The first time Rohan walked the wall with him, Jorren handed him a maintenance brush and pointed to a silver lens.
"Clean."
Rohan looked at the lens.
It was angled over the western ash field, mounted in a ring of dark metal that hummed faintly beneath his fingers.
"Is this safe?"
"No."
Rohan waited.
Jorren said nothing else.
"How helpful..."
The Jorren sound.
Rohan cleaned the lens.
He learned that the wall devices were not true weapons in the way he had assumed. They did not create silver light. They caught and focused it when Cael Athis's upper atmosphere fractured the star's radiation through ash-heavy clouds. The locals called those flashes "skyglass pulses." The wall lenses stored some of the charge in storm-silver coils and released it in bursts.
Useful against skarn.
Useless in heavy cloud.
Dangerous if cracked.
"Why does the silver light hurt them?" Rohan asked.
Jorren shrugged.
"Burns the ash they wear."
"They're made of ash?"
