by Cale Plamann
“If you’re any good at it, you’ll make a killing,” his father said, beaming back. “Just make sure to pay your dues to the artisan guilds and they’ll smooth things over with the city. I’ll introduce you to someone tomorrow and we’ll have you up and running in no time.”
“What about Jo?” Trevor cut into the cheer. “I know she misses you, but she was really upset with how you stormed off. I think she wanted to be there with you on whatever your big final mission was. I really think the two of you should try and patch things up.”
“Wait.” His mother’s head whipped around to squint at Micah. “Jo? The Jo in Trevor’s squad? How come I didn’t know that my little boy had a girlfriend?” She snorted and tossed her head toward Trevor. “I can’t count on this one to settle down with any one girl. He’s always looking for something that he can’t quite find. That said, if I have a chance at grandkids, I need to know.”
“Veronica.” Micah’s father shook his head. “By the unending grace of the Sixteen…”
47
An Epilogue of Sorts
The bell jangled on the door to Micah’s shop, causing him to look up from the Folio. He’d spent most of the afternoon working on the design for a pendant that would increase its bearer’s strength. It was an interesting combination of ritual and Wood magic he’d been worrying over for the past two days without any real results.
Closing his book, Micah searched the small store for his customer. Simple wooden shelves contained some of his earlier works, and placards detailing their effects covered the walls. A pair of windows let in light, illuminating three pots with different flowers in them, colorful against the dark wood of their surroundings.
Nobody.
A voice giggled beneath the counter. Micah smiled and stood up, walking around the edge of the wooden table.
“There you are, Esther.” He reached out and tousled her hair. “What are you doing here? I thought Mom wanted you helping her around the house with chores.”
“Chores are boring.” She pouted, scrunching her nose. “Mom just makes me clean the house over and over again. As soon as I’m done, she tries to teach me how to read.”
“Don’t underestimate reading.” Micah smiled down at her. “Pretty much everything I know I learned from a book. The rest? Well, I’m not sure you need to know it.”
“But, Micaaaaah.” Esther ran to one of the walls, picking up a wooden flute enchanted to put low-level monsters to sleep. “I don’t like reading. It’s slow and the words are too big. Why can’t you just tell me what I need to know? Then we get to spend time together and I can grow up to be big and strong like you and Trevor!”
Micah snatched the flute from her hands, quickly snagging an ivory carving of a dog and placing it in Esther’s grasp. He’d been meaning to enchant the carving later, but for now, it found a higher calling as a knickknack to keep his sister’s nimble fingers occupied.
“I can teach you some things,” Micah replied, casting Plant Weave with a motion of his hand. After enough skill levels, the spells incantation had shortened. Years of repeatedly using his spells in combat situations meant he didn’t even need his words for a first-tier spell.
A leaf extended from one of the flowers, growing rapidly on a thin stem from the window until it reached Micah’s hand. Gently, he plucked it. In his hand, it twisted into the figure of a young woman made of vine and sap. She began dancing, twisting and swaying to unheard music while Micah smiled on.
“Wooow!” Esther exclaimed, her eyes wide as she clapped her hands, the dog figurine forgotten. “Teach me how to do that! I want to be a magician when I get blessed too!”
“I can teach you the words to the spell,” Micah chuckled at her, extending his arm to allow the figure to prance and twirl its way toward Esther, “but past a certain point, you’ll need to study what they mean. How they interact with each other and the rest of the world. At some point, you’re going to need to read to solve the riddles I don’t have the answers to.”
The leafling jumped from the end of Micah’s hand onto Esther’s shoulder. It spun toward her before grabbing on to her hair and climbing atop her head. Esther giggled, reaching for the leafling. With a wiggle of Micah’s fingers, the construct dodged past her hand and jumped onto Esther’s other shoulder.
“Are you ready to go home and do your chores now, Esther?” Micah asked, a smile on his face as he watched her shriek and try to collect the dodging plant golem. “Mom is going to worry if she can’t find you.”
