《The Tower of Stone and Sky》


 Prelude: Five Heroes Stand Before a King...?

    Listen, I''m not proud of how this all started. Some would argue that I dug my own grave with the bullshit grandstanding, but in my defense, having a cranky, misanthropic, entitled old wizard in my face was pretty unpleasant. I was standing there, along with Steve, Jess, Alice, and John, and we were all in front of a whole lot of spectators, one of them a freaking king... though only a couple of them really mattered to the plot. And by plot... I don''t think I mean what you think I mean.

    Said cranky wizard was exactly the sort of goateed grand vizier type that Disney among others had done an excellent job of convincing me through my childhood was secretly attempting a coup while also hiding a puppy-kicking habit and lusting after "the princess", though I hadn''t yet seen a princess. As it turns out, she was on a high balcony overlooking things from behind a curtain, but I wouldn''t know that she even existed for many years, and that''s all you really need to know about how relevant she was to me. The vizier, though, was trying to convince all of us that he was the font of wisdom for the half-desert kingdom we now found ourselves in, and people would either drink from said font of wisdom or die of thirst.

    He was making that point most directly at me, though that was because it was the hardest to sell it to me. Because while Alice--like me--was gifted immunity to manipulation, she was also the sort to go along with everyone else''s decision, where I definitely wasn''t.

    The five of us were lined up a row, me with my jade bracers, Steve with his golden broadsword, Jess with her diamond-topped staff, Alice with her brilliantly shining crystal orb, and John with his bow made from pure darkness. So far, everyone else had more or less agreed with everything that had been presented to them, because the deal was, largely, pretty good. We would get training and support, and they would get... well, us, essentially. Our services in whatever task they set us, as long as it aligned with our... blessings.

    I could read the writing on the wall in terms of what I''d be doing, though, and I wanted no part of that.

    "Do not think for a minutes," the vizier sneered at me, "that you can do this without me. You have no idea what you are capable of."

    I studied him, my mind whirling. "I think it''s you," I answered him, "that doesn''t know what I''m capable of." A self-absorbed bluff, maybe, but the artifact had already cleared my head quite a bit, letting me know exactly what my powers were--no, what its powers were. I was only wielding it; I can be honest about that. If the blessing was removed from me, I''d be worthless, or nearly worthless. Certainly, I could be no Hero.

    "Please," he returned with disdain, the single word sounding like he meant it to end the conversation. "If you''re so grand, by all means, impress me. Surprise me. Show me anything that you can do that I haven''t already thought up."

    I could clearly sense the others in line exchanging looks. They hadn''t wanted to be confrontational; and if this guy hadn''t been a jackass, getting up in my face, I wouldn''t have, either. But I drew on the power of the bracers, their fields instantly searching the surroundings for material as I considered exactly what I could show this stupid nitwit that would impress him. Gunpowder? If he was a wizard, that would only seem like a trick. Electricity, somehow? Light? Magnetism? All things that would most likely have easy magical alternatives.

    A terrible idea came to me, and I acted on instinct, drawing heavy metals from the earth far below us and using my power to Fabricate a small, dense little ball wrapped in lead. Just the mere presence of the stuff in the room irritated and frightened me, and on instinct, I redid the Fabrication, diffusing it temporarily, so it would not immediately go off, and doubling the lead shielding.

    That heavy little ball that appeared in his hand was excessively unimpressive to look at, and I started to realize just how dumb the thought I was having was. In the end, the only reason I went through with it was that he didn''t even want an answer. In his mind, he could do no wrong and I could do no right. I could only imagine that in his head, I was some completely daft prick, and as such, he completely underestimated me, and the danger he was in.

    "What''s this? Trash? A ball of lead? Pathetic." He tried to throw the ball at me--doing better than I would have thought, because it was a very heavy little ball--but I caught it with my mind, a psychic shield preventing it from coming anywhere close. "You really are--"

    I grabbed the ball of lead with my mind, empowered by the bracers, and held it steadily just in front of his face so that he could watch, and with another use of Fabricate, rearranged the lead and uranium, creating a very small ball of extremely dense radioactive metal, and a lead shield--a lead shield was very thick on most sides, but with no shielding at all in one particular direction. And then all in a burst, I telekinetically squeezed the ball, slightly increasing the density and accelerating the already rampant, but invisible reaction. It was nowhere near enough to become critical--which was good, because I don''t think the bracers could have stopped even a tiny nuclear explosion--but more than enough to to get right up to that point, creating intense heat, light, and ...other undesirable things.

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    It was testament to how magic worked in this world that I could feel an extremely aggressive pulse of something bad radiating straight through the Grand Vizier''s head. It didn''t leave a hole or even a burn mark, but it did something far more important. Well, two things. First, it... well, I assumed at the time anyway that it gave him a lethal dose of a couple different types of radiation to the brain, and I think it was at least clear that such was my intent.

    But more importantly, he sensed that weird radiation magic that I had created out of a ball of metal, and he realized he had no idea what I had just done.

    I could tell that the two other magic types in "our" group had also gotten an impression of bad juice being shot in his face, and I heard and felt them both take a step back. The Vizier, though, just stared, confused, and after a moment, reached up to take the bead, still hanging in the air.

    That was, of course, a terrible idea; aside from being radioactive, it was also now insanely hot from the reaction, and I used Fabricate a last time to rearrange the materials, plus air and some other junk, into an inert blob of nothing buried far under the palace. I wasn''t sure where, exactly, but I decided that it would be difficult if not impossible to find, if anyone even knew to try.

    To try to distract from exactly what I did, I opened my big stupid mouth again and said something dumb. "Don''t think that you''re the greatest in the world. Even if you''re a genius, you''re not the only one, and frankly, I don''t want to be your tool or plaything." As I realized what I was saying, I turned to look past him, at the man situated on the throne, the would-be king.

    That''s not fair, really; for now, he was the actual, titular king of the kingdom, whether or not he deserved his father''s title, and who was I to judge? The man wasn''t much to look at; he was a chubby and young, in the rich but thin clothing typical of a more equatorial, hot-weather dictatorship--none of that northern European finery with all its furs and thick cloth. Most of his clothing was nearly transparent, but layered and richly styled; the kind of clothing worn by men whose minions worried about heatstroke and not hypothermia, even if this particular bastard had probably never worked a day in his life, nor ever been more than ten feet from a cool glass of water. He was young, spoiled, and you could see in his face that he was an idiot, if a very polite and well-meaning one.

    I bowed stiffly to him, counting on his politeness, and said, "With all due respect, your majesty, I appreciate the offer, but I think it''s best if I go it alone." I looked over at the other four heroes, but not really giving them any opportunity to interrupt, quickly continued. "I mean no disrespect, of course, and if your nation is ever truly in need of me, I may be convinced to return. But for now, I think I must find my own way."

    The king put a hand to his chubby, shaved chin, and frowned. "If you must," he said, doubtful.

    The vizier snapped his head towards him, angrily. "Your majesty--!"

    "Then, I bid you farewell," I said, and turned to walk boldly out of the room, with absolutely zero idea of where I was going or even how to get out of the building.

    "Colin!" John broke ranks to try to grab my arm, but while he was able to lay a hand on me, I grabbed his own with my mental power before his fingers could close. He... didn''t try to force that, but he did lean in and whisper quietly. "Are you sure about this? After what we discussed last night..."

    "I know," I whispered back. In truth, we hadn''t had much time to make a good decision, but I didn''t like any of this, from the very beginning. We''d only been given a day to talk about it, but... there also didn''t seem to be that much of an urgency. People in power just always wanted things done on their schedule, was all. "Look..." I shook my head. "Everyone got powers that fit them, right? Everyone--all of you," I emphasized slightly, "feel like you were chosen for a reason."

    "So maybe this was all done intelligently, and maybe I was meant to be different." I pulled away from him, but met his eyes. "Look... as far as I''m concerned, we''re parting as friends and equals. I don''t hate you. But I won''t be Jafar''s errand boy," I nodded towards the vizier, my facial muscles bristling with repressed disgust.

    Jess stepped up, too. "What do we do if we need to find you?"

    I looked at her, and at the other two. I shrugged. "I don''t know," I said. "I don''t know where I''m going. Probably just out to build my own place somewhere. I''m sure you or Alice will be able to send a message. In the meantime..." I laid a hand on John''s shoulder, then Jess''s. "Thanks."

    In my mind, I could feel the touch of Jess'' thoughts, though it felt clumsy, as though she had to force her Staff to do it. Perhaps telepathy was not a part of her magical gifts, despite everything. Did you seriously just irradiate that asshole?

    I met her eyes and let the grin spreading across my face answer that, and each of my hands delivered a final shoulder pat before I turned away and walked out of the throne room.

    In the end, guards directed me out of the palace when I asked, and I found a merchant caravan willing to take me to a nearby city, leaving immediately. Before they had quite finished loading, though, I found myself walking near a shadowy corner only to find the Grand Vizier suddenly stepping out of the darkness, apropos of nothing, a stony look on his face.

    "What did you do to me?" he hissed, his body otherwise stiff, either with rage, or because it was a poor illusion--the bracers were quite clear on the fact that he was not here in person.

    "Hopefully, I killed you," I said. "Though, maybe not fast enough. It doesn''t matter now." I turned to look at the illusion. "I know what you wanted me to do, to be. I won''t do it. The others may be pawns in your plan--"

    "You have no idea what kind of majestic creations your power will enable," he snarled at me. "And you''ll give it all up, for what, your pride?"

    "For yours," I answered, tiredly. "Your pride is what drove me away, but I know you''ll claim everything is my fault and not yours. So no, I won''t be your pet architect, or weapons maker, or whatever else." I turned to the caravan and hopped into the nearest cart, looking back over my shoulder at the fading illusion and ensuring that, at least in my own mind, I had the final word.

    "I''ll be my own."

 1. The Road to Anywhere

    I quickly took a liking to the wagon driver who I was bumming a ride off of. It started with a frank discussion of women''s outfits in the marketplace--he was neither fond of the overly-seductive garb some of them liked, nor a prude.

    "When I see a woman in a marketplace all but announcing herself as single and eager, I think of my sister," he said as we sat there, the cart rocking slightly on the uneven road. "From the ages of fifteen to twenty she was certain she was going to seduce herself the perfect man. At the age of twenty, she took a job handing the money and records for my father." Haal picked at something in his teeth for a moment, or maybe bit his nail, I wasn''t really paying attention. "The funny thing," he said, "was that once she took the job, her face was never pleasant again. She was always annoyed with something or someone. Now whenever I see some young woman with an unworried face I can only see a child, not a beauty, and those are the ones who are most eager to go around showing what''s under their silks, you know?"

    "Did she find a husband?" I figured I knew the answer, and was more or less right.

    "Of course she did! Her face was always rough after that, but she knew what she was saying when she talked. Within two years, she had gotten into an argument with a trader in a tavern about business, and they were married soon after. And not because he had taken her to bed, no," he laughed. "She didn''t give him a child for five years after that. No, because he recognized a good woman by what she did, not what she looked like. For a trader, that is what''s important."

    I nodded, looking out over the arid steppe ahead of us. We were close to the end of the caravan, but there was a good cross-wind keeping the dust out of our faces, for now at least. It had been on us before, and would be again. "The smart money is in smart people," I agreed.

    Haal smacked my arm jovially in response. "The smart money is in smart people!" he agreed, loudly. "I like how you talk, boy. The smart money is in smart people."

    I liked Haal, but his habit of repeating himself did get tiring.

    A while later, our conversation had wound around in some idle circles, and he asked me what I knew they all wanted to ask me. "So why did you leave Aurnal? Surely the capital has many prospects for a man such as yourself, eh?"

    I didn''t have a good answer, because the only honest answer was that I''d tried to kill the Grand Vizier when he offered me a job... a bit too aggressively. Dumb, I know. So I avoided the question. "I don''t like the people there," I said after a little bit of silence. "They are fine for city people, I guess, but I don''t like them."

    "Ah, some of them can be tricky, I know," Haal seemed to find whatever I said agreeable, maybe just because he wanted to be agreeable in general. "Aurnal is too big a city for me to stay in. The people there always want to be paid the most and get the most for too little coin. You do anything wrong and they frown at you like they''re wondering if you did it on purpose. They think everything must go their way, and if it doesn''t, oh!" he threw a hand up dramatically. "Something must be wrong, and it must be wrong with you, and not them."

    I chuckled, for all that I knew nothing at all about the city. I''d only been there two days--well, a day and a half, maybe. "Some people are like that," I said, thinking to a disagreement I''d had with a maid in the palace. "They always find something to complain about, even if it''s the lacing of your shoes."

    That phrase made Haal throw his head back in a howling laugh. "Ha ha ha haaaaa!" he screeched. "I like that! Some people will always complain, even if it''s just about the lacing of your shoes."

    I shook my head, continuing my thought once he''d settled a bit. "So now I''m going somewhere, and I don''t know where." I placed my hand on my left bracer, now concealed under the thicker shirt I was wearing. Haal hadn''t seen the artifacts, nor had most of the caravan, and I wouldn''t be sharing that if I could avoid it. "Somewhere I can find a little place to make my own, I think. Not too far from a large town, but not a city."

    "Hm, hm," Haal made agreeing noises. "There is a village across the border, Kurnal, I think. It is on a small trade route, but it is quiet there. I will be heading past that on my way home, but not right away. There is water in Kurnal, and traders stop there as they head into the dry hills to the east, as that is the fastest route to Bur''jaal. Profitable, but not enough to draw trouble. Depending on what you can do, you may find work there."

    I fixed the name in mind and nodded. I didn''t care either way, and I didn''t really want to travel too far. Haal was a character, but I didn''t think he was stupid. If there was a problem with the place, he would have said.

    Day turned to dusk quicker than I expected. It was an easy day, in terms of me not having anything to do, or a hard day if you want to talk about how the bouncing wooden bench seat wore a flat spot on each of my ass cheeks. We ended up stopping just a bit early because one of the wagons ahead snapped an axle when they hit a gopher hole or something similar. The wooden shafts had no suspension and didn''t take abuse well.

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    While I was wandering around, I quietly and without any fanfare used my Fabricate power to repair and slightly reinforce Haal''s wheels and axles, though I don''t think any of the work I did was urgent. I wasn''t so much scared of being found out as one of the five Heroes--though also yes, I didn''t want them to be able to track me down easily later on--so much as mostly, I didn''t want the attention or interest. The way that the palace had treated us, it seemed like Heroes rising occasionally was a big deal and also a very famous legend in the area, and so it seemed best to me to just not get anyone involved.

    After having fixed up Haal''s wagon, though, I thought about how any of the wagons breaking down would delay us, and ended up silently extending the same courtesy to other wagons, if the crews would let me get close enough. If I had changed anything, it might have been obvious--I couldn''t use that power on the broken shaft without giving away the game, for instance--but if I distracted people by asking questions about where they were going, and only fixed what was already there, there wasn''t much to notice.

    Most of the traders were, frankly, uninterested in talking to a stranger, but there were a few who engaged me, and when I started asked about Kurnal, I was directed back to a group that had turned me down for talking just before, who were apparently headed through to Bur''jaal. The leader of the guards there was a severely imposing woman with a hell of a lot of scars, the sort of physique in general where they generally don''t have to tell you twice to do something. I''m sure that if I pissed her off, she could hit me hard enough with her knuckles alone to break my bones, assuming I didn''t use the bracers to soften the blow.

    Even so, after she''d told me once to leave, I ended up coming back, getting right to the point and asking about Kurnal. She grudgingly called over one of the traders, who broadly speaking had no opinion about the town, just confirming that it was quiet and not of much note to them and that a fair number of traders took the route, but nobody really stayed.

    That wasn''t much praise, but I wasn''t looking for a real praiseworthy place to live, just good enough.

    The next day of travel was interrupted by us catching the edge of a sandstorm. We weren''t quite in the desert where we were, but nobody seemed all that surprised either to find a massive wall of wind howling out of the sands to the north. Everyone set up shelter quickly enough, me helping Haal, and we all spent a fairly boring hour-ish period of time isolated from one another.

    "These storms are much worse in the desert," Haal said not long into our brief stay, "but this close to the edge, they are still blinding and can pick up lighter goods and carry them away. Twice in my life have I pushed through storms along this road, and neither time did I lose anything, but..." he grimaced. "It was a close thing both times. Since the storms are shorter here, not much time is lost, and so I have found it not worth the trouble."

    "It must also be painful," I said, hearing the grating sound of sand whipped against the tent.

    "Yes," he said, "but each time I weighed pain against money, and the pain wasn''t much. The horses..." he sighed. "They were not all that happy, but they weren''t bloody messes. Chelli," he patted the head of one of his horses, both of whom were intruding into the tent at least a little as they lay on the ground outside, "she argued with me the last time I did that, telling me that is no way to treat a loyal horse, and she was right." He patted the horse a couple more times, and the horse moved her head just a bit, but didn''t otherwise comment.

    "You can talk to your horses?" I wasn''t sure whether to think of that as a magical thing or a more subtle, empathetic thing.

    He shrugged. "Not usually. I have a cousin who can speak with animals; he helps me to buy animals that are loyal. But once you know that a horse is intelligent, that you are not imagining it yourself, you can tell what they are thinking, sometimes, and once a horse knows that you know, they listen to what you say and respond, in their own way."

    Chelli moved her head to bop Haal''s knee, and he patted her again, but neither said anything more about that.

    I suspected, if I''d played around with the bracers, I might have learned to communicate with animals. The green stone bracers had a number of possible uses; I knew that Fabricate was only one of several powers, and the more general shields and telekinesis were only trivial powers. Most likely, on the scale of a divine artifact, telepathy--with people or with animals--was also a fairly trivial thing, but I didn''t want to experiment, not there.

