Mazelton pawed through his inventory of unpolished cores for a suitable test piece. He found a decent one, about average for a human (which is to say, small) and put it on a little bit of stone to keep his camp desk from getting burned. He carefully poured heat into it from his core.

This caused him to immediately regret some life choices.

It felt like trying to overfill a bucket by squeezing his kidney juice into them. It felt like, instead of the test core overheating, his core was overheating. He wanted to puke, curl up and pray for death, but he didn’t have the energy any more. On a spiritual level, he no longer deserved that much comfort. Mazelton collapsed.

When he finally pulled enough of himself together to move without wanting to cry, he checked the test core. Neither it nor the stone it was sitting on were even slightly warm. He had missed something.

Sitting very still on his cot, he tried to think it through. Why could he shift heat so easily between the light-battery cores but not from his own core to the unpolished core? It couldn’t be the unpolished bit. He had drawn heat from unpolished cores a few times now. He wouldn’t say it was particularly easy, but it wasn’t all that hard either. Like opening a stubborn jar that fought just long enough to make the Pop! and release deeply satisfying. What was different?

Could it be that he was directly using his core? It seemed unlikely, but… now that he thought about it, he had generally been using his core as a medium or a transmission point. Haul in all the heat around him and feed it into something else. Maybe trying to load heat this way was stressing his heat transmission system in a way he didn’t understand? It seemed pretty likely, he understood very little about all this. When you got right down to it, he was trying to copy what he saw the Stone God doing, through the lens of his family’s legacy.

It just felt so right. Like finding out that you had been missing a hand your whole life, but now suddenly it was there. You didn’t even notice your empty sleeve before, and now you are knocking over your tea cup with a clumsy reach. It occurred to him that, just maybe, there was more to the great Clans than just longevity. After all, while the Ma were mighty, they were just one of the marchers in the Black Parade. Surely there was more to acquiring this power than just… being good at controlling your heat. Otherwise, wouldn’t every old polisher be able to manage it?

Did the Pi have something like this? Or the Xia? The Bo? Well, with the Bo, who could even tell. And while the Pi, Xia, Bo and Ma were currently dominant, the Black Parade had other marchers too. Lineages that had now fallen quiet, but were likely not gone from the world entirely.

Mazelton remembered an old myth of the Bo who managed to rebuild himself from a single droplet of blood, memories included. This was usually met with howls of laughter, as awkward questions like “where did all the mass come from?” and “how did they re-form their memories?” always cropped up. It was clearly bullshit. But maybe it pointed at a truth. He knew the Bo could regrow limbs, some of them. It took a while and a huge amount of food, but they could do it.

What was hiding in their genomes? In the cultural legacies they all carried? Even by the standards of the Pi Clan, there was something very off about Lettie. She played it down, but he had the feeling that she was frighteningly strong in her legacy. The Pi tended towards distractibility because the world demanded their attention again and again, every minute. Lettie tended towards monomania. Like she had trained herself to focus on one thing and exclude the rest of the world. She probably had to, to protect her mind.

Mazelton sighed. Not everyone could be as well balanced as him. Well, the hearts of his enemies weren’t going to roast themselves. Time to get back to work.

Mazelton met the morning with bleary irritation. Work had not gone well. He could move heat between polished cores fairly well, and from unpolished cores to polished cores with some difficulty, and from polished cores to unpolished cores with a huge amount of difficulty and immense energy losses, but trying to go from his highly polished and very active core to an unpolished core was always a recipe for incredible pain.

The obvious answer- “Don’t do that, then.” was unsatisfying. There should be a why behind the what, and the Ma in him resented relying on a tool to do something he should be capable of doing unaided. Tools broke, after all.

And it was raining. A steady thrum of rain falling on the tents. The streams were full and lively, the land lush and rich. Mostly small pines and firs, of course, but here and there you saw shocking little sprays of purple and lavender from flowering trees. He was grudgingly prepared to admit that it was pretty.

“This will be great farmland, if they clear it out.” One of the teamsters said admiringly. He was probably right. It was a wide, flat valley, twenty miles or more across. Plenty of room for farms. Bleeding cold and snowy in the winter, but… it really would be good farm country. Woo. He had hearts to roast, damnit.