“No.” Esther grabbed the leafling just as the spell ran out and it reverted into inert vegetable matter. “I can learn to read later. I didn’t get to play with you for almost two years, and then when you came back to the city, you started spending all of your time at this shop. I’m playing with you today.”
“I need to watch the shop in case a customer shows up,” Micah said, trying to deflect her earnest energy.
“There’s nobody here.” Esther furrowed her brow as she glanced back and forth. “Actually, it doesn’t look like there’s been anybody here for a while.”
“Fine.” Micah chuckled, reaching out to touch a crimson string that stretched into the back of the shop. “If you want to play, we’re going to go and do something actually fun. There’s no point in hanging around an empty shop all day hoping for a customer.”
Esther squealed and ran out of the store into the busy market district of Basil’s Cove. Micah followed her, pausing briefly to bar the door and make eye contact with the Onkert that slipped out of the back room to guard his shop.
Outside the shop, he closed the shutters on both windows as a pair of horses clopped by. No need to advertise the presence of a daemon to the entire downtown. The Church of Luxos was already trying to make trouble for him, constantly asking nosy questions about where he’d acquired his wares.
“Micaaaah.” Esther’s hand on his shirt brought Micah back to the crowded street outside of his store. “You said we were going to do something fun. Where are we going?”
“We’re going to tell Mom that you’re tagging along with me for the day first.” Micah scooped Esther up and put her on his shoulders.
“I don’t want to go home,” Esther said, trying unsuccessfully to struggle free as Micah held her in place with his enhanced strength. “Mom will yell at me for not cleaning my room or washing the dishes.”
“You can clean and wash later.” Micah began walking toward their home at a steady clip, weaving in and out of the busy marketplace foot traffic. “I just know better than to let you spend an entire day hiding from your chores with me without telling Mom. She’ll get worried and yell at me until her face turns red.”
Above him, Esther’s tiny frame shook as she laughed, squirming against his shoulders. Micah smiled.
“Sure,” he said, feigning outrage, “it might seem fun to you. You’re not the one getting yelled at for helping his kid sister run off without saying anything.”
The walk home was relatively uneventful. At one point, Micah and Esther had to step out of the street to allow a carriage to pass, but other than that, there was no damper on their cheerful banter. After alerting their mother and quieting her concerns, Micah brought Esther to the city gates.
A quick chat with the guards later, and they were on their way toward the cave, Micah barely able to hold Esther’s attention as her wide eyes took in the countryside. Eventually, he just gave up trying to talk to her and let her run back and forth, pointing out squirrels and birds.
After ten or so minutes, the excitement began to fade, and Esther stopped chasing every small and cute animal. Before too long, she began nagging Micah, complaining about the distance of their walk. Finally, they reached the cave.
“We’re here.” Micah set Esther down after carrying her for the last half of the journey to quiet her complaints. “This is where I come in my spare time. It’s easier for me to get work done out here away from the bustle of the city.”
“Is it like a fort?” Esther perked up,
the boring walk forgotten once she saw the signs of Micah’s campsite. “This is where you came to play while we were working?”
“I don’t know about playing.” Micah chuckled, watching Esther run over to the cave. “It was actually brutally hard work.”
Micah glanced up at the snap of a twig from the forest. Telivern walked into the clearing, slowly chewing on a mouthful of moss.
Esther squealed. Turning from the empty firepit, she sprinted toward the great white deer. Almost before Micah could say anything, she grasped onto its fur and pulled herself up onto Telivern’s back with the agility of a monkey.
The deer looked at Micah with mournful eyes, cocking its antlered head to the side in a silent question.
“Esther,” he laughed, “this is my good friend Telivern. Telivern, this is my sister Esther. She was curious about how I’d been living my life, so we took a little trip out here to meet you.”