    The delay caused by the storm was brief, and everyone was eager to get back underway once the winds slowed. And it was slowed, not stopped; someone came around banging on the tents when they were confident we could move on, and we packed up while still feeling the end of the storm, but it was a lot lighter. Still, the spray of sand on my exposed skin burned, and I was grouchy for a while afterwards that I''d had to be out in it. I wasn''t the only one, but mostly it was womenfolk complaining, and I mostly kept my peace.

    Not that there were many women in the caravan, I realized as we set off. Larger groups brought some of their family along, but most of the smaller traders like Haal were alone, and there were no independent female traders that I could see, and female guards like the one headed to Bur''jaal were fairly rare. Perhaps that was different somewhere, but not in... well, honestly, I didn''t remember the name of the country, and I was somewhere between too embarrassed and too grouchy to ask.

    Not that anyone really cared. We just kept on traveling, headed for a city I knew nothing about, and then we''d split, and I''d go off towards this new town, probably. In truth... I knew nothing about where I was going, and that was perhaps for the best.

 2. A Stop Along the Way

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 3. Where I Belong...?

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 4. Settling In

    The caravan only stayed a night; they were gone before I knew for sure that Kurnal was where I really wanted to stay, but then, that was more or less what I''d signed up for. In the morning, a pair of elders walked me around the town, introducing me to people, and trying to suss out what I was capable of. Of course, I said that I could mend items, and that turned into a first job almost immediately.

    They introduced me to Miun, a potter that was obviously also not from around here. If most of the people around here seemed vaguely Arabian, she seemed vaguely east Asian, but with the kind of muddled features that suggested she might have been half of each. She''d been hired to do a number of tasks, but many of the creations broke when she fired them, either because she didn''t know how to fire the clay correctly or because there was something to the clay that made it more difficult, the elders didn''t know.

    Miun gave me an untrusting look, and I steeled myself. I''d been thinking about this a little on the walk, but especially in a small town, I didn''t want to make anyone feel superfluous or redundant. Really, in general, I didn''t want people to resent me, but when there were only a few people around to offend, things could only possibly get worse; Kurnal had less than a thousand people, and any one of them would have more cachet than me, unless they were really on the town''s shit list.

    So when they asked me if I could fix the clay half-pipes that Miun had been asked to make, I made something of a production about it, making it look a lot more difficult and time-consuming than it was rather than snapping my fingers and making two dozen more in an instant. Everyone but Miun seemed relieved that I could do it, with an elder explaining that the pipes were needed to irrigate the fields, and that everything she''d produced had been broken of late. Miun looked at me, grumpy, but didn''t object or try to explain anything. I promised to repair a few of them at a time, and we moved on to other things.

    In addition to showing off that I could repair things, I also demonstrated the telekinesis that the bracers gave me, and this impressed one of the elders, who introduced me to Kalam, a fruit grower whose tall trees were mostly filled with something like pears. Kalam smiled at me openly, and we walked to the nearby trees, where he pointed up.

    "We use ladders and climbers to get most of the fruit," he said, "but some of the high pieces won''t fall until they''re overripe. We can still press those to make cider or brandy, but even that is better with properly ripe fruit."

    Again, I overstated how much trouble it was, but everyone seemed much happier that way.

    On the topic of more general things that needed doing, they also introduced me to Nim, a stonecutter who had been working long hours maintaining and expanding some stone-paved roads. It was tedious labor--cutting stone to size and shape, digging a similarly sized hole, positioning the stone, and filling carefully back in around it. I was more interested in the quarry he ran; he told me that much of the stone around here was sandstone, but the high plateau I''d seen coming in was partly an old eruption of a denser, harder stone, and there were remnants of the same scattered around. Long ago, people had tried to mine the mountain, but found it a lot of struggle with few rewards. He was still willing to dig out and cut some of the other stone nodules, since their dark color was a nice contrast to the lighter sand, dirt, and sandstone around here, but it was tiring.

    Between the three, I figured I could find enough labor to pay for food and basic shelter for now, which also brought me to the question of said shelter. The elders conferred, and admitted that the best chance of having any privacy was probably with a goat herder on the edge of town, whose daughter had died a couple years before. There was still a spare room there, separate from the parents'', though it would need fixing up.

    That goat herder was Malla, a middle-aged woman who wore the passage of time on her features like a heavy coat. I got the impression that she had married young and had only one child, making her probably in her forties at the oldest, but she could have been sixty for the gray hair and wrinkles. She agreed easily to lodge me at a price I could afford, and that was more or less enough for the two elders to declare their work done for now.

    Malla showed me her daughter''s cottage, but saying the place needed work was being rude; it was in good shape, the roof showing no signs of substantial rot or leaks. Once I was left alone, a quick pass through with Fabricate repaired some old nails and merged the roof together a little more cleanly, but it didn''t take much more than that to keep things sound. The bedding was trash, admittedly, and I used Fabricate with abandon to turn a years-old dusty straw-stuffed mattress into something workable. If only for show, I''d probably want to find a new mattress or at least new stuffing, but that was just me hiding what I was capable of, and only as long as I wanted to hide it.

    Aside from that, there was no furniture, not even an old stool or dresser. I suppose there had been, but it might have been sold or taken by the mother over time; it didn''t matter, not for me. I did a last check on my feet--they were achy, but would be fine--then, for lack of another immediate task, went out to look at the goats.

    They were woolly sorts, smallish, and they''d no doubt done quite a job keeping the grass and shrubs in the area short, as goats were known to do. Aside from the horses, they were only the second animal I got anything like close to, and they seemed... familiar enough, at least, in form. A young kid saw me watching and moved over towards where I was, tossing its head at me and sending a thought at me that I didn''t immediately understand, even once the Bracer translated the thought.

    Baby (child)?

    I frowned, wondering if the young goat confused me for the woman''s dead daughter, but it wouldn''t have known about the place''s past, not at its age. I knelt down and offered a hand through the fence, but when the goat got close, it suddenly backed off.

    Baby... Nice? Oh, no.

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    It looked at me sideways for a moment, trying to determine if it should run, and I didn''t force anything with the bracers, just tried to see if it would accept me as I was.

    Eventually, the goat reached out to me, sniffing my offered hand, but it didn''t try again to mentally connect. I considered the question, gently touching my bracers, and they gave me a faint impression of a thin web of lines connecting the young goat to others in the family. I cocked my head to the side, considering. Were the goats faintly psychic? Did it pick me up and wonder if I was part of the family, just from that?

    I ended up leaving without an answer, getting supper at one of only two available diners--the one that wasn''t the inn I''d stayed in last night. That place had patrons, and food, but I''d not been a fan of either.

    The tavern I tried tonight was a slightly rowdier place, and seemed to be the only real place for any of the single people in town to eat or drink. There was no individual seating, so I found myself on a long table between unfamiliar people, which was definitely not immediately comfortable, but across the table and one aside was a moderately attractive young woman who noticed me sitting down with a cocked head, leaning in almost immediately.

    "You''re the new guy, aren''tcha?" When I nodded, she nodded back. "I''m Ella, and this is Jurro and Fizz," she gestured to the one across from me and the one next to me and across from her. "The fellow on your other side is Murra, and you''ll soon find out why people don''t want to sit by him."

    Murra slammed down his mug and turned to glare at her. "Shut it, Ella," he warned, lifting a hand to point a finger. "You''re always talking about it like people avoid me. Everyone has gas sometimes, and the mutton here--"

    Jurro snorted. "Everyone has gas, but yours is the worst, Murra. It stinks like Malla''s goats wrapped in dead fish."

    A server interrupted, dropping plates before spotting me and leaning over the two across from me. "Whaddya want?"

    I paused, not sure what was even on offer, and said, "Water, and whatever''s cheap."

    The server gave me a look, and retreated. The others around me turned to look at me, and I wondered if what I said was dumb, somehow.

    "When you have the money," said Jurro, "you''ll definitely want the ales, or at least a good brandy. The water is fine for travelers, but not much to live off of."

    Ella snoted, and gestured at her neighbor with a thumb. "Jurro drinks ale like a fish," she says, lifting her own frothy mug of something and taking only a sip. "Don''t let him tell you what''s for drinking, unless you have a whole stack of golds to go through. Mayor''s nephew, that one, and he gets some cushy jobs that pay him well enough--"

    "Oh, come off it, Ella," snapped Jurro. "You''d drink more if you had the coin, as we all would."

    Ella grimaced into her mug. "Not all of us need as much booze as you do to get drunk, and if a pretty young thing like me was sauced every day, well," she snorted, "I wouldn''t still be single at my age, I think."

    Next to me, Fizz snorted. "If you got as sauced as Jurro does even once a week, by now someone would have killed you for your singing voice alone."

    Ella stood and made a gesture like she was going to punch Fizz, but sat down, clearly not having meant it. "I have a lovely singing voice," she said, in the kind of frazzled voice you get from yelling over people while drinking. "It''s the lyrics I don''t remember." She nudged the person on her other side, who I hadn''t been introduced to. "Hey, Harla, how''s the--"

    Harla slammed down her own mug of ale and, without waiting for Ella to finish, started belting out a song, in a remarkably clear voice:

    Well I sent my line a-fishing, and the fishes sent for me

    Along the muddy waters on the banks of He-la-ti

    The fish it gave a struggle and the struggle gave it me

    I found myself a-swimmin'' in the muddy He-la-ti

    A dozen voices repeated the last line, and Harla took a break only long enough to swallow another mouthful of ale.

    I thought myself a rancher but the ranch it wrangled me

    I knew that there''d be trouble once the first bicau were free

    Though I tried to tell ''em where to go, they turned around with glee

    And then around the virgin veld, the bicau herded me

    Most of the room, this time, repeated the chorus, and Harla grinned at someone in the pause.

    I thought I''d be a farmer but the farm it planted me

    I spent my years a-plantin'' twenty rows of kipear trees

    I''d hoped to see a harvest after all the years of need,

    But it weren''t long at all ''afore the farm it planted me

    She sat down even before the rest repeated the line, tearing into some kind of meat like she was suddenly starving. Ella, for her part, was cackling, and she''d tried a time or two to sing along, but she didn''t have the voice for it, nor the memory, I think.

    "Is that what you wanted her to sing?" I asked, once the noise had died down a bit--and there was a bunch of laughing and shouting after the brief musical interlude.

    "Ah, yeah," Ella almost had to shout to be heard over the din, or at least she thought so. "It might as well have been written for me, seein'' as I can''t do anything right." She picked up her mug, made a face at it, then took a much larger mouthful of it, coming away with a bitter look on her face. She coughed a time or two, and Jurro chuckled in her general direction, already looking like he might''ve been drunk, but Ella pushed him away. "Can''t cook, can''t hunt or ranch, can''t sew or spin thread. When I was a girl they gave me a hoe and a spade and told me to dig a garden and I ended up hanging from the barn in my knickers bleedin'' from my shins." She snorted. "Though part of that was the desert fox, not that anyone believes me about that."

    "I''m pretty sure you were just up there screwin'' off," Fizz said tiredly, "Since there weren''t tracks anyway."

    "There were tracks," said Ella quietly, but not quietly enough to not be heard, but that seemed to have taken the will to talk out of her.

    Just as well, since I wasn''t really the sort for all the small-talk. I supposed I''d get used to it, but I was a bit overwhelmed. It was about that time that I was delivered a bowl of soup and a mug of water, and paid for both. The soup... well, it wasn''t nothing, and that''s about all you could say about it. It clearly had some vegetables and other juices, but it was barely food. Given the cash I had, I might be able to afford a bit more, but... it was worth saving in case I needed something.

    Other talk picked up in the meantime, and Murra passed gas, which was only about half as foul an odor as Ella''d promised, though it was loud and disgusting. I ignored it, ate, and when nothing else seemed really to be of interest, departed back to my little cottage. I looked up at the clear sky above as I walked, eyes looking over the unfamiliar stars and wondering just which the locals would have grouped into constellations, before finally ending up back at the goat farm.

    Because the area around was well lit from the stars and a bit of moon, I could see a shape along the side of the road, and two eyes--a fox or wild dog, I thought, from the size and shape of it. I didn''t stop, keeping an eye on it as it kept an eye on me, but eventually it turned and dashed away into some scrub bushes a little ways off.

    That encounter got me thinking about the nomads, and I resolved to mention them to someone in the morning, but it didn''t seem like it was worth talking about now--especially if the others in the caravan hadn''t said anything.

    For now, the straw mattress was itchy, but... passable.

 5. Uncertain Future

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 6. The hero and...

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 7. Life Interrupted

    It happened mid-morning, and I just so happened to be more or less in the middle of town. I''d been by Heglid''s shop--I wasn''t so much hovering and asking everyone for work; he''d made a passing reference that he would look into something, so I asked, but today he had nothing--and was walking down the street. Carli was with me; so far, she was more or less acting like a very young child, observing things without even really knowing what questions to ask, yet. Heglid had been nice about her, though I could see a certain caution in his eyes that I, as a person who had already had to clean up goat shit the night before, easily understood.

    In the middle of the street, I felt a deep sense of foreboding, and then a snap, and turned to find that hanging in the air in the middle of the street was a large magical hologram of Jess, our wizard, made entirely of amethyst-colored light. She was perhaps twice living size, plus or minus; Jess was a little shorter than me, but the hologram was also floating about two feet off the floor, which messed with my sense of proportions severely, and her head ended up above the rooftops. When she spoke, her voice came out thunderous, rattling the buildings around and hurting my ears for a moment, before the bracers adapted and dimmed the effect for me and, I would later assume, also for Carli.

    "Colin Asheron," she said, looking around as though she didn''t immediately see me, "We have need of you."

    I slammed my hands against my ears, feeling a deep and infuriating swell of humiliation build up in my chest. Because I had dug ditches and smacked rocks with a hammer in order to fit in, and it had all been undone in five seconds, tops.

    "Zeus'' zombie butthole, Jess," I snapped, "do you not have any way of communicating that''s even in the least bit discrete?"

    The projection looked down, in confusion, and then resized to be my height, which only made the hologram twice as bright--like she was still using the same amount of magic. But why had she not realized she was too big when she looked around and saw rooftops? I flinched back, but the bracers again quickly helped me adapt, which is the only reason that I saw, as though in slow motion, her mouth open, and realized with shock that the same was almost certainly going to be true of her voice.

    I slammed a bunch of energy into my bracers and did my best to dispel Jess'' projection, even as her voice--saying something I paid not the slightest bit of attention to--shook the windows and boards of every building in town. Fortunately, I succeeded.

    I blinked away the spots in my eyes that the projection had left, and immediately grimaced, looking around, certain that people were going to already be gawking. Nobody had been looking at that exact moment, but the sound drew people over the next few seconds, all rushing to their doors and windows--some windows newly cracked--to see what the hell the disturbance was. I looked back towards where the projection was, noting that the mere appearance of it had left a spot of scorched ground--no doubt because of the ridiculously intense purple light.

    Shit, if it was violet light, was it also putting out UV? I hated to think that I was going to get sunburned from that brief encounter, but the mark on the ground left little hope that her projection had been harmless. I made a mental note that any experiments I did with my power henceforth would have extra safety margins built in, to avoid me being responsible for such a monumental screw-up.

    On a related note, the sleeves of my shirt had burned away from my bracers, leaving me with charred bits of cloth around my wrists and elbows, and nothing in between, though my arms themselves felt fine. Clearly, channeling a lot of power through the jade artifacts was every bit as dangerous as channeling whatever spell Jess used, and I should not attempt it with--for example--a goat in my arms.

    Jerk! For her part, Carli stomped over to the burned circle and bounced up and down a little bit, trying to be assertive, I guess. Bright lights hurt! Loud sounds hurt!

    "Come on, Carli," I growled, "lets get the hell away from here in case she decides to call back."

    The goat bounced another time or two before immediately following me, as I stalked immediately out of town and away from anyone else. It wasn''t hard to get away from things--it would definitely have been hard to get to a place where nobody could see or hear another incident like that one, but when fifteen minutes passed and nothing made of light and thunder appeared overhead, I found a convenient place out of the way, sat down, and tried to meditate on my bracers.

    Any of the three of us with magic should have been able to communicate in some way or another, and I figured that as the one of us with a more psychic, will-based magic, I''d be able to do something telepathy-ish, though the distance might be a problem. It occurred to me that the distance might have also been why Jessica put too much energy into her spell, and I very carefully calmed myself down and reset my expectations to zero before pulling on the Bracer''s power.

    The impressions I got were very vague, but I didn''t have to spend a whole lot of power to get them. Jess, I found, was being tended to by Alice, looking like she had a mighty headache. I was... not sympathetic, though I had a moment of fear that I''d done some permanent damage to her, or something. But if merely dispelling her had hurt her... I cleared that thought from my mind and tried to touch both their minds, as gently as I could.

    [ Hello, ] I tried, and the two of them both immediately looked up. I got the impression that they said something out loud, but I didn''t hear it. [ It''s a psychic link, guys. Try thinking at me. ]

    [ Colin! ] Jess seemed surprised. [ What the hell was that for? ]

    [ First of all, I was trying not to reveal to everyone that I was a Summoned Hero, and second of all, your projection was loud enough to break windows and eardrums for hundreds of feet. ] I sneered, feeling a little holier-than-thou about this, and I got the impression that that came through. Either way, Jessica seemed suitably chagrined.

