by Ember Lane
“After. It was Digberts, no one else. The tree powers the essence of the land. The mighty jaspur, as it fades, so Barakdor falls into chaos. Now we live here to protect it. It is our toil that keeps it alive. The ground dried up, we water it every day, thousands of buckets from the lake, but to no avail. Digberts placed a curse on it.”
Her words fell to the ground like droplets of despair. Her eyes were downcast, her manner defeated. Glancing back at the tree, he felt its sadness too, if that was truly possible. Lincoln let his mind drift down into the soil. He saw the dry mud, despite the rain, despite the efforts of the elves, and he saw the trees withered roots. Farther down, the packed earth became looser, and then his mind broke through and he was under the tree, under the soil and then plunging through a skin of clay. Once past it, he plunged into a vat of water, an aquifer, but Lincoln sensed the water was tainted with iron leached from the red cliffs, unable to drain away, plugged by the clay.
“It wasn’t Digberts,” Lincoln muttered. “When the land changed it released, it trapped…” he looked up. “It let loose some poisons and started drowning the roots.”
“Lies!” Glenwyth shouted.
“It will die unless you move it,” Lincoln said, simply. “I can help you do it, for the gnome. My price is the gnome.” And then he blacked out, his energy finally drained by the divination, and he tipped, face first into the ground before him.
Lincoln woke and screamed. Crags looking straight down at him, still covered in smears of rotten fruit.
“I don’t know what you said in there, but I sure am grateful,” he said. “You?”
“Nope, me neither,” Aezal’s voice boomed out. “One minute I was in here on my own, the next, you two were thrown in. Now, well, at least we’ve got food.”
“Yeah, and they’re not throwing it at us,” Crags added.
“What did you promise them?” Aezal asked, but before Lincoln could answer, the door to their room burst open and a dozen or more elves crashed in, picking up Lincoln and dragging him out, then Aezal, and then Crags. Soon outside, they were carried through the village and toward a large house nestled in the corner of the valley where the ridge and mountain met. Lincoln was deposited by the dwelling’s front door. Before he’d even gotten a good look at the place, the door opened, and he was pulled through.
Torches lit a large, round room. A set of spiral steps led up to an upper level, and a small ember fire glowed in its middle. A sole elf sat the other side of it. He had long, gray hair, a wispy, straggling beard, and a frame that resembled a skeleton. Sagging, tired eyes looked up at Lincoln. He appeared to have the troubles of the world on his shoulders, and looked defeated, bereft of any hope.
“Lincoln the Builder, you promise much. Please sit.”
The old elf patted the ground beside him. Lincoln rounded the fire and sat.
“I’m Forgarth, supposed leader of this tribe of wood elves—the tribe of the land. We are tasked with protecting the tree, though the tree fades, and I with it, as the tree fades, so do my children. Its blight affects everything we are, everything we do. Glenwyth tells me that you think you can save the tree, restore it, but alas, I think we only have one option left to us. That option is contrary to everything I believe, but the gnome was brought to us for a reason, so it must be his blood and guts the tree hankers for.” Forgarth looked up at him. “The tree is thirsty for a final sacrifice, before we all join Lamerell.
“His blood will not cure the tree,” Lincoln said. “His death will not save your souls.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I have seen what is wrong.”
“Are you a farseer?”
“No, a builder, I build things, make them grow, and the only thing that will grow if you sacrifice Crags is your war with the gnomes.”
Forgarth scoffed. “Those vagabonds.” He turned to Lincoln. “And you think you know the answer?”
“I do,” Lincoln said. “I would move the tree to a clearing I found, it will thrive there.”
Forgarth rasped a laugh. “You can’t just move a tree.”
Now it was Lincoln’s turn to laugh. “You can, it just needs planning. I will save your tree if your tribe of elves will live in harmony with my new settlement. That is my promise to you.”
Fogarth took a long breath. If possible, he seemed to wilt farther toward the embers, as if a breath of cold would freeze his bones. Then one eye perked up, and he regarded Lincoln with the glow of a spark.
