《The Ingress Estate》


 Ch 1. Beginning

    Wind swept down the hillside, bringing a momentary reprieve from the smell of blood, bile, and burnt flesh rising from the small valley below. A man stood at the crest of the hill, looking down, his cloak billowing around bloodstained gambeson and armored skirts. He held his helmet in one hand, a broken haft in the other, gray eyes surveying the scene before him, shoulder-length hair swaying slightly in the wind.


    The bodies were densely packed, like the valley was filled with rocks of black and gray and red, with the occasional flashes of tan; strips of orange and gray cloth, where officers or maybe flagbearers lay. The black roiled from time to time, as flies were disturbed. There were birds, as well, hopping around, searching for unarmored flesh to feast upon.


    There was a denser piles, a line of bodies where the initial charge had met, where spears lay at haphazard angles, thickets of iron-tipped grass growing towards the sun, and his eyes paused on these.


    Up the far end of the opposing hill, the bodies were more scattered, interspersed with green grass, mostly facedown, where the lines had broken and men and women had run, slaughtered in their retreat. He focused on the crest of that hill. Birds were still descending in that direction, for miles. The trail of death was both thinner, and far greater in scope than the spectacle below.


    His hand tightened on the haft in his hand, and then it fell, rolling down the hill a few feet until the angle brought it perpendicular to him. The helmet was tossed after it. The man''s eyes turned down to his bloodstained armor, and he pulled the gambeson free, and it joined the helmet, his bare chest a dozen shades of purple and blue. He unstrapped the skirt, and it fell noisily atop the gambeson, leaving him in what had once been a white breechcloth, now streaked with brown and red, new blood and old.


    Gray eyes flicked between the gear now laying on the ground, the blue and green silk armband still tied to the gambeson, streaked in blood, wavering in the breeze, and the field of the dead.  The man shook his head slowly, just standing atop the hill, watching the flies settle and swarm, and settle and swarm again, the buzzing joining the cries of birds and the wind, the sounds familiar to every battlefield, only the cries of wounded missing.  He''d survived.  Again.


    The sun moved down the sky, behind the next hill over, one still body among many, but the last to see the light.  The man turned and started walking, directly away from the battle. The croaks of birds and the buzzing of flies followed only a short distance, before disappearing behind him.


    Lira Bai won her empire, unifying the seven central kingdoms of Arne. Her two sons became kings in turn; Den, the king of the North, and Anir, the king of the South. Of the other six kings and queens, Shin Are fled to the northern wastes; Dei Atwen was slain in battle, Fier Atwen was captured, Mien Atwen chose to marry Anir rather than lose everything, and Wiers Atwen left as a political refugee for the eastern isles. Lenne Bai, Lira''s cousin, now ruled a city-state in the northeast, nominally independent.


    Empress Lira turned from consolidation to developing trade routes with the south and west; the southern desert isthmus became a place of merchants and travel.  Shiran, the western continent, already had its own empire, and the pirates of the West Sea became traders, which had suddenly become a far safer occupation.


    Jonathon Eucole, once a soldier in Shin Are''s employ, didn''t care anymore as news filtered to him; he had seen the ideals of kings, and what was left of them on the battlefield. He had left the battles behind him, traveling to the monastic scholars of the Three Isles, on the southwestern border of the empire.


    He found he didn''t fit in, exactly. He was a little too old, at in his late thirties now, and his focus on rituals and artifactuary lore was somewhat outside the norm. The predominant focus of the scholars was research into invocation, which didn''t interest him much, and the development of a new and modern school of magic, selenomancy, which interested him even less, save for the art of shadow walking, which he learned, albeit without much talent for it.


    He made a friend while he was there, a precocious young lad with a talent for grasping invocations.  They didn''t share interests, but they did share enthusiasm for their respective projects, and brought interesting tidbits and new books in their respective fields of study.


    Things got a bit ... odd. Jonathon guessed an invocation had gone horribly wrong and the boy got touched in the head; it wasn''t uncommon. Invocation was borrowed power, and there was always a price from the person or entity which lent it.  Sometimes you paid twice; some damn fool had tried out an invocation which summoned a lake, at the cost of some vitality.  The vitality wasn''t a terrible price, but it summoned the lake on top of the poor invocationalist, who barely survived the experience.  Vitality, such as it was, was cheap; sanity was not.


    The boy disappeared, a year after ... well, John wasn''t entirely dissatisfied that the poor lad had probably died. Some things shouldn''t be survived, and the kinds of things invocation could do to a person fell into that category.


    Damned fools. John stayed another couple of years after the boy''s disappearance, before a series of deaths changed his mind on the matter, and he departed. They just wouldn''t stop opening old books and speaking words of power to see what happened, and he didn''t want to see any more of it. The little bit of research into artifice and arcana he got done in the last couple of months didn''t offset what he saw happening.


    He traveled north from the Three Isles, with some moderate talent for bending space, which permitted him to evade the local creatures.


    And when flight finally failed him, he used his hands.  That had been an interesting fight; his rusty medical skills helped him to bandage his wounds after, as it had gone rather badly for him.  He wasn''t entirely dissatisfied with the results, however.  Nothing on what he once had been able to do with a halberd, but he didn''t actually have a halberd on him, and he was never without his fists and feet.


    He had stripped away all his dependencies, and while he would never be a match to the warrior he had been before, he was now without the baggage, both literal and figurative, that had come with that life.  No halberd, no heavy plate weighing him down.  He was, in fact, surprised to discover he enjoyed walking, without the burden of his old kit, and a newfound attitude lightening him on his feet.


    He kept moving, journeying east, into the great southern forests of Arne. Empress Lira died; war spread, and ended again, as Emperor Shy rose to power. It made little difference to John, the wars never reached this far from the capital. He worked odd jobs to feed himself, the passion and ambition of youth left behind in a battle that nobody remembered, between two kings who nobody followed.


    His aimlessness ended in those forests.


    "Turn it over and we''ll leave you in peace, else you''ll end in pieces!" Three men and four women, armed and armored in a motley assortment, confronted a single man dressed in spun silver, wielding a staff of silver capped in glimmering crystal; opal, if John didn''t miss his guess.


    The singular man confronting them was tall, and powerfully built; he didn''t respond, only slowly spun the staff, retreating before the seven confronting him. Long gray hair fell loosely from the cowl hiding the upper portion of his face; his mouth was pressed into a firm line, displeased.


    "I''ll do nothing of the sort. Depart, rogues, or you shall - " without finishing his sentence, the man released the staff with one hand, his other gesturing towards the nearest opponent, a woman wielding two daggers; she jerked, red fire racing across her body. Arcs of black lightning immediately followed. She jerked, falling to a knee.


    John moved more completely behind the tree he was observing from, until only one eye observed the arrows flashing towards the man, embedding themselves into his chest. He barely reacted, turning instead to the next closest person, who collapsed screaming, the red flames and black lightning enveloping her in turn.


    Three more arrows struck the man, and he showed as little reaction to these. The woman struck first fell to the ground in turn, the smell of burned flesh rising from her. A man raced forward, raising a sword; the gray-haired man touched him, and stepped backwards as the sword fell where his shoulder had been.


    The second target of the red and black stopped twitching, and the black lightning faded, although the flames continued burning.  Three more arrows struck, and the man with the sword jerked, started to take another step forward, and then collapsed to the ground, eyes staring blankly.


    The staff of the man in silver swung in a wide arc, hitting a woman in the chest; a flash of purple light sprayed forward, and her chest was gone, as well as half the head of the archer standing next to her. Two more arrows struck the man, his chest now a field of feathers and wood. His next swing missed as he staggered, falling to a knee; two more arrows struck him.


    John moved forward, then, with a sudden inspiration that the strange man shouldn''t die here. The world went gray as he stepped through shadow, moving through the tree directly towards the nearest archer, dashing back into reality with a punch that caught the woman in the square of the back. Bones broke beneath his fist, and she slumped wordlessly forward.  A splash of gray, and he spun into the last archer, the few feet turning into momentum that brought his elbow crashing into the man''s temple with a crunch and a spray of blood.


    John surveyed the skirmish quickly; two bodies, no longer burning, clearly dead. The woman with the missing torso was also dead, transparently so, as was the man whose head has been splashed with the violet light. The man with the sword, John wasn''t certain of, but the two he had struck would never be getting up again.  Right.  John checked the man with the sword first; no pulse. He then moved to the silver-garbed man, who was kneeling, panting heavily with a liquid sound, blood dribbling from the arrows pincushioning his chest.


    John fell to his ass and sat back against his arms, feeling a little dazed, watching the man cough, blood splattering the ground. Well. Shit.  John, of course, had survived.  He couldn''t say the same about the man.


    "I''m Jonathon. Sorry about your situation, doesn''t look like I can do anything about it." The man spat out another mouthful of blood, and looked up, grimacing.


    "Well met," the man coughed and spat again, "Jonathon. Worse than it looks, the arrows were both barbed and poisoned. Leonard." Leonard looked over the seven bodies, scowling slightly. "Not their poison, they''re shit. Somebody made it for them. Should''ve taken viviomancy, I guess." His half-obscured face turned back to John, and he struggled for a moment to raise a hand. "Enchanter."The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    John took the hand. "Initiate." The enchanter laughed at that, pulling himself back to a seated position.


    "Pity, could have used a good alchemist." John smiled at the man, who was now alternating between coughing and laughing, the tones somewhat bitter.


    "Alas, but I used to be a soldier."


    "Man of peace now, are you?" Leonard glanced over at the two archers. "Well, maybe not, although can''t say I''m not grateful. I''d rather that lot be dead." He pulled back the spun silver cowl, letting it fall over his shoulders; his eyes were nearly the same shade as the metal. "For spite if nothing else. Kill me, will you, you damned thieving bastards!" The last was raised in a near-shout, and he fell into another coughing fit. John simply watched him.


    "Any last wishes? Messages I can deliver? I''m not going to lug your carcass across the country, but would you prefer a fire or a burial here?" Leonard''s mouth pulled into a scowl, which turned into another bitter chuckle.


    "Fire''s fine. No next of kin, not that I care about. Huh. Initiate." The man looked up to the sun filtering through the branches above. "Veteran, though.  You have anywhere to be for the next decade?"


    John blinked at that. "Decade? I ... well. I suppose not. Not going to promise anything about that, though, that''s a long time." Leonard just smiled.


    "In that case, just take my gear, and follow the map." The man spat. "Ah. Lord Tenash take my soul, praise the Pantheon."


    Eight bodies burned, lighting up the darkness of the forest, shadows dancing. John didn''t pay them much mind, looking at the small pile of equipment in front of him.


    A spun silver cowl; the fabric, fine silver threads, as smooth as silk; it was not armor, the threads too fine to offer any protection. The Grim Mark it was enchanted with improved the ability to hide, which wasn''t of much use to John. He set it aside.


    A spun silver cloak; a Spirit Mark on this, which offered some protection against spellwork. Somewhat more useful, although perhaps a few years too late. This joined the cowl.


    A sword, a cudgel, a dozen knives, and four bows were placed in another pile. Two packs full of an assortment of basic gear and rations joined the cowl and cloak. The poisons joined the weapons. The map, from Leonard''s pack, he set aside from everything else.


    A silver ring. Leonard was fond of silver. It had a Glow enchantment; a useful bit of gear, it offered light in the darkness. Like the others, it was a permanent enchantment, which was rather unusual for Glow; few would spend their soul for such an effect. This joined the silver pile.


    The staff, also silver; it was capped in grown opal, not altogether that unusual a choice. The Energy Sigil it was enchanted with wasn''t, either, the effect which had killed two of the thieves. John hesitated on this weapon - he had no expertise with a staff, and his well-instilled training with a halberd might get him killed if he forgot what he was holding in the heat of a fight - but the enchantment was quite potent. Ultimately it joined the rest of the silver, in indecision.


    And finally a ... now that was interesting. Mythril? An unusual choice for a collar.  Maybe a gorget? He lifted it up, examining it. No, a collar, although it would offer some protection. Enchanted with a Mage''s Mark, and a powerful one. This, with reluctance, joined the pile of silver; he could melt it down if nothing else. The Mage''s Mark was concerning, if it wasn''t Leonard''s, for he had been wearing it - somebody might be tracking it.  And it was powerful to his limited mana senses.


    Leonard had been wearing some other spun silver, but it was unenchanted, and his clothing, besides; not quite valuable enough to temp John to wear a dead man''s clothes.  The garments had gone into the pyre with the man, as had the bandits'' clothing, including the spares that had been in their two packs.


    He put on the equipment, including after some hesitation the collar - it offered some protection, and the Mage''s Mark didn''t care if it was in his pack or not. The staff he picked up, and the rest of the equipment joined the pyre. He pulled the map out of the pocket sewn into the cloak, and examined it in the light of the fire. The destination was clear, a slightly lighter shade of ink. East.


    John folded the map, looked up at the stars - found them hidden behind the canopy. Right. Forest. Shaking his head, he sat back down, watching the fire slowly fade. Morning, then.


    The ground wasn''t comfortable, but at least it was early summer, and the night didn''t bite deeply. He made a pillow of his pack, and closed his eyes, drifting off.


    Morning was unpleasant, as he was awoken by a sharp pain in his foot. He sat up, examining the small jade hunter gnawing on his left shoe. He kicked the small green boar off of his foot, looking to the pair that were chewing on the bones of the pyre.


    John briefly debated killing the trio, but skinning and dressing sounded like more effort than he cared to invest. Sighing, he finished standing, checked the direction of the sun, and set off to the east. He felt a slight mental strain - not quite a headache, not quite pain indeed, more like pieces of his mind weren''t quite attached anymore, a sense of fragmentation. He started walking; it had been a while since he''d felt Potential settle on him like that.


    The map was familiar. The forests of Arde through which he traveled formed a cross shape across the land mass of the north, with mountains forming a crescent to the north, and marshes filling the southwest. The southeast was plains and farms, dotted with villages. Arde itself sat nearly in the middle. The isthmus connecting to the south was barely represented, with a handful of cities dotting the hills and mountains which bordered the great isthmus desert. The northeast was the independent city-state of Reln, floodlands where the great Arde river met the ocean. It had been Empress Lira''s home province.


    He was headed to the province of Errile, and his destination was a small village just south of the city of Errile, circled in a lighter shade of ink, the slight difference in the ink''s reflectivity less visible in daylight than firelight. It wasn''t far, as he was in the eastern edge of the province of Jorga, central to the southern cross of the forests; Errile straddled the forests and the plains, the city itself situated at the border.


    John guessed it would be a week''s travel, at least if he could find the damned road. He had avoided the road, both because he hadn''t been going anywhere in particular and roads tended to go somewhere particular, and also because of the risk of bandits.  He practiced moving through the gray world of the shadows as he moved, but didn''t get much better at the art; it was useful for short distances, but not a lot else.


    On the second day he encountered a herd of elk, their blue pelt glinting in the sunlight. They stood out in the forest, but he knew from personal experience they had something like shadow walking themselves, vanishing from one place and appearing in another, when fully grown. They had other defenses, as well.


    He heard the screech before he saw the beast, halting, hand tightening on the staff, quickly scanning the forest floor. Nothing. Only after checking the ground did he scan the trees - some pack ambushers would climb a tree and make a sound, distracting from the rest of the pack. There. Fifty yards southeast, halfway up a tree.


    The wyvern was one of the smaller sorts, in total about the size of a human torso, its wings looking like a tattered cotton sheet. Clothwing. Shit. He kept scanning for the rest of the pack. Two more held onto other trees, looking his way. Maybe more he couldn''t see. They knew he was here.


    He moved to a tree, placing it behind him, watching the wyverns; he didn''t want to get behind it, as they might have more of their pack behind him, attacking while he was distracted. They didn''t move yet. He leaned to the left, scanning behind him and up. Nothing. He repeated the motion to his right. Yep. Two more, one hanging to the side of a tree trunk, the other on a large branch, their gray scales glittering as wind swayed the leaves above them, moving the light across.


    Five. That was ... too many, really. John breathed out, relaxing into a fighting posture. Breathe in. Breathe out. One of the wyverns dropped from its perch on a trunk ahead of him, tattered wings spreading and swinging it from a drop into a dive straight at him. Breathe in. Breathe out. Smoke poured out of its pointed snout, followed by fire. The staff fell from his hands.


    Swing. Crunch. Breathe in. Breathe out. The staff hit the ground an instant before the wyvern did, flames licking over John''s torso for an instant, a hot breeze. Breathe in, breathe out; a sound from the side, a pivot, forearm shoving the wyvern''s flight straight into the tree next to him with a meaty noise. Another wave of fire.  He moved through it quickly, holding his breath.


    The third wyvern struck him from the side, talons raking across his shoulders and back. A flash of pain. Another shadow passed above him, his scalp stinging. His fist caught the fifth, boiling-hot blood and fire combining in a spray across his face, forcing his eyes shut. Pain and darkness.


    Another sharp pain, now in his side; a cry from his left. John took a single step through gray shadow to the side, a momentary respite before reality returned, the sparks on his clothing suffocated before it could begin. Sight; he searched quickly for the two remaining wyverns. He saw one, but not the other, almost as soon as it saw him, the flutter of wind over cloth rising as it dove again. A spin to the side, the back of his hand narrowly missing, a fluttering as the second wyvern flashed past where he had been, the two crossing in the air.


    John moved back against the trunk of a tree, eyes flicking to either side as his foes swooped around for another dive, one from the left, and one from the right. A second passed, and then he ducked forward, the heel of his foot rising as he fell forward onto his hands, shoving the flight of one wyvern into another. A crack, as they collided, and he stood up again, his foot smashing down into the entangled pair with all his weight with an unpleasant grinding, snapping sound.


    A huff, a snarling whine, and then silence. And then blood reached his left eye from his torn scalp, forcing it shut. John took a few steps, and then collapsed heavily against a tree, surveying the scene with one eye. At least it was too wet for the wyvern flames to catch. His hands started shaking, the adrenaline losing its outlet, and he pressed them to his knees, bowing his head forward to rest on them. He''d survived again.


    It was only as he sat there that he remembered that he knew the use of simple magical projectiles, aether arrows. He had yet to use the damned things in a fight, and they were not instinctual. John broke out in something between cursing and laughter.


    He followed the terrain down a slight slope until he encountered a stream, and used his ladle to fill his stew pot, which he set over a quickly-started fire using supplies from his pack, mainly a log of compressed kindling which would burn for a couple of hours. When the water was brought to a boil, he pulled it off, and wet some cloth, beginning the process of cleaning the wounds, a deliberate, slow, and painful process. No deep burns, thankfully, but he''d have some new scars.


    Strictly speaking, he had some immunity to poisons and diseases, which meant he didn''t need to be so thorough, but he didn''t entirely trust the devotions of the pantheon. His years as a soldier had instilled in him a distrust of wounds; more men died in the week or two after a battle than during it. Usually.


    His medical equipment contained some broad leaves with antiseptic properties, packed in bladders full of brine to keep them moist and fresh, which he bound over the wounds with more strips of cloth. A sharp pain flared as the salty water met flesh, and then subsided to a low ache.


    His attention turned to the cowl and cloak, both of which now sported a few tears. John washed the blood out in the still hot water of his stew pot - it washed out of the metal quite easily, to his surprise - and hung them from a branch to dry.


    His robes, gray silk, were somewhat harder to clean, and would probably bear a stain. He hung them up as well, and leaned against the tree to wait, the wind cool as it blew over his flesh. John remembered a day when he would have been embarrassed to be naked outside, for fear that somebody might spy upon him - years of campaigning had erased that. There were far worse things than to be seen nude, and the weather was pleasant, at least. He looked up to the canopy above, admiring the brilliant shades of green, like a field of sparkling emeralds in the light.


    The sparkling light faded to a darker green, and then darkness.  His robes were still wet, but the cloak and cowl had dried; he put these on, pushed leaves together into a pile, and, wrapping the silver cloak about himself to form a barrier against the scratchy leaves, knelt and laid upon the pile.


    He slept.


    He dressed himself in the morning, changed the bandage out for a fresh set of the brined leaves, and, collecting his stew pot and ladle back into his pack, set off again towards the rising sun. It was an hour later that a shout caught his attention.


    The man was dressed in - well, spun silver, again. This man wore a shirt and coat, and long pleated skirts in the Errile fashion, all of the elegant material. He walked with a slight limp, helped by a silver cane tipped in grown opal, which glittered in the light.