    [ We had no idea how to contact you, ] Alice broke in, diplomatically. [ Your role as the Hero of the Jade Will means that you''re supposed to do some things for us, and we need your help with one of those things right now. ]

    I sighed. [ What sort of thing? ]

    [ Armor, ] replied Jessica. [ Especially for the two of us. The kingdom can provide heavy metal armor, but nothing light and flexible enough for us to wear that''s suitable for enchantment... ]

    [ I get it, ] I snapped at them. [ I don''t mind, but I''m not exactly close enough to take your measurements, and I''m not eager to run back to the kingdom, not after what I did to the Vizier. How did that turn out, by the way? ]

    [ He''s not dead, ] replied Jessica, smoothly. [ And you''re very much a wanted criminal here, so we''re not asking you to meet us here. Maybe we can meet in the middle somewhere? ]

    I considered that, but frowned. [ As a wizard, can you not teleport? ]

    [ To a marked location, sure, ] Jess replied. [ You would have to engrave a mark over there, and if you do, another wizard--say, someone who is an old, mystical asshole who has a grudge against you--can use it just as easily as I can. ]

    That figured. [ Can I, say, lock the mark so that I have to be there for someone to use it? ]

    Jessica thought about that for a moment, no doubt conferring with the massive library of magical knowledge that being the Hero of the Diamond Mind provided her. [ Yes, ] she said. [ It''s a very complex engraving, though. ]

    I sighed. [ Give me a couple days to prepare a site, and we''ll link up again. You tell me how to make the engraving, and I''ll bring you guys in, set you up with some armor, and send you home again. ] I paused. [ Or, you can send yourself home again, assuming that they let you set up a return mark somewhere in the castle, or wherever. ]

    This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    [ Right, ] Jess replied. [ That would be easier with your help, of course. ]

    [ Pity I can''t go there. ]

    [ Because you attacked the king''s right-hand man. ]

    [ Stop it. ] Alice''s voice in the link was backed by a firm but gentle will, of the sort that only the Hero of Purifying Light could throw around on a moment''s notice. [ What''s done is done. Colin, if you''ll help us, we''ll also do whatever we can to help you. You understand that, right? ]

    I forced myself to calm down, which was much easier with Alice''s soothing voice over the link. [ Yes, I know. I''m sorry. ] To be fair, I''d never even considered not helping, though I was still more than happy to force them to work for my help. [ Jess... one other thing. If you can think of any spell that just, you know gets my attention without doing whatever it is you did to me, I''ll happily open this kind of link, as long as I can. But also... maybe practice things like that somewhere that you can see the result. ]

    [ I get it! I''m sorry I screwed up. Sheesh. ] Jessica seemed upset rather than taking it in stride, which I found irritating. I had only intended it to be feedback, not another reminder of her failure, but I wasn''t sure how to phrase that in a way that didn''t continue to make it sound like she was the one being unreasonable. Which... she was, I guess. [ I did look at several options for trying to reach you. This one just seemed like it would be the most reliable. I''ll try something different next time. ]

    [ Something more discrete, please. ]

    I got the definite impression that she made a nasty face at nothing, but I ignored it and closed the link. I opened my eyes to find that Carli had decided that it was her job to protect me, and was patrolling the area doing the goat equivalent of a child putting on a "serious face," twitching at anything that moved or made a sound. I smiled, and she sensed me awakening through our link at about the same time, immediately turning to look and quickly bounding over, looking pleased. Colin!

    "Hey, Carli. Thanks for standing guard." I stood up, immediately gritting my teeth as started thinking about what came next. If I was going to carve a big screw-off teleport marker, it would be in a place I could secure, and that meant immediately moving my plans forward and claiming a spot, probably that space by the cliff. I wasn''t the sort of person to just do that without talking to people, though, which overlapped with the other half of what was coming next: facing the music about the bullshit I''d just been through.

    So I firmed up my balls and just marched back towards town, taking just enough of a detour to make sure that nobody had decided to march on my temporary home and demand answers from me there. I considered demanding that Carli wait for me there, but decided that was probably both pointless and not necessarily a great idea in the first place, and just headed back to town.

    The group that had gathered around the spot where Jessica''s projection had appeared was... well, it was basically all of the town, or at least everyone who was close enough to town to have heard it or received news of the event in the past twenty minutes. The ones on the outside didn''t seem to know that I was a part of it, since they turned to look at me but didn''t immediately get out of my way when I started pushing my way forwards. Nobody resisted me either, though, and it wasn''t long before I found the elders in a circle around the scorched spot of earth, whispering to each other with worried looks on their faces.

    "I suppose you''d like some answers," I said, and I was surprised when the group of faces that turned to look at me all seemed baffled by my presence.

    "What?" asked one of them, as though my presence only confused matters rather than simplified them.

    "Are you serious?" I scowled. "You''re going to say nobody heard what the damn projection said, or saw me standing right next to it?"

    "It was speaking a foreign language," said Heglid, stepping up to my side. "I saw that you did something to get rid of it, but I had no idea..."

    Foreign language? Shit. I shook my head, realizing that I''d just stepped into something that might not have been associated with me at all if I hadn''t. After all, they knew I was some kind of mage, just not what kind. "Right, well, it was trying to communicate with me. Ineptly, and I stopped it. It won''t happen again."

    "What did it want with you?" The elderly woman who spoke put enough scorn and doubt in her voice that it was clear that she couldn''t conceive of a person who just recently entered the town having contacts outside of it--that she was, in other words, a complete idiot.

    "That''s my business," I said, mentally trying to backpedal from discussing the Hero thing. "And to keep my business from affecting the town in the future, I''m thinking I''m going to claim a place for myself a little ways--"

    The woman turned away, shaking her head, and started talking, and it was only because I stopped to find out what she was saying that I realized she still didn''t believe me. "...still say it''s that Naishi woman. Can''t trust the southern folk; if anyone was consorting with devils, it would be that one. Disgusting creatures, Naishi--"

    "Excuse me," I flexed my will to put extra emphasis on my voice, and everyone involuntarily took a step back, including the whispering elder. "I won''t tell you my business, but it was no devil. Just a powerful magician who doesn''t yet know how to control her powers. I''m sorry for the trouble and I''ll repair any damages, but I''m going to start getting insulted if you ignore me when I''m trying to explain what happened."

    Another elder stepped in between the two of us, which was probably wise since the old crone had gotten an insanely nasty look on her face like she wanted to walk up and punch me. "And we appreciate your trying to help, son," he said, clearly just trying to keep the peace. "Perhaps we can talk more in private?"

    "Sure," I said. "I just want to make clear--again--that I''ll repair anything that''s damaged, no charge and no trouble. I''m sorry for the disturbance."

    "Broke my mirror," said a voice nearby. "Not even glass, is the strange thing..."

    The elder stepped forward and took my upper arm, smiling. "Come along, then," he said, loudly, and gestured somewhere. "Heglid, do you mind...?"

    "Oh, sure," drawled the shop owner, making a vague go-ahead gesture.

    And so, a few minutes later, eight elders, a foreigner, and a goat were crowded into a sundries shop, and nobody there was happy in the slightest. The only one who seemed actively upset was the crone who''d been eager to blame this on--I assumed, from context--Miun. Thinking of Miun, I could only recall that she had suggested that everyone would be interested in protecting the town above all other interests. And, well, I couldn''t argue with that.

    "Well," said the elder who had taken it upon himself to mediate, "go ahead, son."

    I wished I had a countertop to lean back on, I guess as a defensive thing, but could only straighten my back and try to appear in charge. "I am one of five heroes summoned by the gods and given divine artifacts," I tapped my bracers, which I still hadn''t repaired my shirt to cover. "But I''m not one that''s meant to go around slaying demons or causing mischief. I just want a place to stay, and occasionally, the others may drop in to get my help with things." I frowned. "The... incident was caused by one of the other heroes, who created an... an image," I simplified, "to try to reach me. She didn''t control the power correctly, and I had to disrupt her spell. Then I left and contacted her a different way. She won''t try that again, and nothing terrible happened."

    The circle of six old men and two old women stared at me. They weren''t so much unable to comprehend what I was saying, I quickly realized, but rather didn''t believe me.

    "I see," said one of the old men that I hadn''t met, in a tone that carried enough sarcasm to paint a small house. "Just two heroes talking to one another, mhm, quite understandable."

    So I gestured, and picked myself up off the ground with only a minor flex of the bracers'' power. The others immediately took a step back, except for Carli, who bleated at me. Haha, flying!

    "I don''t throw the word around because I want to," I said. "I''m not calling myself a heroic sort of person or saying that I''m somehow superior. But the artifact is the real thing, and that''s why I want to live a quiet life where nothing terrible happens."  Well, I realized after I stopped talking, that wasn''t quite following my logic, but they were both true, at least.

    I lowered myself back to the floor, and Carli, for reasons I can''t actually put a finger on, suddenly leaped six feet in the air and landed, forefeet on my head and rear feet on my shoulder. The move shocked me, but I just reached up and patted her protectively, since she wasn''t nearly heavy enough to hurt me. I couldn''t quite see, but I could imagine the little goat glaring around the room, or maybe fixing one of the nastier elders with a goaty little glare for daring to doubt me.

    Either way, nobody said anything for a minute.

    "Which brings me to my next bit," I said. "I plan to make myself a house, and I''m thinking I''m going to take the sheltered cove by the plateau. Does anyone object?"

    "That place?" One of the few elders I''d actually talked to frowned. "That place is haunted. The whole plateau is. Kids go there once a generation to spend a night, but nobody in their right mind wants to stay there."

    That sounded perfect, and I smiled grimly at him. "Then I trust nobody has any objections."

    That, more than anything that I''d said or done since I''d found them worrying over the burned spot in the middle of town, seemed to genuinely frighten the old folks. When nobody spoke up, I started towards the door. "If you do, you know where I''ll be. But you''d better hurry, because once I get started, I''m going to make permanent changes pretty damn quickly."

    "What are you planning to do?" The crone who had been snippy earlier now looked somewhere between terrified, confused, and furious.

    "I told you," I said as I opened the door. "I''m planning on making myself a home."

 8. The Bracers of Jade Will

    Now that I got my second look at the little semi-circular bite taken out of the plateau, it wasn''t as perfect as I''d kind of assumed after my first brief look. While I could still envision a tower that rose straight up in the opening, it wasn''t all that even, and the rock sloped away faster than I''d originally estimated, so it would end up pretty far away from the plateau when they ended up at the same height.

    I also took to heart the idea that the area was haunted, instructing my bracers to scan for any sort of spiritual activity, but that wasn''t one of their main functions, and all they could really tell me was that the plateau was somehow maybe-vaguely magical, but they were terrible at explaining what that meant or might mean. I did circle the plateau once again--a bit faster than the walking pace I''d set last time--just to ensure that my readings on that were consistent all around, but it seemed that the town''s dislike for the plateau wasn''t founded on anything that the bracers, at least, could detect.

    So I returned to the area I''d intended to base the tower on, and cleared away the burned remnants of my shirt''s sleeves, and instructed Carli to stay away, before stepping up to an area and doing my best to visualize it in my mind. The Bracers of Jade Will glowed brightly as I concentrated, and with a rush of adrenaline and psychic power, I lifted a perfect circle of ground two stories deep and thirty feet across out of the ground, as though it were a child''s wooden toy block.

    "Judge me by my size, do you," I quipped, as I moved the entire thing--a mixture of dirt and rock--out and away from the hole and set it down, letting it slump and crumble as I removed my focus from it. I dropped down into the hole, catching myself only at the bottom, and took a look around at the now-crumbling dirt and rock walls around me. This part was easy to visualize, and I took my material only from the plug of ground that I''d just removed, and Fabricated a solid--dare I say flawless--wall of stone an inch thick surrounding the giant hole in the ground I''d just dug.

    Not bad for two minutes of work.

    My next order of business was Fabricating supports that would serve to hold up the various levels of my basement. Lacking access to a piece of good steel that I could copy, and not knowing the ingredients or ratios thereof, I decided instead to make diamond I-beams (since I knew what carbon was, the bracers could do that easily) and basically teleported them into place, so that they were firmly embedded into the stone walls, just densely enough that I could put a good floor on top, but not so densely that they took up all that much space or material. I didn''t know enough engineering to be able to predict how much weight they could hold, but I wasn''t expecting to have stone golems or whatever jumping up and down on them; I was pretty sure they would hold several people''s weight, and that was all I figured I''d need, certainly for now.

    The only floor I actually put in place was the ground floor, and that I did by simply making a single large, thin sheet of stone and setting it down on top of the beams, so that it was essentially flush with the stone lip of the basement wall. As I did, I discovered that the floor wasn''t level, which made me question whether anything I''d just laid down was--and no, as it turned out, I''d just hollowed out a hole that was straight down into the ground relative to where I''d dug, and that ground wasn''t level. That led to me redoing the five minutes of work I''d just done--ugh!--using an old trick I''d read about, and and using channels in the ground filled with water to provide a perfectly level floor, which I filled in afterwards. Redoing the hole so it was straight up from there was annoying, but nothing difficult, and setting the floor perfectly flush and perfectly level on the ground just felt right.

    I stopped to take a break, letting the bracers cool off. The divine artifacts were insanely powerful; nothing that I''d just done was a reasonable thing to ask someone to do, and it had all been done trivially. Whatever its power source was, it had to be substantial, and all the more reason to be worried that the gods would be grouchy about how I wasn''t out there defeating the Demon Lord along with the rest of them.

    Well, all the more reason why I should make sure Jessica could reach me.

    After a brief break, I used the rest of the material I''d excavated, plus several more large rocks scattered over the ground in the general area, to create a two-story cylindrical tower on top of the foundation I''d just laid, the wall itself being a single piece of stone whose outside I patterned to look like bricks. This wall was thicker than what I had used for the basement, but most of that thickness was empty space--as in, I literally created vacuum in the stone to serve as insulation, though I had no idea how long it would last. My memory was that gasses, especially very small atoms like hydrogen, would eventually bleed through most materials and fill in any vaccuum, though I suspected that an inch of solid stone wouldn''t readily yield to air pressure.

    It took no more effort to secure the tower top to the basement, add the second-floor supports, and add a roof, than it took to do the rest. The perfectly flat roof would, I knew, be trouble for most people using most materials--it would create standing water, and be prone to leaks--but I also figured that I would be adding floors to my tower soon enough. And... it''s not like I was worried, even if somehow water decided to pass through the solid stone I''d laid down. I suspected what I had done was too flawless to leak, but if it wasn''t, it wouldn''t take much effort to find and fix the leaks when the rains came.

    With the basic shape roughed out, I cut a hole for the door of the tower, resealing the vacuum voids immediately after, and created a paved path leading up to the tower, one that was actually a single piece, though again I disguised it as bunch of bricks, dumping dirt in between them to cover the fact that the stone underneath was continuous. I didn''t have the path leading too far away; the only really practical thing I could do would be to pave all the way to town, and that was too much. But a little path to the front door would bring a touch of order to the surroundings, and I appreciated that.

    That done, I went back and created more thin stone floors and mounted them on the supports. The result was annoyingly resonant--you could hear my footsteps all too clearly, because the stone I''d made was too thin. Instead of using more material, I ended up taking the material of the floors stretching it vertically a little, leaving cavities inside the stone that screwed with the way sound moved through it. The result was almost exactly as strong as before, but footsteps didn''t land quite so cleanly, and it sounded fine.

    Of course, that wasn''t the only problem with sound echoing--the smooth stone walls made every scuff of my boots sound ridiculously loud, especially when I stood in the center. I was able to add a rough pattern to the inside walls that didn''t look too odd, based on anti-echo panels I knew I''d seen in movie theaters. It''s not that I really understood how they worked, but I figured quickly that if you messed with the surface enough, sound wouldn''t bounce cleanly, and that was good enough for a first attempt. Sounds were still louder than they should have been, but not too much.

    For now, I had no stairs going up and down the tower, only holes where the stairs would be--not that I would ever need stairs, but it was, again, something that seemed natural, and if I had guests, especially Earthling guests, they might appreciate not having to use magic to get from the teleport circle to the outside. I was going to get to that next, but got distracted when I realized I hadn''t seen my goat in a while.

    Carli, I discovered soon, had decided on her own accord to become a mountain goat, for all that I''m pretty sure that wasn''t her genetic heritage. It was only our link through the bracers that helped me find her, since she had gone around the corner and was working her way up the sheer cliff face, using some part raw goaty talent and some part active psychic power to very carefully pick her way along a series of ridges that were too narrow for me to feel at all comfortable with my linked baby goat relying on them.

    It was barely a flex of my bracers to get me up to where she was, and she turned to look at me, smiling proudly with her mouth and her mind as she saw me coming, only to turn her attention back to the next little leap, which she made with incredible aplomb.

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    "Carli." I hovered just next to her, reaching out and petting her head. "You shouldn''t be up here."

    I can do it! The goat turned one eye to look me full in the face. My instincts were still to have someone staring with both eyes, but goats, like most herbivores, didn''t have their eyes set like that, and so Carli could only look at me with one. I''m a great goat!

    "Are you going to be able to get back down?" I don''t know if goats were like cats in being able to get up but not down things, and I wasn''t sure that I trusted her, not yet.

    Sure! I can do it! Goats can. I''m a great goat. She tossed her head, and I thought I got the sense she was eyeing the cliff below her, maybe nervously. I can do it.

    I sighed. "If you can''t, you don''t get to complain when I get mad at you later," I said, trusting that the bracer''s power would, at the very least, stop her from killing herself by falling off a cliff that she had climbed herself. It was, maybe--probably--a stupid thing to believe, but I also didn''t want to end up being forced to chase her around all the time, stopping her from doing something dumb. Either I could trust her, or this was all a terrible idea and I might be better off letting her splat her brains at the bottom of the cliff.

    I''ll do it! I''m fine!

    I just sighed and returned to my psychic masonry.

    After examining the tower for a while, it occurred to me that I really had made a building that was virtually airtight, and while that was great for thermal insulation, it was bad for... you know, breathing. So I carved in some extra air channels here and there just to ensure that the solid stone box wasn''t going to suffocate me, then created diamond staircase frames and laid more thin stone panels down on top of them. With that done, I ended up staring at the ceilings from below and being dissatisfied, so I created some frosted glass sheeting that I then stretched across it to hide the diamond I-beams, latching it to the underside of the beams with a technique that was more instinct than science. The ceiling looked odd, but the shining diamond beams were odder, and it''s just as well they weren''t visible.