“Will you do this?”
Forgarth has offered you a quest. Save their One Tree. Reward unknown. Do you accept the quest? Y/N
“Save the tree, and we will talk again,” Forgarth added.
“I cannot save the tree without founding the settlement. You’ll just have to trust my intentions.”
Forgarth nodded slowly. “Do you accept the quest?”
“Yes.”
You have accepted the quest, save the One Tree. Reward yet to be revealed.
“Then found your village.”
“I will have to destroy much of yours to complete the quest.”
Forgarth looked at him. “My tribe has fallen the way of the tree; poison runs through their veins. I thought it the poison of the gnome, but if you’re right, then laughter may once more vanquish sorrow in this valley, and we will be forever in your debt.” Then the spark of life left his eyes, and a cold returned. “The gnome stays here; you may have the warrior’s aid. If you fail, we try my way.”
“If I fail, it is because the tree is already dead. If I succeed, I will build you a village around the tree, so that you may tend for it and live in harmony with us. In return for two things…”
“And they are?” Forgarth furrowed his ranging eyebrows.
“Firstly, you make sure the forest and the mills are in perfect harmony.”
“Agreed.”
“Secondly, the tree houses… For my own sanity, I’ll have to change them,” said Lincoln. “I couldn’t help but notice some design flaws. It’d drive me nuts to know I had such badly built huts in my settlement.”
15
Echoes
“So let me get this straight,” Ozmic said, as they sat around their new fire pit—the dwarves hadn’t been idle while Lincoln, Aezal and Crags had been with the elves. “You’ve agreed to move a tree in return for getting the gnome back. A gnome—if you don’t mind me saying, that we didn’t want in the first place and is potentially spying on us.”
“But is quite fun,” Grimble added, shifting on their new bench.
Lincoln had been pleasantly surprised when he’d gotten back, and even though it was way past dusk and headed toward the middle of the night, the dwarves were still up and tinkering with their new creation. They’d set the fire pit halfway between the bridge and the first huts they’d built. Made of a drystone, hexagonal wall about a foot high, they’d also made six simple benches and placed them around it. Lincoln sat on one, Aezal next to him, with the two dwarves opposite.
“I still shouldn’t have left him. I should have bargained harder,” Lincoln said, angry with himself, visions of Crags stranded up that pole in that cage, haunting him.
“A hoard of angry elves is not to be trifled with,” Aezal said. “They knocked me and Crags straight out with some damage-over-time potions imbued into their arrows. They could have killed you any time they wanted and then raced back here and killed you again.”
Lincoln quickly checked his respawn point’s location to make sure it wasn’t set where they’d put the fire.
“We’ll get him back tomorrow,” Aezal said, clapping one of his big arms around Lincoln. “Grown quite fond of the little mutt myself.”
“So, how did we fare today,” Lincoln asked the dwarves. “I’m liking the fire pit.”
“The farms should be done lunchtime tomorrow. As you can see, we let them complete the six cottages, and the extra bodies are working on completing the level 2 woodyards earlier. The question is, what’s next. You’ll have idle lab
or tomorrow,” Grimble told him.
“Bethe?”
The city guide appeared next to him. “Yes, Lincoln.”
“Remind me, how much for the warehouse?”
“One hundred food, 1,500 lumber, 1000 stone, and 300 iron. Five men, 1 day, but you’ll likely need to increase that rapidly with the farms coming, starting to produce and no population barring you five…four. Though as yet, you aren’t classed as population.”
“Five. We’ll get Crags back, one way or the other,” he said, grimly, then perked. “Okay, what to build?” Lincoln tapped his lips in thought. “We’ll need a central place, like a town hall to run everything, but not yet. Tavern!” he cried. “How much for a tavern.
“Same as a warehouse,” Bethe replied.
“Really? I thought it’d use a bit more iron. Right, we’ll build a tavern and a warehouse.”
A small cheer went up from the three others.
“You can’t build an tavern until you upgrade some cottages to level 2.”
“Okay, we’ll do that instead. Five times, I want each of us to have the same level.”
