Don't bother with a trebuchet at Castle Dantwater, you'll have to scale that wall. The Steelsong made it for Lord Dantwater out of Obsidian Brick. It's ten feet thick seamless stone, you'll never break through it. — MasterBuilder Renyoung to SiegeMaster Fontarger
What to do with all the Lava?
When the
Steelsong arrived at the
The Spiral Mountain Range the land was particularly inhospitable given the geothermally and arcanely active shear fault in the mountains. The Steelsong dwarves though were up for the challenge. They put their best engineers and magicians on the task to make the land habitable, and the first step in that process was to cool down the continental crust that frequently spit out lava.
It was immediately apparent that the first order of business was to devise a method to pull energy out of the blistering hot melted stone. To do this, the Steelsong wizards and sorcerers invented the Sorcerous Engine that converted heat into arcane power. The conversion rate between these two powers is quite small, requiring large amounts of heat to produce small amounts of arcane power, but that process works in the favor of the Steelsong who were looking to get rid of the heat that liquidified the stone. The production of arcane power was another huge bonus, giving the dwarves a source of arance power in the form of earth magic to fuel the wizardry that they learned from the humans. In all, the sorcerous engine was a fabulous device with nothing but upsides.
But the gifts of the Sorcerous Engine did not stop there. Orininally a simple by-product of the heat to earth magic production process, the sorcerous engine created obsidian out of the lava flows that it was used to cool. Lava flows cooled quickly, and obsidian formed around the edges of lava flows that were being treated. The faster the process worked, the more obsidian was created, and given the strength, beauty, and utility of this razor sharp stone, the obsidian by-product became as important as the generation of earth magic.
Soon the engineers and wizards and sorcerers began to look for techniques to cool the lava quickly and evenly through magical means, which they found. It was dangerous work and required hanging an apprentice over a pool of bubbling hot lava to get the even cooling needed. On top of this, some bright young engineer suggested that if the Steelsong dug channels for the lava to fill prior to being cooled by the sorcerous engine, the obsidian could be formed into an almost endless variety of black stone glass shapes.
Spurred by this discovery, architects and builders alike were inspired to attempt to cast large structures with the new material which presented the opportunity to create buildings of fantastical shapes in virtually any size, limited only by the ability of the dwarves to move them after they had been cast.
The obsidian manufactured this way is called obsidian brick, and the largest foundary of this substance is located at
Obsidian Mountain where constant basalt lava flows from several benign volcanos meet.
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