    That left me probably ready to actually carve the glyph that Jessica had talked about, but I''d told her I''d call back in days, not an hour, so I dismissed offhand the thought of doing it right that minute. Instead, I stepped outside, first looking for Carli, and finding her a few dozen feet further up from where I''d found her--but also, I caught sight of several people walking my way from town.

    So I scooped up my goat, against her protests, and brought her down with me to see what they wanted.

    It was about half of the elders, and predictably, the half that didn''t like me. I met them a ways away from the tower, at a point where what I''d done was only slightly in view, the rest concealed behind the curve of the plateau wall.

    It was the crone who''d been gossiping who spoke up as soon as we had all gotten into conversation distance. "We don''t think that a person like you ought to be messing around with curses," she said, as though what she''d just said made any sense. "If you''re going to insist on trying to build a house here, you''ll get no help from us." There were several nods from the other elders.

    "I was never expecting help from any of you," I said, I think reasonably.

    The man who''d been thick on the sarcasm before snorted. "So, what, you think you can just make a house appear out of nothing? Very heroic of you." He shook his head. "I don''t know what you think you know about construction, son--"

    "Can we talk while we walk?" I gestured towards where my house was, wondering just how close we''d get before the irony of what he was trying to say smacked him full in the face. I started moving in that direction without waiting for him to reply.

    "Don''t interrupt--rude..." he said, and the group started following. They were, I guessed as we went, all in fair shape for their age, though clearly none of them were joggers. "A proper house... shows... that a person has respect for the dangers of the world. Sure you can throw together some ramshackle collection of wood planks or a mud hovel... stick yourself in some crappy little cave, if you have no respect. A proper craftsman takes pride in his work, pride in the years of experience it takes to learn how to build a proper house..."

    "You''re doing a lot of work to tell me that I need you, when I''m pretty sure what you''re really saying is you don''t want me here," I said, trying to keep humor in my voice. Carli bleated as I finished, in agreement.

    "You can''t just move in without our say-so," one of the other old men said. "I know you think you can--to say nothing of thinking you can handle the cursed mountain--but you ain''t some kind of hero, kid. You don''t know anything of how..."

    I wasn''t looking back, but I got the strong impression that he stopped walking and was staring at the two-story stone hut that had appeared out of nowhere. I smiled, still moving forwards and not turning back, wondering how many other people had noticed something yet.

    "I''ve already moved in," I said. "But unless you want me closer to the town when something else comes up--"

    "What we don''t want is you messing around with forces you can''t control," complained the crone. "So you can levitate yourse..."

    She also stopped talking, and I continued walking for a little while longer, until I could tell by the sound of it that everyone behind me had stopped. So I turned around and looked at them, trying to keep the look on my face at a manageable level of smugness. The four of them were all staring, now, and scattered over a fair length of pathway. I lifted my arms, in a sort of shrug-ish way, and dropped them.

    "I may not be able to control all the forces in the world," I said. "I''m not invincible, and I''m not so full of hubris that I think that I can absolutely everything. I was only one of five heroes, and I don''t think that I can do the things they do, better than them. I get you being scared of curses, haunted places, and things that go bump in the night."

    "But the things on my forearms were given to me by a god, face to face." I held up my forearms, as though that was any particularly useful demonstration. "I didn''t make a big fuss over it because I don''t want to. I''m not here to gloat. I was planning on taking a lot longer and hiding who I was for a long time, but for right now, I have to do some work, and I don''t think I can do that stealthily. So now you elders, at least, have to know."

    "You don''t have to like me, and you sure as hell don''t have to force people to do anything for me. I''ll do what work I can myself and pay people for the rest. And if you have any legitimate concerns, I''ll listen. But ''don''t go there, it''s haunted'' isn''t a legitimate concern. If anything, going places others don''t is part of what a hero is supposed to do. I did look around, and I don''t sense anything out of place. But even if the place is cursed... I''ll deal with it, or my friends will." Well, calling us friends was stretching the truth a bit for the moment, but hopefully, me actually doing my job would help with that.

    "How did you..." The crone''s voice was cracking, and I admit, it made me smile.

    "Want a tour?" I gestured, and I let my tongue go ahead of my brain, thinking about what I said only after I said it, though not in a foot-in-mouth way. "I haven''t made any furniture yet, and I didn''t put in windows, so the lighting is terrible. Eventually, I plan to make it much taller, but there''s no reason to do it all on the first day."

    The four elders didn''t move any closer, or say anything else for a long moment. Eventually, the sarcastic one cleared his throat. "Well... I suppose if anyone is going to deal with these things, maybe it''s for the best if it''s you."

    I pointed at him. "That''s the spirit," I said. "In the meantime, if something else comes up that you need my help with, let me know. Fair?"

    The elders still just stood around for a moment, but one took a step forward. "Is that really real?"

    Instead of demonstrating that it was real by inviting him over, I picked up a rock and reshaped it into a small model of Carli, and dropped that in the elder''s hand. He touched it, flinching for a moment like it was hot--I hadn''t considered that, but maybe it was, and the bracers protected me from it?--but was soon exploring it with his fingers, feeling the smooth rock and the minute details. The others looked at him, and it, but didn''t try to touch it.

    "Keep it," I said after a minute. "It''s not an illusion. The bracers let me reshape the world. Hence..." I gestured up the way towards my home. "And that''s why the other heroes need my help, and I need a place to work. But..." I remembered, not too late, who I was talking to. "I''m not trying to mess with the peace of the town. I''m not intending to draw a bunch of clients here, or monsters, or anything else."

    "Why not?" The last of the four, who hadn''t talked so far, broke in. He was a painfully thin man, looking more withered than most people I''d ever seen. "If you make things, you can bring in business from all over."

    "And they''d mostly be paying me and not you, and I don''t need all that much from the town," I said. "Plus, a lot of them would want to stay."

    "''Course they''d stay," he replied, ignoring the nasty looks the other three were starting to give him. "This place is dying," he glanced at the non-sarcastic male elder, as though the two had arguments on this topic, "it needs new blood."

    "Not this again," his apparent verbal sparring partner replied.

    "We can discuss it at length later," I interrupted. "For now, I hope I''ve satisfied you that I''m not going anywhere, and you probably shouldn''t try to make me."

    The four turned to look at me, and all of them had variations of a sour look on their faces.

    "Fine," said the crone, bitterness thick in her voice. "But don''t you think that we''re done with you."

    "The only way you''d be done with me is if I left," I called as she turned to depart. I suppose I could have made a threat there, instead or in addition, but I didn''t see a need to.

    If there was any harrumphing or reply, from her or anyone else, I didn''t hear it.

 9. The Waves Settle

    Having set myself up with my own private little wizard''s hut, I actually then went back to the normal things of my day, mostly to see whether or not everyone hated me now. Carli came along, and accordingly my first stop as Malla''s hut. She was out; I could see the goat herd in the distance, grazing, and Malla was out with them, but I didn''t see a good reason to chase her down just to talk about this. Most likely, she hadn''t heard, and bringing it up just to say "I''m leaving, and also now my goat is super smart" seemed a bit silly.

    I stopped by Nim''s quarry, and I could tell from the look on the man''s face that something had changed in our relationship. He didn''t voluntarily bring it up, and I wasn''t sure I wanted to, either. Of everything, I had kind of assumed that Nim wouldn''t like me once he understood that me doing backbreaking labor beside him was... well, who knows what he thought. That I was making fun of him, maybe? He politely said he didn''t need any help for today, when I asked, and I left it at that.

    Heglid was polite, and directed me to a few items that had fallen off of shelves due to either the sonic disturbance or a meeting of elders in his shop, and I repaired them all. He didn''t seem to have anything to say beyond that, and he even left me with the impression that he didn''t really care all that much what my history was, which was nice. While I was in the area, I fixed several windows without asking anyone and made the burn mark in the street go away, but I wasn''t sure what else was related to the incident. There were a couple people who saw me working, but they didn''t comment, and I didn''t ask them to.

    Miun had busied herself with painting some ceramics, but interrupted that immediately when I stopped by. Or, well, sort of; she kept going for a little bit, but she stopped doing detail work and only moved to things that she could do without intense focus. "Sounds like your secret''s out," she said, and I wasn''t sure if there was humor in her voice.

    "I realized too late I might have continued pretending," I said, "but there''s no point to it. So yes, for now... at least the elders know, and plenty of others saw part of it."

    "Everyone will know everything," she said, tiredly. "That''s life in a small town."

    "I suppose," I said, without venom. I leaned against a counter, watching her, and I know she was looking at me in her periphery, because she raised her eyebrows. "Given that they know, I''m not sure what to do about the pipe situation."

    "Just fix the ones I have," she said. "They''ll honor the original contract, as long as you don''t undercut it."

    "You don''t mind?"

    "I took the job for money, not for fun." She moved from one small clay pot to the next. "It''s nice to do something useful, but the pipe sections are large and ugly things. Necessary, but not pleasant."

    "And what do you do for fun?" I realized as I said it that it could be taken for flirting, but I also wasn''t sure what there was to do in a small town like this.

    "Archery, mostly," Miun admitted. "Plenty of pieces break in the kiln, and I like to take things that displease me and destroy them."

    I grinned at her, and I could tell she was working not to smile. The words had a little bit of an implied threat to them, but I had no reason to think it was directed at me, except in jest. "I could never get a handle on archery myself," I said after a moment. "It just doesn''t suit me."

    "However will you defend yourself?" Miun let her sarcasm sound perfectly innocent instead of biting, which I appreciated.

    "Hopefully there will never be any need for me to defend myself," I replied easily, shifting my weight. I felt the counter shift slightly underneath me, and frowned, momentarily considering just fixing it before I realized that tampering with other people''s property without permission--even a friend''s, and even something that''s an unambiguous improvement--was a dick move. Arguably, I shouldn''t have just fixed the windows in town for that reason, but... that, at least, I was responsible for. Or, well, sort of. Either what, what happens in Miun''s place of work should be up to her. "If you want--"

    "Don''t do anything to my shop, please," she replied immediately, and I nodded. All things considered, it didn''t surprise me at all that she would be fussy about that.

    "If you ever want me to, I don''t mind."

    Miun glanced up from the clay pot in her hands and raised her eyebrows. "I believe you," she said, and looked back at her work.

    I really wasn''t sure what that was supposed to mean. Was it just a reaction to me being, essentially, flirtatious? I hadn''t meant it that way. I just shrugged and set it aside. "I have decided to make myself a home by the plateau. The others say it''s haunted, or cursed. Do you know anything about that?"

    Miun nodded, without looking up. "Whenever there''s a blood moon, the plateau glows too brightly at night, and an unpleasant shade. Creatures from the wilderness gather there and howl, and some people claim there are ghosts." She dabbed her paintbrush back in the container and glanced at me only briefly while her hands were busy. "I saw one there, once."

    "A ghost?"

    She nodded, focused again on her work. "I was... out, with the son of one of the farmers, late at night. He had been warned not to go near, and he had regretted not visiting in prior years. He thought that it was a rite of passage, and he was behind, because the blood moons had come and gone without him noticing. He wanted to challenge the haunted plateau, until he saw his grandfather again, or so he said. I don''t believe what we saw was his grandfather, but whatever it was, it was real."

    That was interesting, and spooky, but it didn''t necessarily mean that it was something I couldn''t handle. "How often do blood moons occur?"

    "It should be months until the next one," she said, "but I don''t keep track. They are at most twice a year, on the night of a full moon."

    I nodded, not really sure which phenomenon was termed a blood moon, anyway. A lunar eclipse? That would make sense, if the atmosphere let only red light by. Why would an eclipse affect the mountain, though? Or was it actually unrelated?

    We sat there in silence for a moment, and I realized after a bit of that that I had meant to ask something, though I wasn''t sure how to go about it. I frowned, and I saw her eyebrows rise, so I cleared my throat. "I... am not from around here," I said, "So forgive me if this is a strange question. I heard an elder complaining about the Naishi."

    The look that crossed her face confirmed my theory that the racism was directed at her.

    "...I am not the sort to believe those sorts of things, as I hope you know," I said. "I''m curious what the bad history is."

    "Bad history." Miun''s voice had gained a very sharp edge. "The bad history is that many of my people went to war with many of their people, and many of theirs went to war with ours. That''s always the way of it."

    "I have no doubt," I said, wryly, and when she didn''t comment, I just shrugged. "You don''t know anything specific?"

    "Wars have soldiers, and soldiers die," Miun replied, testily. "I don''t know anything about what happened, but I can guess."

    "Then I won''t ask more." I shook my head. The elder was certainly old enough to have had a brother, son, or grandson go off to war and never return anytime in the last fifty years, or more if the people of this world were long-lived. "I was just curious."

    "If I thought you were trying to give offense, I would have thrown you out," Miun said, and I could tell there was anger in her voice. "As I hope you know."

    I just nodded, and after a moment, stood. "As far as I am concerned, we are friends, Miun," I said. "I won''t do things just to upset you, and wouldn''t even if we were not friends. It''s not in my nature."

    Miun nodded at me, finishing what she was doing, and set her brush down. "Thank you," she replied. "That''s not a particularly special thing, but it''s nice to have it confirmed and not need to guess."

    I nodded at her, and I noticed that her eyes drifted for the first time to Carli, who had remained outside and was now peeking in the door. Miun looked... confused, and I grinned at her.

    "One of the goats took a liking to me," I said. "And Malla said that the other goats didn''t like her, so I am taking pity on the poor thing."

    Miun looked at the goat for a moment, then frowned. "Taking pity on a woman just because she has no friends, you say?"

    I realized only after she said that how that could be interpreted very cynically.

    "Not an adult goat," I clarified. "A child. I doubt an adult would need anything from me."

    Mean! I was surprised to note that Miun startled when Carli''s mental thought rang out. Don''t leave when I grow older!

    "You can hear that?" I asked, a little surprised. In truth, I wasn''t entirely sure whether it was just a loud thought, or an active power that Carli now had, but it only got more suspicious when Miun didn''t seem afraid, only surprised.

    "I, uh..." For the first time, Miun seemed entirely flustered. "It''s not... the first time..." She looked down and away, blushing.

    "You hear spirits?" I raised my eyes. Classic earth mythology didn''t treat people who dealt with ghosts very well, but this was a world with magic.

    "Not spirits, usually. Our people have ancestral gods, and one spoke to me when I was younger." She frowned. "I was told that my bloodline was special, and I would be persecuted for it. The words were correct, at least in that. The Naishi have attempted to leave certain things in their past."

    I nodded. "Your bloodline doesn''t change who you are," I told her. "It may open doors, and behind some of those doors are bad things, but you have to make your own choices."

    She gave me an unimpressed look. "Very wise sounding words, coming from a man who was handed his power," she said. "Sometimes, the things hiding behind doors are trying to get out, and should not be allowed."

    I shrugged. "Well," I said, "I guess it''s good to have powerful friends in that case, isn''t it?"

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    She had no cynical reply to that, which was just as well, because Carli was grumpy at me for not replying to her, and charged in to bonk my shin. Don''t leave!

    "I won''t leave, Carli," I said, kneeling down to pet the goat. "You''re special to me now, you know?"

    I''m special. The thought carried more than enough arrogance to let me know that, one way or another, I''d be in trouble for taking care of this kid, but it was also cute, and those things were hard to reconcile.

    "Special?" asked Miun, and I grimaced, a little.

    "Yeah, well," I said, and sat down on the floor next to the goat. "She is, and I''ll take care of her."

    Carli appreciated that, as though she understood all the reservations that I didn''t voice, which I very much doubted. Either way, she moved in and butted her head against my chest, and I gave her a little hug. I feel like... like that shouldn''t have been a gesture that communicated cleanly across the human-animal barrier, but apparently it did, given the reaction I could feel in her.

    "Special or not, if she makes a mess of my shop, you''re going to clean it up."

    I just laughed, and stood up. "Yes," I said, "I would, and will. But I ought to go instead of taking up all your precious time, oh great potter."

    Miun sniffed at me. "Don''t say that like you mean the opposite."

    "You''re the greatest potter I know," I said with a wide smile. "At least, the greatest real one. Some time I''ll tell you a story--"

    "Oh, just get out of here," she said, clearly exasperated. "Go and leave me to my clay."

    I laughed, waved, and was gone.

    I visited several others around town through the rest of the day, but avoided the tavern, just because... well, because the last thing I really wanted was to be in the middle of a crowd that wanted to talk about it all. Dealing with the elders was problem enough, and that was a select group. That left me having to get food for myself, but I planned ahead well enough to buy some meat from the butcher''s, and some pickled vegetables.

    Pickled vegetables wasn''t my idea of good food, mind you, but I realized very quickly once I started talking to the woman in the market that in ancient societies, there were basically three types of food: fresh, preserved, and spoiled. Vegetables being what they were, you either caught them in season... or you didn''t. I made a mental note to start a vegetable garden of my own, especially some kind of root vegetables, and also to make something like a fridge as soon as I could.

    The only other person I who treated me exactly the same was Malla. I briefly described what had happened when I passed her by, and explained that I would be moving to my own place to keep trouble away from everyone, and her first questions were about Carli. That made me happy, and when I told her that I would keep taking care of the girl, that seemed to make her happy, and that was about all there was to it. I guess she was just an animal person at heart, and judged others based on how they took care of animals above all else.

    I told Carli as we left that Malla clearly liked her and was worried, and Carli looked like she wanted to run back and be nice to Malla, but we continued home regardless, with a promise to stop by again tomorrow, and many times to come.