    The man was older, perhaps in his late sixties, with thin gray hair cropped short, a mustache of a lighter shade of gray. His cheeks were shaven, but a beard descended his chin down to his chest. Bushy silver eyebrows rose when he caught sight of John, and he halted.


    "Where is Leonard?" A baritone voice, scratched with age.

 Ch 2. The Manor

    "Dead. Bandits."  John surprised himself by speaking, and stopped himself short of giving a debriefing, feeling the words already spooling themselves up in his mind.  He let them fall away.


    His eyes stayed on the old man, ready to drop the staff and leap backwards into a shadow walk if he made any motions. It must be his Mage Mark on the collar, and if his arcana skill dedications didn''t lie about the strength of the spell, this man was somebody to reckon with. He''d been a soldier long enough to have learned that you didn''t get to be a soldier long if you underestimated magic.


    The old man, however, simply looked west and nodded, his face, like a landslide, collapsing into wrinkles. A frown that encompassed the entire face, Jonathon was impressed.


    "Figures. You have his gear, so I assume he succeeded, at least. Follow me." The man turned, then halted, shaking his head, and turned back around, bowing slightly. "Zyet, Sage."


    John returned the slight bow, which encompassed only the barest incline at the waist, going no deeper. He didn''t know who this man was, or what this was about. "Jonathon, Initiate." A Sage. Interesting.


    Sages had many dedications of lore, which, if it pleased Tenash, lord of knowledge, would grant inspirations of knowledge, key bits of insight into their specific expertise.  Sages were also granted an innate ability to use their souls directly in an attack, bypassing the need for spells. Jonathon''s own innate magical resistance would offer some limited protection against it, but it likely wouldn''t end in his favor. He was inclined not to offend this man, and had a momentary regret for not bowing perhaps a little bit deeper.


    Zyet didn''t appear to notice or mind, simply nodding, and spinning in place to limp back away. Jonathon hesitated before following. He had nowhere else to be, and this man seemed to know what he was doing here, which was more than Jonathon could say about himself.


    The trip was short, the forest abruptly going dark, as they met the treeline and the much denser brush that grew in the line of light, and then, shoving through the briars, open air. The damned road which Jonathon had been looking for.


    A carriage was waiting, no horses to be seen. With a Sage, no surprise; he could likely outpace them with spells to manipulate gravity or create impulses of force. A Mage''s Mark wasn''t unique to the Focal school, most schools of magic had some way to create one, but the particular characteristics of the Mage''s Mark on the mythril collar heavily suggested Focal magic.


    Jonathon went through a mental inventory of the few Focal spells he could remember. Telekinesis? No, didn''t work on heavy objects. Crush might be employed that way through artifice, but unlikely, the carriage wasn''t heavy enough.


    Could the man have been made enough to grant the carriage sapience? Zyet motioned for him to get in, and Jonathon did; all the other Focal spells he could remember at the moment wouldn''t work on an inanimate object, most of them using sympathetic links of one kind or another to influence other living things at a distance.


    Jonathon had barely noticed the exterior of the carriage as he had gotten in, too caught up in the absence of horses; the interior of the carriage, however, got his attention. The floor was smooth and black; the sound of his footsteps on it made it clear it was wood, but he couldn''t identify where one plank began or ended. The benches on either side of the carriage rose abruptly from the floor, a sharp ninety degree angle, and then another sharp ninety degree angle from that. Also black, also smooth, no seams to be seen.


    The benches met the front and back of the carriage in another square corner. The front and back walls were flat, black, and smooth, rising to the ceiling. Also black, flat, and smooth.  The far side of the carriage was also, no windows to be seen. He stepped into what would be, except the benches on either side, a midnight black cube. He turned, blinking at the door that Zyet closed in his face. Hadn''t he seen windows on the outside - but no, it was also flat and black, and as the door closed, the light winked out.


    Jonathon felt along the wall of the door that had just been closed. No handle, no seams. He had barely finished searched before the carriage suddenly lurched into motion, and Jonathon found himself sprawling backwards, head colliding with the bench.


    He pulled himself into it, considering shadow walking out again. But, once he realized that was an option, he relaxed. Well, he mentally relaxed; the bench wasn''t comfortable at all. He moved down off of it and sat on the floor of the carriage instead; no much more comfortable, but the bench had been too narrow to sit comfortably upon.


    Jonathon focused on the sense of motion, curios to see what manner of impetus drove the carriage. He didn''t feel like he was falling forward - indeed, he had sprawled in the opposite direction - so it wasn''t a gravity spike. Elemental had a few wind-based options, but he couldn''t hear ...


    Huh. He couldn''t hear anything. It was absolutely silent. That was ... weird. And uncomfortable. So some kind of sound-proofing. Wind was an option; he really couldn''t feel any mana. The area around him just felt ... empty, of magic of any kind.  John considered for a moment, then attempted to relax.


    The trip was boring. He was in a black cube, couldn''t guess at how far or fast he was traveling - he at least had an idea of direction, no new impulses of momentum suggesting that they were continuing down a straight road in the direction of the city of Erille.


    For lack of anything to do but wait, John practiced meditation.  For a self-proclaimed Initiate, he had scant practice at it.


    Momentum shifted; they were heading southeast.


    Momentum shifted; east again.


    A sequence of shifts roused John from his meditation, which had at some point turned into a nap. Another half hour, perhaps, passed, and the door opened, the sudden bright green startling in its brightness.  It took his eyes a moment to adjust, squinting as the old man just smiled at him.


    "We have arrived. Welcome."


    They were on a gravel path, surrounded by a vast, apparently perfectly flat field of manicured grass. The forest was visible in all directions, so distant that when John lifted a hand as far from him as it could reach, the tree line, a dark green boundary between the clear blue sky and the light green grass, was slightly less than the height of his thumbnail.


    The road the carriage was on made a straight line back into the trees, up to a wrought iron gate, before which they had halted, perfectly centered in a wrought iron fence with stone foundations. The fence ended, twice John''s height up, in simple spikes; the distant corners were made up of gray stone columns, as were the sides of the double gates.


    Beyond the gates was a structure of points, swirls, and odd angles, painted in a a wide variety of interpretations of dark gray. Four towers rose, ended in a lighter dark gray conical points, forming a rectangle or square, it was hard to tell. The structure of the rounded towers was built of a particularly dark gray, and the wall stretching before him, dotted at irregular intervals and heights with black squares bounded by slightly less black shutters, was perhaps wood, the lightest of the dark colors.


    The upper line of the front wall was not flat, the roof a haphazard jumble of heights, all mostly horizontal but forming jagged teeth of which no two lined up. The roof was occasionally visible through gaps in the teeth, the same lightest shade of dark gray as the conical tips of the towers, made of irregularly sized and shaped tiles of, perhaps, slate.


    The large arched double doors of the building looked sized to permit the carriage through, and opened up onto a porch with a multiply-gabled roof, supported by apparently randomly placed support cylindrical columns of yet another shade of dark gray, with no consistency of diameter. The gables themselves had no consistent angle or height, and the porch reached from one tower to the other.


    It was ... ugly. And the bedraggled, half-dead columns of trees forming a sort of canopy on either side of the path from the gate to the house didn''t help. They, also, weren''t of consistent height, as if somebody had only bothered to care for them intermittently and inconsistently, an observation supported by their sorry state. The grass within the gates was patchy and brown, with irregular blotches of dirt visible.


    John turned slowly around, his attention only briefly caught by the fact that the carriage doors did, in fact, have windows, and he could see through the damned thing, before it focused on Zyet, who was looking up at the ghastly construction.


    "What ... what ... " Leonard looked his way, and back to the estate, lips curving in something that wasn''t quite a smile.


    "Indeed. Welcome, as I said, but not to what, to which I must make hasty amends - welcome, Jonathon Eucole, to the Ingress Estate."


    John only looked at him. Had he given the man his family name? The air had developed a chill that had little to do with the setting sun. As they stood there, the gate slowly opened with dual squeals that sounded more like stricken pigs than metal. Hell no. Hell fucking no.  He found himself walking forward anyways, compelled to keep up with the old man''s strident steps.


    The entry hall was enormous; thirty carriages could be parked on the perfectly white floor, polished mirror-smooth, reflecting light from the myriad misplaced mirrors, set at odd intervals and heights, high above them; John looked up at the vaulted roof, from which were suspended dozens of lanterns, all lit with a golden light he couldn''t see the source of. Again, none of the damned lanterns were set at the same height, and they weren''t set to any recognizable pattern.


    But otherwise the interior wasn''t actually that bad; the enormous room was made up of light brown wood and what John guessed was white marble, although he''d never seen marble so uniform of shading. It was elegant, to John''s eyes, although he knew he had little experience of such things.  More the pity about the sensibilities of the architect, for the craftsmen who had apparently followed the orders of the madman had clearly been masters of their own crafts.


    The walls were of what was recognizably wood, to his relief, and the planks were even lined up with each other. There was a balcony wrapping around the room on the second, third, and fourth floors, with doors set in the walls at regular intervals. The door frames and balustrade were carved wood, a slightly darker brown than the walls. He couldn''t quite make out the carvings of the second floor, but turning in a slow circle to look up at the arched door frame behind him, they appeared to be scenes of people interacting.


    His slow circle brought him back around; there were three other doors on the ground floor. Otherwise the room was empty. Zyet stepped beside him, his cane tapping lightly on the floor, smiling around.


    "It''s nicer inside. Come, I''ll show you to your room." John turned to his strange companion, feeling a frown tugging at his lips, and not feeling any desire to suppress it.


    "Hold up. What am I doing here, why was Leonard''s mission a success?" Zyet''s face wrinkled up in what was probably intended as a smile.


    "Sir, you are the owner. That was indeed Leonard''s mission. I must say he expected to retire afterwards, but, well, that was never in the cards." John tried to imbue his stare with the essence of his first sergeant''s skill; that woman could stare a wall into submission. Zyet simply looked back at him. John gave in first.


    "Right. I''m the owner. Why not." What did that even mean? Who cleaned this place, anyways? Did he have to pay staff? He could maybe afford his meals for the next week, that wasn''t happening. Maybe there was money somewhere in here to pay for that. Wait, this was an estate, he vaguely recalled that estates earned income ... somehow. He hadn''t seen any farms in the front of the ... manor? Maybe they were behind it. Right, staff. "Who works here?"


    "Me, sir."


    "Right, but who else?"


    "Me, sir."


    John looked back around the hall. He wasn''t sweeping this floor. Who needed this much floor? For one room? His mind reached for the dimensions of the place he had seen from the outside, trying to identify how much more room there could be.


    "If there will be nothing else, sir, follow me to your rooms." Feeling thoroughly out of sorts and overwhelmed - he''d been comfortably wandering the wilderness just a few hours ago - John followed as Zyet began tapping his way across the wide foyer, towards the door on the right.  He''d figure this out after resting a spell.


    John suddenly noticed that the Sage''s limp was gone, had been gone for some time - but it was just one more thing, and there were currently too many things.  He reluctantly let his attention drift on, gaze sweeping around his surroundings.


    He followed Zyet down a winding series of too-narrow corridors, through doors apparently at random. The hallways were narrow, but tall, with open windows randomly appearing above them, too high for him to reach, intermixed with the golden lanterns to help light the spaces.


    The walls were the same pale planking, and closer, John saw that the wood was richly textured, albeit not in straight lines but whirls and loops. Another oddity in the capital of odd things.


    There were paintings scattered on the walls. John barely noticed that they weren''t placed at regular heights at this point, but did notice the rich gold plating of their frames. Their subjects were mostly people dressed in finery, but there were some landscapes dotted amongst them. John deliberately stopped paying attention to them the first time he noticed that one of the landscapes featured trees with eyes.  Right.


    Otherwise, and other than the doors with scenes of people carved into the frames, the corridors were plain. There were no carpets, no other ornamentation, not that there would be room for any ornaments. John stopped tracking the turns they took after the fifth left turn in a row. Right. He didn''t open any of the closed doors on the path, suspecting he would regret doing so.


    "Here we are, sir." Zyet stopped quite suddenly and turned to him, pushing a door that looked like all the others inward. John looked at him, and stepped into the ordinary-looking room. "Call for me if you need anything." John hadn''t finished turning back to Zyet before the door closed in front of him. Right. Okay.Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    He turned slowly back around, looking over the furnishings. A four-poster bed, to his right, voluminous and sheer cloth draped around the side of the thing like a cobweb. No, no, they were just privacy curtains, the cobwebs were just his state of mind. What the hell was he doing here?


    The bed filled up an alcove in the T-shaped room, again with a tall vaulted ceiling, along with two double-doored armoires of a rich red wood, a material uniform across the furniture here, stationed on either side of it. There were doors to his left and right, with plain frames for a change, and three windows opened to blue skies set high in the flat wall in front of him, which stood out sharply for the the fact that all three were the same height, and spaced exactly evenly. The sight of that made him relax a little, releasing a mental strain he had been unaware of.


    The alcove on his left was a ... study, he guessed. A full bookshelf reached nearly to the window, hundreds or thousands of books filling its shelves. The corner away from the windows held a tiered desk, the upper tier an assortment of shelves full of bottles, a cup filled with feathers - quills, he guessed - and neat stacks of paper. The chair in front of the desk was plain, albeit, like all the furniture he examined, made of the same rich red wood as the armoires. There was also an upholstered seat with a side table positioned between the bookshelves and the desk, and a shorter circular table set in front of it. Alright.


    The door to the left opened into a square room, whose central feature was a large circular copper bathtub centered in it. There were also benches on either side of the room, above which were hooks suspended from which were white cloth, towels perhaps. The steam rising in wisps from the hot water filling the tub was a little strange, but downright normal compared to everything else. John closed the door and moved to the other.


    A privy. Right. The toilet, a white bench set into the wall with a hole, was nice. There were three basins of water on one side for washing up, and another rack of cloth. Alright. Normal.


    He closed this door, as well, moving into the room, looking around it again, feeling the strain of the past half hour. This place was, apparently, his. He really didn''t want it, right now. The five left turns had really cinched it for him.


    He was, however, far more terrified of Zyet''s response if John told him he didn''t want the place. Something about the man gave him an ache in his jaw, a toothache out of place. John didn''t want to deal with any of this, but he wanted to deal with Zyet even less. He''d sneak out later.


    A bath sounded nice. At least these rooms felt normal.


    The bath was nice. He was appalled to discover that the tears in the cowl and the cape Leonard had left weren''t there anymore when he started getting dressed again, and that the bloodstains in his robe were similarly missing. He put the collar on the bed - the Mage''s Mark was likely how Zyet had located him in the first place - and opened the door into the passages outside.


    There was a door across the hall he was pretty sure hadn''t been there before. Also, there were windows above that door, open to the skies. He started trying to judge the distance between these windows, and the windows in his own room, but quickly halted that line of thinking, starting down the hallways.


    Three right turns later he came to an open door.


    Of course it was his room, the collar still sitting on the bed.


    Six more attempts, in different directions, following different turns, and he found himself back at his room six different times. John fell into the upholstered chair in the reading nook, staring around the space. He was dead. He had died, the bandits or wyverns had killed him, and he was trapped in Artra''s domain for all eternity.


    No, maybe the lord of war had relinquished his soul when he had abandoned the arts of war, and he was in ... whose realm? Elder''s? Surely Halei''s realm wouldn''t be ... this. Tenash''s, either, although there were a lot of books on that bookshelf. Maybe Tenash had his soul, and he was being punished for his erstwhile pursuit of knowledge as only the lord of knowledge could punish someone.


    Jonathon did not want to open any other doors. He looked at the bed. Tired, but he didn''t feel like sleep, either. A book? His gaze flickered over the massive bookshelf. A book. He got up and started examining the selection, relieved to see titles he recognized after a few minutes of searching. Nothing from his studies of invocation, of course, but mundane fiction. He picked out a title he had enjoyed a few years ago, and sat down to read.


    He was startled when he reached the last page. He looked to the windows, feeling a vague worry that the shade of blue hadn''t changed at all since he had started reading, although he wasn''t certain. He wasn''t hungry, either, in spite of ... how long had he been reading? He picked up the book, feeling the weight of it in his hand. It had taken him two days to get through the last time he''d read it, back in a war camp, soldiers trading entertainment as if they were the richest gold, but he''d had other things to occupy his time, like the bannerman of the next camp over.  He caught himself short of drifting into memories, and shook his head.


    Four hours? Six? The sky should have changed. He stared at the windows, trying to decide whether or not the color was different. Maybe it wasn''t the sky, maybe somebody had just enchanted it to glow blue, to give the feeling of looking up at the sky? John closed one eye and then the other, trying to get a feel for distance, if it was a surface. No, that was the sky, he was pretty sure.


    He tried the hallways again, and was quite surprised when he saw the foyer ahead, moving towards it with a sense of elation that cracked, an avalanche of emotion crushing the momentary joy at the possibility of escape, as he saw the balustrade.


    He was on the third floor, looking down at the white floor below him. He circled it slowly with a sinking feeling, confirmed after one loop. The arched door was gone. This was either a different room that looked startlingly similar to the foyer he had entered in, or the door that had led into this terrible construction had disappeared. All the doors were rectangular, there wasn''t an arch to be seen.


    He turned back to the way he had come in, and wasn''t entirely surprised to see a closed door. There had been no door coming here, the hallway had just opened up into the foyer. He opened the door, and moved back into the hallways.


    John explored, if you could call it exploring, when he refused to open any doors in the hallways and just walked through the hallways, choosing intersections at random. He occasionally found the foyer - or perhaps a foyer - but none had arched doors. It wasn''t terribly surprising, only a little disturbing, that he found himself on different levels each time.


    He did find himself on the ground floor once, but each door had opened into hallways. He chose one at random. The bedroom passed occasionally, almost exactly as he had left it. The notable difference was that the towels he had used to dry off after his bath had disappeared from the floor, fresh dry towels hung up to fill each hook.


    Shadow walking through the walls terrified him more than opening any more doors. He had considered it once, briefly, before imagining what the space outside the hallway might contain.


    He kept walking, until the ringing of a bell behind him sent him to the floor, tripping over his own feet in a sudden need to dash away. John lay there for a few seconds before rolling himself slowly over onto his back.


    Zyet stood, expressionless, holding a plate covered in a metal dome in one hand, the other holding the cane vertical against the ground. "Dinner, sir." John didn''t see a bell.


    John ate at the desk in his room, surprised at how hungry he was. The plate had heaping portions of some kind of mashed yellow vegetable, which was slightly sweet and very salty, a large boiled helping of some kind of bird, to judge by the flavour, and salted boiled leaves interspersed with what John guessed from the texture was salt pork, except it was unexpectedly bland. None of the flavours were exceptional, but it was filling, and John had finished off portions which would have fed him for a day or two on the road.


    Setting the fork down on the empty plate, he looked up to the windows again, relieved to see that the sky through them had darkened to gray. It felt like he had spent days in here, his sense of time as utterly defeated as his hope for a quiet escape.


    His eyes moved over the room again, halting on the bed. Something was off. He examined the blankets and pillows, plain white. They were fine. The curtains themselves also looked the same. The bed was still made.


    Ah. The mythril collar was missing. John looked around the room, and stood, moving to the armoires, checking one, and then the other. They were full of spun silver clothing, and the shelves had black leather boots with silver buckles, polished and well-crafted but otherwise plain. His heart sunk a little bit as he picked up one of the boots, and realized it would fit. Right. He put it back, checking again. The collar was gone.


    He closed the armoire door and turned, before a thought occurred to him. He reached up, fingertips quivering. It was on him again. John pulled the curtain aside, and sat in the bed, his mind fuzzy, feeling drained and empty, a single question repeating itself in his thoughts.


    What?


    He woke with a start, sitting up sharply and reaching to his side for a halberd that hadn''t been there for years, his hand only catching soft fabric. Looking around, dazed, at the enormous and comfortable bed, it took his mind a few seconds to catch back up, as he wondered where the camp was, then what had happened to his simple cot, and finally wound through the previous day''s events.


    What.


    He pushed the curtain aside, moving to the privy, although it took two tries, as the first room he tried to go into was the room with the copper bath, water still steaming. Once he was done in the privy, he went back into the room with the copper bath, and stripped again, sliding into the hot water with an utterance at the heat.


    This was relaxing, at least. He sank down until the water was just under his chin, trying, and mostly succeeding, not to think. He closed his eyes, and let the heat and water work its subtle magics on him, his myriad unnamed anxieties slowly slipping away.