“Wow!” Esther’s eyes were wide. “It’s like it can talk to me, but only in feelings. It just keeps saying ‘confusion’ and ‘amusement’.”
“That seems like a fair emotional response to a little girl climbing on your back to me.” Micah shook his head, smiling at the two of them. “I suppose it’s better than Esther being terrified of you, but it was hardly the reaction that I expected.”
Telivern snorted back at Micah before lowering its head to eat some grass near the edge of the clearing around the cave. Maybe it was the fairly constant campfire that he kept lit when he traveled out to the cave to inscribe his enchantments, but the grass was yellow and patchy. Whatever was in the soot had twisted and killed the plants.
Someone coughed gently, prompting Micah to spin, an Air Knife half-formed in his hand before he recognized Jo at the woodline. She averted her gaze, spending a solid second looking at the firepit and the cave before looking back at Micah as he watched her silently.
“Gods.” Jo smiled weakly. “This is a lot harder than I imagined it.”
Micah sighed, trying to clear the memory of her jumping off that roof in Basil’s Cove from his mind. It’d only been a month ago, but after his war with the Durgh and establishing his new peaceful existence, it seemed like a lifetime. He’d seen her a couple of times since then, but each time, she’d managed to avoid him, ducking out of social gatherings and disappearing into the night before he could track her down.
“How did you imagine it?” The question didn’t come how Micah had intended it. Instead of carrying the confidence and swagger that he’d tried to cultivate, the words were quiet. Almost scared.
“Well.” Jo looked back at him for the first time. “I imagined secretly following you out here to whatever secret base you had and giving you a piece of my mind, for one. I thought we were something more than a quick f—”
Her eyes flicked to Esther playing with a visibly suffering Telivern, and her sentence ended abruptly in a fit of coughing.
“I thought that things were heading in a more serious direction,” she finished, slightly flatly with just a hint of a blush coloring her cheeks. “But now, none of that really seems to matter. If we’re going to be something more, I can’t have any more of this ‘hero-complex man of mystery’ crap. It was cute at first, but that isn’t something you base a relationship off of.”
Micah smiled back at her.
“Before you ran off last time, I was going to tell you everything.” As he spoke, he walked toward her, his voice quieting so that Esther couldn’t hear. “I fought most of the Durgh army in this area. They were going to attack, wipe Westmarch and Basil’s Cove off the map. I had a couple dozen daemons around level 20. They didn’t even last a full minute in the final battle.”
“Micah,” she said, her voice as quiet as his, “I never really asked, but what level are you?”
“40,” he replied, a slight smile on his face. “My class is a bit different, though. I gain 3 attribute points per level and I can maintain a lot of powerful summons at once.”
“Fo—” Jo burst out laughing. “My class gives me 3 attribute points every four levels. You’re literally getting more than twice as many attributes per level as me. By the Sixteen, you’re probably more powerful than the guildmaster and you’re not even eighteen!”
“I am,” Micah responded evenly. “In the final battle, I had two summons that were the equivalent of a level 60 warrior, and about a dozen that were the equivalent of a level 40. Well, over half of them died and I barely escaped. If you’d come with me, you would have died. I can guarantee that.”
“Gods.” She stared at him in silence for almost five seconds before continuing. “No wonder you didn’t want people to know what you could do. No one would ever leave you alone if they knew.”
“Or worse,” Micah agreed, a shadow flashing by his eyes despite his slight smile.
“So,” she sighed, not quite able to meet his eyes, “I guess you did have a good reason to warn me off before you went on your adventure? It wasn’t really some sort of masculine bravado?”
“Jo.” Micah shook his head. “I’d never do something to hurt you. I sent Telivern away at the end. I don’t actually think there’s anyone in Basil’s Cove that could have properly stood with me in that final battle. I really just couldn’t bear to see someone I loved die in front of me while I looked on, helpless. Again.”
“Lo—” Jo blushed. “I. Uh.”