    After eating (and Malla had given me some tips for helping Carli find forage out my way) I went straightaway into making a large walk-in insulated room off of the lowest floor of the tower. The insulation was a tricky thought for me at first, until I remembered something vague I thought I''d heard about silica aerogel--something like a gel or jelly where all the liquid was safely removed. It took some experimenting--trying to create what was essentially jello out of water and crystal powder, set it up, and the remove the water--but before too long I was able to produce something workable, and even that was probably not ideal--though it was definitely good enough.

    Now, I knew just a bit of chemistry--it wasn''t something that I did professionally on Earth. I knew that there was a difference between pure silicon and silica, an oxide, but nothing about how useful the difference was or how to predict it. I was able to fashion a regular mesh network out of silica, though, that had all the properties I expected from aerogel, including being incredibly sensitive to breaking. Considering I could replace it later, I didn''t care about that; I just made my new cellar a stone box with enough arched supports all around so that I could walk in it, and all the areas aside from those supports were voids filled with the stuff as insulation.

    For some reason, it was relatively hard to use the same Fabricate power to suck all the heat out of the cellar once I made it, even though it was kind of ridiculous to call that difficult when I could do such incredibly fine work with the bracers as aerogels and diamonds, let alone finding radioactive elements deep in the earth from the royal palace''s throne room. I guess... it''s just something that the gods chose not to include in my power set? I wasn''t in any position to complain, given the circumstances.

    Part of me not being able to complain was also that I could cheat--again, it didn''t make sense, but I could just convert the nitrogen in the room to liquid nitrogen, Fabricating something into a colder version of the same thing, and that chilled things pretty quickly. But trying to adjust the temperature? Control it? No, I couldn''t do that. That would be silly.

    Having made an insulated cool box, I also decided to make an insulated hot box, on the other side of the basement and a level up. This was... not a walk-in thing, just a fairly standard-sized oven, by American home kitchen standards, I guess. I had to do a bit of engineering to make it work, making it coal-fired but insulated from the smoke and gasses themselves. I wasn''t fond of the idea of burning solids to cook, but I could generate coal out of nothing, and besides, with enough insulation I wouldn''t need too much fuel... I hoped.

    My first attempts to cook meat in that oven suggested it would be harder than I thought, but well, that wasn''t much of a surprise.

    Lighting the coal and getting the oven up to temperature worked in roughly the way I expected, though the lack of a thermometer left me with some guesswork on that part of it. I had basically tried to make a metal rack for cooking meats on, but again, I didn''t have proper steel; I had the ability to make pure iron, out of nothing, but attempting to use that caused chemical reactions with the meat and juices very quickly, including where the meat charred and stuck. That''s something I could do something about, in the short term, but I''d want proper materials, or a better way to handle things.

    Anyway, one way or another, I had a meal, and it was... fine. Pickled vegetables weren''t great, but they were fine.

    I lacked a bed, since I didn''t take mine from Malla''s, nor even ask if I could. Instead I spun up a hammock out of thread, and that was more than enough for now. I hung there in the darkness and thought about thread, wondering if I could find a nice sample of silk or even spidersilk, and that thought got me wondering about the armor I was supposed to make for Jessica and Alice. Ideally, I''d make it out of some kind of magical super-material, but I''d need a sample to do that. There was no chance of something like kevlar, from Earth, without a sample of it. I frowned, as I considered the clothes and things we''d brought through the portal, things that had been taken from us the first day--and I hadn''t stopped back by the room to pick anything up, since nothing I''d had on me was helpful nor sentimental.

    It hit me, and I sat up in the hammock suddenly. Wallets, I realized. Credit cards. Plastic.

    I took a meditating position and reached back out for Jessica... to find that she was, ah, busy with John, the archer. I shifted my focus immediately to Alice, to find that she and Steve were laying in bed together, though from the emotional waves pouring off of Alice, she wasn''t an eager partner... or, possibly, even a willing one. I bristled, but once I confirmed that she was, at least, awake, I touched her mind, gently.

    [ Alice? ]

    She immediately sat up, waking Steve, but she didn''t seem to care. [ Colin? Do you need something? ]

    [ I... well, yes. But more importantly, are you alright? ]

    Alice flushed, and Steve sat up, beside her. I couldn''t hear whatever was said out loud, but Steve laid back down, and I feel like some magic was involved there.

    [ I''m fine, ] she said, with the obvious subtext it isn''t your business.

    [ I''m not going to pry. I just... don''t want... ] I shifted subjects, so subtly that I''m sure she didn''t even notice. [ Do you know if they kept any of our stuff from Earth? ]

    [ We made sure that they did, ] Alice replied. [ Why? What do you need? ]

    [ The power I''ll be using to make things is called Fabricate, and it needs a sample for anything with complex chemistry--anything I can''t understand myself, basically. If it''s just a single element, like carbon, aluminum, or iron, that''s one thing, but I need samples of things like silk, steel, or plastic. ]

    [ Plastic? ]

    [ I was thinking credit cards for that, ] I replied. [ But also, nylon and elastic from clothes, and anything else that would be helpful that you guys can get your hands on. If they have materials you want me to make something with, get a sample. It doesn''t have to be much. ]

    [ What about things made from animals? Leather, bones, dragonhide? ]

    I passed along a sense of surprise. [ They have dragons here? ]

    Alice sent back a sense of exasperation, as though this was something I was supposed to have run into on my own, in the few days we''d been on the planet.

    So I just shrugged. [ I was able to... well, it''s complicated. ] I didn''t think she would appreciate tales of me repairing my blistered feet. [ I am not sure, but I think those will work, and again, I just need a sample. Any piece will do. ]

    [ Any piece will do, but if you can also screw over the Grand Vizier, I assume you would appreciate that. ]

    I was genuinely surprised, but smiled. [ I mean, I wouldn''t say no, but now that I''m beyond the bastard''s reach I don''t care about him anymore. That''s the nice thing about leaving, you know? ]

    I could swear I felt a deep sense of jealousy from Alice, and I realized that things must have been worse for them than I''d realized. [ If he figures out where you are, he''ll send someone to kill you. You know that, right? ]

    [ I''m not in his country anymore, I''m pretty sure, though it''s not like I have any sway with the government here. I doubt the locals could, or would, retaliate on my behalf. ]

    [ Okay. So... special materials. And... probably gems, too, right? You could make more of those. ]

    [ I don''t have immediate uses for gems, ] I admitted, [ but if there are any, I suppose it''s better to have a sample just in case. ]

    [ I was thinking about money. ]

    [ I could probably mine enough gold with my brain to destabilize the economy of an entire continent, ] I pointed out. [ And the same with gems, yes. But I don''t have a whole lot of use for the cash, and that whole destabilizing the economy thing... ]

    [ You may not need it, but if we''re ever to get out from under the Vizier''s thumb, we will, ] she pointed out. [ Just tell me that it will help us. I can speak in a way that they know I''m telling the truth, as long as I am. ]

    I chuckled, and took a deep breath. [ A sample of any precious gems will definitely help, along with magical metals, special threads, potions, vials of dragon''s blood or ommel snot, or shards of divine power stolen from the heavens. ] Most of that was horseshit and we both knew it, though I could tell the specifics of my humor were lost on her.

    [ Potions. That''s a good one, but I don''t think you''ll be able to make them, because Jess can. Alchemy is part of her skill set. ]

    I sent Alice the sense of a nod. [ Oh, also, spidersilk. Special types if they have it, but regular spidersilk is supposed to be good, tough stuff. ]

    [ I''m not sure there are any spiders near here, but I''ll ask. Probably oils, right? For burning, I mean. ]

    There were probably those things locally, but sure. [ Oils, gunpowder if they''ve heard of it... oh, actually, as a personal favor, if you see any seeds or vegetables that I could grow in the marketplace, could you bring some? I want to start a garden. ]

    [ I''m going to be honest, ] Alice replied, and I was startled by her sudden seriousness. [ If you can provide me with a steady stream of fitted bras for the rest of my life, I will owe you more than enough favors to cover much larger things than that. The one I have will do for now, but I''m already gaining weight from the way they feed us, and once my girls start growing a too-small bra can be worse than none--except that going without one attracts the wrong kind of attention. ]

    [ From friends and enemies alike? ] I hadn''t studied either woman''s chest in any great detail, but Alice was what most people would consider busty, and Jess... perky. Both would attract attention, but in different ways, and Alice would definitely attract more.

    I could sense Alice smile grimly in the darkness, but she didn''t reply.

    [ You don''t even have to ask, ] I finished my reply after a moment of silence. [ You guys are my friends, and as long as we''re friends, I don''t mind doing little things like that. ]

    Alice nodded to herself. [ I''ll look around for anything else that can help. Maybe books? Maps? ]

    [ I''ll appreciate anything you get me. I just wanted to make sure that plastic was on the list, and... any medicines you might have had in your pockets, or purse, too. ] Alice, as I recalled, had come with a purse--one that seemed too big for her. I got the impression that meant she, like I, was older than she now looked.

    [ Okay. When will you be ready for us? ]

    [ I have a location secured, so technically, I could do it now, ] I replied, [ but we might as well wait until you get materials. When do you think I should call back? ]

    [ Tomorrow night, but just after dusk, ] Alice replied. [ This time is... late. ]

    [ I know, I''m sorry. ] I paused a moment, then said, [ Take care of yourself, Alice. I mean that. ]

    She replied with a wave of emotion, first, and then a sense of a smile. [ Thanks, Colin. ]

    I broke it off after that and settled back into the darkness in my hammock, caught somewhere between content that my friends were okay... and deeply worried that things really weren''t okay, and might not be without some kind of major intervention. The kind of intervention, I was pretty sure, that they wouldn''t like.

 10. Homemaking

    The most important thing that came from sleeping was the fact that I had, in fact, successfully slept in the shadow of the supposedly haunted plateau. I admit I felt a bit of hubris, both looking back at the night before and on waking up safely in the morning; I felt like all the ghost stuff must have been hogwash. As I thought about it through breakfast, I could at least intellectually admit to myself that it didn''t need to be hogwash for me to have slept one night safely--Miun had said it came with the blood moon, or maybe with the full moon. Either way, I''d have to see.

    After choking down some stuff that really shouldn''t have qualified as breakfast, I found myself sitting on the roof and thinking about expanding the tower again. It left me thinking about what I really needed; a bedroom for myself, a dedicated work space, a kitchen and dining space, relaxation space apart from my bedroom, storage, and maybe guest bedrooms, at least for the other four heroes. If the first basement became storage and the second basement was the teleportation anchor, that was at least eight stories aboveground. I looked up at the cliff overhead; the plateau was probably a thousand feet over the lower hills near the town, but it was maybe five-six hundred feet straight up from the base of my tower. Six hundred feet would be... well, given my existing layout, maybe fifty stories? Now that I thought about it, it''d be better to have fewer stories and taller rooms, in case I needed the space for something. Better to redo the tower now, at four stories, than be forced to adapt later.

    The thought of planning a tower that large also made me worry about my foundation. Even though I''d added vacuum voids to the stone and lightened the load a little from that, there was a very real chance that the tower base would fail because of something deep underground, given just how much stone was going to go into it.

    I started by checking on Carli, who had found shrubs nearby to eat and was happily standing on a large rock. I''d planned on taking most of the loose boulders for materials, and asked her if she had a favorite rock she wanted to keep, to which she immediately pointed out, like, four of them. Considering I''d just sprung the question on her, I decided to start by taking small things and removing anything that would let a person climb the wall immediately next to the tower--I included Carli in that, for obvious reasons--so that there would be no easy way to get access to the higher floors except by going through the tower, or using magic, which I figured that someday I''d have a way to block.

    That thought, though, made me consider running structural beams between the tower and the cliff, just to make sure that the weight wasn''t going to end up being too much. It could start relatively high up, and I could make the cliffs all around it slick. I looked up at it for a while, considering as I did that I could also build rooms into the cliff such that you could only access them from the tower, and smiled quietly to myself. The two thoughts together made a nice single whole, and I appreciated that.

    After thinking about it for a while, I basically destroyed the whole tower and started over; the only real losses were my cold room and oven, and neither of those was I happy with yet. I made the basement just a touch deeper, and sat in the bottom and concentrated really hard in order to slowly develop an enormous, foot-thick footprint twice as wide as the tower that was a single piece of fused stone, perfectly level and essentially impossible to budge for those without divine powers or a similar level of being frightfully overpowered. Then I made a new wall for the basement floors that was extra thick, fused to the base, and perfectly round, then added the diamond cross-beams and floors to get me back to ground level.

    I paused for a while, looking at the cliff, and then decided arbitrarily that the tenth floor would be the first one that connected to the cliffside, then went out and collected a bunch of loose stone. I found Carli glaring at something that I had to work to discover was a fox in hiding in the distance, and praised her for keeping us safe before going back to work. With my extra material, I made a tower five stories tall that was just a little bit thinner than the basement walls, and had a few voids in it, and then added five more stories that were a bit thinner still, with more voids. For the floor of the last story I added, I made the diamond crossbeams very thick and ran them a good hundred feet into the cliffside, which was doubtless overkill, considering that I honestly wasn''t even sure that the beams would do anything to hold up the weight of the tower.

    Either way, I spent a little while adding stone floors and a ceiling to the tower, then turned the support beams into a bridge and carved open a room in the cliffside, a room that I genuinely had no use for but knew I would eventually. Only then did I go back and add staircases again, making the tower usable by normal people.

    Colin! I was sitting on the tower looking at the cliff when I heard my goat calling me. People!

    I looked, and found that several townspeople had made their way out towards the tower, and were now staring in shock as they discovered what I''d done. I felt a little self-conscious, as I should have; I''d been so intent, before, about being normal, and then thrown it all away as soon as I had an excuse to start playing around with stone. Which... this was fun, and satisfying, and I felt like I had been... unpleasantly held back by not being able to flex my new muscles, but it did make it very hard for me to be... normal.

    Not that I was ever going to be normal, I realized, as I hopped off the top of the tower and caught myself again just above the ground. I could pretend to be, but I wasn''t.

    As I got closer, I discovered that many of the gawkers were young adults, plus Heglid and one of the elders--the one who had joined the group yesterday but suggested that maybe me bringing business to town was a good thing. The young adults gawked at what I''d done, and at me as I approached.

    "Hello, Heglid," I said, nodding around. "I haven''t been introduced to most of these people--"

    "You don''t do things by halves," said the elder, sounding impressed. "Is that some arcane implement to further your power? A talisman to protect the world from evil?"

    "Just a building, so far," I said, feeling embarrassed that he--they all, probably--expected it to be some kind of tool. Though, I supposed, it would be, once I had the teleportation circle inscribed. "Arcane glyphs and that sort of thing are better left to one of the other... one of my other friends." Now that I was put to it, calling myself a Hero in front of a bunch of young men and women seemed... grandstand-y.

    I did my best to ignore the enormous, towering, vaguely phallic double standard that I had just been building and focused on being humble in my words, at the very least.

    "Can you, like, call power from the gods? Smite your foes with lightning? Can you make me fly?" One of the young men seemed like he had gotten lost in a story he was building in his head somewhere and I really wasn''t sure what exactly he was thinking or where the ideas had specifically come from.

    I wanted to casually reference how divine the bracers were, but bit my tongue to stop myself. I took a deep breath, thought for a minute, and shook my head.

    "I can do some interesting things," I said, "but not everything, and I''m not going to give away all my secrets, so, ssh." I put a finger to my lips, and the boy nodded, giving me the best ''yeah you can totally smite people with lightning, I get you'' look he possibly could.

    "I wanted to ask what you could possibly do for the town," said the elder, and I couldn''t help being irritated. "Certainly, with your power," he gestured, "there are some things you could do to help all of us out."

    Having been put to it, I understood the trap. I had reasons not to screw everything up by making everything about me, but it was too late to deny that I was extremely powerful. I could, once I got samples of materials from Alice or from traders, mass produce all kinds of things and turn this sleepy little town into the center of my own empire, if I really wanted--a trade empire, or a militant one, once I had steel and gunpowder. To turn around and deny that I was capable of it would make me look like either a cheapass, a liar, or an idiot, and it was even odds, as far as I was concerned, which of those the people would settle on.

    Instead, I crossed my arms over my chest and frowned at him. "I intend to take things a little slower than you might wish," I said, doing my best to sound stern, though from the looks everyone gave me, I could have put on my best Micky Mouse voice and they would have been intimidated. "It''s not my intention to replace people who have spent their whole lives learning a trade. I don''t mind helping people by creating the right tools for people to do work they want to do, but I''m not going to just," I gestured vaguely, and I could tell at least one of the boys wondered if what I just did had deep arcane meaning, "whip up a batch of legendary swords and let you all sell them."

    "But you could do that," blurted out someone.

    "There are a lot of things I can do that I shouldn''t," I answered. "That''s why I''m going to take things a little slowly and try not to make too many blunders along the way. If people have a real need for something, especially if they can''t get it from one of the townsfolk or traders, I''m happy to help, but if someone else can do it, maybe I shouldn''t."

    "Even if you could do it better?" asked another young man, sounding incredulous, and also extremely cynical.

    "I don''t want to replace people who''ve done a job their whole lives," I repeated. "I''ll take care of myself, and I can help people, but--"

    "Can I get a home like yours?" One of the few women in the audience, who seemed kind of tomboyish but wasn''t charming at all as far as I was concerned, spoke over me.

    "Do you really need one?" I shook my head. "If I start handing out big favors, it''ll tear the town apart. Surely you understand that."

    I don''t think they did. Maybe Heglid did, and maybe the elder understood, but the younger ones definitely looked at me as though I was telling them that skateboarding was not, in fact, cool, when they knew for a fact that it was.

    So after a brief pause, I shrugged. "You can ask," I said, "but I''ll say no."

    "But you said you''d help," the girl insisted.

    "If you don''t need it, it doesn''t help."

    "I need a house. Why can''t I get one like yours?"

    "When you can make one yourself," I purred in her direction, "you can."