Mazelton looked around hopefully. This was usually the moment where some seemingly unrelated thing provided the key inspiration for a huge leap in understanding. The farming enthusiast ripped a monumental fart, one of such noise and ferocity that it startled the nearby aurochs.

Probably not that. Please, please, not that.

Mazelton got his head down and collected his somewhat soggier than usual porridge. He added some salt and the tiniest pinch of sugar. It helped a lot.

Polyclitus got the wagons moving south west. It was damp, squelchy going. Mazelton got to travel in style, sitting on the box of his well sprung wagon under the little awning he had made for Duane. Many wagons didn’t even have a box. The driver walked along next to their aurochs, and everyone else walked with them. The wagons mostly didn’t have suspension, or it was of a very poor sort. You would have to be two thirds dead to want to try riding in that kind of wagon.

So they trudged through the mud and animal dung, soaked and chilled from the rain, and soon, chafing, as the wet cloth clung and rubbed. And rubbed. And rubbed them more, until they were seeping blood and plasma, unable to tell blood from water as their coarse clothes stuck to skin.

Nobody complained. At this point, they were all used to it. Didn’t like it, but… nobody and nothing gave a damn about what you liked. Just… try not to get an infection and die. And if you died, try to die somewhere where you wouldn’t inconvenience the rest of the caravan. It was depressing, stepping over corpses that had been crushed by wagons and aurochs. Even now, it was really gross. But sad? It was hard for them to still feel that kind of sadness for a stranger. The rolling wagon wheels had steadily ground it out of them.

Soon home, soon home. Mazelton muttered to himself. The blank looks in the eyes of the other settlers scared him. They weren’t dead, but not altogether alive either. They had been reduced to machines for walking. Unless something happened to shake them out of their torpor, they would walk without thought until lunchtime. This too was a form of protecting the mind.

Soon home. Perhaps they thought that too. Soon home. You can rest when you get home. More work to do, always more work to do. But for a blessed little while, you could rest.

Why was it such a stone bitch to move heat from a polished core to an unpolished core, but not the other way around? He really didn’t know. Mazelton’s current best theory was that a polished core had all the nasty irregular edges smoothed away. It was sending out nice clean waves of energy. Clean in the sense of tidy, orderly. The unpolished cores were anything but. They were lumpy, misshapen things. Any heat coming off them was chaotic, and frequently interfered with itself. All those unplanned geometries give rise to impure noise. The black sun could absorb the chaotic noise well enough, and smooth it out into useful energy. But trying to push through all the noise? Push into those irrational geometries? That was hard.

It explained the loss of heat. So much got wasted pushing through the static and into the bizarre, irregular shapes. This is why there were polishers. To turn irregular waste into smooth, productive utility.

Despite the filthy conditions, they made decent time. The road was well used, quite clear and even. The land was fairly flat too, though the horizons were walled with mountains. Tromp tromp tromp.

Thinking it through, if a skilled polisher could just haul on a stack of unpolished cores and cause their enemies to keel over dead, they would absolutely do that. Who would bother carving complicated heat weapons? But people did make weapons. Some of the elders loved to show off particularly beautiful or deadly heat weapons, and those old wretches commanded heat like they commanded their servants-entirely too comfortably.

So it must not be economical and impractical to an unreasonable degree to funnel heat into a core as a killing move. It was an unsatisfying answer. Very unsatisfying. Why have an almighty black sun core if you cannot roast your enemies hearts within their chests as they look on, horrified, not understanding why or how they died? No damn point at all!

Although…. While you can’t roast the hearts directly, the black sun was very good at detecting heat. Could something be done with that? Maybe… ooh! Some kind of assisted targeting? That could be very fun.

Mazelton closed his eyes and visualized, happily passing a rainy day on the trail. They stopped for dinner by a wide, though not terribly tall, mountain. Polyclitus’ map said one hundred and two miles to home. By the time he got to bed, Mazelton could reliably tell the difference between a human core and an auroch core. Oh this was getting good.