“Look.” Micah smiled at her, taking both of her hands into his. “We don’t have to be fast about this. Why don’t we just start things over again? This go around, I have all the time in the world for you.”
The afternoon went quickly. Micah, Telivern, Esther, and Jo played tag in the woods, much to Esther’s delight despite Jo always winning. When his sister grew bored, they searched for herbs that Micah’s mother had requested until the sun began to go down.
After walking both Esther and Jo home, Micah walked back to his shop whistling. Now that he had his own business, it wasn’t appropriate for him to spend every night at his parents’ house.
Unbarring the door, he walked in, a cheerful smile on his face as he sent the Onkert back to the small chamber it lived in behind the storefront proper.
Micah hardly even noticed that all three of the plants in his window were wilted and yellow as he climbed the ladder to his lofted bedroom, as crisp and lifeless as the grass in the clearing.
48
The Setting Sun
The next morning, Micah got out of bed early to work in the shop. It was a stretch to say that he woke, given that he barely slept an hour a night, but even so, he found it refreshing to spend at least a couple hours in bed with his eyes closed going over the events of the day.
Business was sedate as usual. Few people could afford the luxury of enchanted items, but those that could were willing to pay. Shortly after sunrise, a merchant stopped in to commission a set of crystal bottles that could maintain the freshness of their contents with Wood magic.
That project kept Micah occupied for at least an hour or two, at which point a noblewoman’s servant came in to pick up her purchase from a week ago. The project wasn’t anything all that taxing for Micah. Just a pair of hairpins that would tighten skin and prevent wrinkles. Exactly the sort of thing to keep him occupied during his semiretirement.
Checking the time, Micah smiled and dismissed the Folio. He’d almost completed his design for the enchantments on the bottle, but it was time for lunch.
Walking out of the store, he plucked the thread leading to the guard Onkert, summoning it from its hiding spot as he barred the door and shuttered the windows. Briefly, he frowned at the dead plants. He was unsure when exactly they’d grown brittle and yellow, but ultimately dismissed the passing thought.
He’d have to hurry back to his parents’ house if he wanted to make it in time for lunch. He’d only gotten his mother to agree with his kidnapping Esther for the entire afternoon by agreeing to a family meal, and he was pretty sure that she’d track him down and beat him black and blue despite his levels if
he tried to back out of his agreement.
The walk back was brisk and uneventful. He spent most of his time halfheartedly thinking of the days before his sojourn into the Great Depths. He’d never had moments like this back then. No time to enjoy fresh air for its own sake or try to earn an honest living while enchanting mundane things.
True, he couldn’t help but wonder about more combat-oriented enchantments. In the past month or two, he’d had a couple of ideas about ways to imbue Time enchantments into armor and weapons. The idea was borderline intoxicating. An adventurer armed with bracers of Haste and a helmet that could grant brief flashes of Foresight would be incredible.
Even someone as weak physically as Micah was able to kill a pair of elite Durgh warriors under the influence of those spells. In the hands of trained warriors? Well, it wouldn’t be as impressive as the Luoca fighting at the Khanmoot, but it would make a mockery of an opponent's levels. Even if someone was more powerful, moving faster than them and being able to see their next move was a hell of an advantage in a life-or-death struggle.
Of course, there was no real need for weapons like that. Basil’s Cove didn’t face any real threats. Other than the Cavern of Rust, adventurers could face every other challenge at their own pace. They might buy a sharper sword or armor that could repair itself, but beyond that, most of the adventurers were content with whatever low-tier enchanted weapons they could dredge out of the dungeons.
Despite enjoying the period of peace, Micah couldn’t help but feel like something was wrong. His entire existence was predicated on perfecting himself, always preparing for the next challenge recklessly, disregarding his own physical and emotional health. Spending his time crafting peacefully or relaxing with Telivern just felt wrong. Like something terrible was hiding just out of sight, waiting around the corner for him to let down his guard for a second.