    She flushed, and at least one of the boys in the audience clearly got upset with me on her behalf, but I ignored the byplay.

    "In the end," I summarized, clapping my hands, "I''ll decide what I do. Just because you want me to, and just because I can, doesn''t mean I will. But if you need me, I''ll be there."

    Most of the younger people grumbled. Heglid, though, looked thoughtful, and I looked at him directly, inviting him to speak.

    It took him a moment to notice. "Oh... begging your pardon, sir Hero," he said that without any irony, which was fine, but also without any sense of worship, which I appreciated more. "I wanted to ask if you had anything you''d like to request. There''s likely to be a caravan in the next day or two, and if there is coin in it, traders will go to a nearby city and bring things back relatively quickly. I tend to do those negotiations..."

    "I''ll think on it," I said, feeling a little bad that I was planning on making for myself or getting from Alice almost anything that I could request right now. "Probably the things I need most right now are a good bed and a well-made stove."

    The elder''s eyebrows rose. "You plan to cook for yourself, or hiring someone?"

    I hadn''t really thought about hiring help, though that wasn''t a bad idea, especially while I didn''t have anything in the tower I was worried about getting stolen. I could just lock, or physically block off, access to the basement or other sensitive areas. "I might hire help later," I said, "but I don''t have enough finished here to live on my own, let alone put in a helper."

    "At the rate you''re going, it won''t take long."

    I laughed, good-naturedly. "You aren''t wrong," I said, "but I also have duties I have to attend to starting soon. That''s why I wanted to get the tower finished."

    The elder''s eyebrows rose again, but he didn''t ask.

    "If all goes well, you won''t even notice, or possibly my friends will wander into town, as though from nowhere. No booming voices, this time."

    Heglid shifted nervously. "Not coming on a caravan?"

    "They''re people like me," I said with a smile. "Strange and powerful people busy with their own problems. But don''t worry, they''re not taking the place of traders, either."

    That seemed to relieve him, though I admit it was partly a lie, since Alice bringing materials removes one of the key things I would otherwise have asked Heglid to do for me. Still, he nodded, looking better about the whole thing.

    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

    "Is it true this place is haunted?" asked one of the young men, suddenly.

    "It wasn''t last night," I answered, "but if it turns out that it is, I''ll deal with it. Don''t you worry. But for now," I clapped my hands, "unless there''s something else, I should get back to work." That wasn''t so much true, as I knew that people in a small town, if they lacked something to do, could sit around for hours and talk. And while I could do that... I wanted to have some things done before tonight.

    They didn''t disperse, but I walked away anyway, and pretty soon I had set aside five floors for rooms--before realizing that a thirty-foot diameter tower was too much room for an empty bedroom with little but a hammock in it. So I made the second floor, just above ground floor, my own master bedroom, then a common area, then two floors that were split into two bedrooms each. The internal walls that blocked off the bedrooms from each other and the stairs were carbon supports holding stone panels in place, and after considering it for a bit, I filled the wall separating the two bedrooms with aerogel, on the theory it would make sound-deadening insulation, though I wasn''t sure of that. I made crude armoires out of stone and iron for each bedroom, since for some reason I couldn''t make my power create wood without a sample, and provided tables and chairs in each room and in the common area.

    I really needed a kitchen, so I put that above the two levels of guest rooms, settling for a less impressively sized cooler and a much smaller grill for cooking, plus plenty of countertop space, a lot of cabinets, and a pantry for dry goods. I was starting to be reminded, though, of the need for toilets, and so I got to that next, plumbing a simple drop chute that ran down a concealed pipe into a crude septic system that I buried nearby. I was pretty sure a proper septic system involved more than a tank, but... well, first things first, after all.

    Of course, proper sanitation meant running water, and I didn''t have that, but I made a storage tank at the top of the tower and was able to just magically wish water into it, then piped that to the kitchen and toilets with pure copper tubes. I... didn''t want to create a proper bath until I had a way to heat the water, since that was not something my power did, but at least it felt doable. Maybe just a fire and a heat exchanger?

    Fussing around soon enough turned the clock from morning to evening, and I contacted Jessica from my basement around dusk, as planned. I found her sitting at a table with a big piece of paper spread before her, and mentally tapped her shoulder to start the conversation.

    [ ...Colin? ] She seemed surprised that I was there, which was a little confusing.

    [ Is this a bad time? I know I''m early. ]

    [ No, I just... didn''t feel you connect. ] She frowned.

    [ I suppose after your display, I default to being too subtle, ] I answered. [ I''m surprised you can''t tell, though. ] Well, mostly. After she... didn''t notice me last night, I did get the impression that I was quiet enough to snoop, though I wasn''t interested in that.

    Jessica gestured to the paper in front of her. [ Can you read this? ]

    [ No. I can''t exactly see, and can''t hear, although I get a vague sense of what''s around. ]

    [ That makes this difficult. Hmm... ]

    [ Can you hold the figure in your mind? ]

    Jessica just stared at the paper. [ It''s pretty complicated. ]

    I considered for a long moment, meditating on the way my bracers worked, and getting a vague sense from them that this was doable, without any real specifics. After a long moment, a thought occurred to me, one at least partly sourced from the artifacts. [ How about this. I''m going to try to create a mental canvas, and you draw on it. ]

    It took some concentration, but I was able to do just that, holding what was essentially a blank sheet of paper in between our two minds that she began drawing a figure on. As she''d suggested, it was very complicated--too much for me to analyze even when we finished and I got a good look at it. Prior to that, I was too busy to do anything else but hold the canvas.

    She finished the figure and double, then triple checked it, before giving me a mental nod. [ That''s it. ]

    I was able to carve that exact image on the floor of my basement with no trouble whatsoever. [ Okay, ] I sent back. [ It''s engraved. What do we have to do to power it? ]

    [ The blank area between the two crescent moons, ] Jess tried to explain, though her mental picture was better than her words to explain it. [ You should be able to focus on creating an energy pattern there that serves as a key, one that touches each of the two moons exactly once. Only someone that knows the same key can use it, and only as long as you hold the pattern in place. ]

    For a demonstration, I used a simple rendition of the Superman logo, and darned if the pattern didn''t flood the entire teleport anchor with power. I was impressed. [ Okay, that seems to work. ]

    [ Great. I''ll gather the others and we can come over... if you''re ready? ]

    [ There''s nothing going on here, ] I confirmed. [ Did Alice find my stuff? ]

    [ She''s been out doing something all day, but I don''t know what. Call me back in ten minutes? ]

    I sent her a wordless confirmation and broke the link, then went scouting around to make sure there was nothing else that needed doing. I found Carli standing in my doorway and staring at me, and I realized I''d been ignoring her all day. I knelt down and gave her a bunch of rubs and scratches, before deciding that she might as well come down with me, so that I could thoroughly confuse the other Heroes as soon as humanly possible.

    It might have been five or twenty minutes before I decided ten minutes had passed--without a clock, it was hard to tell, and how was I going to calibrate a clock even if I could build one? But when I called Jessica back, I could tell all four heroes were gathered in someone''s bedroom, and I smirked to myself before initializing the teleporter pad with Superman again, and sending Jessica an OK, and the image.

    I had kind of imagined that I would be more taxed for being on the receiving end of the teleporter, but even given how my bracers would have taken all the strain, as far as I could tell there was no strain to take. Jessica, being the one who was actually teleporting, must have taken it all, and the only discomfort I felt at all was the brilliant flash of light as the four appeared.

    Rude! Carli bleated loudly. Bad light!

    "Sorry, Carli," I said, kneeling down. "I should have warned you." And I should have, but also, I was enjoying the fact that everyone''s attention was down drawn to my telepathic goat.

    "Is that--"

    Before Steve could finish his question, Alice rushed forward and gave me a hug, which was... or, well, might have seemed weird to the others, but she''d been a bit more of a touchy-feely person than any of the rest of us. It didn''t go beyond that, and maybe it was just a friendly hug and not at all a reflection of my promise to help protect her, no matter what.

    "Hi, Alice," I said, feeling a little awkward because it was definitely the first time the two of us had touched aside from shaking hands when we were summoned. I looked around and nodded to each in turn. "John, Jess, Steve."

    "Was that--" Steve started to repeat, but Jessica interrupted him.

    "Where are we? This building is strange."

    "I made myself a tower," I said, "in a small town only a few days away from the capital, really, but I think it''s over the border or something. This is Kurnal, and the closest ...city? Is Amash." I frowned. "We''re by the stone hills and the passage to Bur''jaal."

    John reached into one of his bags, and it was clearly some ''of-holding'' variety of bag, because he pulled out a rolled up map that was far longer than the bag was deep, and began to glance over it.

    "You made it?" asked Jess.

    "Am I the one who''s crazy?" whined Steve, still staring at my goat.

    "Fabrication is one of the Bracer''s main functions," I pointed out. "I intend to make it bigger in time, but it''s already mostly empty space."

    John laid the map down on the floor, and I realized I was still holding the teleportation anchor, so I released the power to that. That made the room dark, but Alice conjured a ball of beautiful, clear white light with a snap of her fingers, a light that cast no shadows and seemed to illuminate everything cleanly.

    Pretty light! beamed Carli, her attention drawn to it immediately.

    "And you''re a pretty little goat," cooed Alice, kneeling down in front of her. I expect Carli might have shied away from most people, but Alice--the Hero of Purifying Light--was bound to be popular with animals, and Carli moved in eagerly to be pet and scratched.

    "So we started here," John said, tapping what I was sure was the capital. "Here''s Amash, and here''s Bur''jaal. I don''t see a Kurnal on this map."

    I knelt down and was able to identify the nearby landmarks instantly. "We''re probably exactly here," I said, laying a finger on the plateau. "You''ll see when we get outside."

    "So, are you going to--" Steve started to say something, but I clapped my hands, knowing that I was being an asshole, and interrupted him, just to keep the streak going.

    "So let me give you the nickel tour," I said, and gestured to the staircase. "First of the tower, and then of Kurnal, though to be fair, it''s definitely a small town, maybe little more than a village."

    "What do they do here?"

    "Survive," I said solemnly, "and provide water and food to traders passing through. Like I said, it''s on the road to Bur''jaal, just before the stone hills." I paused at the foot of the stairs. "For now, this room is the second basement. First basement is for storage, but I don''t have anything in it for now." We traveled up through there, Alice''s light revealing the next floor to be essentially featureless, and the ground floor wasn''t much better. "Ground floor will eventually be for reception, I guess," I said, "I don''t have much use for that at the moment."

    "Can we look at it from outside?" Jess asked. "It feels insanely solid. It wants to block my magical perception, somehow."

    I shrugged, and we took a detour outside. As soon as we were out, Carli bleated and jumped up on a nearby boulder, one of the ones she had identified as a favorite when I asked her what I shouldn''t destroy for raw material. I could feel the others a bit surprised and confused when they came out in a hilly region not far from the mountains, but far more confused when they turned around and saw the ten-story tower vastly overshadowed by the plateau behind it.

    John whistled. "When you said ''exactly here'', you weren''t kidding."

    I grinned. "You can see it from a long way off. Eventually I hope to make the tower as tall as the plateau, but I''m worried that I''d need to reinforce it structurally to support all that weight."

    "You''re kidding, right? That''s, like, a hundred stories," said Steve, finally managing to complete a sentence without being interrupted.

    "Around eighty, I think," I said, gesturing. "The tower is ten, and you can see it''s about an eighth of the way up..."

    "There''s something odd about it," Jess said, and Alice nodded along with her, both of them studying the rock.

    I shrugged. "I''ve been told it''s haunted," I admitted, "but I can''t sense anything. Do you think it''s a problem?"

    The two other magic users were quiet for long enough that I started to get nervous.

    "No," Alice said, finally. "It''s not a vengeful spirit. It''s more like... there''s something unusual here, and it attracts ghosts."

    Jessica nodded. "It feels ancient," she said. "Older than the plateau. Be careful if you dig into the center of it; I think you''ll find something there, and it... might be strong."

    That, I had to admit, gave me the willies. If one of the other Four Heroes said something was odd, then it was probably bad, but if two said so, I''d have to be careful.

    Carli bleated behind us, and I turned to look at her. She sent a message to me without saying it to the others. I want to climb!

    Just be safe, I answered, and Carli bleated again, then scampered towards the cliff.

    John, in the meantime, had gone in a little circle around the tower to see what was behind it, and pointed at my bridge. "What''s up there?"

    The others moved over to look, and I joined them just to see things from the same perspective they did.

    "Like I said, I intend to reinforce things," I began. "So I thought I''d run supports into the plateau every ten stories or so. It may not be enough, but it has to help."

    "But you also dug into the cliff," said Jessica, and I nodded, though they weren''t looking at me.

    "A little. I like the idea of a room outside the tower you can only access from the tower. Or, I guess, by flying." I gestured at the cliff face. "That''s part of why I made the cliff so sheer. It looked more like the rest, before."

    The others nodded, and then John spoke. "Can we just go up to the top? From what you said most of the floors are empty, right?"

    I sighed, and picked everyone up with the Bracers. It made everyone momentarily nervous, and Jessica decided to teleport herself instead, but I brought the rest of us up only seconds behind her.

    I hadn''t spent a whole lot of time taking in the view, but I could admit it was nice. With the way I was positioned from the plateau, you couldn''t see the town, but the view of the hills and mountains was... I guess I could admit it was breathtaking. It''s easy to think of hills as just hills, mountains as just mountains, but when you look at them from the right angle, they''re rolling contours onto which a complex painting is stretched, rocks and bushes, and some scattered trees, all finding a way to live in a world that was anything but even and predictable.

    Everyone was quiet for a minute, though when I looked around, Steve seemed largely unimpressed by the view. I could chalk that up to him being kind of an ass, but he was the Hero of the Golden Armory, and he was intended for a lot more up-close action and a lot less talking and standing around. John, in contrast, had his eyes on the horizon, drinking in sights that were probably well beyond my ability to see. The Hero of the Phantom Arrow could probably have put a hole in anything I could see well enough to describe to him--or possibly a hundred arrows in the shape of a smiley face. I had to assume the non-magical heroes were as overpowered as I was, just each in their own way.

    Alice had her eyes closed, enjoying the breeze, and Jessica was studying the plateau itself. I let them, finding my thoughts drifting to the task of building up the tower some more. Should I have more supports? Did I need to make the supports of a different material? I wasn''t sure that the raw carbon I had was ideal for these purposes. What if I made the cliff a single piece as well?

    "This is great and all," Steve finally said, "but I''d like to sit down, and hopefully get something to eat."

    "Right," I said. "Let me show you the rooms, first of all."

    We went down the stairs, me pointing out the little work I''d done before we got to the first of the two levels with guest rooms. "This and the next floor down each have two rooms apiece," I said. "I don''t have mattresses, because I''m not sure what to fill them with--"

    "Oh, I can help with that," said Jess, reaching into her own holding-ish bag and pulling out a pair of over-ear headphones. "I think the cups on this are memory foam."

    I barely had to touch the headphones to Fabricate a sample of the rubbery foam inside, examining it. I wasn''t convinced that it was perfect, but it would do very well for mattresses and cushions. I nodded. "This will help," I said. "I could also use some good steel--"

    "Oh, right," John reached into his own bag and pulled out a pair of glasses. "You might like these."

    I raised my eyebrows at him. "The Hero--"

    "Yeah, yeah," the archer snapped back at me. "Great eyesight was my wish and I got it. It''s not that surprising."

    I nodded and took it, not really sure what the frames were made out of. "So it''s--"

    "They''re the kind of frames you can wrap around your finger," John said. "Some kind of memory metal."

    That did get my attention, and with a moment of concentration, I generated a chunk of metal that was equivalent to the glasses frame. While I didn''t have an immediate use--no, that wasn''t right, I''d probably do something for armor with it. It seemed too exotic for common purposes, though.

    "We also have a few different types of plastic, not just credit cards," said Alice, though I noticed she didn''t have a bag of her own. I doubted that the bags had any weight; was she not carrying one because of some kind of class restriction?

    "And three cell phones," said Jessica, with a grimace. "For what good they do us in a world without cell towers or wifi."

    Only three? Even assuming mine had been stolen or destroyed by the Vizier, that left at least one person who didn''t have one on them when they were wished away. Or maybe something else happened? I didn''t care enough to ask, but I was curious.

    "Okay," I said, shrugging. "We don''t have to get to all of that just now. But if Steve wants to sit down--"

    "Honestly," he took the bag off his belt and threw it in one of the rooms, "Right now I want food."

    We looked around between us, and I shrugged.

    "Okay," I said, "let''s go to the tavern then."

    <hr>

 11. Food and Exposition

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

 12. Preparation and Danger

    By the time that Steve came home in the morning, I had improved five hammocks into metal-framed foam beds with silk sheets and big thick comforters, obtained the sample of meteoric steel from John''s supplies, and quickly experimented with making, essentially, micro-chainmail with a single long thread that weaved up and down, linking into the previous rows, while spiraling down the torso. On its own, the single small thread of steel wasn''t really powerful enough to stop deadly blows from very heavy weapons, but Jess assured me that the suit, being one piece, could be enchanted enough to defend her against most attacks.

    Making the suit out of a single thread came with challenges, namely the fact that a shirt of mail normally had, you know, two sleeves, and other topographic features that weren''t quite as straight forward as a basic tube, especially when it had to fit women. Although it hurt my brain to do, I did end up succeeding, creating a good garment that looked and felt like fairly normal chainmail, unless you looked very closely. The end result was something more flexible than common garden-variety chainmail, because the wire was thinner, while still being able to repel a common arrow or blade strike.

    And that was before Jess got her hands on it.

    John insisted that he didn''t want the meteoric steel as his main piece of armor; although they declined to share his holy-metal poem to me, he did say that there was a type of shadow-attuned metal that would be perfect for his armor. Instead, he wanted a single-piece arm armor that would cover everything from his wrist to his bicep, could be removed, remained perfectly flexible, and exposed a certain spot on his inner arm that he said was important to the use of his powers.