    He woke a second time that morning to the unpleasant sensation of water in his nose, jerking himself back upright after a bit of thrashing to get his bearings, and get a hand on the side of the tub. Right. No sleeping in this absurdly large tub.


    John toweled himself off again, dressed again - reluctantly putting the mythril back on, as he found the idea of putting it on far less taxing than it appearing on its own again - and stepped back out into the hallways. Today, he''d investigate the other rooms.


    The first door opened up into a library; he had thought himself inured to this place, but he was still taken aback by the vast scope of the room. Perhaps as fourth as large as the foyer, and about as tall, enormous bookshelves rose above him, each possessed of a ladder set into tracks. The bookshelves were of variable height - some reaching nearly to the suspended golden lanterns, others only two or three times taller than himself. Each shelf was more like a tower, and he circled one; it formed a square, each of the four sides holding books and a ladder. The towers were scattered throughout the room, without order; they weren''t even aligned to the same angle, and certainly didn''t form neat rows.


    In the center of the room was a long table, with benches on either side. Unlit candles ran down the center, each burnt to a different height. The shutters over the windows here were closed, light filtering through the wood, illuminating dust that floated in the air, motes of light dancing about above him.


    The first title he examined was in a language he didn''t recognize, simultaneously too angular and too curved; not merely foreign, but of alien sensibilities. As were the next five. The sixth, he could read. "A Compendium of the Known Offworlder Species". Nope, he wanted nothing to do with this. John replaced the book and left the library, shutting the door very firmly behind him. It barely made a noise as it closed.


    Alright. He breathed slowly, in and out. He was a competent person, he had survived battle, he had survived at a school for invocationalists - he could deal with a damned cursed castle, or whatever this accursed place was supposed to be. He stretched out his mind, feeling for ... ah. He shut down his mana sense, hard, which was screaming at him. Nope, he wasn''t going to deal with that.


    Alright, he had picked up some psionic abilities.  Aether Arrows wouldn''t be much use without something to kill, but maybe Bend Space would do something. He concentrated; the range of his skill wasn''t great, but it cost him nothing but effort. The far end of the hallway, a T-intersection, was suddenly directly in front of him.


    Well, that worked. He let the effort go, ignoring the sudden sweat it had produced. He tried again, focusing on the space to the side of his bedroom, the doorway still in front of him, trying to bring it into the hallway.


    John picked himself up off the floor, trying to still the shaking of his hands, and the incoherent shouting in his mind. Right. None of that now. He was very glad he hadn''t tried to shadow walk through any walls here. His eyes moved down to the pool of - what color was that - liquid at his feet. Not blood. Probably. Maybe. He turned and walked the other direction.


    The next door opened into a larger version of the study in his bedroom; the windows here were slightly askew, but closer to the normal of his bedroom than the random placement he had seen in most of the rest of this ... place. The books - the T-shaped room was full of them - were even a normal selection of fiction and history. One of the side rooms here was a storage room, full of bottles of ink and quills, as well as stacks of paper that represented years of his salary as a soldier.


    The other side room was bare and empty, gray stone walls which were somewhat startling after the wood paneling everywhere else. The ceiling was low, and also stone. A matched set of circles was embedded in both ceiling and floor, iron rings hammered into a circular groove in the stone. Right. That was more like this place. John moved on.


    The next room was a library again, the question of whether it was the same one was something he carefully ignored, then a different bedroom. He knew it was different because it had the skewed windows, and the fabric in this room was green. Even the towels in the bathroom. The bookshelf was also mostly empty.


    Another bedroom, this one in blue, and either the same or a different study, and he found himself in the foyer once more, on the second floor. Shadow walking took him down to the ground floor, and he looked around.


    Hey. The arched door! John dashed for it, opening it to the blessed sight of the bedraggled trees and wrought iron ... the skies were cloudy. He turned, looking up at the blue skies visible through the window. Right. John closed the door to the manor, and dashed madly down the porch, and then down the path to the gate.


    And ... kept running. Trees passed. He watched them pass, carefully tracking one. The gate remained in the distance. Slowing, then halting, he turned, looking at the porch which he was two steps away from. Right. John started walking backwards away from the porch, counting the steps as he moved away from it.


    Forty steps away, he stopped. The manor had stopped retreating, trees had stopped passing into his view. He walked back, reluctant to move closer, but wanting to know. Twenty steps. Alright. John turned again, bending space. The gate jumped forward. John stepped through the warped air, and was halfway to the gate. He bent space again, and stepped right up to the gate.


    He couldn''t bend space past the gate. Not entirely unexpected. John shadow walked through it. Or rather, he shadow walked directly into it, his face colliding with the wrought iron, sending him stumbling backwards, clutching at his eyebrow, which he had somehow led with. No blood, at least, although he expected it to bruise.


    John shadow walked upward, instead, halting only at the last instant as he realized that, while he had the range to get up to the top, he''d impale himself on the spikes if he attempted to leap back into mundane space. He fell back to the ground as the power ended, landing in a crouch.


    Okay then. Brute force.


    The grown opal on the staff had cracked. He had beaten the wrought iron with the enchanted weapon, the enchantment fluffing off it without apparent harm to the gate. He had punched - he could theoretically break rocks with his punches, but had never tested this - kicked, tried to bend the iron. It didn''t give.


    Mana senses gave him nothing except the uneasy feeling that this wasn''t actually a gate, and the fence wasn''t actually a fence. He hadn''t pressed further on that front for fear of learning something else. He walked past the line of trees into the dead and dying grass, briefly considering digging. Dread of what he''d discover stayed him.


    Instead, he walked the perimeter of the fence. Judging by the sun, it took him two or three hours to walk it, returning to the path leading up to the entrance he had started at.


    It was a square, and it was a lot larger than it looked. Than it should be. The horizon didn''t move properly, and if he watched the grass outside the square, it moved slower than the grass inside. Spacial distortion, not ... entirely surprising, given everything he''d seen. The square enclosed by the fence was bigger on the inside. Much bigger.


    On the far side of the manor had been a orchard, the trees all having the same withered, half-dead look that the trees on the path had, but bearing fruit. He''d stopped approaching when the smell of rot had hit him, worse than any battlefield. He also hadn''t approached the five or six fields of vegetables, the orchard having put him firmly off exploring the food here.


    There had, however, been a pen of large, dumb birds, gray-feathered, and surprisingly ordinary on approach. Perhaps a hundred of the things, pecking and scratching at the bare ground, with a large, rectangular wooden shack, which smelled of mundane foulness. They were fat, not malnourished. The source of the meat, hopefully. He didn''t particularly want to think about the vegetables he had eaten.


    The sides of the manor had the same piecemeal, mismatched look as the front, but there were statues lining the base of the wall where the porch sat on the front. John had looked at them just long enough to decide he didn''t want to examine them any more closely.  Too many thumbs for the number of hands.


    He sighed, looking at the gate, and back to the manor. He''d decided, on the walk, that it was a manor, if for no other reason than that, apart from the four towers, it didn''t actually look like a castle.


    Well. Might as well. He started walking back up the path, feeling more resigned than anything else. Not like he had any other plans, after all.

 Ch 3. Time

    The manor felt easier to navigate, now. There were still hallways with far too many left turns - there were also hallways with too many right turns, but the left turns felt somehow worse - and he could still walk down a hallway and come to the same room he had left from, but it felt like he could navigate, now. The foyer seemed to have the arched exit to the outdoors most of the time now, as well, although John hadn''t approached it again.


    The foyer occasionally opened up into another enormous room, an enormous rectangular hall perhaps twice as long as it was wide, with two other doors on the sides. Tall, like the foyer, lit by four skylights that ran the length of the hall, metalwork barely visible holding the sheets of glass aloft; the sky was blue. There were, of course, the ever-present lanterns, adding golden light to the blue.


    The walls were the same light brown wooden planking, split by eight enormous tapestries, four to each of the two long walls, bordered in yellow and green squares, which rendered simplistic nature scenes; one portrayed a meadow with a single tree, another a mountain range, the next a forest scene.


    There were four columns of tables running down its length, perhaps a dozen tables per column, all constructed of the red-tinged wood from which the bedroom furniture had been constructed. The grain was, like much of the woodgrain in this place, in whirls and loops instead of straight lines. He couldn''t imagine trying to cut the stuff, whatever tree it was from.


    The chairs had simple white cushions attached to the seats, and high, skeletal backs, comprised of seven vertical slats, with a single horizontal slat halfway up. Each of the vertical slats ended in a carved knob. There were eight chairs to each table, spaced just far apart that elbows wouldn''t rub. John tried one of the chairs; it was comfortable enough, but he wouldn''t want to spend much time in one.


    Both of the doors led to identical kitchens; circular rooms, the center of which held large firepits, as wide across as John was tall. The ceiling was an uncharacteristic black, forming a cone leading up to what looked like from below like a smokestack. There was a breeze in the kitchens, the source of which John couldn''t find. The walls were all counterspace, the doors the only entrance or exit. Under the cabinets were shelves full of utensils and dishes. John didn''t explore the two kitchens much, beyond noting that they were mostly identical. Each also had a door, which led to small room with empty shelves, and empty hooks suspended from the comparatively low ceiling; larders, probably. There were also barrels set against a wall, but judging by the weight, all empty.


    There were more bedrooms; he''d found at least seven, differentiated by the color of the fabrics, but the fact that he found another room with white cloth, identical to his own - he knew the difference only in that the layout of the bed and the study were reversed - suggested that there might be more. He hadn''t paid close attention to the orientation of the alcoves in the other rooms.


    There were also garderobes, small rooms containing only a bench with a hole in it. He had found, with some mental discomfort but physical relief, that they turned up behind doors whenever he started looking for one.


    There were also larger bathing areas, except with pools set into the floor instead of the tub in his own room, stone steps encircling the square pools. The water steamed. The towels in these - or maybe it was only the one room, repeated as he searched - were white. The room had only one other door, leading to a privy.


    He found no barracks, nor armory, nor storerooms of any kind. Nor did he find access to the four towers he had observed from outside the manor. He also never crossed the hallway with the pool of what he quietly hoped wasn''t actually blood, from his experiment with bending space. Or perhaps it had been cleaned up.


    Growing restless and uneasy, John gave up on the explorations of the increasingly repetitive rooms, after the third door in a row brought him back to the library. He returned to his room, the open door appearing as soon as he turned a corner, and settled into the study chair.


    This place was ... convenient. If he could silence the shuddering voice in his mind that was alternating between monosyllabic utterances and railing that the walls would bleed if cut. And if he ignored the fact that he hadn''t been able to find a way out, even once he had managed to get to the manor grounds.


    His eyes moved back to the bookshelf. A title caught his eye; he had seen it in the library. "A Compendium of the Known Offworlder Species". That ... hadn''t been in his study before, he was pretty certain.


    John found his hand shaking slightly as he leaned over, pulling it from the shelf, the books on the left falling to a slant with a quiet ''papf'' of leather bindings colliding. The book was settled onto his lap, and he opened it up.


    Neat, flowing lines topped the page he opened to, somewhere around halfway through the book. Piraphagos. Beneath was an illustration, which must have used half a bottle of ink, of a blacked-in oval, with jagged textured-gray triangles filling ... was that a mouth, were those supposed to be teeth? Was the entire thing a mouth? He read the description below.


    This variant of phage consumes fire and ash, devouring heat itself. Victims of its bite are left frozen and brittle with a cold that does not dissipate. It can be tracked by following the trail of ice it leaves behind, for mundane heat cannot replenish what it has consumed. A phage, its reproductive cycle is unknown, but juveniles range in size from a hen''s egg to the size of a grown man''s head, and these pose little danger in themselves; anything larger has been known to kill those of weak constitution in a single bite.


    John studied the illustration, and turned to the next page; the ink bleeding through the pages meant only one entry existed per page.


    Crevog headed this entry, below which was a ... rather disturbed illustration; a human head with long hair, facing up, trailed by a spine, the hair mixing with the spine; there were odd protrusions on the spine where it met what the illustrator presumably intended to be the ground. Below the chin were a pair of narrow eyes, and a mouth with teeth that, were it not for the rest of the illustration, John would have chalked up to an exaggeration on the part of the illustrator.


    Like many offworlder variants, the crevog would seem to be designed to create disgust, revulsion, and fear in the mind of the beholder. The Crevog moves on small insectile legs, resembling human fingers, protruding from the spine. All observed Crevog have had feminine features of the face, and most of those observed have been possessed of what is assumed to be a minor teleportation ability. Many specimens have also been observed to exhibit aetherial characteristics when attacking, meaning they are particularly problematic for magii to deal with. No information on their reproductive cycle is available.


    John sat back, closing the book, not particularly interesting in reading any more from the vile thing. That had been ... more or less what he had expected, when he first encountered the book. Lithe maggots were the only offworlder he had particular experience with - every soldier dealt with the cursed carrion-eaters at some point in their careers. They were bad enough; cut them apart with a sword and you had two to deal with, and they grew as big as his two fists put together. They''d also explode in small hordes out of corpses, eating the insides first and multiplying; one of the maggots wasn''t terribly dangerous, but a pile of them could just swarm over and devour a man no matter how quickly he stomped and crushed them.


    Hell, they didn''t even need to eat you. John shuddered to remember the aura of rot that surrounded them; weak individually, but a group of them together made every wound fester and blacken in seconds. Cleaning up battlefields and burning corpses was important, if disgusting, work, which if ignored could mean disaster for nearby villages, a plague of death that spread until it was burned out.


    The book was replaced on the shelf. He picked something else out, "The Wagonwright and the Wyvern", and settled in for some considerably lighter reading.


    The next was a book on magical history, and John found himself groaning at the language, which used the old Simui language to obfuscate. Mil taris. Just call a thing what it was, a mage. And the book took great pains to distinguish between the different kinds of tari - magic. Ievra tar, for the elemental school; mira tar, for focal and thaumaturgy schools; and mavri tar, instead of viviomancers, biomancers, and necromancers, treating the three schools of magic as if they were the same damned thing. It at least had acknowledged that "mira tar" referred to two distinct schools of spellcrafting.


    If he hadn''t spent time in the Three Isles, the damned book would be incomprehensible. It was old, that was something of an excuse; this was pretty common in older reference works. At least the bits on the mathematics behind "mavri tar" was interesting, few people bothered with the mathematics anymore, as the spell schools were generally considered fully explored and defined. When he had left the Three Isles, everybody interested in the leading edge of magical research was experimenting with selenomancy. Less because sleep magic was particularly powerful or potent, John had gathered, than because it was new and interesting, and people could still get historical credit for developing new spell forms.


    This book seemed to have been written sometime around the point of the schism of necromancy from viviomancy and biomancy, as it mentioned the differences that were arising between the construction of the spells that animated dead flesh, and those that restored and altered it. He was amused to note, in view of his thoughts on selenomancy, that he didn''t recognize any of the names of the people who had been developing the spells forms of what would become necromancy.


    The three spell schools dedicated to biological matter, living or dead, were probably the most complex, and had required the development of a new mathematics, which focused on patterns made up of smaller parts of themselves, to construct the spell forms around. Flesh and wood simply aren''t as simple as fire or wind. John settled back into his chair, enjoying the reading on the difficulties involved there.


    Jonathon put that book down when it started getting into the politics that had divided the Four Towers, a long-dead institution that had developed the elemental and planar spell schools, and the Jhenn, an equally extinct religious sect which had developed the focal and thaumaturgy spell schools.


    He had found the details about religion particularly irksome; they didn''t even have gods when the book was written, less so when the Jhenn had been about. Unless you counted Artra, the creator, but as far as he knew Artra had been trying his damnedest to kill humanity at the time. Fucking mystery cults.


    Sighing, John rose, looking up to the windows. He''d have sworn it should be evening by now, but judging by the brightness of the sky, or whatever he was looking at, it was still midday. Maybe this place messes with time as well as space. But he wasn''t exactly ravenous yet, so perhaps it hadn''t been as long as he thought. He walked down the hallway, wandering until the foyer had a door to the outside, which it did the second time he found it.


    The sun was, indeed, overhead. John looked over the grounds, wondering vaguely who maintained the grass outside the manor fence. And then, with a huff, he started walking the perimeter; his legs ached from sitting and reading, and he found that he needed to stretch them out and get moving.


    Nobody tended the vegetable fields, nobody tended the orchards, nobody tended the animal pen, where he stopped to watch the birds peck at the ground, finding the companionship of the mundane creatures relaxing. He hadn''t expected to see anybody; maybe Zyet, as he was curious as to where the creepy man got off to when he wasn''t appearing behind John with the ring of a bell that wasn''t in evidence. Sage historian indeed.Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    And, indeed, the creepy sage showed up again that evening - it felt more like a week, save that hunger had barely set in - a bell ringing outside his bedroom door. John opened the door to a face that was crinkled up into something that might be a smile, if one was generous.


    "Dinner, sir." John took the covered platter, and Zyet turned without another word and started walking, before John even had the opportunity to offer thanks. Weighing food against the mystery, John stepped out, looking after - and the man was gone, the hallway empty. Right.


    It was the same meal as yesterday, and John ate slowly and deliberately, barely tasting. Leonard had asked him if he had any plans for the decade. Had Leonard been here before him? Was this a ten year stint, whatever this actually was? Why was he even here, eating food and reading books in a manor apparently designed by a mad planar magus?


    The magic here was impressive. Incredibly so, if John let himself process exactly what the manor represented, setting aside the fear of it for a rational analysis; the simplest thing he had seen, in terms of planar magic itself, was the bigger-on-the-inside effect at play within the fenced perimeter, and while the effect was simple, the scale was massive, the work of a master magi. If it was planar magic at all; there was certainly some kind of magic at play, but it was beyond his arcana senses to even detect.


    The hallways, on the other hand, were, he was reasonably certain, entirely beyond the scope of any living magus. John had spent a decade studying magic with some of the most gifted magi in the continent, and he''d not even heard of anything like this. Moving rooms, maybe. Geometries that allowed five left turns, possibly. But rooms changing, and blood in the spaces ... he stopped that train of thought immediately. The manor was not alive.


    Right. If he was stuck here a decade, and then forced to find a successor, he knew a dozen people back at the Three Isles that would trade a limb for the opportunity to study this place. Not that he was particularly enthusiastic about anybody replicating what he had seen so far - well, maybe the moving rooms, it was very useful to be able to find a privy whenever he needed one - but perhaps the insanity that had given birth to the place could be put to some more useful purpose.


    The plate was empty. John set the utensils back on it, and replaced the cover, retreating to the bath to wash up. The water was steaming and clean. He started to leave, then stopped and turned, focusing on arcana while trying to inspect the water, to see by what means it was kept hot and refreshed.


    He left the room with a shiver, finding nothing that could explain it.


    John went back to exploring, trying to find a way into one of the four towers. He settled on a strategy of trying to go in one direction; if a hallway corner forced him left, he''d take the next right at an intersection; he kept a mental counter, adding to it whenever he took a left, and subtracting whenever he took a right, and kept it close to zero. He checked doors as he went, to see what was beyond them.


    Mostly bedrooms. There were at least 20, now; white, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, red, a different shade of red, brown, and different shade of white, all in two different orientations. Jonathon wasn''t entirely certain he''d done a perfect job at tracking orientations.


    And he did find a storeroom, mostly empty, except a rack of farming implements against one wall. There were also a couple of sacks of seeds, unrecognized to him; one bag contained bulbous red-and-white-striped seeds, about the size of the tip of his pinky, with a point on one end. The other contained some kind of grain seed, tiny and yellow, and when he first opened it, he thought he had found a bag of sand. Otherwise the room was bare, empty iron shelves in rows. The shelves hadn''t rusted, and he wasn''t sure if that was odd or not.


    Otherwise, John didn''t find much of anything. The hall kept going. He gave up with the enterprise after what might have been two hours of walking, and turned the next corner looking for his room. It was the first door on the left, already opened for him. He slept.


    His third day in the manor, out of three thousand and six hundred, if the decade estimate was correct. A slight pain behind his eyes had woken him up, quickly faded.


    He spent the morning reading some light fiction, about a huntress who fell in love with a baron''s son, and when he finished, looking up, it was with a sense of emptiness. Given the size of the library, it was entirely possible he could spend the next ten years reading, but he needed to do something else with his time.


    He found the storeroom again - it took thinking of the farming implements for it to appear behind a door, as opposed to thinking of a storeroom, or maybe the doors he could see were already pre-set in terms of what the opened into; he''d have to do some experimentation.


