Primer on The Mortal Engine System

Standard Edition for the Abyssal Academy of Engineering , 4th Cycle

Soulforge Technology

Other Names: Soul Engineering, Demon’s Forge, Mortal Engine System

"When mortal flame burns out, its ember remains. We only learned to make the ember useful."

— Arch-Engineer Valzithrax, Keeper of the Third Forge

The Mortal Engine System represents the pinnacle of demonic innovation: our long-awaited victory over the instability of leyline sorcery. Whereas leylines resist corruption, souls submit. Through disciplined application of Soul Resonance theory, a captured mortal essence can be extracted, refined, and converted into a usable power source capable of sustaining engines, wards, and even entire cities.

At the system’s heart lies the Soulforge: a complex matrix of obsidian conduits and arcanite crystals, calibrated to resonate with the moment of death. This allows engineers to capture and distill soul energy into stable crystalline form. The harvested essence is stored within arcanite soul gems, which may be networked together to form energy grids or embedded directly into constructs.

When channeled through containment runes, these stored souls animate Soul Puppets, autonomous servitors retaining echoes of their mortal skill. Properly handled, such workers can labor indefinitely without rest or revolt. Improperly handled, they produce bleed events: hauntings, phantom manifestations, and localized reality distortions. Such incidents are now rare thanks to the improved containment geometry pioneered by Bellum Co.

Development and Historical Context

Soulforges first emerged in the deep Abyss, where pure leyline magic refused to yield to demonic shaping. Early prototypes were unstable, consuming their soul-fuel in days. Refinements came over centuries of experimentation, and by the Wars of Sundering, the technology had become essential to abyssal conquest. When leyline access was cut off, Soulforges kept the armies moving and the siege engines alight.

Today, though technically proscribed by interplanar accords, Soulforge facilities operate openly within the Graz’zian Empire. The largest, Bellum Co., is a state-chartered conglomerate responsible for the manufacture of artificial arcanite, the design of mass-scale soul-reactors, and the management of the Empire’s extensive mortal labor force.

Their motto, “Obedience Refined,” has become a guiding principle of demonic industry.

The Great Forge of Bellum Co. and the Martyr’s Pit

The beating heart of Soulforge industry lies within the sprawling industrial complex of Bellum Co., the Empire’s crown jewel and the largest functioning Soulforge in existence. The facility itself is less a foundry and more a city devoted to extraction, its furnaces and laboratories stretching for miles across the volcanic plain. Every tower hums with the captured resonance of a million bound souls; their energy funneled through arcanite conduits into the Empire’s war engines and citadel grids.

The Forge is sustained by an inexhaustible power source: the Martyr’s Pit, a chasm of molten stone and swirling flame situated north of the Catenna Plains. The Pit’s depths seethe with the spectral remnants of those sacrificed to feed it, most notably during the event mortals call The Day of Black Ashes (6687), when thousands of captured clerics were cast into its fire. Their sanctified souls, once devoted to divine service, now form a ceaseless current of purified agony that Bellum Co. engineers have learned to harness with remarkable efficiency.

Even now, the air above the Pit stinks of brimstone and despair, heavy with the metallic tang of burned faith. Its glow can be seen for leagues, a permanent twilight on the horizon. The Empire regards it as both memorial and miracle: a wound that never closes, and therefore never ceases to bleed power.

The Grand Soulforge of Bellum Co. draws upon the Pit’s spectral heat through a network of arcanite siphons sunk deep into the crust. Each pulse of the Martyr’s chorus resonates through the Forge’s obsidian arteries, recharging its reactors and keeping the city-forge alive. It is said that when the wind is right, the cries of the sacrificed can still be heard echoing through the vent chimneys, a reminder that all power, properly refined, is paid for in devotion.

“We do not burn the righteous in vain; we simply ensure their faith remains productive.”

— Chief Engineer A’khir the Red, Bellum Co. Operations Division

Arcanite — “Blood Gems”

Description

Arcanite is a crystalline medium capable of storing and programming magical energy. When uncharged, it appears as clear quartz veined with crimson threads; when filled, it glows from within, the hue reflecting the type of energy it holds. Its dual nature, as both battery and processor, allows engineers to imprint complex magical routines directly into the lattice. A single shard can operate as both power cell and computational mind.

Natural vs. Artificial Sources

True arcanite occurs only in the Iron Peaks, mined primarily from the dwarven hold of Kir Darul, now the last surviving bastion of its kind. Though the dwarves still refine the mineral, innovation has slowed since the end of the Hundred-Year War. The Western nations, long cut off from steady supply, treat arcanite as myth or relic.

In the East, demonic artificers overcame this limitation by developing synthetic arcanite, nearly indistinguishable from the natural form. This artificial variant, produced exclusively by Bellum Co., is less pure but far more plentiful, and its properties can be fine-tuned for specific energy frequencies (necrotic, infernal, or elemental). The result has been a revolution in demonic infrastructure: soul-powered cities, self-repairing fortresses, and weapons capable of rewriting matter itself.