    "Does it also need to julienne fries?" I asked, deadpan.

    "No," he replied in kind, "but if you could make it machine washable, I''d really appreciate it."

    Steve''s arrival was about three-quarters of the way through me figuring out a good way to accomplish all this, and I discovered that he''d really got my goat. I blinked to see him walking in with Carli in his hands, and the goat jumped down and bleated at me, seemingly proud of the blood on her little horns.

    "What did you--"

    Beat up fox! Carli informed me, proudly.

    "I woke up," said Steve, sounding somewhere between good natured and on-his-way-to-angry-again, "wondering where I was and what had gone down the night before, to find that all my friends had gone and left me at the bar. Which," he paused and held up his hands, "I get. I''m not mad, though there was a moment there I was grumpy. I paid off the tab and all the damages, and I''m just leaving when some little kid runs up to me and says that the hero''s goat is out on a friggin'' pear farm covered in blood."

    "So what do I do," Steve shrugged. "I''m a hero, you''re a hero, you have a goat. I go out there and find that this little bugger," he knelt down and stared at Carli, who immediately turned and met his stare, "had chased down some kind of a... I guess it was a fox," he squinted at the goat, and Carli tossed her head in challenge. "Didn''t even kill it, but had beaten it up and sat on it. How does a goat even restrain a fox without killing it, I have no idea, but that''s where he was."

    "She," I said, a little confused. "Carli''s a she-goat." I knelt down and put a hand on Carli to get her attention, making her lose the staring contest. "Why did you fight a fox?"

    Took from herd. Bad (undesirable) creature. Should not!

    "It attacked Malla''s place?" I interpreted, and the goat tossed her head in a definite yes-motion. "Is she okay?"

    Herd lost one child (young). She (human-Malla) was not there (visible).

    I sighed. "I ought to check on her."

    "You stay," said John. "I''m getting sick of waiting here so I''ll go check on your precious goat farmer."

    "Do you need--"

    "If I have any trouble finding an entire herd of stinking goats then I''m worth absolutely nothing as a tracker," John called, already on his way down the stairs.

    Which... was entirely fair.

    "I''ll go with him," said Steve suddenly. "No offense, but I''d go crazy standing around in a tower waiting for you to do... something." He gestured at my pile of metal vaguely.

    I waved in his general direction, dismissively, and went back to adjusting John''s armor, using a replica of his arm in clay to keep the fit about right. Jess had been the one to insist on that, so that I didn''t have to keep trying to fuss over her torso directly while I worked on the design for her armor, and of course it made sense in retrospect.

    That left Alice to coo over my heroic little goat, Jess currently being elsewhere in the tower working on her enchantment stuff. I wanted to yell at Carli, honestly, but... if she was saving what was essentially family from a threat, then she really was being a hero, and what part of that could I really complain about? Without being a massive hypocrite?

    So I went back to trying to mentally hold together all of the bullshit requirements John gave me, slowly refining the prototype into something usable. It wasn''t terribly long before I had a nicely done piece of flexible arm armor, as John had requested, but with him out and ensuring my best goat''s family was okay, I turned to Alice and Carli, to find the Hero of Purifying Light giving me a very odd look that took me a long moment to parse.

    "Underwear?" I finally asked, and she nodded, apparently very serious.

    The simplest part of what followed was giving her more (clean) copies of what she already owned, but then we got into little modifications. Some versions were a lot more conservative, while others were more risque, than what she''d been wearing on the day. For her bras, she had me adjust the fit of her cups, resize the bands so that they could be adjusted in a to a range of sizes she expected to need over time (which I would not have thought about, but she insisted there were a lot of reasons why her boobs would swell or reduce slightly, depending on things like weight, hydration, muscle mass, hormonal levels, and more), and added push-up and sports variants, with a particular emphasis on making sure the sports bra was going to support her girls right.

    This process, naturally, left me staring for a long time at a mostly-undressed Heroine, with her sometimes jumping and gyrating. I, of course, did my utmost to be polite and professional. We both found it amusing for a little while, but once it actually got to working on the problems, there wasn''t room in my brain for a boner, and forced to choose between the two, I decided to preserve my friendship instead of being a creep. Because while she was lovely, and while I knew the other Heroes had been banging... and while I kind of knew that Steve and Alice weren''t really much of a pair, in her eyes, none of that meant that this was some kind of opportunity to push my own agenda.

    Besides, I was still kind of interested in Miun, and the last time I''d gotten distracted from my current target it had gotten me a reputation, one that had taken me a long time to shake off. It''d be different if I got a complete rejection from her--I didn''t consider her reaction to my first attempts at flirting a rejection, because I agreed that was a very early point in the relationship for me to have started with that--but we were still barely moving past those first knee-jerk reactions. We could end up as friends, or more, or less, but impatiently moving from one possibility to another was awful behavior, and I was sure she would agree with me on that. For certain, my past girlfriends would.

    When Alice was satisfied, the two of us went to look for Jess. Alice went in first, and I was invited in a few minutes later, to find that Alice was, for the moment, sporting her one-piece armor, which I had to admit, from a distance might have just been a metal shirt. I half expected her to wrestle with getting it off, but she just gestured and it disappeared from her body and reappeared on the table.

    "So Alice says you''re willing to be our... provider," Jess said, and I could tell there was a layer of thick humor there, as though I were offering drugs instead of fitted bras.

    "What are friends for?" I asked, not really sure that I understood the subtext. I glanced at her armor. "Did the enchantments take?"

    Jess paused, as though unhappy to be distracted from the joke. "Yes," she said after a moment. "For magical metals, the Staff of the Diamond Mind can engrave the enchantments in some kind of secondary, non-physical space. It''s actually more flexible than it was when you made it, but nearly indestructible. And the metal..." she paused, tilted her head, and decided to explain.

    "I didn''t mention, but meteoric steel''s main benefit is that it passively generates stellar energy and can release it in a burst. For my armor, I have that linked to a defensive spell, while John will be using his for an attack, hence the arm guards. The metalwork you made is too fine for me to add a secondary effect, but I think I''ll keep it like this for now. Maybe later I''ll ask for a heavier version of the same."

    I nodded, already reappraising the metal. I hadn''t detected any sort of latent energy in it, but if Jess was content that the extra I''d generated really was meteoric steel, then I trusted she knew her business. "How quickly does it charge?"

    The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

    "I say passively, but that''s when it''s being worn by me or John, as it reacts to the artifacts. For us, it probably recharges twice a day at most. Meteoric steel can also recharge under the light of the sun and stars, but much slower. Indoors or on a cloudy day, probably nothing."

    I nodded, already considering setting up some kind of meteoric solar panels, though I wasn''t sure what to do with the energy yet. "What can--"

    "I''d love to talk shop," Jess interrupted, "but I''d also really like to get fitted before the boys come back, please?"

    Fair enough. Fitting for Jess wasn''t that different than for Alice, except that Jess didn''t request any... adventurous underwear, either because she wasn''t comfortable doing that in front of me, or because she wasn''t comfortable doing it in front of Alice, who declined to leave on her own, and Jess didn''t press.

    Jess, however, also requested shoes. That included everything from three-inch heels to running sneakers, and she insisted on similar for Alice, despite the Purifying Hero blushing madly and insisting it wasn''t important.

    It was in the middle of this that we heard a commotion below that was the other Heroes returning, and I took the opportunity to escape and find out what had happened.

    Malla, it turned out, was ...not quite alright.

    "This," said John, as he lifted something that looked like a desert fox, if a desert fox had been handed to a video game designer with instructions to make it ''look evil'', "was apparently trying to make friends with the local fox population. While your goat defended the herd, this thing attacked the goat herder, and dragged her off into the wilderness, I guess to act as a sacrifice or something."

    "Yeah, it was weird," Steve said, helping lay Malla on a table that I had quickly raised up out of the ground. The old woman had a chunk taken out of her arm and another out of her leg, and had lost more than enough blood to be unconscious. Alice quickly stepped over and I could feel an intensity to her magic that I hadn''t felt out of her so far, enough to convince me that it wasn''t minor healing. "The thing drug the woman in a pattern like he was making some kind of spell out of her blood. John shot it in time to stop whatever it was, but..."

    I felt immediately cold. Already, the idea that this little backwater town was safe from the Demon Lord felt like a naive little lie. "Where was it?"

    "I''ll show you," John said, and I nodded at him, following while Alice, Steve, and Jess watched over the goatherder that had only briefly sheltered me. As soon as John got outside, he suddenly blurred into a high-speed movement technique, and I forced myself to follow, the power of the Bracers of the Jade Will letting me push off from the ground like a cannon, while his Bow of the Phantom Arrow let him pass through miles of terrain like a phantom.

    In truth, he could have just pointed in the direction, and I would have eventually found it. It wasn''t that far, once you knew the location, and the blood circle was way too obvious to miss. I had to adjust a bit in midair, but landed safely next to the scene, studying the circle drug in the dirt with a rising feeling of both terror and disgust.

    "Heptagram," noted John, and I nodded, having already counted the seven points of the star. "There''s something inherently magic about the shape itself, maybe only when made out of blood... and I think the demon fox was also pouring some kind of evil energy into it as it drug the woman along."

    I knelt by one of the lines, my Bracers easily telling me that something magical existed here, but not giving me details. Either of the other spellcasters could have told us more, I''m sure, but I''d run off out of anger and fear, not because we''d thought this through. "A part of the Demon Lord''s Grand Work?"

    "A part, a consequence, a prerequisite. I don''t know. The Demon Lord isn''t supposed to be active yet. Either this is part of what wakes him up, or it''s a side-effect of the thing that will."

    "Or it''s gods or demons screwing with us," I said, grouchy, and stood. Although I might have waited for Jess to come over and study it, I flexed my will and broke the earth underneath the spell circle, physically pulling the thing apart so that it was no longer whole.

    "We''ll want Alice to clean this up," John said, turning to me, and I could see him distrusting the fact that I''d dealt with it myself. "It''s her job."

    Purifying, right. I nodded, sighing. "I... understand. I just don''t like leaving it here."

    "If you''re nervous, I''ll wait here while you get her. You can probably carry someone faster than me."

    I nodded to him, turned, and flung myself back across the miles to my tower. By the time I got back, Malla was whole again and already sitting up, but she looked ...older, withered, somehow, as though the aborted ritual had been stealing her life force, whatever that implied. I kept my face impassive, though I felt like I wanted to cry. "Are you alright, Malla?"

    The woman turned to me, and I saw fear in her eyes, but she pushed the emotion down. "Worst I''ve ever been," she said, "but I''ll live. But that thing..." she turned and looked at the black-and-red fox that was bleeding on my floor.

    It was dead, I noted when I turned to look at it, which was just as well. My powerup poem suggested I needed, like, at least two evil familiars, but I wasn''t keen on rewarding something that had attacked my family with that kind of distinction, and I imagined Carli would agree. I went over and knelt down by the body, using telekinesis rather than my fingers to examine it, noting that while the fur was obsidian black with blood-red highlights, and its eyes replaced their white sclera with black, it otherwise physically normal--the claws and the teeth hadn''t become black knives of pure evil or anything.

    "What is it?" asked Malla, after a long moment.

    "We think it''s--" I started to say, before Alice interrupted.

    "It''s dead now," she said. "That''s all that matters." She turned to me, and gave me a look that told me not to talk too easily about this stuff, and I frowned, but didn''t argue.

    "I don''t think there are more," I agreed. "I think it was just... changed."

    "Is it because you live by the cursed mountain?" Malla asked, and I could tell there was a deep fear in her voice.

    "No," answered Alice, quickly. "I would know if that were the case."

    Malla looked to her, and I frowned, but stood up. "On that note, Alice, can you come with me for a minute?"

    She nodded, and Jess moved over to stand protectively next to Malla instead. I took Alice outside, and after briefly filling her in, I took her in another flying leap to the shattered blood circle.

    Again, I could feel that her power was strangely intense, indicating that what had gone on here wasn''t trivial. But when she pushed that power out into the segments of blood on the ground, she didn''t just wipe away some kind of indistinct ''bad mojo''--the blood itself blackened, cracked, and lifted off the ground, turning to dust, while the ground itself, which had been only able to support thin grass before, suddenly sprouted incredibly thick, luscious, vibrantly green grass and a number of flowers, of kinds that I was immediately sure were not native--there was no way their seeds were just laying in the dirt here waiting for a little magic to grow. So purification on dirt would just spontaneously grow new plants from nothing? I wasn''t entirely sure what to think about that.

    By the time she was done, I almost didn''t want to un-crack the ground, because the inside of the crevasses had filled with plant life, but I did anyway, ignoring the now-buried plants even though it bothered me to waste them. Now there was truly nothing left in the place that felt evil or demonic, and it... it had become something like a holy site in return, which seemed overkill to me.

    I turned from examining the ground to find her and John sharing a moment, which I didn''t interrupt, although my thoughts immediately wanted to protest that John had been with Jess before. Instead, I deliberately turned my thoughts to the garden I was intending to grow. While I certainly didn''t want Alice to do all the work for me, it would be nice if I could get some food plants in season right away. In fact, while I had the others here, maybe Jess could help me with a more ideal growth environment? Was there a way to turn the Meteoric solar panel idea into the power source for an accelerated growth bay, or was the energy produced incompatible with that idea?

    After a moment, I cleared my throat, and the two separated, embarrassed. I hauled Alice back, and John took his own way, as he had on the way out there. In total, only a few minutes had passed, enough that when we stepped back in, we could pretend that nothing of consequence had changed.

    Malla was standing, if still leaning on the table. She looked... well, not great. I moved up and put a hand on her shoulder, meeting her eyes. "I''m sorry this happened," I said, meaning it. "Please let me know how I can help."

    Malla shook her head. "Still need to take care of the herd," she said after a moment. "That''s not something you can do for me, unless you plan to learn..."

    I shook my head. "I can make things to help you get around, if you need that."

    Malla snorted. "If I need something, I''ll take a horse, or maybe one of the Caliman riding dogs. Those are supposed to be good with herds, but it''d be hard to find one of those this far east."

    Riding dogs? That''s nice. I let that thought wash past me, though I knew Jess and Alice would probably keep her in mind if they found one on their travels. Instead, I just nodded. "I could also make a large fenced area pretty easily..."

    "Colin," she said, struggling a little with the name, as most people did. It wasn''t quite how their language worked. "You''re kind, but I''ll deal with my own problems."

    So I stepped back and nodded. "Okay. But if there are ever troubles, let me know, and I''ll help."

    She smiled back, but the smile was more fragile than it ought to be, missing something that had bled out of her in the dry grasslands.

    "Also," Alice said into the moment of silence, "I should probably mention that I purified the place you were attacked, and there will be a lot of plant growth there for a while. A good place for your goats, maybe?"

    Malla turned to look at her, surprised. Clearly, she didn''t need to be told how far it was from here to there, having internalized the area after a life spent grazing herds across it. "You did? When?"

    Alice smiled sweetly. "While you were indisposed," she said, and I smirked, then hid it when the woman turned to look at me, clearly confused.

    "Alright," she said, I think trying to understand everything that had happened. "Just give me a minute, and I''ll be on my way."

    At this point, Carli, who had been... mostly, I think, trying not to be in the same room as the dead demon fox, finally sprinted from the stairwell where she''d been hiding to around in front of Malla, and stood up on her back legs, kicking her front legs in a way that was obviously desiring attention. Malla, nice!

    "Aww, sweet thing," Malla purred, though I definitely got the impression she didn''t hear Carli. She reached in and scratched her and pet her for a minute anyway, and I could tell that it made the goatherder feel better, too. "I''m glad you''re getting along well here."

    Nice, happy! Good Malla!

    Malla cooed over her for another minute before standing up straighter and marching out the door, more resolute and energetic than I think she would have been otherwise. Carli let her go, following her out the door and watching, before suddenly getting distracted by what turned out to be a sudden need for her to make little goat turds in the wilderness.

    "If we''re all done examining this..." Alice gestured to the black-furred fox, and when nobody objected, she gestured, and a ball of light appeared around, it, light that had the intensity of an early-morning sun--it was too bright to look at, and cast long shadows in every direction, but it was still somehow gentle, stirring something within instead of creating any kind of fear or pain reaction. In only a few seconds, the light faded, and nothing remained of the demon creature, not even ashes.

    I blinked away the afterimage, and studied the lack of remains for a moment. Then, with a shrug, I just turned to John. "Let''s look at your arm armor," I said, wanting to get that done, finally.

    The archer turned to me and nodded, and we went upstairs.

 13. They come and they go

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 14. Life continues apace

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    <hr>

 15. A Demon...?

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 16. Containment, and Goats

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 17. The Peaceful Days Suddenly End

    When another half-day passed without me hearing from my friends, I checked in on them. Since they had been on a quest to find a mithril halberd, I was half expecting them to have already gotten through the dungeon, or whatever, and coming back with the metal in hand to get more armor made.

    The vague sense I got when I sent my mind chasing after Alice was that of a narrow corridor of old and broken bricks--I thought maybe sandstone, but it was hard to tell. Confusingly, though, she was alone, and creeping carefully through the darkness. Instead of pushing her, I backed off and tried to reach Jess.

    She was chained to a wall, alone and unconscious.

    I hissed, wishing I had some way to teleport over there like she did, but backed off and went looking for John. Unsurprisingly, the Phantom Arrow had not been captured, and he was squatting on a high edge deep in a cave, looking intently at something.