    Grabbing a hoe and the bag of red and white seeds, he walked to the foyer and out the door, looking around in the midmorning sun. Huh. Had there been chairs on the porch before? He walked off to the left, where a bare patch of dirt was visible. Now, how did farmers do this?


    He ended up using the corner of the hoe, dragging it as he walked backwards, to pull up a line of dirt. He repeated this five more times, about a pace apart, until there was a small square of lines of furrows. Setting the rake down next to the bag of seeds, he pulled a handful out, and moved to the first line.


    He wasn''t sure what the seeds were, so walked heel to toe, every third step dropping a seed into the furrow. Reached the end of the line, he turned around, and walked back, again heel to toe, this time using his boots to push the upturned line of dirt back into the furrow to fill it.


    He repeated the process for each furrow, barely making a dent in the bag of seeds, and looked up at the sun. It had barely moved. Right.


    John  stopped when the bag was empty, the sun halfway down its descent. His square was ... somewhat larger, now, although the last furrow had ended up going mostly empty when he ran out of seeds. He looked up at the sky, which was only slightly cloudy. Well, the crops at the back of the manor seemed to be doing sort of alright. He walked around the manor, looking for a source of water.


    There wasn''t a well, nor could he find a spigot, or any other source of ready water. Well, rain would have to do. Curious, now, he moved to a corner of the nearest field, kneeling to examine the plant growing there. The crop here was a green stalk, almost a stick growing out of the ground, tapering to a point, with triangular leaving sticking out of the sides. Maybe a root vegetable?


    John left the field, looking to the orchard, reluctant to approach again; it had smelled awful. He did have a source of water, as he considered his options, but ... well, the lake-summoning invocation didn''t do anything in half measures, if he remembered the words correctly. It had flooded one of the Three Isles completely, only the forgecrafted wards on the buildings preventing the irrevocable destruction of countless priceless books of antiquity.


    Here? This land would be marsh for weeks. No, he couldn''t use it. But John did wonder what would happen if he used it inside the manor. No, bad idea. But then again ...


    He rounded the corner, bringing into the field he had sown when his thoughts died, abruptly. There were neat columns of very wilted plants where he had left light tamped soil. There were knee-high stalks, where there should have been flat earth, purple leaves hanging limply up their lengths. John approached, moving slowly, an itch rising up his spine. That ... that wasn''t right.


    The stalk opened readily to a knife pilfered from a kitchen, revealing pulpy, woodlike material in a paler purple than the leaves. His sample had a simple root system, just a tangle of thin white cords hanging from the base where he had pulled it from the ground. There was a faint hint of magic to the plant, but nothing extraordinary.


    He was sitting in his study, the half-dissected plant sitting on the reading table, a botanist''s field guide in his lap. It was sorted by criteria he didn''t fully understand, and his attention drifted between the plant, and the book, which had illustrations drawn with a careful and steady hand, albeit without color.


    He was reasonably certain he was in the right major section, what the book called a family, now - it had something to do with the stem, or stalk in this case. Family followed by a subsection categorization that he thought might be leaf shape, although there were a lot of exceptions as he flipped through the book.


    It wasn''t the right section; he tried twice more before he located the plant; a purple coneberry. The seeds were the berries, which were edible, which he thought might mean disgusting - there was another classification, delicious, which suggested that edible wasn''t. The conical fruit the seeds grew on was the portion that was, apparently, the primary reason the plant was cultivated; the cob, as the book called it, had a variety of purposes.


    The cob was mildly poisonous unless twice-boiled, throwing the water out each time, after which it could be dried and ground up to make a nutritious flour. The poison itself also had some alchemical properties which, when distilled, could be used in a number of different potions.


    It did not grow magically quickly, at least normally; his field of crops should have taken around six weeks, if he interpolated the illustrations of various states of growth correctly. It fruited at four months, and every three to six weeks thereafter, and died in the winter.


    John closed the book and set it aside, looking at the plant again. If all plants grew that quickly in here, how long would it take for the soil to be stripped? He was vaguely aware of crop rotation, the practice of changing out plants to keep soil from becoming barren, but knew nothing of how exactly it worked. Maybe all the plants inside the fence were dead because of how quickly everything grew in here.


    Or maybe this manor just has a sickly aura that kills everything. Not a pleasant thought. But Leonard hadn''t seemed sickly, so maybe, if that was the case, it just effected plants? They probably didn''t have the magical resistance that humans developed over time, after all. Well, most of them. Probably grass didn''t, at least.


    Another possibility, of course, was that the half-dead state of all the plants had something to do with the rapid growth without water. They certainly looked like they could use it. John stood, picking up the book, and went to the library to replace it.


    The dissected plant was gone when he got back to the bedroom. He settled back into his chair, reaching over to the bookshelf for some more light reading, and settled back until Zyet appeared with the ringing of a bell.


    "Dinner, sir."


    The same meal again. At least John had managed to thank the man before he''d completely disappeared from sight, this time. He ate while he read, until the light from the windows faded into dusk, and then moved to the bed.


    He dreamt of hallways, walls scratched and bleeding, and doors that opened up into snarls of teeth that spun and ground against each other.


    He spent the next morning picking coneberries, filling a large basket he found in the farmer''s storeroom, and the afternoon carefully stripping off the seeds and refilling the bag he had taken them from, and then three more empty canvass bags. He wasn''t sure if the basket, or bags, had been in the storeroom the last time he''d visited, and wasn''t certain he really wanted that question answered.


    The cobs, conical things about the size of his fist, he placed flats down on the metal shelves, filling most of the shelves in the storeroom. When he went back outside, the field was full of unpicked coneberries again. He ignored them, instead walking a couple of circuits around the perimeter of the fence.


    On his return, John collected the basket once more, and started collecting the coneberries again, this time just piling them up in the storeroom.  Not long after, dinner arrived; John thanked Zyet for the meal, and sat down in the storeroom, shoveling through the food.  It probably wouldn''t work, but he had to try it.  The field was full of dead plants, when he went out again; dead, dry, and brittle.  He pulled them up, piling them in another corner of the storeroom, and then it was time for some sleep.


    More nightmares, little changed from the previous night.


    John stacked the dried plants against the fence, forming a latticework with them.  On top of these he piled the conical cobs - dry and brittle, crumbling in his hands, as if they had been in the storeroom for months.  Finally, as the sun reached the peak of its ascent, he dumped the last basket of the coneberries, also dry and brittle, the seeds falling off as he handled them, on top of that.


    John sat down, then, tired and sweaty from the countless trips back and forth.  The manor hadn''t given him any trouble, and the storeroom had always been easily located.  Steel and flint, now.  It took three sparks before the pile ignited, the flames leaping up with a roar that sent him onto his ass, scrabbling backwards on the ground away from the sudden and intense heat; clothwing wyverns had nothing on this.


    The fire roared, clouds of dust leaping up and igniting in small explosions, accompanied by a caucophony of popping as the seeds ruptured and spit.  He had to move back again, and then again, as the inferno blazed hot, air blowing past him to feed the flames, which grew hotter and higher as he watched.  The brown grass nearby blackened and disintegrated with tiny puffs of flame, but it didn''t spread from the sporadic ill-grown plants, which just wasn''t thick enough to support the spread of the fire.  John watched with satisfaction.  This probably wasn''t quite hot enough to melt the iron, but maybe it would weaken it.


    The flames started guttering and dying after just a few minutes of intense heat - the fuel burned hot, but it also burned fast.  John pressed the flat of his hand to the ground, pushing himself to a knee, and then rising, feeling his age.  He moved cautiously forward, looking over the metal where it met the ground.  It was still black.  He had expected a glow.


    Well, it isn''t getting any hotter.  He moved closer, the heat in the air not seeming to agree with the thought, and gave the metal an experimental kick with the side of his boot.  Nothing.  He tried again, harder.  Still nothing.  Alright then.  He sat on the ground, turning to the side and then onto his stomach, feet towards the fence, and crawled towards it.  Winding up his leg, he kicked out with all his strength.


    The dirt met his face.  Spitting, he rolled back onto his back, and, wiping his eyes clear, looked.  The fence still stood there.  He fell backwards into the ground, a wave of exhaustion rolling over him.  That hadn''t worked.  Maybe if he buried it, made some charcoal?  But then again... John sat up, and pulled himself to his feet.  He walked over to the pile of ash, embers still red, and leaned down, tapping a finger against the metal.


    It was cold.

 Ch 4. A Visitor

    Jonathon spent the next few days reading, although he took less pleasure in the activity than he would have a week before. He went to bed when the sun set, and woke when it rose again, simply by virtue of the superior light the sun - or whatever the source of the light through the accursed windows actually was - provided.


    He then returned outside and started farming again, trying the small seeds this time, as well as a smaller crop of the purple coneberries. These smaller seeds grew into something like wheat; a tall yellow grass, sprouting dozens or hundreds - he wasn''t going to count - of the seeds in dense florets on a thick head; again, he refilled the bags of seeds first.


    Next, he tried grinding up one of the coneberry cobs - really, just pressed it between his hands and rubbed, the magical drying and/or aging, or whatever it was, that occurred in the storeroom leaving them brittle - and tasted it by licking a finger, and touching it to the powder, then to his tongue. Bitter, slightly nutty. He spat the powder back out, mindful of the fact that the cob was supposed to be poisonous.


    The berries were ... well, edible. Slightly less bitter, with a sharpness, a flavor sensation he had trouble identifying - but with a strong astringent effect that left his entire mouth feeling numb after a few seconds. He found another bag and filled it with some fresh berries, leaving them in his room.


    The not-quite-wheat turned out to be easy to find in the botany book; it was eldergrass, apparently a staple crop in a nation whose name he didn''t recognize. It was used for fermentation of a kind of beer, which he hadn''t heard of, and for flour, and little else.


    Beer. Hm. Jonathon looked at the handful of seeds. Well, worth a shot. It took a couple of hours in the library to find a book, another couple of hours hunting through the kitchen for ... most of what he needed, and then he brought his pile of goods and the book to the storeroom.


    And returned to the bedroom to collect some of the heated water from the bathtub; he''d been drinking it, for lack of any other identifiable source of water in the place, and it tasted sterile enough.


    Next, he started grinding up the eldergrass seeds using a mortar and pestle from the kitchen; he had four glass jars, now full of still-hot water, and he mixed the flour into each, stirring using four different spoons. He crushed a handful of the fresh coneberries into one of the four jars using the allocated spoon, and then set the lids on each of the four jars, slightly askew to let air flow in. Not ... quite what the book had said to do, but he didn''t have the materials to do it quite correctly. He then left, and returned to farming.


    He checked back in another couple of hours later. Whatever time effect was at play wasn''t something he knew how to predict; if he had a clock - not that he could have ever afforded one - he would be curious to see what would happen to it, left in the room for a few minutes.


    One of the jars had developed a thick brown clump in the bottom. One had developed a thick lumpy greenish mass that was kind of straddling the entire jar. One had a thick brown foam, and the other a thick ... purplish foam. The two with foam also had masses floating loosely in the bottom.


    The two jars with lumpy masses, he took outside and dumped near the fence. Those clearly weren''t right. The two with foam ... filtering would be a problem. John considered the issue for a few seconds, shrugged, and used the spoon to scoop the foam - which had a thick, sticky texture - out and into one of the now-empty jars.


    He couldn''t do much about the sediment in the bottom, though, and there was a lot of it - probably because of the raw flour he had used, without even boiling. He took a careful sip of the purple coneberry beer, as judged by the color of the foam he had scooped out.


    It was ... not great. Bitter and sour, with a hint of, well, the taste of vomit. And faintly astringent to boot, although not nearly so much as the berries themselves. He set the jar back down, screwing the lid back on.


    The other beer was better. It lacked the sour note, and more importantly the vomit flavor. It still wasn''t great, or even good, but it was better. He lacked the equipment to do anything more - he''d probably have better success if he just had hot air to malt the seeds first - but this was what he had, so he screwed the lid on the first, picked up both jars, and brought them to his room.


    Dinner arrived, and he had beer with it; John found himself returning to the sour coneberry brew more than he would have expected. He read the brewing guide as he ate, the book propped up on a knee. He had not, in fact, made beer. He''d need to figure out how to malt the grains, and indeed how to boil the grains - he had no wood, unless he started ripping pieces off the building itself, which he really didn''t want to do. The coneberries burned, but they burned too hot and too fast.


    He finished his meal, and enough of both jars of beer that he started getting sediment. Jonathon needed to figure out how to make fuel out of the coneberries that wouldn''t burn so quickly, and he had no idea what book he might find that information in.


    He laid in bed thinking through the problem. The cobs weren''t dense enough, basically; they burned quite well, but he needed to compress them somehow. Maybe he could grind them up, add water, and put weight on them? He needed a mold.


    The following morning, he started experimenting. He began the morning by replanting, then retrieving a couple of pots that would stack inside each other from the kitchen, as well as another jar; he detoured to his room on his way to the storeroom, and filled the jar with water.


    He ground up a few of the cobs from the shelf until he filled one pot to the point where setting the other pot inside it rested on the finely ground powder, then poured water in and mixed it with one of the spoons. He then left to collect more coneberries and eldergrass seeds, carrying two baskets back with him.


    On his return, the powder was, as expected, dry. It was, however, still powder. He needed glue, or something like it. He looked at the basket of eldergrass seeds. Flour was sticky when it got wet, right? And this stuff was used to make bread.


    He left again to give the seeds time to dry out, taking a bath to relax and pass the time. Time was something he had no shortage of. As he relaxed, pondering on the time, a thought struck him. Did time pass differently for him, too? How long had he been in this estate, from the perspective of the outside world?


    He dressed again in the same clothes - did he actually need to wear clothes? No, no, he wouldn''t go down that path. He wanted to rejoin society at some point. The seeds were dried out when he got back to the storeroom, although the jar that had held his water was also dry. He made a round trip to refill the jar, and sat down to grind the seeds up in the mortar and pestle.


    He dumped some of the cob powder out into one of his jars - it still held sediment, now powder - and added the flour, pouring hot water over it once again, and mixing it. Yep, it was sticky; it should hold a shape. The pot was placed back over the mix, and he once again went out to harvest another batch.


    It ... kind of worked. It formed a cake, of sorts, but it wasn''t quite as dense as he had expected. Also, it had developed a white fuzzy layer of some kind of mold. John had to break it apart in the pan with the spoon to get it out, but it did come out, albeit in chunks.


    He dumped the chunks in a jar, grabbed a couple of cobs, and detoured to his room to pick up his steel and flint on his way outside. He arranged the chunks in a rough pyramid, one of the cobs set underneath it, and ground up the other cob around it. A few tries later, and the powder ignited, followed by the cob; then the little chunks lit up, and he sat back to observe.


    They burned for a few minutes - longer than the pile. And notably, produced glowing embers, although they didn''t last as long as a wood fire would have. He just needed to compress it more; it had too much air in it.


    John continued through several more batches as the day progressed, but ended up settling on a fairly simple improvement - filling the top pot with dirt. This, finally, produced long-burning embers that outlasted his patience to wait and see. He got two more pairs of nesting pots out of the kitchen, emptying it, and started producing his fuel bricks in earnest.


    That evening, he had something more palatable with dinner. Boiling the flour really helped. He''d need to fashion some kind of kiln to malt the seeds, so he searched the library until it was time for bed, collecting books on metallurgy, pottery, and baking. The pottery books ended up being the most helpful, and he made plans to try looking for clay for the following day.


    Which he promptly abandoned when he walked into the kitchen. No, the baking book had been the most helpful, because he now recognized the odd metal dome over a furnace as a bread oven.


    The morning was, again, spent replanting the crops. He had a sizable collection of fuel, which he loaded into both a regular oven, to boil water, and the bread oven. He didn''t start that just yet, instead taking a bucket he found in a corner to his bath, cleaning it out, and bringing it back, to begin soaking seeds.


    Some experimentation followed, as the first batch he came back to had sprouted, died, and began rotting. He got the timing down after a few tries, using smaller batches; it took leaving the kitchen, walking outside, counting to twenty, and returning, to get the seeds to sprout.


    The sprouted seeds were then spread over a pan and placed in the bread oven, which he lit. This took a few tries before he managed not to burn them.


    These were ground up and boiled, and then this product was what he finally put into jars, now in the kitchen. The success rate was still about half, the other half of the jars going completely rancid, but over the course of the day, and multiple harvests, he managed to start seeding the other jars with successful batches.


    The final improvement, which took him another day to work out, was boiling the jars between uses - he''d noticed that the jars that had gone bad were more likely to go bad again - and he now got an actually palatable brew more often than not. Dried coneberries worked slightly better than the fresh ones, and he had two varieties of beer - he''d decided it was beer whether that was accurate or not, it tasted pretty close - to choose from.Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    However much time was actually passing outside, from the perspective of his personal time, this was actually some of the fastest progress in anything he''d made in years. Since leaving the military, actually. He spent the next day drunk, celebrating the successes. And the next few reading, between his new daily chores, enjoying himself again.


    It didn''t last very long. John needed things besides reading to occupy the rest of his time. It was time to get into one of the towers, he resolved after reading a chapter for the fifth time, not having processed any of it.


    He stepped outside, walking to the gate, and turned around to study the architecture from the outside. Four towers, one to each corner. The windows were irregularly spaced, like the entirety of the place, so who knew how many landings there were, but assuming the exterior matched -


    "Hey there!" What? John slowly turned in place. A ... man stood on the other side of the gate. A young man, actively waving a hand at Jonathon. He was dressed in a threadbare brown hooded cloak that hadn''t seen oil, probably, since its previous owner had purchased it, because the man, maybe in his late teens or early twenties, couldn''t be old enough to have reduced it to that state. Underneath were simple white pants tied with a rope, and no shirt. "Hello!"


    "Ah. Greetings, sir. Jonathon Eucole, at your service; what can I do for you?" John spoke more out of routine than anything else - it was only a moment after he said it that he realized he couldn''t do anything for the lad.


    "Could I beg a meal and some water? And maybe a bed for the night? Oh, sorry, my name is Avers." The boy pulled his hood down; he had the beginnings of a beard, perhaps four or five days since his last shave, and shoulder-length brown hair. His features were plain, and Jonathon thought, from his shoulders and arms, he was likely a farmer. "Avers Duness. Uh, at your service?"


    John looked at the gate, considering for a moment. It had let him in well enough. Getting out was the problem. "Water and a meal I can certainly do, but I''d hazard a reasoned guess that you probably don''t want the ... bed ... " John trailed off as the boy''s hand moved up as he was speaking, as if miming opening the gate ... and walked through the metal as if it weren''t there. Which, it took him a moment to consider, it probably hadn''t been. "Ah. Right."


    "Thank you much, and anything with a roof over it would be ... hey ... " Avers trailed off as he turned, staring at the gate. "Did that just close on its own?"


    "Near enough." John groaned inwardly. Well, at least he''d have company. "Come along then, I''ll show you to your room."


    "Thank you much, sir. Say, why are the windows all funny?" The lad didn''t even spare a glance for the half-dead everything around the manor.


    "I honestly have no idea."


    Avers gaped as they walked into the enormous foyer; John chose the right door on a whim, and had to slow his pace, as the boy spent too much time staring around at the oddly constructed, if elegant, building. Had he spent that much time staring around at everything when he''d first come here? Probably.


    The lad was stunned when John showed him to the green room, right configuration - he had discovered he had to consciously choose a specific room, in order to get it to reliably show up when he went looking for it.


    And quite ecstatic at the hot bath waiting for him. Jonathon left him to that, walking around a corner to get to the kitchen, where he had his supplies of the eldergrass. He ground up a batch of it, mixed it with a small amount of water, cooked it in a pan over the bread oven, and made - well, it wasn''t bread. He tried a bit of it. Nutty. Needed salt. But it was food. He then got one of his water jars - he kept some around so he''d have cool water, instead of hot water straight from the bath - and grabbed one of the jars of beer as well, and returned to the room.


    Avers was getting dressed, and looked up at the plate of breadlike something. "Food! Thank you. I''m starving." The lad took the plate and jar of beer, and looked around, before moving to sit on the edge of the bed. John took the implicit opportunity to sit in the chair.


    "You are quite welcome. Let me know how the beer is, I''ve been experimenting." Hopefully Avers liked it, because there wasn''t much else available. Would Zyet bring two meals, or just one? He''d just have to wait and see.