“You haven’t got enough food until the farms start producing. As of this moment, you only have 980 food left,” Bethe explained.
“Exactly what I was afraid of. Damn, I hate running out of resources.” He pulled up his city stats.
Settlement name: Joan’s Creek.
Population: 0. Population capacity: 120
Attributes: (Level, Bonuses)
Politics: (0, 0), Culture: (0, 0), Defense: (0, 0)
Build speed: N/A, Learning advancement: N/A, Defense bonus: N/A
Buildings: Amount - levels
Cottages: 12 – 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1
Production
Farms: 5 – 1,1,1,1,1. Sawmills: 3 – 2,2,2,
Quarries: 2 – 1,1. Mines: 1 – 1.
Resources (Amount, Production rate, (Consumption-food only))
Food: (980, 500/ph, -0p/h), Wood: (9,750, 300/ph)
Stone: (6,350, 200/ph), Ore: (4450, 100/ph)
“Dump my unallocated points into politics, let’s get some build speed going,” Lincoln said, and then did some mental calculations. “Okay, this is what we’ll do. We’ve got plenty of labor and not enough food. We don’t want to be clearing that forest to house farms in the valley, so we’re going to have to supply the food from up here. The sawmills we’ve built in the forests of the vale will serve most builds and will save us hauling timber up that slope. Lumber’ll become a real issue when we start thinking about defenses and building that wall spanning across the valley, then it’s all going to be about wood, stone, and iron. We’ll hunt the minerals out later.”
He was thinking fast, rambling, ideas falling over each other, then he made his mind up. “For now, it’s all about farms for us up here, and we’ll start losing workers if we can’t get some population. So, we need to upgrade the cottages and get that fissure passable. Farms and a community—that’s what we have to build here.
“Bethe, upgrade all farms to level 2, then I want another five level 1 farms built over the river, and one just over there, but don’t plant it with the usual—it's mine. I want hops planted, and barley, and some fruit trees.”
“Why just over there?” Ozmic asked.
“Where better to grow the ingredients for your ale than right behind the tavern? We might not be able to build it yet, but they can’t stop me making the ale! Bethe, I’ll need fifty of these too.”
Lincoln imagined a wooden barrel. “And one of these,” and he imagined a big iron pot over a fire pit similar to the one they were sitting around.
“It will be done. And if the workers are finished before the day is done?”
“Have we got enough food to get the warehouse done?”
“Just.”
“Then that will do, but the priority is the farms. How much can they each store before it goes bad?”
“Each level 1 resource can store ten thousand units before it has to go to a warehouse.”
“So we’ll be fine. Now, on to tomorrow’s real plans.”
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
“I don’t know how you keep all that in your head,” Aezal said.
Lincoln huffed. “Are you kidding? I’ve only just gotten started.” Despite Crags still being held by the elves, he felt good especially, now he had a course decided. Food was the immediate key, but he’d have to hope the elves would help move the tree. It’d take a day to get the next settlement’s cottages up and give him the workers he needed to dig out the tree, but he knew the food price would be harsh. The farms would just be churning out daily produce until they matured—not much use to any apart from fuel for the workers. Lincoln knew it would swing around soon enough. He hoped Forgarth would feel fit to release Crags as soon as he saw progress.
Their conversation petered out, and Lincoln yawned and stretched out. “I’m done for the day,” he said.
“Ah then, we’ve got one more little surprise.” Ozmic led Lincoln over to the cottages on that side of the river. “Now, it’s not the best, and it still needs a bit of work and that, but we decided the first cottage should be yours. We’ve built you a little bed and one of the workers made some mattresses—don’t ask me what out of, they only cost food, iron, and wood, though in miniscule amounts. Anyway, enjoy.”
Lincoln opened the door. Though it was pitch-black, his night vision kicked in and he saw the bed tucked in the corner, and a small table by it.
“Needs a candle. I’ll get to making them, soon as I can find me a good kill,” Ozmic muttered, but Lincoln hardly heard him as he darted for the bed and lay straight on it, boots and all. He didn’t hear Ozmic pull the door closed.
