Steel had a soul of cold tension, but wood was alive.
Master Caleb Thorne-Wood stood at his heavy carpenter’s workbench on the Mile Twenty staging deck. His broad thumbs tested the razor edge of his cast-steel wood slot adze.
Around him on the steel grating lay twenty-four massive billets of mountain iron-heartwood.
The timber was a deep, rich chocolate brown, cut from ancient mountain trees that grew in the high stone ridges of the western frontier.
For fifteen years, Caleb had seasoned these timbers in giant vats of cold-pressed walnut oil and raw beeswax. It allowed the dense natural resins to fully displace every molecule of moisture within the wood’s blood-vessel tiny blood vessels.
The cellular structure of mountain iron-heartwood was one of the natural wonders of the northern ranges.
Growing on near-upright granite cliffs where the wind blew unceasingly at sixty miles an hour, the trees developed a blood-vessel system comprised almost entirely of thick-walled tracheid fibers, tightly packed like bundles of steel wire.
Over hundreds of years of growth, the heartwood piled up heavy stone deposits—iron quartz dust, white lime-chalk, and natural phenolic resins—making the timber so dense that a seasoned log would sink in freshwater like a pig of solid lead.
