Flames from quartz, words from light," murmured Azra, voltage spark licking across the copper coil before snapping into the rune-etched quartz rod. The rod glowed, faint but distinct. On a matching rod twenty paces away, a twin flare answered. Jakob whooped; even staid Henrik grinned. It wasn't yet speech, merely a yes-no blink—but the principle worked: mana-stoked electricity could carry signals faster than any wheel.
Sharath's mind flew. If on and off formed binary, pulses could encode letters. Connect stations by insulated copper string, boost with mana capacitors—and invent telegraphy centuries ahead of schedule.
First they needed reliable insulation. Riverbend's tanners dissolved boiled larch bark into sticky pitch; Mira smeared it over copper and tested in rain barrel—water beaded. Hendrick's apprentices wound pitch-coated wire around cedar spools.
Poles sprouted along the Birch Hollow relay road, each topped with green-glass insulators charmed against lightning. Workers nicknamed them "tree-antlers." Villagers puzzled but shrugged; they'd seen stranger wonders since the bicycle.
Azra fashioned a key: brass lever closing circuit across rune matrix. At Birch Hollow a clerk tapped **- - - – – – - - - **; five miles east, Wheatfen station blinked in Morse-like answer, though no one yet called it Morse.
The first telegraph word spelled ironically: S P E E D.
Sharath convened the Signal Corps, drawing math-strong apprentices and ex-scribes tired of inky fingers. Training: memorize code chart, practice rhythm on slate drums, learn safety—never touch live line bare-handed. Within a fortnight, messages hopped fifteen miles in under two minutes.
King Aldwin toured Birch Hollow line. When clerk tapped a question—"Your Majesty likes stew?"—and tower replied "Yes, with thyme," the monarch threw back his head, roaring laughter that shook rafters.
"What do you name this invisible courier?" he asked.
Sharath pondered. "'Telltale,' perhaps?" Elina shook her head. "'Wire-whisper.'" Finally the king decided: "Lightning Line."
Scale introduced problems. Copper shortages emerged. Konrad's shipping ledgers showed imported ore prices soaring. Mira suggested aluminum, abundant in river clay but locked in ore. Alchemists claimed extraction impossible. Sharath experimented: mana-field electrolysis jar, graphite rods, salt bath. One night a bead of silver-white metal formed at cathode—the kingdom's first aluminum droplet. Lightweight wire soon replaced costly copper.
Sabotage followed. Duke Aldric's last loyalists attempted to snap line near Moonridge. But rune crystals tripped failsafe; relay boards flashed amber; Red-Caps rushed, apprehending culprits mid-axe swing. The Lightning Line earned reputation for near-mythic awareness. Bandits learned throw a stone, watch it ricochet off invisible ward.
The line fanned to South Quay, then north to Cloud-Fang Mines. Market prices synchronized; winter grain shipments optimized before roads iced. Daily Truth established Wire Desks: reporters tapped queries to remote outposts, received data within the hour—birth of near-real-time journalism.
Yet Sharath envisioned broader: multiple wires braided, multiplexed signals overlapping—conversations rather than single pulses. The hardware existed; the limiting factor was human speed tapping code.
Azra whispered of rune-driven pattern readers that could translate pulses into letters automatically, but the work demanded mathematics deeper than any scribal curriculum.
In the warm hush of Riverbend library, Sharath drafted a new educational syllabus: Signal Mathematics, covering binary, modular arithmetic, simple logic gates. This would seed tomorrow's telegraphic engineers, and—he suspected—the future's computational wizards.