    ---


    Kyuse slowly backed away, staring down at the blood. Splatters and droplets covered the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the curtains. Droplets staining the bookcase, splattered over the open pages of a massive tome, the pages soaked in it.


    His eyes moved over the room, past the book, to the shattered bottles of what had been an expensive vintage of wine, the jagged edges of the glass a near black with a long-congealed mess, scattered over a table. A plate sat there, a knife and fork, and a napkin. The plate had ... his eyes moved on.


    The bed. A face, pale and bloodless, frozen in a wide-eyed scream, stared up at him from the bed, framed by hair matted red and brown with drying blood. Her face.


    His gaze jerked away again, to the desk, to the bookcase again, to the table. The small room, so familiar, so alien. The intact bottle of wine, now empty, filled with bad decisions. The tome. The tome, which would never be read again. Should never have been read.


    A little bit of research. He had been careful. He had followed every precaution, save one. He had spoken it aloud. Three years, and he had regretted those words nearly every hour since. His hand lifted, and he forced it down again. It was still there, he knew.


    He took a deep breath. It was too deep, his lungs took in too much air. It came out again with a jagged rumble, deep in his chest, somewhere between a growl and a sob. He looked again to the bed.


    Her body was torn apart, entrails pulled out in loops. The flesh of her arms ended in blackened, burnt flesh at the elbows, the legs halfway down the thigh; the bones scraped messily of flesh and gore, lines of black in one inch increments where fire had cauterized. Strips of skin, sliced messily away piece by piece, in haphazard bloody piles around the bed, each slice burned one one side.


    Kyuse looked at the bloody messy that had once been his dearest friend, and down at his hands, the still unfamiliar pads of his palms, the thick gray hair. The long bloodstained claws.


    He remembered singing as he had cut.


    His hands - his paws - trembled as he grabbed things, shoving them into a pack. He threw a hooded cloak over his shoulders - he was too tall not to be noticed, but if he could get out of the Three Isles without anybody attacking the obvious monster, that would be ... that would be good. He wrapped a leather skirt around his waist, silver buckles securing it into place, and grabbed his old iron estoc, sitting in its scabbard, from a life that was now almost forgotten. The belt didn''t fit around his hips anymore, and he ended up fastening it around his stomach instead.


    Kyuse looked around the room again, forced himself to look around, although he had been a prisoner in this small space for long enough that he had it memorized. The blood and gore was a new look for it, and he could find every droplet. He could smell every droplet.


    The chain wound around his neck, dangling down his chest nearly to his navel, felt heavy, although it weighed rather little. The links pulled at his hair - his fur - as he moved, small sharp tugs. There was no abrasion, at least.


    He turned, pulled the hood down further over his face, trying to hide the muzzle where a mouth should have been. Yellow eyes glinted under the hood as if they possessed their own internal light; he knew well that glint from the mirror that had shown him everything. He wrapped the cloak tighter around him - it didn''t hide him entirely, but perhaps it would hide enough, in the darkness of night - and stepped out the door, ducking under the frame, closing and locking it behind him. He was free. He didn''t feel free.


    The apartment hallway was thankfully empty, the claws on his feet clicking on the tile floor until his consciously raised his toes, walking on the fleshy pads instead. He was ... sort of used to this body, now. It had been nearly a year, even if it had been spent in a single small room.


    Down the hallway. A left he hadn''t taken in months. A right. Out through the door, into the muggy heat of the night in the marshy landscape. Raised wooden planks connected the buildings, the ground a perpetual mud on the northeastern of the Three Isles. There were lights to the south, and voices, which he heard too well. He headed east, towards the river, towards the forest. Kyuse saw three figures ahead, no taller than his chest, for all they were ... probably normal sized, for humans. He hesitated, then took a sidepath, passing between two three-story buildings with fluttering orange firelight filtering out through closed curtains on their upper floors.


    He could see better than they could, in this darkness, so they probably hadn''t seen more than a shadow. They didn''t raise an alarm, so they almost certainly hadn''t seen him. There were people who possessed one of the powers to see in darkness even better than he, however, so he was cautious.


    The blood on the walls, on the floor. Kyuse slowed his walk, looking around in the darkness, spots of red swimming in his sight. No, no. That wasn''t ... real, not here.


    He ducked into a doorway to avoid another pair of people. The Three Isles were busier during the day, but there were always people up and about, even though it wasn''t particularly densely populated; perhaps eighty thousand people lived here, attracted either by the knowledge gathered in the capital of scholars, or the jobs that wealthy scholars naturally brought with them.


    There were also refugees; the civil war that had erupted when Shy took over the empire had been brief, but burned farms and cities had caused some significant unrest, and in the year since the last skirmishes had ended, people continuing fleeing to this politically and militarily unimportant corner of the empire. The Three Isles kept the name, but now something like twenty islands were populated, albeit none so densely as the central isles.


    Kyuse made his way to the brackish water, winding his way through the outskirts of the island, and stripped quickly, wrapping his skirt and estoc in his cloak, and holding it with his pack over his head as he waded into the waters.


    He wound his way through the shallow river, feet sinking ankle deep into the silty bottom, avoiding the other islands as he made his way across the enormous river delta towards the eastern shores.


    The sun was rising when he reached the grasses; the water dropped to his ankles.  Kyuse didn''t pause to dress, water still soaking his dense fur, but did lower the bundles to his chest, setting out across the thick waist-high grass. There was a fishing village to the south, the buildings on stilts visible over a rise between here and there, but nobody would attempt to farm the grass sea.


    It was midday before he felt sufficiently dry to dress again, his arms aching from carrying the weight. He paused to eat some dried meat from his hasty preparations; Kyuse was somewhat dismayed to realize he''d been rather light when grabbing food, and had enough for only a few days. At least he''d remembered steel and flint, and a knife. Some of his other packaged goods were ... well, he hadn''t been thinking very clearly.


    Two vials of carefully packaged acid, some writing materials, three books, three lengths of rope, an iron pot. Most of the space was filled with food, and the pack was mostly full, but he ate ... rather a lot.


    He settled the pack back over his shoulders, a stick of beef in hand, which he tore absently from. He started walking, continuing east, now angling north. He''d follow the Arne river to the forest, and find a place to set up camp there.


    He halted, halfway into the evening, when a smell hit his nose; musty and sour. His ears turned, a peculiar sensation, upwind, and he lowered himself until his eyes were just over the tall grasses, listening. Snorting, grunting. An occasional growl. Boar, maybe?


    Kyuse drew the estoc at his side, a lengthy blade intended for thrusting, and stalked towards the sounds, still listening intently and sniffing lightly at the air. The smells were intense and confusing, but ... maybe three?


    As he approached, as quietly as he could manage, he started to see flashes of red through the grass. Emberwolves. Not wolves, they were in fact a variant on the common boar, notable primarily for their red pelts. They also weren''t particularly aggressive; although they could and would eat meat, they were more pests for farmers than threats. Unless you were a child, anyways. Kyuse mentally cursed whoever named the simple beasts.


    He leapt into a dash when they were just a few yards away - and they promptly scattered, emitting noises somewhere between a honk and a shriek. His estoc caught only air as dark red tails and haunches vanished into the grass.


    Kyuse paused there, for a second, before finally straightening and sheathing the estoc. So much for fresh meat. He turned and resumed his northeastern path.


    Night fell. He kept walking, eating a few more strips of jerky. He half-emptied his canteen, tilting his head straight up and pouring it down his throat; his muzzle wasn''t made for sipping. He stopped to rest again, and rose an hour or so later, continuing away. His fur was uncomfortable, burrs from the grass tangling themselves up, and his tail was an utter mess. He''d deal with that later.


    Kyuse reached the edge of the great Arne forest around dawn, and pressed through the heavy brambles marking the edge.

 Ch 5. A Camp (Kyuse)

    Kyuse flicked his tail, yellow eyes glinting in the darkness of the forest, a slow appreciation growing within him for the difference between old growth forest, and the overgrown brush he had previously thought of as a "forest". It was dark, although his eyes adjusted to that easily enough; what he found more interesting was how clear the forest floor was; there were small scattered clumps of thick brush, lit brilliantly from above, visible for a surprising distance around - tree trunks were spread out more thinly than his previous experience would lead to expect.


    He set his pack against a tree, turning in a slow circle, listening to the calls of birds, and the distant overhead rustle of wind unfelt in the warm enclosure of the trees, and the sound of water to his south. A river cut a meandering path through the forest, forming a semicircle here. A glade formed a barrier to the north, with relatively narrow trails to the northeast and northwest. The horizon was lit up in green in every direction, walls of thick brush lit up in the life-giving sun.


    He''d settle in here. "Eruta nagistrias." A hum filled his mind, and information began filtering into his awareness.


    Kyuse quickly reviewed his personal notes - it was a useful invocation, that came at the price that everything he "wrote" here was accessible to basically any scholar in the Three Isles. Thaumaturgy had been an excellent spell school, in that life. He wasn''t living that life anymore. This being a forest, the natural spell school would be, of course, biomancy. He mentally pulled a student catalogue into his thoughts.


    The immediately headache, he was quite accustomed to, but thaumaturgy proficiency was relatively simple by comparison; action, reaction, and an innate and intuitive understanding of the aether itself, the fabric underpinning the art of magic itself, into which all invocations were ultimately written. It had been quite useful.


    Biomancy, by comparison, was ... huh. He was sitting down? No, laying down, that was the canopy. Biomancy was complex, and where the experience of expanding his knowledge of thaumaturgy had been like somebody writing research directly into his mind, biomancy was more like a dozen people drawing different pictures, that joined unexpectedly.


    It was a fractal; he was vaguely familiar with them, they had been heavily researched during the early days of magical innovation. A pattern which, at any degree of analysis, was only a small portion of a much more complex version of itself. It felt like ... no, not like someone drawing into his mind, like an uncountable number of spiders crawling through his memories, weaving webs into bigger webs.


    The feeling passed, the knowledge slowly integrating itself into his understanding. Kyuse took a slow breath, propping himself up on his elbows. Oh. Ow. Ow. He leaned onto his side, unpinning his tail from underneath his weight. Okay.


    Now. He wanted... the ability to manipulate wood. That would be most useful here and now. He pulled from another part of the catalogue. This knowledge didn''t hurt quite as badly; it was just a modification of the shape of the fractal. Woodwarp. He added a mental note. His knowledge suggested it was quite useful, but not quite everything he would need. He focused again, and this time, it was rather worse; he was overdoing this.  But first, his notes.


    Woodwarp: Creates an outgrowth of living wood at rapid speed, total volume determined by the number of spell layers.


    Nurture: Increases the natural rate of growth, whether sprouting a seed, growing a tree, or spreading disease.


    He''d need to do some testing with them; the knowledge that came with the spell formations was simultaneously vague and potentially enlightening; Kyuse was vaguely familiar that disease was something that was alive, but it was startling that a spell that caused seeds to sprout faster would also increase the spread of a disease.


    Kyuse moved to a tree, and started experimenting. First he cast Nurture with five spell layers, the most he could manage; the casting wasn''t anything like thaumaturgy, where it was a process of mentally creating lines and curves in the aether permeating everything. This was more like creating spirals within spirals within spirals. He couldn''t direct the growth, as far as he could tell, and the tree creaked slightly, visibly widening. Alright. He turned his attention to woodwarp.


    At five spell layers, his mind focusing on overlaying a shape onto the complex spirals of aether, the effect was quite dramatic. With an incredibly loud crack, a bark-covered cube exploded out of the tree, protruding from the trunk of the tree by a corner, of dimensions slightly shorter than the average human arm - his arms were somewhat longer, now, to go along with his generally larger proportions.


    The two spells had consumed about two thirds of his mana, and he used woodwarp again with a single spell layer; this formed a cube about a third of the length of a human arm. He carefully broke the two cubes off the trunk of the tree, leaving scars in the bark, and weighed them experimentally in both hands; they were heavy.


    The growth in volume was approximately linear with spell layers, at least going from one to five layers. Since the mana cost was closer to exponential, it was more cost effective to not add additional layering.


    Kyuse set the cubes aside - he''d break them apart later, and dry them out for a fire. He then moved to the center of the area he''d chosen, judging roughly by the distance to the green-lit brambles in each direction, and hunted around until he found a trio of trees forming a roughly equidistant triangle, about ten paces apart.


    He then moved to the southernmost tree, and began woodwarping, forming buttresses of wood facing each of the other two trees, about twice his height up - he had to touch the trees, and the potency of the spell seemed slightly attenuated by the distance up, but not by much. Two single-layer casts of woodwarp for each buttress, mentally focusing on the shape he wanted, and he moved to the other two trees in sequence, repeating the process.


    He then knelt, landing heavily on his knees, mana and mind exhausted. He slowly went through the process, and then felt like slapping himself on the face - the last time he''d learned new spells, he hadn''t had the experience of a craft. He should have used two spell layers, the cost difference was negligible with the craft augmenting him.


    Kyuse closed his eyes and rested, mentally observing the slow growth of his mana reserves, and, with a slight strain from splitting his attention, brought the soulcrafted gem into his awareness.


    His next casts - at two spell layers each - expanded the buttresses a bit more, forming sturdy supports that tapered down into the trunk of the tree. Next, he expanded straight lines, about the width of his arm, between the trees, meeting approximately in the center. The wood from the disparate trees refused to connect directly, so instead he grew them together in a very rough helix.


    Kyuse then had to take a break - he went to the far end of the northern edge of his patch of forest, digging a small pit to deal with the necessary functions of biology, covering it back up when he was done.


    When he returned, he headed to his pack and retrieved a rope, which he tossed over one of the lines of the triangle, in the exact center. Hoisting himself up it, he was pleased to find that it did, in fact, support his weight, barely creaking under the strain. Given the weight involved, however, he started casting again, expanding the helixes downward - a process which required a lot of walking back and forth between trees, at first, until he could reach up and touch them - down to the ground, and then out over it in a pair of interlocked spirals, forming a rough disc at the bottom of each of the three columns to help distribute the weight.


    Kyuse stepped back a few dozens paces, looking over the odd-looking triangular framework. The height wasn''t exactly level - he''d formed the buttresses of one of the trees a little bit lower than the other two - but maybe that wasn''t a terrible thing. He had to rest again, and then returned, moving to one of the columns, and tossing his rope over it; catching both ends of the rope, he set a foot on the column, and started hauling himself in a vertical walk up to the top.


    It was ... narrow. The claws of his feet dug into the wood, and he fell forward to use the claws of his hands as well, moving awkwardly down the length of the "board" towards one of the trees. Grabbing onto the tree, he stood slowly up, looking down at the ground an uncomfortable distance below.


    Right. He thought about the next steps - he wanted an actual platform to stand on, and symmetry seemed better - he wasn''t certain how much strain the additional mass would place on the health of the trees he had suborned for this purpose, but he didn''t want to kill them. He planned to expand this, and the spell only worked on living trees. He could always nurture them if it turned out to be an issue, he supposed, but the less of that necessary, the better.


    He chose a rotational direction - south, to west, to north, to east, to south again - and started using woodwarp to grow planks across the beams, about a hand''s width wide, and a couple of fingers thick. He wanted thin gaps so rain wouldn''t pool too badly - the bark on the top wasn''t perfectly flat, so that would already be an issue. They were formed at an angle, cutting across the points of the triangle, extending from the top of one beam, resting on the other.


    He had enough space to lay down when his mana was again exhausted, and light was getting scarce anyways. He climbed back down, collected his pack, and headed south, pushing his way past the brambles - his thick brown-gray fur was immensely helpful for keeping the thorns from cutting too deeply - into the slightly brighter light of the setting sun, clouds drifting overhead in a graying sky.


    His feet - paws? - squelched unpleasantly as he pushed his way through the waist-high river grasses, to the river''s edge. Kneeling, he swung his pack around to rest on his knee, retrieving a canteen and a pot, filling the canteen from the river water, and the pot half-full. His eyes drifted across the wide river - some kind of insect noisily buzzed in a series of swarms along both banks. The water was clear, the river perhaps shoulder-deep - it was hard to gauge depth - and fish swam amidst the rocks at the river''s bottom. Fish might be a good source of food, later.


    He squelched his way back into the forest. The pot was set to the ground, and claws tore through the ground easily, as he dug out a small pit, into which he started piling loose sticks and dry leaves.


    The fire started easily enough - the air in the forest was dead, and the leaves lit after only a few dozen sparks from steel and flint. He sat beside the fire, the darkness around him growing more complete as the unseen sun set, until the flames were the only significant source of light. Not that he had too much to worry about there; his new eyes were pretty good in the dark.


    He let the fire die to glowing coals, relaxing as he lay on his side - the tail was kind of inconvenient for sitting down. Kyuse set the pot of river water into a bed of glowing embers, and threw a few strips of dried meat and vegetables from his pack into the water. He was vaguely aware that he should have waited for the water to boil, but it would give the dried out ingredients time to rehydrate, maybe.Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    Dinner was more a chunky slurry than anything else, which he more drank than ate. His sight in the darkness was all shades of gray, color an artifact of light, and his ears were full of the screeching calls of tree frogs, and the nearly painfully high pitched cries of bats hunting overhead. There were probably insect noises, as well; he wasn''t sure if it was his improved hearing or not, but the forest at night was quite loud.


    Kyuse climbed back up onto the finished corner of his platform, and, laying on his side and curling up slightly, quickly found sleep. The nightmares that came with sleep didn''t wake him; they were nearly familiar, now.


    The next morning, after a quick breakfast of slightly moldy bread and some river water from the canteen, was spent expanding the platform, until a triangle of empty space formed in the center, each corner of the larger triangle formed by the frame filled with planks from the tree counterclockwise from them.


    It was ... pretty large. Twenty paces - twenty of his paces - was quite a distance. He''d had to thicken both the support columns, and create a thicker vertical support down the length of the longest planks, until they stopped bowing as he attempted to put weight on them.


    Kyuse rested, and started the entire process over again a little more than his own height up, creating a rough ceiling over it all, this one angled up as he approached the center, to direct water down to the sides - these planks were much thinner, about the thickness of his finger, and much wider, overlapping slightly on the edges. He initially intended to leave another triangular hole in the center, but decided against it, after deciding the center triangle would be where he put his rope ladder when he put the walls up.


    The walls took another day, and he left gaps as windows. These, he formed more likely intertwining vines - it took more effort than the planks, initially, but he quickly found a pattern to the work, and he was pleased with the aesthetics. Wide gaps formed windows, about two thirds of the way up each wall, running nearly the length of each, the weight of the upper portions, unsupported from below, instead hanging suspended from above. He had to extend the support columns up, however, as the weight started to bow the ceiling.


    He looked around, grinning widely; the sensation felt odd, as he had more of a muzzle than a mouth, and his lips didn''t quite ... feel the same, anymore. He hadn''t had cause to smile much, in the year since ... he''d been in this form.


    The grin slipped, when his eyes, following the wall ... back to where it started. He had closed off the area he had been climbing in and out of his living wood structure. He had one rope, not enough to make his planned rope ladder.


    He walked back over to the center hole, looking down. It was ... a long drop. Maybe his legs could take the fall, maybe not, he hadn''t tested that kind of thing, and wasn''t inclined to do so now, far from civilization and healing.


    He moved to his rope, coiled up and sitting on the bark floor, and picked it up, experimentally dropping one end down. There was some slack, but not nearly enough to double it up. Kyuse sighed, and sat down next to the hole, studying the drop.


    Well, nothing for it. He touched the floor, and started woodwarping again, forming a rough wooden ladder down to the ground, where he formed it into spikes, driving it down into the ground. A short time later, he descended, retrieved his pack, and climbed back up. The ladder broke off the wall after a solid kick to each of the poles connecting it; it remained upright, at a slight angle, supported by the poles still embedded in the ground.


    Hm. Kyuse used a foot to hook onto the ladder, and with a heave, pulled it back out of the ground. He pulled it slowly up, breaking it apart into pieces, preserving each rung and a small section of the poles.


    His afternoon was spent tying two of his three ropes around the rungs - and then untying and retying, as he couldn''t get the two lengths of rope to line up quite right on any of the thirty two rungs on his first try, or indeed for many on the second, third, or fourth try, either. He did eventually have his rope ladder, with wooden slats instead of his original plan of just rope. Judging by the difficulty he had had with the lengths using the wooden slats, it was probably a good thing he had done it this way instead; he''d climbed a rope ladder once before, and even a properly strung rope ladder was difficult to climb.