Applications

• Power Regulation: Artificial arcanite provides the most stable conduit for channeling soul energy, minimizing the volatile feedback once common in early forges.
• Containment: Its crystalline structure prevents spiritual leakage, making it ideal for long-term storage of ensouled energy.
• Programming: Runes etched into arcanite behave as permanent logic circuits, allowing self-correcting enchantments and automated war-machines.
• Integration: When combined with Soulforge matrices, arcanite enables continuous soul siphoning and remote recharging of constructs and engines.

Warnings for Apprentice Engineers

1. Never expose a charged crystal to direct moonlight, it may remember what it once worshiped.
2. Always use triple containment runes; two is invitation, three is command.
3. If the gem hums in a language you understand, evacuate the facility.

Economic and Political Implications

Arcanite’s scarcity has split Elantra into two technological worlds.

• In the West, its existence is whispered of in academies and heretical circles; rumors of “crystals that think” and “machines that dream.”
• In the East, it is industry itself: every demonic citadel, every siege construct, every Soulforge reactor depends on it.

This disparity ensures that the Graz’zian Empire maintains absolute dominance in magical warfare and infrastructure. The Empire’s mastery of artificial arcanite has rendered leyline sorcery obsolete; where once power had to be drawn, now it can be manufactured.

The Soulforge of 666 Flags

Where Bellum Co. represents order through industry, 666 Flags represents chaos refined into precision; a carnival built upon the bones of genius and ruin. The park stands where the gnomish city of Freefort once rose, a marvel of invention and civic brilliance now erased beneath gilded tents and laughter. When the Graz’zian Empire conquered the region, its engineers found the ruins ripe for repurposing, and its surviving gnomes, equally so.

Under the rule of Ravian Cirrus, the self-proclaimed Smiling King, 666 Flags was transformed into a permanent demonstration of demonic engineering, a fusion of spectacle and subjugation. The gnomish artificers, renowned across Elantra for their mastery of mechanism and efficiency, were forced into service to improve the Soulforge System. Their innovations; micro-arcanite capacitors, recursive containment runes, and fluidic resonance relays, revolutionized soul energy transmission across the entire Graz’zian Empire. Many of the Empire’s current-generation reactors trace their lineage to what was first achieved in the carnival’s depths.

The heart of this operation lies beneath the Tower of Ten Thousand Smiles, where the true Soulforge of 666 Flags beats like a mechanical heart. Known among engineers as the Laughline Reactor, it powers the entire park through an intricate lattice of siphoning conduits that thread beneath every ride, hall, and midway. The system harvests the emotional resonance of guests (joy, terror, awe, despair) converting these ephemeral states into measurable energy. Each laugh, scream, and gasp becomes a spark in the endless circuitry of the carnival.

Deep below, the Forge itself is described by witnesses (few of whom remain) as a cathedral of brass cages, each suspended in humming symmetry around a central piston. Within each cage floats a glowing orb of spinning light, the captured essence of a gnome, once an engineer, now a component. The piston drives in rhythmic synchrony with the carnival above, pulsing with every cheer and shudder from the midway. The gnomish souls are said to power the Laughline System, a network so efficient it requires no leyline tether, feeding endlessly upon emotion and memory alike.

The Laughline’s stability is anchored by a singular relic at its core, the Laughing Glass, an artifact of unknown origin said to resonate with every sound of mirth within the park. Without it, the entire network would collapse in on itself, devouring the very joy it was built to consume.

Today, 666 Flags remains a masterpiece of abyssal artifice, a theme park, a prison, and a power plant bound together by laughter that never truly ends. To mortals, it is a place of wonder. To demons, it is proof that even happiness can be engineered.

“The gnomes gave us machinery that could think, dream, and laugh. We gave it something to laugh about.”

— Ravian Cirrus, the Smiling King

On Biological Soulforges (Addendum: Restricted Study — Category 7)

Among certain traditionalist sects of demonic engineers, there persists a preference for Biological Soulforges; living or semi-living vessels designed to extract and channel soul energy without reliance on arcanite substrates. Though markedly less efficient and far more temperamental than their crystalline counterparts, these systems are valued for their “organic resonance” and the aesthetic purity of their operation.

Unlike standard forges, which filter essence through inscribed arcanite or synthetic conduits, Biological Soulforges employ living tissues, nerve webs, and sympathetic organs to process and redirect energy. Their yield is irregular, their lifespan short, and their temperament notoriously unstable; yet many elder engineers insist that “living matter remembers the shape of pain,” and thus conducts certain frequencies of soul energy with unmatched fidelity.

The best-known (and least understood) example of this technology is the siphoning array located in Nowhere, a region where standard instruments fail and even arcanite loses coherence. Reports describe a lattice of flesh-vaulted corridors that pulse in rhythm with unseen machinery, and pools of viscous ichor that glow faintly when souls are drawn across the veil. Whether the system is demonic, mortal, or something older remains under debate.

The official position of the Graz’zian Engineering Corps is that Biological Soulforges are “inefficient, unstable, and unsuitable for sanctioned application.”
Unofficially, several prototypes remain active, their caretakers sworn to silence and their names erased from every ledger.

Closing Observation

“Energy cannot die. It can only obey.”

— Motto of the Third Forge

Through arcanite and soul alike, the Empire ensures that even death serves purpose. What mortals call atrocity, we call efficiency. Every scream, every prayer, every last breath—they are all, in the end, renewable resources.