for a repair," Kael said automatically, his voice flat, his body tensing. Trouble had found him.
The man's eyes, glassy with pain, locked onto his. They held a desperate, searching intensity. "L-lion's… mane," the man rasped, the words a barely audible code. A code from a dead world.
Every muscle in Kael's body went rigid. It was the recognition phrase for his father's most secret network, the "Mane," intelligence agents woven into the fabric of the kingdom. He hadn't heard it in ten years. He said nothing, his face a careful mask of confused concern.
The man's hand, trembling violently, fumbled inside his blood-soaked tunic. He pulled out a small, hexagonal data-crystal, its surface scratched and dull. He pressed it into Kael's palm, his fingers cold as death. "Prince…" he choked, blood flecking his lips. "Your father's… last act. The Royal Vault… in the Labyrinth of Roots… keyed to the last bloodline… all the kingdom's wealth… not gold… artifacts, cores, knowledge…"
Kael's heart hammered against his ribs. The Royal Vault. A children's story, a legend. It existed?
"Valerius…" the agent gasped, his body shuddering. "Bankrupt. War with the southern clans… failed crops… he emptied the treasury to fund his coup… thought the vault's wealth would transfer to the throne… but the old magic… keyed to Lionhelm blood… not the chair…" A horrific, gurgling laugh escaped him. "He's broke… tearing the land apart… taxes, conscriptions… looking for it… for you… You're not just a loose end, Highness… you're the key to the kingdom's riches…"
The truth detonated in Kael's mind with more force than any alchemical blast. It wasn't just power. It wasn't just eliminating a rival line. Valerius was a king sitting on a hollowed-out shell. The true wealth of Aethelgard had slipped through his fingers, waiting for the last legitimate heir. He was the greatest treasure in the kingdom.
"They're… close…" the agent whispered, his eyes losing focus. "Found me… in Tarnstead… followed…" His head lolled. The life left his eyes, leaving Kael holding a dead man's secret and a blood-slick crystal.
For a moment, Kael just stood there, the weight of the corpse and the crystal dragging him down. Then, survival instinct, honed over a decade of paranoia, kicked in. He had to move. Now.
He dragged the body into his back room, covering it with tarps. His mind raced. He needed to see the crystal's data. He slotted it into a reader of his own design, a discrete slate of dark glass. Glyphs and images flickered to life.
It was all there. Secret ledgers showing the kingdom's debt, orchestrated by Valerius over years. Intercepted messages between the Duke and the mercenary captains of the "Grey Wolves." And finally, a grainy, soundless recording, captured by a scrying orb hidden in a pendant: the Sunstone Hall, moments before the blast. He saw his father laughing, clapping Valerius on the shoulder. He saw Valerius smile, then subtly nod to a figure in the shadows. He saw the first guard draw his blade—not towards an external threat, but towards the King's unprotected back.
Kael's vision swam. The cold rage from a decade ago returned, not as a spike, but as a deep, settling frost, filling his veins. It had a target now. Not a faceless tragedy, but a man. A betrayer. A thief.
He was pulling his emergency pack from its hidey-hole when a new sound cut through the Marhaven din—the clear, piercing call of a royal herald's horn, followed by the steady, ominous beat of a drum. A crowd was gathering in the muddy street outside.
Kael moved to the window, peering through the grime. A herald in the silver-and-grey of House Valerius stood on a crate, unrolling a heavy parchment. The King's Seal, now bearing a hawk's head, glinted in the sun.
"Hear ye! By order of His Majesty, King Valerius the First, Protector of Aethelgard!" the herald boomed. "A bounty is hereby placed on the traitorous serpent, Prince Kaelen Lionhelm, murderer of his kin and blight upon the land!"
The crowd murmured, a mix of fear and morbid excitement.
"For his capture, alive and unharmed, so that he may face the Crown's justice…" the herald paused for effect, "the reward is one hundred thousand gold crowns! A tract of fertile land! And a title of Lordship!"
A collective gasp swept the crowd. It was a fortune beyond dreaming.
The herald held up a poster. The artist had done a capable job. The face was younger, cleaner, but the sharp line of the jaw, the intense grey eyes, the slight, thoughtful frown—it was undeniably him. The words below screamed: TRAITOR. REGICIDE. TECHNOMANCER.
The title was used not as a class, but as a slur, a synonym for "monster."
The herald's final words washed over Kael, now standing frozen in the shadow of his shop. "He is considered armed and exceedingly dangerous, wielding unnatural artifacts. Report any sighting to the local garrison immediately. The Hawk's eyes are everywhere!"
As the herald moved on, the poster was nailed to the cooper's door next to his own shop. Kael saw his own face staring back at him from the street.
The hunt was no longer a quiet, persistent fear. It was public. It was ravenous. And it had a price on his head that would make every greedy soul in the continent his enemy.
He looked around his cramped, cluttered shop. At the harmless ploughshare on the shelf. At the cold corpse on his floor. At the crystal holding the truth.
The decade of shadows was over. The man who fixed winches had to die. The Prince, the heir, the Tecnomancer, had to rise. Not for a throne he never wanted, but for the truth. And for the cold, precise engineering of a reckoning.
He slipped out the back door as the first curious neighbors began to peer at the new poster, his bag of tools and the data-crystal heavy against his side. The harmless inventions were left behind. It was time to build something new. Something fit for a hunt.