    He formed two thick knobs on either side of one of the triangles, wrapped one end of his ladder around both, tied it, and then for good measure woodwarped the knobs to engulf the rope as well. Kyuse dropped the ladder, and it fell in jerks and starts, uncoiling until it trailed the ground at the bottom. He pulled it back up, coiling it into a cylinder as he went, and tried it again. Alright. He dropped it once more, and descended.


    The descent was ... unpleasant. The rope swung wildly under his weight, swinging away from his probing feet whenever he moved. But it did work.


    Kyuse went fishing. This wasn''t something he was prepared for, although he did manage to grab three up over the course of an hour and a half, which is when his patience ran out.


    He cut the heads off, tossing them back into the water, filled his pot, and carried his load back to the pit he''d made. He had to scrounge a bit further for sticks and leaves to make this fire; he''d have to figure out how to split the cubes of wood he''d made pretty soon. His knife wouldn''t cut it for the task.


    He diced the fish up; bones, viscera, and all; and set them in the water of the pot, which was soon nestled in the dying embers of the fire. A few of his remaining dried vegetables - some kind of pale yellow root - were chopped and joined the chunks of bloody fish as the water slowly heated up.


    The resulting slurry was ... unappetizing. The bones had mostly dissolved, but he still found himself picking fragments out from between his teeth with his claws. His teeth were more widely spaced than human teeth, making the picking easier, and all sharp; none were any good for grinding. Hence the slurry he made for himself now.


    It took him a frustrating number of minutes to climb back up into his ... house, it was basically a house now. Sleep came easily, as did the nightmares.


    Morning came, and he went fishing again, catching only two fish over the course of two hours. He then spent some time foraging, without much luck - he didn''t recognize any of the plants, and certainly wasn''t going to be eating any of the berries he saw.


    Breakfast was therefore meagre, and hardly filling. The next couple of hours were spent growing and snapping twigs off a tree near the river - if he killed a tree through this practice, he didn''t want it to be one of the tall central trees of his part of the forest - making a pile to be used for kindling. Then he grew larger pieces of wood, connected to the original tree by thin, easily-broken rods, which created a pile which could be used as logs.


    It took three trips to lug the two piles back to the firepit he had dug, and another trip to fashion a pair of wooden racks, which he brought back. Kyuse sat down, retrieved his knife, and started stripping the bark from the thicker rods of wood he had created, making a pile of the bark next to the firepit, and placing the stripped wood onto one of the racks to dry. Not that there was any sunlight here, and the air was both rather humid and without wind to help the process, but he might as well start now.


    When the rack was full, he dug the firepit deeper, piling the dirt up next to it, and started laying the rods into it, forming a dense lattice of wood, until he ran out. Then he went back to the river and created two tubes of wood - it took three tries, as bark kept filling the tubes - and dug trenches on either side of the pit, laying one end of each tube on either side of the lattice of wood. He covered the lattice with leaves, then carefully piled dirt over the leaves and buried the tubes, leaving the far ends exposed. His next couple of fires might dry out this wood enough to use to make another batch.


    As he started the fire for dinner - four fish, and while he felt like he was getting slightly better at it, he had had no more luck with foraging - he had not been expecting the smell, as smoke started filtering out of the tubes. His relaxing time by the fire no longer relaxing, Kyuse stood up and went back to his house, climbing up into it in another frustratingly difficult process, and started forming some shelves on the walls, which he started emptying the contents of his pack onto.


    Three books were unwrapped from the waxed paper he had held them in, and placed on the shelves; two invocation books that the Three Isles probably wouldn''t notice the absence of, and one book on advanced thaumaturgical principles he''d never gotten around to reading, which they probably would eventually notice was missing. A small bundle of candles, four bottles of ink, an abacus, three wax-wrapped bundles of velum papers, and a pair of slightly bent quills.


    A whetstone, for his knife and estoc, he placed on a different wall which he mentally designated his material workspace area, with his third rope. These were joined by two bottles of acid, each wrapped in multiple layers of leather to keep the glass from breaking, a similarly-wrapped jar of oil, and two bags of glass marbles. An afterthought, a small pile of copper, and four pieces of silver, joined these shelves.


    The final wall, he formed larger shelves on; his folded spare cloak went on one of these shelves. The cloak was joined by a pair of simple brown skirts. He put his other clothes - pants and delicate buttoned shirts - on a different shelf; these, he couldn''t wear anymore. He wasn''t entirely certain why he had brought them, but he supposed he could cut them apart and make skirts and loincloths out of them. His fur didn''t cover everything, after all, and there was no reason to live like an animal even if he looked the part.


    The foul smell had mostly abated when he got back, although not entirely - the lack of wind could be a problem, there, which he''d need to figure out a solution for. The air in the canopy above him was hazy with gray smoke. Kyuse set the pot of fish and water in the embers, and sat down to wait.


    After dinner, he headed back north, where he had been digging and filling in pits. A shovel would be nice ... ah. He formed a wooden shovel using woodwarp, and started digging. The wooden shovelhead turned the dirt over easily enough, but he knelt frequently to use his knife to clumsily saw through roots. He only managed to dig about knee-deep before he reached roots too thick for his knife to cut through, however.


    It''d have to be deep enough. He woodwarped the roots to form walls around the pit, and then kept moving the walls up, forming two rails as a kind of seat - once again, his tail would get in the way. He ... tried it out, and it worked acceptably well. Kyuse sprinkled some dirt over the nightsoil, and headed south again, past his house, to the river.


    He removed his cloak and spread it over a bush, unbelted his estoc from his side and set that onto the cloak, the thick canopy of the bush giving some way under the weight, and followed that with his skirt. Kyuse pushed through the grass to the river, looking down at his reflection.


    Yellow eyes looked back up at him, large, tufted, furry ears spread out above a face that had more resemblance to a bear''s than a man''s, with a short muzzle. His face had fine gray and brown fur, hiding the skin beneath; a long mane spread out where a human''s hairline would be, of a darker shade of brown, nearly black, tucked back behind his ears, and falling down around his shoulders, nearly halfway down his broad, furry chest, the fur of which was lighter, gray more thickly interspersed with brown there. The gray metal chain hung there, swaying slightly with his motions, fastened around his neck with closed links.


    He was ... mostly human in shape, if not in appearance; his back legs were at least jointed in mostly the correct direction for standing upright. He tried a grin; the face peering up at him from the water bared its teeth in a predatory expression. He let the grin drop again. Friendly, it was not. He stepped into the water, which felt cold after the warmth and humidity.


    He moved until he was waist-deep, claws scratching uncomfortably on the rocks underfoot with an unpleasant grinding sensation, and began methodically washing. His tail got the most attention, the wide bushy fur having collected detritus and burrs, which he used the claws of his fingertips to comb through. He should have brought a brush. His legs were next, almost as dirty as his tail, and his feet were difficult, particularly cleaning underneath the claws at the end of each of his toes.


    Cleaning his genitals was done gingerly, mostly with the knuckles of his fingers, as best as he could - his claws were sharp - and he mostly used the pads on the palms of his hands to rub at his face. The mane at least wasn''t too bad, only having a few snarls formed around burrs. Finally he washed his arms, and scrubbed out underneath the claws of his fingers, using other claws to do so, quite carefully.


    He stepped back out of the water, feet immediately sinking into the mud that the thick river grasses grew in and undoing some of his work there - maybe he could make a wooden ramp tomorrow? He was heavy - fur held a lot of water - and paused to wrap his estoc and skirt in his coat, to carry back to the house a few feet away from his soaked and dripped body. As he approached the still-burning fire, he halted to form a somewhat lopsided stool, which he broke away from the tree he had formed it on.  He formed a wooden hook on a nearby tree, and hung the bundle his cloak formed from it.  And then Kyuse sat on the stool until his meal was complete, his gaze barely drifting from the fire until it was nothing but fading embers.


    Yellow eyes reflected the embers as Kyuse stared down into the pit. He''d smell like smoke tomorrow, but there was no helping that, and it wasn''t like there was anyone around but himself to smell it.

 Ch 6. Companionship

    Zyet had brought two meals, surprisingly to John. Well, he had arrived with one meal, and then, after John had put it before Avers - the young lad definitely needed the food more than John did - Zyet had reappeared with another. The two ate and drank in companionable silence; John drank water he fetched from the tub, and Avers drank the beer.


    "This is pretty good. Uh, the food''s ... not bad either." Avers was lifting the beer, examining the sediment at the bottom, and his stricken expression only deepened as his mouth opened again, apparently unwilling to stop himself in time. "Although you should filt- ... ah, sir." John just shrugged.


    "I don''t have anything I can use to filter it, although figuring that out is next on my list. Been brewing it myself with the stuff around the manor." Avers looked up, and then back down to the beer, with a complication expression that John couldn''t quite figure out. Something between confusion and ... something else.


    "Uh, sir. Why don''t you send your man to town and get some cheesecloth?"


    "Zyet?" John blinked, looking out the door to where the strange sage had disappeared. "He''s not ... but I don''t know, I hadn''t thought to ask. I guess I''ll ask him tomorrow."


    "You can''t send for him? Oh, uh, forgive me, sir." Avers ducked his head, his face reddening.


    "Lad, I''m a mil- I''m a scholar." The second wasn''t quite right, either, but the first, as automatic as it had been, was entirely wrong. "The only thing qualifying me for that sir is my age, and I think my deep well of immaturity balances that off nicely. It''s John, or Jonathon if you insist."


    Avers looked up. "You''re a scholar? Oh! Forgive me, Professor ..." he paused for a moment, searching, "Professor Eucole." John couldn''t help but bark out a laugh at that. It did sound almost right, for all the pretense involved; he almost was the picture of the absent-minded self-professed professors he had met in the Three Isles. Although he''d yet to doddle about, holding ''classes'' only the newly arrived attended, in which he spouted opinion like it was fact. He''d attended a few himself before he learned better.


    "John is fine. I''ve gone by it far more than I have any other name." You got one-syllable names in the military. Anything longer, and you might die when somebody was shouting for you, as their tongues labored over the extra baggage.


    "So forgive me from asking, si- pro- ... uh, John, but are you the owner?" Avers was looking around the room they were in, still awed at the fine furnishings. John considered the question for a moment.


    "I don''t think so. Maybe? Zyet seems to fit that role better. I''m not really sure what I''m doing here. I''d leave if I could." Oh. Whoops. He''d meant to let that particular conversation wait until ... well, the lad was fed. Close enough. Avers'' eyes turned back to John, widening.


    "You''re a prisoner? But you were outside ..." Avers looked John over, then around the room, looking for something only he knew.


    "Gate won''t open." Avers attention returned to John, expression going flat. Ah yes. He had walked through the gate; he thought John was messing him about. John elaborated. "The gate doesn''t open from the inside. It didn''t close behind you, it was never open." Avers continued giving him the look. "There''s some kind of spacial magic going on here."


    The look evaporated, into an expression, first of relief, then of fear. "Magic?" What rural backwater was the lad even from? Most large cities had nearly as many magi as anyone else, if for no other reason than that it was necessary for food and water. Farms could produce more food, and much more flavorful, for less effort, until you considered transportation. Only the rich and the rural ate farm-grown fruits and vegetables; everyone else ate manna.


    Most people supplemented the magical nutrition with meat; meat was far tastier than magic-summoned food, and was only one extra step away, feeding the animals the magical food. It was slightly more expensive, but well worth it. Even John''s parents, poverty-stricken as they were, had mixed meat in with their manna stew more days than not.


    John''s attention returned to the lad, who still had a rigid and unnatural posture; he raised a hand for Avers to relax. "It''s just magic. If you''ve been to a city, it''s everywhere. I''m still working out how to get out of this particular place, although I must admit I''m not working too hard at it, as curiosity has caught me as thoroughly as the magic itself." He mused for a moment on his fear, and his temptation, of investigating the magic that let this estate function. The fear still outweighed the temptation - the blood, he was sure it was blood, that had come from the walls still terrified him. But the fear was fading, and the temptation remained as strong as ever.


    "Uh. Right." Avers still looked fearful, but straightened himself up; John eyed him, recognizing a country lad trying not to be seen as unsophisticated. It''s what John had been aiming for for many years.


    "Anyways, yeah. I haven''t been able to figure out a way out. I guess I can work a little harder on that, get you out of here before you''re as old as I am." John laughed, but Avers just shrank in fear a little bit more. "Don''t worry lad, there''s a way. I know Zyet can leave, and another gentleman left as well." Unspoken was Leonard''s implication that it might have taken a decade. Avers definitely didn''t need to hear that.


    "Uh. Right. Sir. Uh, John."


    "Anyways, I''m rambling a bit. Zyet isn''t much for conversation" if the sage was even human "and I''ve spent a little while now without any decent company. You''ll want your rest, I''ll come by in the morning and we''ll see about getting you fed again and on your way."


    "Thank you, sir." John stood, and left, Avers looking terrified behind him. Well, so much for the lad''s rest. Maybe he''d get a little bit of sleep anyways; the beds were quite luxurious, and while John didn''t actually have much experience with luxury, they definitely exceeded anything he had encountered before.


    Avers walked out the gate - the closed gate - without apparent issue. He''d just moved his hand, and the gate opened in front of him. John stared in shock and dismay as the lad turned and looked at him.


    Avers, for his part, was giving John a look that suggested he now thought John had been telling him ghost stories the night before, his hands moving to his hips.


    "Ah. Right. Well, maybe it''s just me, then." John thought about the odd mithril collar he couldn''t remove, at least not for very long. Maybe the effect was somehow bound to it?


    "Ah. Right. Well, uh. Thank you for the meal and bed, sir. I ... " Avers paused for a moment, then, expression clouding. Then it cleared. "I''ll try to be back in a few days with some cheesecloth. I think your beer would be pretty good."


    John blinked, and smiled. "I''ll have some ready for you."


    John filled every available jar with beer over the next few days - if Avers could be a reliable intermediary to trade with whatever village he came from, as John hadn''t though to ask, he needed some trade goods - and spent some time exploring. He did find a new and different storeroom, or maybe laundry room - this one contained bedding, towels, and an empty copper washtub. One corner also held a large mechanical contraption with rollers he couldn''t quite figure out the use of - he couldn''t find a handle - but which he thought might be for wringing out water. It was the only new room he had found, but he suspected there were many.


    Otherwise, he started focusing on the farming, until one rack of shelves of the farming storeroom were heaped with elderberry seeds. Well, maybe not heaped - they weren''t actually in danger of sliding off - but he was pleased. His only other focus was building up a supply of his fuel, and having run out of places to put more berries, he started adding them into the fuel as well. It didn''t make a huge difference, but it made some.


    Zyet, somewhat to John''s expectations, did not respond whatsoever to anything John said. He was quite sure that Zyet was not human, but couldn''t progress any further on that mystery, no matter how he tried. He spent his days waiting for Avers to get back - he wanted to trade for some more bags, and maybe some barrels, to begin with. Actual barrels, that could be sealed, would mean he could make more beer, and then he could start trading for more valuable things. He wasn''t sure what those more valuable things were, yet, but he''d figure it out.


    ---


    Kyuse stared into the dying ashes of the fire. Another day, another meal of fish. He was tired of fish, but his heart also felt too dull and worn-out to really get worked up over it. His nightmares were old friends, but they were friends who had overstayed their welcome, and which he couldn''t ask to leave. He deserved them.


    At length, he rose, moving to the ladder, which he ascended smoothly. He had gotten pretty good at climbing up the thing, although climbing down was still challenging. His camp - no, his house - greeted him.


    He''d added some additional furniture, grown from trees further out, and then broken off. He moved to the chair he actually sat in - the seat was angled on one side, back supported entirely from the other, so his tail would fit in if he slid into it from the side - and slid into it, relaxing against the broad back of it.


    This was his third chair. His first chair he had broken, after unconsciously leaning back in it, and damn near broken his tail under himself as well. His second chair was sitting innocently a few feet away - he''d tried growing a rocking chair, deciding to satisfy the need to rock back in a chair. It worked, although it had been a pain to haul up into the space. But rocking chairs and tails, as it transpired, didn''t mix. So it sat unoccupied.


    There was also a small side table he never used, but which would hold his books if he ever sat down to read. Light would be a problem if he wanted to read in the evenings, his old habit - he couldn''t exactly light a fire in here. But it wasn''t a problem for today, and his attention moved on.


    To ... nothing. And that was the problem that increasingly pressed on Kyuse. He had set up a comfortable place. He had a source of food, however tiresome fish became. He had shelter from the rain, and when the seasons changed, the snow. His fur meant that the cold wouldn''t be an issue - he ... already knew that, but his mind quickly moved on before he focused on the memories. He was running out of things to do to make this place complete.


    And he started dreading the feeling of completing a task, of having one less thing to occupy his mind. Kyuse had been running on fulfilling tasks, on distracting himself, but the number of tasks was dwindling, and with it, the distractions. Every day he found that he had to try a little bit harder to not think about the last ... the last year.


    Kyuse choked back a sudden rising sob before it had begun, hardening his mind, concentrating on his unsteady breathing until he stopped gasping for air. Calm. In. Out. In. Out.


    The evenings were the worst. No, falling asleep was the worst. Going through the tasks he would accomplish the next day didn''t work anymore. He''d love to have someone to talk to, someone to distract him with inane conversation about arcane powers beyond human comprehension. But he didn''t look like a person anymore, and he''d get an arrow or a sword through him before he could convince somebody that he wasn''t some kind of new and unknown monster. He was lonely, but that wasn''t a problem he could solve, it wasn''t a task he could check off the list.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Kyuse needed ... Kyuse needed a hobby. Something to occupy his time, that wouldn''t end when he completed it.


    He took up whittling with a knife that had never been designed for it. He had no shortage of wood, after all, and the challenge of using the knife for this unintended purpose was perfect.


    ---


    Avers returned, as promised. John saw him approaching as he worked the fields, and moved to the gate to greet him, waving cheerfully. Mostly he was grateful for human company.


    "Hey there!" Avers waved back as John called out to greet him, smiling cheerfully. He moved through the gate, which never stopped being closed from John''s perspective, shifting a bag from a shoulder and offering it to John.


    It had cheesecloth. And also some actual cheese. No, wait - that was muslin. John picked up some of the somewhat finer fabric, looking up to Avers.


    "My da said that cheesecloth would let too much sediment through." Avers offered by way of explanation, then continued, in a slightly neutral tone, eyes moving up as he tried to remember some phrasing. "Also he said thank you for your hospitality good sir and more people should be like you, the old ways of hospitality are important and ..."


    John watched Avers screw up his face, trying to remember the rest of his memorized speech, and took pity. "Tell your ''da'' that hospitality is the proper way of things, and his appreciation is in turn appreciated." Alright, not too much pity. Avers opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, then just nodded, eyes closing tightly.


    "So, want to try some of the beer, sans sediment?" Avers opened his eyes again and smiled, nodding. He was dressed a little more nicely today, looking less worn down and ragged than his last visit. What had he even been doing out here, back then?


    The two walked back up the path to the manor, between the half-dead trees that lined the walk. Avers was from a small farming village northeast of here, a half day''s walk by road, called Rustor''s Walk. They had a single store, which sold durable goods and naught else - it was a community of farmers, and if somebody needed milk they''d trade for it. The local blacksmith was another two villages over, a three day walk. And the nearest glassblower was a week''s journey away, although his wares could be purchased in Rustor, as the town was usually abbreviated.


    The glassblower was the one John had initially been interested in, but Avers informed him that, with the distance involved, glass was too expensive for most tasks. One of the farmers moonlighted as a cooper, although parts had to be ordered from the blacksmith.


    John then gave Avers a tour of the manor; Avers jaw dropped when John demonstrated that the rooms didn''t stay fixed in place, setting a piece of cheesecloth in the floor in one of the yellow bedrooms, then walking down the hall and around a corner, opening a door there into the same bedroom, where the cloth sat right where it had been placed.


    "But ... " Avers pointed wordlessly back down the hall where they had come from. "But we just came ... " John enjoyed the fresh reaction; it had really thrown him for a loop, too, and he was accustomed to some level of magical shenanigans going on, from his time in the Three Isles.


    "Yeah. This place is something else. My goal is to find a way into the towers, no luck there yet though. If nothing else, I''d love a good view of the surrounding area."


    Avers nodded, and John walked out the door and turned left. A new door sat facing him, a dead-end in the hallways that never had dead-ends. John blinked at it. It was metal, some kind of copper alloy, set in walls that were distinctly different from those they met; these were rough stone, compared to the elegant wood paneling of the rest of the manor.