His dreams were filled with desperate visions of Crags, but his exhausted body hardly moved; his nightmares allowed no escape. The day had been long and hard, both for body and mind, and so when he heard a constant thumping on the cottage’s front door, he could hardly believe his ears. Soon after, it opened and he heard the clunk of boots on floorboards, and Lincoln looked up to see Aezal staring down at him.
“Time for training,” the warrior announced.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lincoln growled.
“After yesterday? You think I'd let you off? This place is unpredictable, and will be for a while. You need to be able to defend yourself. Who knows when you’ll be attacked again. Here...” Aezal tossed him an apple. “I used a speed-up on one of the farms and got me some fruit. Take a bite. It’ll get your energy pumping. Outside in five.”
Aezal spun around and left the room. Lincoln very nearly lay back on his bed, but groaned, slapped his leg, and pushed himself up. “This place’ll be the death of me,” he sighed, as he took a good-sized bite out of the apple.
The warrior was lurking just outside and shoved a water bottle into Lincoln’s hands as he emerged from the hut. They walked over to the spot they’d practiced at the previous morning, and Aezal took out his staff.
“Right,” he said. “Plenty of time until dawn.” He grinned, and swiped at Lincoln before he was even ready.
Like the day before, Aezal trained Lincoln until the sun broke over the eastern ridge. Then, sweating, panting, and aching, they traipsed back toward the fire pit. Ozmic was cooking up a pot of the best smelling broth Lincoln had ever savored, yet it didn’t smell of the usual squirrel or rabbit.
“Crawfish,” the dwarf declared. “Grimble’s found a spot down river, thousands of the critters.” He looked positively over the moon about it, and preened his revitalized, purple Mohican. Lincoln sat next to him. It appeared the pit was currently the center of their fledgling village, and he decided that he might just dot a few around the place.
“The workers have just finished the first farm, and they’ve all jumped on the next. Should be getting some food outta them today,” Grimble shouted, as he crossed the bridge and dumped a couple of carp on the bench by Ozmic. “The lake’s teeming, the river’s teeming—why’d we need farms?
There’s food everywhere.” He slumped down next to Ozmic. “Don’t like to say it, Lincoln, but you need a swim.” And he waved his hand in front of his nose.
Lincoln lit his pipe, using the very last of his leaf. “Before we get going.” He guessed that a wash was probably in order; he appeared to have his own half of the fire…
“We still going to explore the mountain?” Ozmic said in surprise.
“Nope, by ‘let’s get going,’ I meant over there.” He pointed toward the other valley. “You two are building doors while I work out how to move a tree and make sure Crags is all right.”
“And me?” Aezal asked.
Lincoln called for Bethe. “Can you get one of the workers to make something for me?” he asked her.
“Of course, Lincoln. You’ll have spare capacity by the end of the day.”
“I’d rather have it sooner.” He imagined a log split in two with the words Joan’s Creek branded along one and an arrow pointing upward on the other. Within ten minutes, a worker appeared with it in its hands. “There,” said Lincoln, “I want you to go plant that by the entrance to the fissure, then mind the settlement until we get back tonight.”
Aezal took a bowl of broth from Ozmic and tucked in. Lincoln could tell he was reluctant to be the one to stay behind, but someone had to. After spooning a couple of mouthfuls in, the warrior looked at Lincoln and nodded. “Just do the deal, get the damn gnome back.”
Half an hour later and a swim in the lake, Lincoln, Ozmic, and Grimble were on their way. Before too long, they were in the tunnel. Grimble told Lincoln that mountain dwarves had carved the route. It was too smoothly done for the deep-down dwarves, and too rough for the stonecutters that lived above the land. Lincoln asked why.
“Army,” Ozmic interrupted. “Mountain dwarves are the fighters. They protect the deep-downs, and will guard the quarries and mines in time of war. They’re the fierce fighters, the bezerkers. If they’ve left their mark here, this far above the land’s surface. This place has seen bloodshed.”