    I touched his mind a little more strongly. [ John? ] And then, a second later, [ Talk with your mind. ]

    [ Colin. ] There was only a momentary sense of relief, and I thought that was more because he wasn''t sure what was going on for a moment. [ Got ourselves in a spot of trouble. ]

    [ I noticed. ]

    [ We''ll get out of it, ] he thought at me, with maybe a little defensive edge to it, [ but I wish you were here. Steve and I have to figure out a way through a bunch of traps so we can free Alice and Jessica. ]

    [ Alice is free and sneaking around, ] I offered. [ Jess seems unconscious. ]

    John seemed interested. [ Where is Alice? ]

    How could I possibly answer that? Instead of responding immediately, I tried to meditate on what my bracers could and couldn''t do or tell me, eventually settling on something else. [ Let me see if I can connect the two of you. ]

    That, like so many other things, turned out to be easier than it should have been. Once I touched Alice and gently nudged her to let her know that I was there, I brought together my connection with her and the one with John, then began a third thread to reach Steve, who was pacing behind a large rock, clearly wanting desperately to charge in and be the Hero of the Golden Armory.

    Having the three Heroes in conference seemed to put them all much more at ease, though I found that my own concentration started to be strained.

    [ ...I''m sure that they were both Demons, ] Alice confirmed. [ But a lot of their... minions, I guess, were just bandits. I was able to Turn one of their hearts, but I could feel the Demon noticing, and he was taken away. This whole area is trapped with magic, I think. ]

    [ Maybe that''s why I''m having trouble, ] I offered, [ because this feels like it should be easy, but it''s giving me a headache. ]

    [ Maybe, ] John returned. [ Jessica said something similar. I''m sure she wouldn''t have been captured if she were at her best. ]

    [ Can you tell us where you are? ] Steve''s voice was tense, angry. [ How to get to you? ]

    [ The jail is on the far side of the throne room, and down, ] Alice replied. [ We were taken through a side room and then through a hole someone dug through the walls. There are... a lot of dug holes. I think a monster did it. ]

    [ I''m not afraid of monsters, ] retorted the Hero of the Golden Armory. [ I''m worried about that black power. ]

    That piqued my interest, which I think John noticed, because he shifted his attention to me.

    [ It has to be Demon magic, or even Demon Lord magic, ] he said. [ It''s a nasty black power, greasy and oily. It corrodes metal and cloth on touch, though less so on the armor coated with nylon. We didn''t try it on flesh, or on the Armory''s armor. I can get past it; the Phantom told me, and I have already tried, but I can''t win a fight against all the monsters that are hiding down there, and I''m not sure I can carry everyone else through it. ]

    [ I can fight an army, ] reminded Steve, [ but the Armory warned me about the black power. I can''t just rush through it. ]

    I concentrated on what was interfering with my communications, and I did notice thick black spiderwebs that I''d pried apart when connecting Steve to Alice. I frowned, noting the webs seemed to be trembling, but disconnected that line and tried to hold everything together using John as the center.

    [ I think my link was running into some of that black power, ] I agreed. [ They might know we''re talking, and they might be able to find Alice, or Steve, since the link was between them. ]

    [ Shit. ] I dimly sensed John and Steve doing something physically in response to the bad news, but didn''t focus on it. [ Okay. New plan; Steve and I are going to rush in. Alice, be careful. Colin, do whatever you can to keep us connected, okay? ]

    I completely recognized that this might be a difficult proposition, but sent an assent, while also standing and moving towards my basement, trying to split my concentration as best I could. [ If you can get Jess up, I can work the teleport beacon on this end, but I can''t pull you through on my own. ]

    [ Got it. ] The three signals faded, as each of them began focusing on the real world instead of the link. I took the opportunity to rush to the basement, ignoring Carli, who had somehow found me and seemed to be looking on in concern. Once I was down to the teleport circle, I sat down, and began to focus once more on Jess, then--once I had all four technically connected to me--I focused as intently as I could on the link itself, searching for signs of the black spiderwebs.

    The area around Jess was full of them, of course, though they weren''t touching me and I couldn''t get any . Alice''s corridor had none, and Steve and John were still getting into position. The more I focused on the links, the more I could sense relative position; it was hard, given the distance, but I felt that Alice and Jess were close. [ Can you get to her? ] I pushed at Alice, quietly.

    [ Haven''t found her, ] Alice replied. [ But she has to be close. ]

    [ There are a lot of those black strings where she is, ] I warned. [ The first thing you''ll want to do when you get there is burn them away, or you might get caught. ]

    [ I learned that lesson already. ] Alice''s mental voice had an edge, but I just nodded.

    [ Just making sure, ] I replied, civilly, then backed off. I wanted desperately to help, but what could I do at this range? I tried to split between holding open the connections and meditating on the Bracers, to see if they had any further insight, but I knew that I wouldn''t realistically be able to do anything to support them.

    Soon enough, I felt the first trembles of combat, as Steve and John ran into a trap they couldn''t sneak past. I didn''t get a good look, but the fight that followed seemed like a bunch of bugs and animals got dumped on them. They cleaned house quickly, but the black tendrils around them soaked up something that came off of their artifacts, probably some kind of divine mana or whatever. I tried to study where the energy was going, but at a distance, it was hard.

    Their encounter did pull the rest of the... dungeon? Castle? Whatever''s attention to them, and only a few moments after the combat died down, Alice found Jessica, and with a flash of purification power, burned away the webs in the room.

    I took that opportunity to reach out to Jess, who started waking up slowly, then snapped back to consciousness all at once with a mental yell that made me--and the other heroes a moment later--all flinch.

    [ Gaah! ] John was the only one who thought to reply over the link instead of complaining out loud. [ Quieter, Jess! Please! ]

    [ John? Colin! Steve! ... webs and ... ] Jessica seemed to be woozily switching between talking out loud and communicating mentally.

    [ Once everyone''s together, can you teleport here? ] I tried to cut through the haze with a kind of magically-enforced calm as I spoke through the link, and I could feel a slight chill spreading, one that brought the feverish panic of the rest down, slightly.

    [ We''re not leaving. ] I was mostly surprised--though maybe I shouldn''t have been--when Steve spoke up, his voice echoing slightly in the mental space with a hint of the Armory''s influence. [ You need to find a way to bring Colin here. ]

    That sounded like a bad idea, for several reasons--not least that I wouldn''t be able to return, since the teleport anchor on this end wouldn''t be powered if I wasn''t here. Even if I wanted to scramble and link it up with a mana crystal, or something, I wasn''t sure how to do that and still provide the teleporter key.

    All I really managed to put into words, though, was, [ But...? ]

    [ You can return at any time, ] Steve said, the gold power behind his words firmer than his own convictions. [ You have ''A Creature Familiar''. ]

    I blinked, understanding his meaning immediately. [ Okay, maybe I can get back. But why force it now? ]

    [ I can feel it. ] Steve''s voice lost the slight echo of golden power. [ I think we all can. This... This is a place where a Demon General is to be born. ]

    There was a sudden silence from them all, a silence that I... I admit, it felt almost itchy. Like there was something to what he said that I ought to know, but which the Bracers were unwilling to tell me. It was something that I knew I needed to know, but... I couldn''t learn it sitting here and waiting for them.

    The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

    [ Fine, ] I said, clearing everything from my mind and trying to grasp the power of the Bracers of Jade Will firmly. [ Anytime. ]

    It took Jess a few moments to gather up the concentration to teleport me... but only a few moments. I could feel the moment she slammed her Staff of the Diamond Mind into the ground, and it was like an infinitely long worm reached out from her to me, passing through who knows how many miles of dirt, sand, and rock. When that worm''s gaping maw passed through me, I was already there.

    In a sad, decrepit stone-walled dungeon, its walls lined with filth and the air thick with fungus. The contrast between this place and my home irritated me, and I flexed the Bracers, pushing back everything and replacing the room with a sterile stone box filled with clean air.

    A moment later, Jess had teleported Steve and John from nearby into the room, and I let go of the psychic threads that had kept us all in contact at a distance.

    "Oh, that smells better," said Alice, her voice still too preoccupied with worried to sound really appreciative. For my part, I didn''t care.

    John immediately turned and looked at me, nodding meaningfully, then faded away with the power of the Phantom Arrow, disappearing from the room. Grudgingly, I reconnected us all with the telepathic links, noticing immediately that since we were closer, the link seemed to tear through the black threads of demon magic without trouble.

    That was only half the trouble, of course.

    [ The black threads can''t weaken the link anymore, ] I told John, [ But I bet for sure they could use it to track you. Should I...? ]

    [ This won''t take long, with all of us here, ] John replied. [ I know about where they are, and we''re coming to them, don''t forget. ]

    Again, something itched at me. I turned to look at Steve, noting that his face was sterner than usual. Jess looked worried, and Alice was staring at me, as though there was something that I ought to know, or be doing. But... I shook my head. "As soon as we know where to go, I can make a passage there," I said. "But I don''t know what I''m doing."

    "All the more reason we need to do things like this," Steve said, but to my surprise, there was no accusation to his tone. "Whatever happens, it''s going to take all five of us to win this fight."

    I frowned, looking at the three of them. Alice was now looking at Jess, worried, and Steve had closed his eyes, and was kneeling down, his face in intense concentration.

    [ I found it, ] John''s voice reached me. [ Join me here. ]

    I didn''t have any kind of psychic map of the whole place, but I could point a finger at John''s position reliably, so I just created a tunnel edged in clean stone straight from us to him. From the moment it started forming, Steve was charging down the hallway, an intensity to the golden weapon in his hand that made me nervous. Jess raised her staff slightly, and it reshaped into a much shorter rod even as she and Alice suddenly were glowing and hovering slightly. They charged down the hallway after Steve, and I, having finished in but a few moments, brought up the rear.

    What we found at the end of the tunnel was terrifying.

    We were underground still; I really didn''t understand where we were, but it was some kind of basement to some kind of castle, from everything I could tell, and that basement bordered on a network of underground caves. The room John found was a stone-brick room with a half-height wall looking down on a much larger natural cavern, in which an enormous golem was perched and waiting.

    This we knew; Alice had told me, when I checked in on her earlier, that they were hunting a mithril halberd in an armory protected by a ''Grand Golem'', which must be this. What we were not expecting, though, were the legion of undead surrounding the golem, along with seven bodies laid out in a series of bloody heptagrams on the floor--each body within one rune, which pulsed and poured out black-speckled magical fog that filled the low-laying caverns and seeped down and beyond our sight. The seven heptagrams themselves formed a larger heptagram, with the Golem at its center, but the lines that formed that larger circle were incomplete, and they showed no signs of growing, as though they awaited some final sacrifice.

    The undead were mostly wraith-like forms that seemed to rise up from the seven heptagrams, though those wraiths were transforming. Some of them seemed to suddenly convert into a zombie, skeleton, or shambling abomination mid-flight, splatting on the ground and then rising again moments later. Other wraiths dove into the floors while still ethereal and rose again as small stone or mud golems, while others disappeared into other things on the battlefield--the small golems, other undead, each other, or the Grand Golem itself. Where they vanished into something small, I got the impression they joined their powers to it, making it stronger, if only a little at a time.

    The Golem, of course, was clearly a great magical working, and from what I could tell, it wasn''t the sacrifice the great array was waiting for; if anything, it was absorbing a lot of that evil energy, plus a large number of wraiths, in order to wake up from decades or centuries of sleep, its form warping slightly as it did so. I noticed after a moment of study that all of the smaller golems that were being raised were also gathering at the thing''s feet, and at least one jumped onto it as through trying to merge with it, though I saw no sign it succeeded. Either way... it clearly looked like the upcoming fight was going to revolve around that thing.

    "Well," John said quietly, gesturing to the corpses making up the evil array, but keeping his tone as light as he could, "at least we don''t have to worry about the bandits."

    Instead of answering, Steve just looked to Alice, who was staring at the whole scene with a strange look of finality written across her features. "How much of that magic circle can you disrupt?"

    Still, she shifted her gaze to the Hero of the Golden Armory without hesitation, and spoke clearly. "I could resist it forever," she said, "but as long as the demons that produced it are alive, I can''t erase it. They are portals to... to the underworld, I suppose. Until the demons die, we don''t win."

    Steve just nodded, looking to everyone. "This has to be how it goes. Alice gums up the working, Jess is with her doing ranged offense. Colin, you keep them safe, and I take center stage and attract the attention. John, you find the demons and do whatever you have to do, to flush them out where we can finish them."

    "Sounds like a plan," John said, with more optimism to his voice than any of this deserved, and he faded away, already moving.

    The two casters looked to me. "Cannon ball?" asked Alice, and I just raised my eyebrows, but shrugged. Alice flicked her staff back and forth, and I felt several defensive spells wind around us, and then I grabbed all four of us with the Bracers'' power and flung us up into the air, then again, straight down into the center of the array.

    Before we even landed, Steve managed to push off of the power--to my surprise, but clearly with the Bracer''s permission--and leap into the fray, the Armory becoming a golden sword so massive that it defied physics and good sense. It reminded me of several different fictional swords from various media that were greater-than-man-sized simply to represent the otherworldly, overwhelming strength of a character; for my part, though, I could tell that his physical strength meant nothing. It was all the power of the Golden Armory, and it was every bit as overpowered as the Bracers were, just in its own way.

    As we landed a ways away from the Grand Golem''s massive feet, the creation stretching at least five stories high above us, Steve''s massive golden sword hit the side of the working''s head with enough force to have knocked my tower into the air--it might have even sent that tower a fair distance, depending on the angle and how much my creation broke up from the impact. The sheer physical impact resonated through all of our artifacts and all of our bones, and I felt a surge of raw sound energy disturbing the black energy fog that coated the area around us.

    The golem''s head was moved slightly to the side, and then, with a certain macabre fascination, I watched the thing turn its head to look at Steve, as though only just now registering that the man was there.

    As I caught us safely on the ground, a necklace on Alice''s neck expanded into the full original form of the Orb of Purifying Light, which raised into the air above us and then suddenly went off like a nuclear blast. It was palpable; one minute the battlefield was one way, and then the next, there was the certainty of death, as every wraith within sight was obliterated, and every embodied undead was reduced to rapidly decaying crumbles of bone dust, all in a single pulse of unfathomably intense light. The smaller stone golems melted, but seemed to resist being completely obliterated, and they turned to look at us with a clear failure to understand.

    Jess''s staff reshaped once more, this time into a wand, and she raised it like a conductor''s baton, tapping it three times on nothing, then gestured with it and her off-hand together. Above her, a shining light appeared, turning into a large ball of burning, roiling plasma, which reshaped itself into a spear ten feet long and a good two inches thick, and with a gesture, it launched itself straight through the golem''s chest and out the other side.

    All of which did about as much to the Grand Golem as Steve''s broadsword broadside had done--which is to say, it got the Golem''s attention and confirmed that we were it''s enemies, and little else.

    All of a sudden, I felt something strange coming at us, and Fabricated a stone wall in plenty of time for something large to burrow through the ground like a gunshot, popping up into the air and aiming straight at us like a big, fuzzy bullet. It didn''t exactly splat on the wall, but I got a sense of impact, as though my bracers were still reinforcing it, and that was the only reason why it had not dug through my stone wall as easily as the stone of the cavern.

    I reshaped the wall to have a look at it, and found that it was a giant mole--large enough to have left a man-sized hallway through the rock behind it. Its coloration wasn''t the severe red-and-black of the Demon Fox and Demon Mouse, but it was reminiscent; large swaths of its fur were dark gray with black spots, or amber with blood-red spots. This, I figured instantly, had to be a child of a demon mole and regular moles, and I grimaced, realizing that it must have grown exceptionally quickly, and that if that demon fox had left behind any offspring...

    Well, this was no time to worry about that.

    The mole was a bit confused, and it squealed in protest, but it didn''t seem to really know how to react to a stone wall it couldn''t immediately penetrate. So, feeling no pity, I Fabricated a giant stone fist above its head and telekinetically smashed down. That... wasn''t enough to kill it outright, but I formed another stone fist, mirror to the first, and caught the beast between the two of them, and that was enough.

    Then I caught the trembling of the floor as two more launched out of nearby walls at the spellcasters behind me.

    They were fast, but since I already had the two giant stone fists under my control, I simply gave the two flying moles one uppercut each. One smashed into the Grand Golem, and to my surprise chipped a bit out of its chest, while the other slammed awkwardly into a stalactite and let out a terrified squeal.

    I drew back the stone fists, unsure how to finish them, but Jess managed to toss another plasma lance through the one by the Grand Golem while it was still in midair, cutting another chunk of the construct''s body away at the same time, while a phantom arrow from seemingly nowhere got the one by the ceiling.

    So I drew the fists back the rest of the way, keeping my concentration on searching for more. Behind and above me, there was another devastating impact as the Golden Armory and the Grand Golem collided, and this time, I felt and sensed the golem forced back a full step. I glanced at it for a moment, watching Jess twist her wand with smooth and purposeful motions, and giant plasma blades flashed out at its limbs, as though to simply cut it down to a useless torso.

    The blades passed clean through the stone--in some places. In others, a black metal frame underneath it was revealed, one sturdy enough that the plasma blades simply were not enough. I nodded to myself, then tore my attention away. It would be too easy to gawk; every last one of us was incredibly powerful.

    Which is, of course, when the battle took another turn.

    I suddenly turned to look, without quite knowing why, at a nearby ledge, to find that standing up on top of it were two creatures in the distinct black-and-red of full-blood demons. As I had started to expect, one of them was a mole, though regular sized and not at all like the giant ones I''d killed. It was standing on its hind legs and raising its forelegs into the air, chittering with delight or simple battle mania.

    And beside it, looking as distinctly unimpressed as its species was wont to, was... a Demonic Duck, of some sort. It was looking at me. I looked back, confused.

    And then the Mole''s mental voice rocked the cavern, amplified by the seven sacrificed bandits, the blood runes around them, and the hell-portals they had spawned. It was shrill, twisted, and oh so gleeful.

    { WHAT UP, BITCHEEEEEES! }

 18. Then, all of a sudden...

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