    "Huh. I think ..." John swallowed. What did this mean? "I think we just found one of them."


    There was indeed a spiral staircase, in a circular room about ten paces across. Windows were set at odd angles in every direction - and John was disturbed to notice that he couldn''t see the manor, or the fence, or indeed the estate at all, through any of them. As far as the view from the tower was concerned, as they ascended, they were in a vast, empty meadow, surrounded by forest.


    The lighting in the tower came from the same lanterns, suspended from overhead, which appeared irregularly. They glowed with a golden light, but peering into the glass, as he walked up and drew level with one, there was no apparent source - it was just bright inside the lantern.


    The lanterns, made of the same alloy as the door - John designed it was bronze, absent further evidence - were suspended with delicate-looking bronze chains, which rose up to a landing, five or six floors above them. There was no rail on the spiral staircase, which wound its way up the walls, a series of stone steps apparently mortared into, and a part of, the walls themselves. He felt like they should break underfoot, under their own weight if not the two hesitantly ascending men''s, but they didn''t shift in the least.


    He had never been afraid of heights, but John could see through the gaps in each step, and as the floor below fell away beneath them, he found himself edging until his shoulder brushed the wall. The stone would not be forgiving of a fall. Avers panted behind him, muttering unintelligibly to himself. John wanted to rant and rave, himself, but he had been looking for these damned towers for - days? Weeks? He''d lost track of time.


    "Hey, uh, Avers." His voice was -not- trembling."


    "Y-yeah?"


    "What day is it?"


    There was a pause, and then a quiet, disbelieving laugh. "Day? Day? It''s, uh, the fourteenth of First Founding. Why?"


    Hell. It had been a month, give or take a few days; he hadn''t actually been doing a good job tracking before he''d gotten here, really. And he''d really lost track of some days in here. Wait.


    "Uh. What year?"


    "Really? Uh. 458."


    Okay, good, a month. Give or take. So time dilation hadn''t been - he resisted the urge to ask which era, which would just be silly. If an era had come and gone, the odds were astronomical against the possibility of arriving in the same damn year. Anyways, if there was a time dilation effect causing a few more days to pass outside than inside, it wasn''t too bad.


    John focused his attention on the lanterns, instead. They were actually really pretty, now that he had gotten used to the asymmetry of the place; the overall effect was almost like an immensely tall, golden-lit chandelier. Sort of.


    "W-why do you ask?"


    "Oh. Time passes weirdly here, and I wanted to make sure the world hadn''t completely passed me by outside."


    "Ah." Avers sounded quiet. "Did it?"


    "Nope. Still the same year. A few more days might have gone by out there than in here, but nothing like what I was worried about."


    They fell into mutual silence as they labored up the stairs. John''s legs hurt; this was a damned long climb. He looked up again at the approaching landing, and could see more spiral staircases above it. It kept going. How tall was it from the outside? He couldn''t quite remember.


    John, leading, arrived at the landing first, and collapsed, panting heavily, to the ground, laying on his back and staring up. He really hadn''t wanted to stop on those stairs, and now he was completely done. Five or six stories? It had felt like more, not that he had ever spent much time climbing stairs. Was it always that much work?


    Avers sat heavily down next to him, not quite as far out of breath, but folding his arms around himself, teeth chattering lightly - farmers tended towards heavier labor than John''s past few years as a scholar. But then, farmers probably didn''t get up to too many activities much more dangerous than the activity itself.


    Not that farming was safe, exactly, but the dangers were more, well, down to earth. Most were rangers, for the benefits in dealing with animals, but even then, a ploughbeast was still not entirely predictable.  They rested on the landing, looking up.


    John''s eyes finally drifted sideways, where he noticed a door sitting in the wall.  Slowly, he got up, moving to the door, and opened it.  He wasn''t surprised, exactly, to discover the quite familiar hallway behind it.  Leaving the door open, he moved through, keeping an eye back on Avers through the opening as he walked to the first door, and opened it.  The library.  He moved back into the tower before he lost his way back in.


    "Checking the hallway to see if there were new rooms, if we were on a new floor." He explained, to Aver''s questioning look.  The lad nodded.


    Hm.  There was a window near to the door.  John walked across the landing, so he could look through the window and door at the same time.  Well, that was a disturbing view; an empty meadow through one, and a hallway through the other.  John moved back in, closing the door.


    "T-this place is creepy."  Avers offered, as he watched John''s motions.  John just nodded.


    "I''d love to know what magic is responsible, though.  I had given up being a scholar, but this place is slowly reawakening it in me."


    ---


    Kyuse was getting pretty decent with the knife, and he''d only cut himself a few times.  Okay, he''d cut himself a lot, until he sharpened his knife on the whetstone.  He really needed a strop - how could he have remembered the whetstone, and forgotten a strop?  He had made do, unwrapping the leather from one of the vials of acid, but the grain was a little course for the work, and he wasn''t sure if it actually helped or not.


    The sharpening as a whole had, and he''d managed to carve himself a simple wand, which he''d used as a focusing implement for growing new wood a grand total of once.  Then he''d realized he could make a better focusing implement, which was what he was working on now.


    A living wood oak staff, grown from an acorn with nurture until it sprouted.  Then he''d carefully alternated carving with nurture and woodwarp castings, until he had a straight sapling, as tall as he was and of perfect width for his wide hands, topped in a dense bundle of living leaves.  Two thirds of it was coated in bark; the bottom third was woodwarped roots, forming a dense spiral.


    It extended his effective reach quite well - strictly speaking, he had other means of doing this, but it wasn''t attuned correctly to biomantic mage, and worked better for pure thaumaturgy.  And this enhanced his spellcrafting slightly, instead of reducing it.


    When he wasn''t using the staff, he planted it, with a small burst of Nurture, beside the river where it could get some sunlight - he''d cleared out a small section of bushes, and cut down the remaining brush around it until the leaves got some more direct light.  There was still canopy overhead, but it was thin by the river, and there was light to be had, at least.  He had to cut the roots off each time he picked it up, but his mana fixed the damage whenever he brought it back.


    This distraction sufficed for a few days, but he was still lonely and miserable, spending far too much time avoiding thinking about things.  He finally decided that he did need to confront at least a little bit of the past years.  The easy stuff, first.


    Like Silvas making him cut off parts of himself and cook them for her, before using her magic to restore him.  He made himself - he let himself - remember.  Day after day.  Week after week.


    When he had finished sobbing until he could barely breathe, he forced himself to start whittling again, through the blurriness of the tears.  He carved a little wooden bat.  Well, a blob with wing-shaped blobs; the knife wasn''t great for delicate work.


    ---


    The next landing was even further up.  If the last had been five stories, this one was six.  They climbed in silence, again shifting closer to the walls as they climbed higher, looking out the windows as they passed them.  They were growing level with the immensely tall trees of the distant forest.


    The next landing had another door; John didn''t bother to open it, knowing what he''d find.  Although he was tempted to go for water, or even better, beer, he wanted to see the top of the tower before he left.


    However, the four or five stories to the landing above them had started to make him doubt he''d get to the top.  He was reasonably certain now that they had climbed higher than the tower had been on the outside.  One more landing.  They rested, and climbed higher.


    Another landing.  Another.  John''s every muscle ached; Avers was quiet, but also, Avers was quiet.  The lad didn''t seem overly strained by the climb, but then, he was a farmer.  He probably did more work every morning.  Through the windows, the ground fell away beneath them, and the forest stretched out towards the horizon.


    "That''s Rustor''s Walk, over there."  Avers pointed towards a gap in the canopy, through which could be seen the sharp lines of brown rooftops.  Tile, or thatching?  Too far away to tell.  It was indeed a good distance away, a long walk.  John nodded, pausing to admire the view.  They just looked out the window for a while, and then continued up without speaking.


    Eleven landings up, and somewhere between fifty and seventy floors, and John reached his limit.  He lay on the floor, spent, where he had been resting for some half an hour now without any sense of recovery.  The meadow couldn''t be seen at all through the windows anymore, and individual trees were indistinguishable, just green blurs far below.


    "Professor, I don''t think there is a top to this tower.  I think it has the kind of creepy like the rest of this place."  John nodded from his position laying on the stone floor.


    "I think you are right, huah, lad." He wheezed back.


    "At least we don''t have to walk all the way back down.  Want help back to your room?"


    John didn''t want to want help, but he did in fact want help.  Avers helped him to his feet, offering his shoulder to the old scholar as they moved awkwardly through the bronze door.  The open door of his bedroom waited a few feet away, and Avers helped John to his study chair, where he collapsed.


    He''d found the tower.  It just hadn''t given him anything he''d wanted.  The view had been nice, but it had only deepened the weirdness inherent to the estate - no tower in the world rose that tall, it would collapse under its own weight, magical reinforcement or no.


    He smiled anyways.  Avers was a nice kid.  He''d have to leave again in the morning, but that was alright; John would send some jars of strained beer with him, and maybe in a few weeks he''d get himself a barrel or four.  Hell, the glass jars, with their screw-on lids, would be worth more than the beer itself, but what he really wanted wasn''t glass jars, but barrels, sacks, and cloth.  And maybe some different food.  He picked at the meal in front of him; he hadn''t enjoyed this meal in a while, now, and he almost had to make himself eat it.  Hm.  Maybe even some spices.  That would be something.

 Ch 7. Moving On

    Kyuse was getting better at the whittling. Not so much at catching fish, but he wasn''t sure how much better he wanted to be at that - he was getting very, very tired of fish. He needed to find some edible plants and start growing those out.


    Strictly speaking, he could probably just start eating things, and see what happened; his unnatural durability meant he should survive most any natural poison, if unhappily and maybe unconscious for a while while he recovered. But that wasn''t something he wanted to try doing unless he found no other choices, and it certainly wasn''t something he was inclined to do just because he was tired of eating the same meal, day after day, week after ... how long had he even been out here? Two weeks? Three? Had it been a full month yet?


    At least he''d know when the season changed, as the leaves falling, or even an early snow as sometimes happened in the central forest, would be a pretty good giveaway, regardless of how poorly he''d done so far in tracking time. Kyuse examined the small row of wooden figures he''d been whittling; he''d put the older work into the drying pit.


    That, at least, had been a success; each fire dried out the wood for the next. He''d also started producing some charcoal from the bits and pieces of dried wood he didn''t fully extract, which, while it was the basis of the design for the pit, he hadn''t actually expected. For now he woodwarped himself a lopsided, bark-covered barrel, as well as a heavy cover that sat on top of it, which he was storing the charcoal in.


    He''d taken to wearing only a simple loincloth; he definitely didn''t want to go naked, but between the strip of cloth, his fur, and his tail, he thought he wouldn''t be entirely inappropriate if somebody might happen by - not that they wouldn''t try to kill him anyways, as he didn''t look human, but it was his standards, not theirs, he cared about. Besides, the fur was kind of warm. He''d cut all his spare clothing apart to make the simplest garments, using a claw, as his knife blade was now perpetually sticky with sticky sap residue, which he couldn''t entirely remove. He had kept the clothes he''d arrived in, however, kept folded on a shelf.


    His other major project now was creating a more solid boundary for his little section of forest. He had an idle thought that maybe somebody would pause before hitting him with an arrow, if they thought he was somebody''s pet.  He''d begun with a fence of living wood that encircled the area, following the trees on the outskirts; Kyuse couldn''t exactly make a gate, so he''d left a gap where the forest went between glade and river, as well as leaving himself a path to both the glade and the river.


    He''d also spent several hours casting Nurture, over and over, on the brambles of the glade and river, leaving his own paths into each area alone, so the brush was thinner and traversable there; other than those two paths, which now formed trails from his constant passage, the brush was impassably thick now. His time in the glade was mostly spent hunting for some kind of recognizable edible plants; he thought he''d found something that might be one of the many varieties and cousins of mint - it smelled right, and tasted right, although he spit it out - but it didn''t exactly go well with the fish. Other than that, he''d found three varieties of berry, but hadn''t ventured to try eating any of them yet.


    He did feel like he had worked through some of his troubles, but there was a lot of baggage to unpack there, and he mostly avoided thinking about it. Silvas had been increasingly terrible as she had grown more and more comfortable with the power she held. Right until that comfort had led to a mistake, and her death. He felt guilty about the relief he felt that she had made that mistake; the whole thing had been his own fault. His hand moved to the chain around his neck, and jerked away again.


    ---


    Avers left with four jars of now-filtered beer - it did indeed taste much better filtered - and a shopping list. John had been correct in assuming the jars would be worth more than the beer itself.


    And back to the manor, which felt ... empty. John had found he could pick the landing of the tower the door opened into, if he had been there before, and spent his evenings climbing the stairs. It got easier, as he went up; these were muscles he wasn''t sure he''d ever given this kind of workout before. John could walk all day, but an hour of climbing stairs left him completely bushed in a way walking through the actual bush had never managed.


    John didn''t have a particular goal, he just enjoyed watched the sunset through the windows, completely unobstructed by anything, the horizon forming a smooth disc in every direction. It was also interesting seeing the shadows of clouds on the forest. Maybe seeing the top of a cloud could be a goal? If the tower kept going. So far it showed no signs of stopping.


    He continued farming, albeit only eldergrass - he had a very healthy stockpile of his fuel pellets now - and stockpiling the grain. John tried a few more experiments with trying to make bread, but had no luck at all there; he just ended up with hard, dry biscuits, or, when he tried cooking it for less time, hard but still wet biscuits. That had been an interesting culinary experience which he had no desire to repeat. Maybe he should hunt down a baking book, but he really couldn''t bring himself to care that much about the failure to make bread. Instead, he stockpiled the grains against the day Avers returned with barrels, and filled a couple of large stew pots with flour, having nothing else to store it in.


    Where John''s mornings were spent farming, evenings were spent climbing stairs; his afternoons were spent reading. Mostly fiction, of which there was an ample supply, because he was reading for entertainment. He was listless, however, and interrupted his readings frequently to go outside, and just walk in the sunlight; too much time indoors, he knew from personal experience, wasn''t good for his mind.


    He finally forced himself to investigate the foul-smelling orchard, and was relieved to discover that the rotting scent, against all his expectations, came from the trees themselves; they had odd bulbous flowers which exuded an awful, offal stench. John was surprised to discover that the flowers somehow trapped flying insects inside and dissolved them; not so much that the tree was eating insects, which somehow fit this cursed place, so much as that there were insects at all.


    He hadn''t noticed any insects in all his time in the estate, including in the considerable time he spent farming, and the discovery that there was a more or less mundane explanation for the fact came as a relief to him.


    The relief was brief, as he realized how many insects the orchard must be consuming every day, given how many insects he''d seen in partially-consumed states.


    ---


    Kyuse listened to the patter of rain on the roof of his treehouse. It was muffled - even the comparatively thin wood of the roof was still considerably thicker than the thin wooden shingles of the Three Isles - but still a pleasant sound. He had to remind himself it was pleasant, because three days of slow but continuous rain had gotten to be a bit much; he''d skipped fishing the first day, but on the second hunger had gotten the better of him. The rain was cold, and his pelt offered little protections.


    Worse, the rain collected on the canopy above, and when it fell, it fell in globs as leaves gave way to the weight and tipped down, rather than nice little raindrops. The sensation of one landing directly into his ear had been thoroughly unpleasant, and had made him drop a fish.


    It also made it impossible to build a fire, which was the real issue; his dried and drying wood was fine, elevated and under the cover of his house, and he could even get more wood fairly easily. The issue was that the only dry place to start a fire that wouldn''t immediately get put out was also underneath his house, which seemed like a spectacularly bad idea.


    So he was eating the fish raw, which left him a thoroughly unpleasant mood. The taste was okay - not great, but okay - but the texture was disgusting, as was the thought itself. Not that he hadn''t eaten raw meat before, but that had been one of the ways Silvas had decided to undermine his sense of humanity, and the experience had put him more off of raw meat, rather than less.


    So he sat in his house, watching the rain fall, tail lashing behind him in an irritation and restlessness that grew worse by the hour.


    ---


    A week passed, and Avers didn''t return. John stopped farming, having run out of usable space to store the grain, and his mornings became duller; he began watching sunrises on the tower.


    Another week passed, and Avers didn''t return. John stopped climbing higher up the tower. He still stepped into the landing to watch the sun rise and set, each morning and evening, but he had lost the urge to see how high the tower went.


    Another week passed, and Avers didn''t return. John knew he shouldn''t be waiting like this; the lad had his own life, and his own work to be doing, and besides which, he had known that the barrels would need hoops from the blacksmith. This wasn''t unexpected, he was just bored and lonely.


    John headed back to the thirty second landing, and sat on the sill of one of the windows; this one happened to be low enough for him to sit on without climbing. It partly inspired him to stop moving up the endless stairs.


    A deep breath in, a deep breath out. He hadn''t tried this in a while. Focus on the breathing. Focus on the feeling of the air, of lungs inflating. He felt the air on his skin. He was aware of his clothing. He became an observer.


    Time began to pass.


    ---


    Kyuss sighed, sitting up. He hadn''t been able to meditate properly in ... well, years now. At least the interminable rain had ceased, and it had brought with it the wonderful chill that marked the beginning of autumn. The leaves were starting to turn, far overhead, but not yet to fall; the endless dark green shade had begun to take on a new radiance, and the canopy itself was a prismatic array of brilliant colors.


    He was in a better mood. Part of it was the chill; his fur was been hot, indeed was still warm, and he was getting more comfortable, the colder it got. Part of it was the new colors in the air. Part of it was the scent - he had been in the Three Isles since his ... transformation, and he hadn''t tasted the scent of fall with his newly improved sense of smell.


    It was glorious. The new colors, the new smells, the weather - he found himself dashing between the trees just for the joy of motion. It was, as he had found himself thinking when he had been trying not to, perhaps the first time he''d been actually experienced anything like joy in years.


    Perhaps he had spent too much time indoors, during those long years, and particularly the last four, when his life had been a single room. But even that thought didn''t bring him down as it had. The forest was there - his house was here. His house, indeed, had only one problem - and that was that it was below the canopy of the trees themselves.


    And so for the first time in weeks, he began on a new project in earnest; he began growing himself a set of stairs, complete with railing. He''d had to start by cutting one of his windows open into a doorway, and then he''d run the stairs up alongside his house, up to one of the three trees supporting his house. There, he ended the stairs in a platform, and grew from the tree a new set of extensions, forming the stairs up to the next tree.


    It was slow and very careful work, and not something that could be completed in one day, or even one week; he began with something more like a limb, starting as wide around as he was, and growing straight towards the next of the three trees, moving clockwise. Then, once it was resting on a platform grown from the next tree in line, he began growing the steps up from it, and the rails on either side. Then he began again from the next tree.The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    He had made on complete loop in the slow spiral, and, looking up, guessed he had another four or five to go, until he started to approach the canopy. He''d need to make the limbs thinner as he ascended, but he had a plan for that, and each day he grew a little bit more of his stairs.


    Eventually he wanted to build something in the canopy itself, perhaps pruning and regrowing branches to have something open to the sun itself. Granted it would likely be winter by the time he reached that point, but it was something to do, each day, besides mope and think about the miseries that had brought him here - miseries it was increasingly hard to focus on, with a purpose in mind.


    Purpose was what Kyuse needed, he had realized, but he hadn''t been able to really get behind one until the season had changed, and his spirit had improved. And then it had kept improving when he had something to fill his time.


    He was stockpiling dried wood as quickly as he could, in the evenings, taking wood from more distant trees, as he wasn''t sure how much strain the stairs would place on the trio he had designated for his house; it couldn''t exactly be good for them.


    He had other plans, as well, one of which was what he was currently occupied with, taking a couple of days away from the stairs; he was growing a tube of wood towards the trio, beginning from the tree he had judged closest to the river, just slightly overhead. Kyuss started back from his house, where he had been trying to meditate - the rest still helped with his mana recovery, even if he couldn''t achieve an actual meditative state.


    His living wood staff helped in the enterprise, and he walked along, tapping the wood to give a burst of woodwarp every few seconds, concentrating on the shape he desired. The tube was much larger than the ones he had made for airflow for the wood drying operation; he could stick his head inside it, like a hollow treetrunk, and it took a constant stream of woodwarp to extend outward.


    It bent this way and that, of course. He couldn''t do much about that; he didn''t want to overburden any one tree, and so it had to run from tree to tree as he went. Kyuse paused, as he reached a tree and made a join, and walked back to the river. The pauses let his mana regenerate a little bit anyways. Kyuse dipped a bucket he had grown in the river, and, climbing up on a little wooden platform he had made, he dumped the bucket into the tube; the end of the tube was open on the top, rather than the end itself.


    He sprinted along the tube, then, watching the joins he had made as the water made its way along the tube. Drips fell from overhead in the tiny holes he had left in the bottom of the construction; he didn''t care about small amount of water loss so much as what would happen to the tube if there was water in it when a freeze hit. It might still break apart some bark where the rough surface captured some water, but he thought that might just pull the bark up, rather than damage the tube itself. Not to mention insects breeding in it come summer. And besides, it was watering the trees a little bit, which was part of the point.


    The newest join between two trees didn''t drip water any faster than expected, and Kyuse continued the work. Another tree, another join; he repeated the jog back to the river to run some water through the tube.


    Water gushed out from the join; the bark made it difficult to get the seams right. He grew one tube out over the other, and ran the test again. It worked this time. He might need to replace that particular join, later; it was more likely than most to trap water and crack in the winter.


    Kyuss began shaping the next buttress in a tree trunk, like a more organic triangle, sloping up out of the trunk of the tree, to form a solid wedge. Then, with a tap of his living wood staff, he started forming the tube, running it back towards the last.


    Five more iterations - and a couple of hours to break and try meditating again - and he formed a final buttress, above a large barrel - if the cylinder of wood, still covered in bark, could properly be called a barrel. This was the other purpose, of course - a ready source of water in camp that he wouldn''t have to lug back and forth. He walked back to the river.


    As he filled the bucket, climbed onto the platform, lifted the bucket over his head and dumped the water in, climbed back down, refilled the bucket - well, as he did that, another project started seeming pretty important. He halted, studying the river. It was moving swiftly enough.


    How hard would it be to make a waterwheel in that thing? Could he even make one, using just wood, without grease?


    Another task was added to his growing list; Kyuss smiled - or, with a glance down into the water at his reflection, he bared his teeth. Close enough.


    ---


    Avers still hadn''t returned, and John was starting to worry about the safety of the lad; it had been more than a month, now. He dressed in his full adventuring gear; he''d taken to wearing more casual clothing about the estate, as there really wasn''t call for the cloak, or spun silver at all for that matter.


    He walked out of the manor, steeling himself, and mentally going through every lesson he''d learned as a soldier.


    He walked down the path, breathing in and out in a smooth, continuous process. Clearing his head. Discipline was - well, discipline. Rage was like a fire; it was flashy, and it burned things. But the calm he needed was more like the embers left burning; far, far hotter than the wasteful flashiness of the flames, after the loose material had been ejected and burned away.


    John stopped in front of the gate. Breathe in. Breathe out. Strike. His palm struck the metal with a noise like shattering glass, but the metal stood. Breathe in. Breathe out. Strike.


    "Stop that immediately, young man." Zyet, who appeared in Jonathon''s peripheral vision - either moving quickly, or literally just appearing, John didn''t know and didn''t care - was glaring at him, as John turned to regard the old man. Gone was the polite "sir", John noticed in his cloud of calm.


    "I am leaving. I need to check on my young friend." Zyet''s face slowly underwent a transformation, to something less furious and more ... solemn.


    "The estate cannot be without its owner."


    "I will return." John was surprised to discover he meant it. Zyet''s expression didn''t change, but his eyes moved to the gate, then to John, then to the manor itself. The old man slowly exhaled, then.


    "Let me open the gate, then, sir." There it was. "Don''t be more than a couple - and I do mean a couple - of days. Things still haven''t ... settled down." John didn''t know what that meant, but he had no intention of returning until he found out what had happened to the lad.


    "I will make the trip as expeditiously as I may, but I sent the lad out, and I would not he come to harm on my account." Zyet slowly nodded, looking to the manor again.


    "I will try to hold things down here, then. I dare not leave at the moment." John slowly revised his suspicious thoughts on the man. Maybe Zyet was human? But where did he spend his time, and to what ends? That mystery would have to wait.


    The gate opened. John looked from Zyet to the gate, and gave a curt nod. He then started at a jog down the path he had traversed what now felt a lifetime ago, albeit at the time in a carriage he had not been able to see out of, going over the map he had consulted the evening before when he had begun his planning.


    "Be careful, sir, and make haste. The Ingress Estate will not wait long."


    The road followed a straight line back to the forest; John followed it until it forked, and took a right. The trees passed him as he moved; he could run, but the jog was sustainable, and he had a long road ahead of him.


    Leaves fell through the air around him, dancing in the breeze. The birdsong was sporadic, and infrequent; most having migrated away already, in preparation for the coming winter. Even the usual buzz of insects that permeated the woods was muted and erratic.


    Breathe in. Breathe out. Deeper breaths, but he kept a steady rhythm, that he had learned long ago in the military. It had taken a good half an hour to get the rhythm back, but it had come back. His legs had already begun to ache; he was older than the last time. But then, the last time, he''d been wearing heavy armor and carrying his field pack besides. No, he''d just spent too long indoors; even going up stairs, and the morning farming, and the walks he took, had been sedentary by comparison to his younger days.


    The road forked again, and he took a left, not needing to think about it. He knew the route he was taking; he''d seen it from overhead, he''d gone over the map. Granted, he''d had to fill in some of the map; the estate, and the road leading to it, certainly hadn''t been on it.


    Breathe in. Breathe - motion. John didn''t halt, didn''t turn his head, just moved his eyes. And fell into a crouch, an arrow, loosed an instant later, flying overhead; too far overhead, that had been a warning shot. Bandits? Here? No, he decided, as he rose smoothly to his feet, studying the men and women who stepped out in front of him. Deserters. The way they stood was just ... right.


    "Hand over your gold, and weuULK" The woman who started walking towards him had clearly not been expecting his wrist to meet her throat. Neither had John, actually; he''d been trying to use the side of his hand, but she''d stopped walking abruptly to start talking.


    Well, that started things off right. One. A flash of light, and John stepped back again, the whistle of a blade passing through air. He stepped right back where he had been standing, and lunged forward, fist meeting stomach. Two.


    John was already moving, hearing the whine of another arrow. He spun into a kick; a woman, who was checking on the choking leader, fell as her knee audibly crunched. One. He ducked under - was that a halberd? What bandit used a goddamned - pain. John stepped away, glancing down to the arrow in his thigh. Nothing vital, later. Count, dammit. One.


    The leader had fallen to a knee, and John moved around her as a woman came at him with a sword. Two. John tucked into a roll - damn that hurt - to the side. There was a meaty sound, and the woman who had led them had an arrow through an eye. If she hadn''t been - no, count. One.


    He rose in an uppercut, blood spraying from the mouth of the woman with the sword, who had been distracted by the death of their leader. A bit of flesh struck him on the cheek; part of her tongue. Two. John let himself stagger to the side; huh. No arrow. He had a moment. He kicked sand towards the man with the halberd, who instinctively raised his hands in front of his face, and then kicked the halberd itself, the haft going straight into the man''s nose.


    And promptly found himself on his back, pain wracking his thigh. Damned arrow. John scrabbled backwards, away from the man with the sword he''d punched in the stomach. Not quite quickly enough; the wild swing had sliced his shoulder.


    This wasn''t going very well, but he did have a couple of tricks. It took a moment to concentrate, but a glow erupted in the air, like a jagged shard of brightly lit glass, and thrust itself into the swordsman''s face. There was no blood; that''s not what aether did.


    The man with the halberd was winding back for a thrust. Another moment of concentration, John''s gaze whipping over, and the pointed end of the halberd came straight at him. Straight at him, but it emerged from the air twenty paces away, straight into the still-stunned archer''s chest.


    John let the spacial warp die quickly, and the halberd shoved hard back into its wielder''s hands, sending him stumbling backwards. Another aether shard caught the swordsman, who simply collapsed, and John grit his teeth, and threw himself onto the man with the halberd, who had yet to recover.


    John wasn''t elegant, he was in pain, and bleeding. He just beat the man to death, quickly and efficiently. And then rolled off of him, looking around.


    The archer was ... well, he was dead. The leader was definitely dead. The swordswoman would probably survive, if she didn''t drown in her own blood; she was on the ground, coughing. He crawled over to her, drew his knife, and slit her throat. She didn''t even notice him until the blade bit. He resumed looking around.


    The swordsman ... well, he was probably dead. And he''d just taken care of the fellow with the halberd.


    John found some coins in their supplies, and took those. He helped himself to their rations, as well, as he dug through their things, before he found what he was looking for.


    The spirits stung like a thousand bees, as he poured them over his shoulder. The cut was shallow, but the fighting had pulled it open wide. It should probably be stitched, but whatever his medical skills, stitching his own shoulder wasn''t something he was going to manage. He settled for tearing the cleanest cloak he could find on a bandit into strips; he soaked a lump in spirits, and set that against the wound - damn and double damn, that really hurt - and then used the strips to bind the shoulder. It would do for now.


    The arrow had struck muscle. Not great for his plans to jog, but he could make do. He considered the wound for a second, and then crawled a few feet. John yanked the arrow out of the leader''s head as soon as he could reach it. He wiped the remnants of brain and eye on her pants, and examined the arrowhead. Bodkin, good.


    He put his knife handle in his mouth, and pulled. Blinding, throbbing pain. He pulled harder, then gave a yank. With a disturbing biological sucking sound, the arrow pulled free. John only screamed a little bit.


    Throwing the arrow to the ground, he pulled the knife from his mouth with shaking hands. He had to wait a moment to stitch anything. He pressed another piece of the cloak to the wound, awkwardly using his other leg to shuffle on his ass back to where he''d left the liquor bottle, and took a long swig from it.


    Previous misgivings aside, that had actually gone pretty well. He set the bottle down and held the hand out again, and then took another swig; his other hand occupied with keeping pressure on the wound in his leg. It tasted ... cheap. Cheap, and strong.


    His stitching, when he felt up to it, was quick and efficient. He washed the wound out with more of the liquor, and washed it again when he was done stitching. Then another gob of cloth doused in the last of the spirits, and another strip of the cloak to tie it all up.


    He''d have to pull the dressing off before too long; the liquor would keep it clean, but the cloth would still get stuck in the clotting blood, and worse, the skin would even heal into it, creating a new wound entirely when he eventually had to remove it. He''d seen that happen.


    Now that he wasn''t immediately dealing with the problems, John wasn''t entirely certain if an infection counted as a disease, which in theory he was immune to, and whether the hygiene was even necessary, but he''d rather find out that the pain was unnecessary. He liked his leg. And his arm.


    And also he''d forgotten about that particular blessing anyways. Really he was just rationalizing actions that had been drilled into him years ago. It hadn''t been necessary. Ah well.


    John moved to a tree, and slowly, hesitantly pulled himself back up. The leg hurt. A lot. John sank back down. He should have brought the damned staff. His eyes caught on the halberd.


    A quick hack job with one of the swords later, he had himself a walking stick. Well, a cane, but that reminded him of his age, so it was a walking stick. John looked at the bodies, debating the merits of pausing to burn them, and losing time, versus continuing on, and maybe adding to the ever-growing problem of the offworlder maggots.


    Damned responsibilities. He sighed, and, after failing to get purchase to drag a body using his one good leg, started focusing, simply bending space to drop them in a pile. He''d need to collect some wood, if he wasn''t going to half-ass this. So much for the two day deadline.

 Ch 8. Aqueduct (Kyuse)

    Kyuse lay in the sun, enjoying the pleasure of the light; it still filtered through a few leaves, as he''d discovered, to his chagrin, that he''d overlooked the obvious problem in his plan to have a house up here, which is that trunks got narrower as you went up. The final platform, in the lower portions of the canopy, was woven from dozens of strands of narrow limbs, and swayed in the wind; utterly unsuitable to live on, but a nice place to get some sun.


    His waterwheel project had been, so far, a dozen different failures, and he''d discovered that his barrel of water rapidly turned into a breeding ground for insect larvae; he just couldn''t form a lid that formed a proper seal. It was utterly unsuitable for any of the purposes he had; he''d dumped the barrel, and left it upside down, until he figured out a better solution there.


    The wall around his encampment was complete, and he''d even managed to make gates, of sorts, although he had to physically pick them up and move them. Hinges were well beyond his capabilities, even after he''d discovered that fish were a source of oil; he had to cook them first, but a wooden lever press could extract a small amount of oil. That hadn''t been his intention, he''d just been trying to crush the meat and bones into a uniform paste, as he''d discovered that the spined fish that were always on the bottom of the river had really sharp bones that didn''t cook soft. He wouldn''t have bothered, except they had a different flavor than the other fish he''d been eating, and any variety in flavor at this point was welcome.


    He''d also given in and tried two types of berries.  The first had resulted in him spending a lot of time over the next few hours rushing to the latrine he''d dug, which was, while unpleasant, not terribly surprising.  The second had resulted in uncontrollable vomiting, which when he started vomiting up blood, instead of dry-heaving as he had expected, had thoroughly put him off trying any more berries.


    He''d had more luck with mushrooms, a source of food he hadn''t expected at all.  There was a yellow variety that grew in shelves on the trunks of some of the older trees which was particularly tasty, when cooked; it tasted like chicken, with a dash of acidity, and he ate it whenever he found a mature patch.  The next mushroom he''d found had been a familiar plain white bulb, another variety of wood mushroom, and it had a solid earthy flavor.  He tested the white mushrooms, now, however; there was a variety that looked similar, except it bruised blue, that had given him three thoroughly unpleasant evenings until he figured out the difference; the first evening he spent convinced that his fur was infested with spiders.  The second, he wasn''t entirely sure what had happened, but his loincloth had gone missing and he spent hours digging burrs out of his fur; he only had a vague memory that a woman was out to steal his books and he had had to stop her.  The third evening had apparently been spent woodwarping faces, and in some cases just the impression of eyes, to stare from trees, again without a clear memory of what had happened.  He still startled himself walking around, now; his little tract of forest had become thoroughly creepy, faces and eyes peering out of the bark in every direction.


    But that was down there.  Here, there was light, flickering a thousand shades of yellow and red as it filtered down through the gently swaying leaves.  It smelled of autumn; he''d gotten used to the earthy scent of the forest floor, and hadn''t realized how pervasive the musty scent was until he got up here, and could practically taste the leaves on the wind.


    The platform swayed with a particularly strong gust; Kyuse moved a hand, to dig in with his claws if it got any worse, but it settled back down after a moment, swinging lightly to and fro.  He should head down; he needed to make dinner, and maybe collect a little more of the fish oil.  He wasn''t entirely certain what he''d do with it yet - it was a viable candidate for oiling an axle for a water wheel, if he could get the wheel to be circular enough to actually rotate, instead of immediately catching.  But even alternating between whittling and regrowth, he''d failed at that task so far; the axle and small wheel he''d made to test with had required a lot of force, and the wheel kept catching.


    Hm.  Maybe it didn''t need to rotate freely at first, though.  He could let friction grind the wood down a bit.  Kyuse sat up, the motion causing the platform to sway again, mentally picturing it.  He''d given up on the axles he''d made so far because he couldn''t rotate the small wheel by hand, but a larger wheel ... he crawled across the platform, feeling a little more energized, and starting scaling his way down the very rickety ladder he''d made up of twined wood, more like vines in appearance, down to the highest level of the spiral stairs.


    The stairs themselves took a while to descend, his thoughts whirling as he made his way down.  The spiral had ended up requiring nine loops, and had gotten increasingly spare with materials as he ascended; here on the upper levels, he didn''t have steps so much as slats, through which he could look down and see his house far below.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.


    He leapt the last flight, landing in a crouch on the soft ground, his joints popping lightly with the sudden strain, then rose and started at a fast walk towards his materials section, where he had his best axle sitting on a pair of V-shaped ... well, sawhorses, kind of.  He''d tried to work out how to make a lathe, but ran into the same problem, only in miniature; the v-shaped wooden brackets had been an alternative solution, fixing his knife with a bit of grown wood to the bracket, and spinning the axle-in-crafting by hand.  He examined this work; it was round enough, he decided, and moved to a nearby tree, to start growing out a long spoke, with a roughly circular hole in the middle.  He''d begin with that.


    Once mounted on the axle, which required a few good kicks for lack of a hammer, he discovered his next issue; the ground was in the way.  The spoke couldn''t spin freely.  So he tried spinning the axle, which immediately caught; too much friction, not enough torque.  He spent a few more minutes growing a new pair of very tall V-shaped brackets, and moving his ladder to heft one side of the axle onto one side, then over to the other to heft it there; the side the spoke was now firmly wedged onto was heavy, and his ladder creaked.  He took a moment to reinforce that, as well; it was living wood, at least for another couple of days.  He''d had to replace his ladder a few times now.


    The spoke could now spin freely, which, predictably as he watched it happen, just spun the axle on the brackets it was resting on.  The ladder was moved back to the side opposite the spoke ... then paused, spinning the spoke again, and watching the axle spin on the brackets.


    It took an hour to move the entire assemblage to the river - he had to kick the spoke back off to move it at all, it was just too heavy together without dragging, which he didn''t want to do.  Nurture and woodwarp turned a couple of seeds into a new pair of brackets, which, after he got the axle mounted into, just underneath his little wooden aqueduct, he then woodwarped around the axle, without touching it; if he overloaded the side on the river, he wanted time to put counterweight on this side, instead of just having the whole assemblage tip over into the river.


    Kyuse retrieved the spoke, but then was struck with the problem of the construct of the wheel itself; he had nearly tossed it in the scrap pile to start over again when a solution presented itself, and he pulled it out into the river, and grew the next spoke around the first, slightly off-center, but on opposite ends to be balanced.  Well, in a traditional wheel, this would be four spokes.  Paddles were added to both ends, and he cut off the connection to the submerged branch he was using.  Two more, again winding them slightly off-center, and then he was confronted with the issue of actually mounting it; it was too heavy to lift.


    He considered a rope, but there wasn''t a branch overhanging the river that could support the weight.  Then again ... he just grew the branch dipping into the water he had woodwarped the spokes from, forming a hard flat surface underneath the wheel, and then to slowly woodwarped to shove it up into place; he grew out some steps to climb up as it was pushed, maneuvering the wheel from a horizontal to a vertical position carefully; he wasn''t sure if the spokes would actually support the weight.  A couple of good kicks - the first sent him into the river, and he had to climb back onto his pedestal, but he braced himself for the second - got it seated.


    It wasn''t quite the waterwheel he''d originally envisioned, but the paddles slowly, laboriously, began to move in the flowing water; he glanced back at the axle.  He did need to add the counterweight, it was pulling up, hard, on one of the support bracers.


    The counterweight ended up just being a large disc he grew out over the end of the far end of the axle, adding to its dimensions until the axle sank back down into the brace.  He reinforced the braces, and after the rotation had completely stripped the bark from the axle and braces, added a small amount of the fish oil, pouring it over the wood as it turned.  It didn''t seem to make much of a difference, but he''d try adding a little each day.


    He now had a rotating wheel.  Kyuse headed back and collected one of his ropes, and returned.  He wrapped it around the axle, approximately where he wanted it twice, and then knotted it into a loop.  The knot stuck for a few rotations when it reached the axle, and then fell free.


    Woodwarp created a fist-sized cup - granted that his fists were rather large - which he had to unknot the rope, knot through the cup, then reknot into the loop again, to integrate.  It gracefully followed the rope up, around the axle, and got caught in the loop.  He spent a few more minutes using his knife to cut a small spiral groove in the wood for the rope to follow, so it wouldn''t wind back over itself, and then the cup followed the rope around the axle, back down to the river, filled up, promptly dumped its contents out, and rode the rope back up.


    It took a few minutes to work out a cup design that would work, with a lip to hold the water in, with only a small aperture.  These were knotted in interval along the rope after a quick test, and water started rising up the axle, and dumping back down.  A wooden halfpipe was extended out to connect the cups to his wooden aqueduct, and he had a trickle of water.


    Following the dripping pipe back to his house, it was indeed a trickle by the time it arrived, but he held a wooden cup out into the fingernail-sized stream of water, and after a minute or so it was full.  He took a sip, and then leaned over to spit it back out.  He''d let it run a little while.


    That evening, he cooked stew, and didn''t have to lug a bucket back and forth.  There were a lot of improvements to be made - he really needed some kind of cistern that wouldn''t turn into a breeding ground for insects, in particular - but it was functional, for now.