Chapter 48: Home
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 15-28, Month IX: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 15th to 28th day of the 9th Month
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Festive Mood
The cheering had already started even before the eagles had finished landing.
It was the kind of welcoming event that would happen when those who had access to the Party Chat also were enthusiastic figures namely Aunt Theressa and the news coming through it for the past several days had worked themselves up into a collective state of relief and celebration when she delivered the news to a bigger audience. They don't know how some people have such abilities, because it wasn't widely known within the village, only those who knew about it knew what it was and those who weren't a part of it didn't. When that energy needed somewhere to go it is during this time, the moment that the people in question actually arrived. The Talon teams came down from the sky and were met with a loud noise — the good kind, the kind that was half greeting and half catharsis — and the visitors who had arrived recently only watched with the polite interest of people observing a custom that was not theirs but that they could appreciate its simplicity on its own terms.
The team of course handled it with the grace of people who were extremely tired and genuinely tried to move their hands in appreciation and trying to hold both at once was not an easy task it seems. It was not their worst performance under those conditions and also not the best.
August only stood in it for as long as it was appropriate, which was not very long, because what he wanted to do upon their arrival was not to celebrate, although it wasn't a bad thing. What he really wanted was on the other side of the village in a house he had not been inside in three weeks, and the cheering was impending his goal to arrive there. He shook hands and acknowledged people and thanked whoever needed thanking and did all of it with the efficiency of a man who was moving toward something specific and was too tired to be subtle about it.
He gave the rest of the team three words before he left.
"Great job, everyone."
Then he went home.
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First Bath
He was intercepted at the door by Griz and Hela, which was the standard greeting protocol for anyone returning to the Finn household after an absence. Griz had turned five and Hela four, and both of them operated at an energy level that suggested the last three weeks had been very good to them personally.
"Ancle! Wewcome home!"
He picked them both up, one in each arm, which was the correct response to this greeting and also something he had genuinely missed more than he would have admitted out loud. The response he got from them, which arrived within two seconds upon their embrace, was that both children covered their noses simultaneously with the coordination of people who had seemingly planned it.
"Ancle stinky."
He had forgotten about his current state and the smell that followed it was indeed unbearable. That was the smell of the blood, dirt and grime that lingered after three weeks of operations, a guerilla campaign through the forest, a final battle, and the eventual flight home on the back of an eagle, would certainly not produce from a person who smelled like anything good, and the children's noses were honest in a way that the adults social courtesy had not been equipped to tell him.
"Hahaha. Yes. You are right, babies. Uncle will take a bath first."
He set them down to do exactly just that. He went to one of the bath houses inside the house. Upon entering he discovered that one of the tubs had already been prepared with hot water, including Aunt Theressa's soap, and with the steam rising off the surface in the way that tells someone who knew what they were doing had timed it correctly. He did not know who had done it. But he was grateful in the specific way that he was grateful for things that did not require him to seek for that person.
He stripped off everything and deposited it all into the magical item pouch for later attention — the armor, the weapons, the traveling gear, all of it needing cleaning or some minor repair or both, and all of it would be someone else's problem for right now (which would be Admin Magnus aheem). He got in the water and soaked himself in the hot bath, he scrubbed himself off of the grime, blood and the foul smell that followed him.
Half an hour in this world's accounting was closer to sixty minutes, and he used most of it. He emerged clean and considerably more functional than in the state that he had arrived with. He quickly dried himself off with a wind element bloom and a touch of his heat from his fire element, (effectively producing a hot blowers effect), which was faster than using a cloth to dry himself with and it was more satisfying this way, and he got dressed in the clean clothes that had been left folded near the tub by whoever had done the preparation.
Then he immediately went to find his wife, which was his goal all along, who he didn't see on the first floor when he arrived earlier. So he could only surmise where she was at that moment, the master's bedroom.
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Angeline's Sleeping Figure
She was asleep when he opened the door to their quarters.
He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at her. Angeline, his wife, who was sleeping in the afternoon light that came through the window at the angle it came through in late afternoon when the sun was getting lower and the quality of the light changed from the direct brightness of midday into something softer and more considerate. She was already three or four months into her pregnancy by now, and the physical reality of it was visible in the way she was positioned and in the way she breathed and in the particular way the afternoon light caught her silver-white hair against the pillow.
He thought about the first time he had seen her. In what was now the headquarters of Maya's Travelling Mercantile — the building that had been his neighbor's house (next door), then it became a storage unit for all the miscellaneous things he had gathered and all the produce from his hunts, then it became a warehouse, and now it became the commercial heart of the village's trade operations — she had been sleeping cold then too, on what had been a very ordinary piece of bed in the second floor of that house, it was still a very different looking building back then, and he had thought for approximately two seconds that he was looking at a ghost because of the hair. He had been wrong about that. He had been right about most things that came after.
He gently closed the door without disturbing her and he immediately went to the garden.
He had a plant in the garden that he tended poorly and thought about often. It had survived his irregular attention through some combination of his Farmer's Blessing passive and its own resilience, which said something about the respective contributions each party was making to the arrangement. Angeline had admired one of its flowers, months ago, in the specific way she admired things when she was not trying to communicate that thought to anyone in particular, she simply admired them. He had noticed it of course. He had planted a second one specifically because of that admiration that came from his lovingly beautiful wife.
He took one of its flowers that had just bloomed from it now, it was a sky blue orchid called Bluo Orchid. He went back inside hiding it in his storage for now.
When he arrived back at the room he put the flower on the pillow beside her where she would see it when she woke up. He sat in the chair beside the bed and watched her sleep in the way that people watched other people they had been worried about when they were finally in a position to confirm that everything was fine and there was no longer anything required of them except to be present.
He was very tired. But he did not move from the chair.
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The Rest of the Day
She woke up and found the flower and found him sitting beside her and there was a conversation that was mostly her expression and his expression and very few actual words, which was how some of their conversations went most of the time.
Then the pregnancy asserted its requirements, which was the theme of the rest of the afternoon.
August had understood, intellectually, that pregnancy produced food cravings and that those cravings were not always predictable or reasonable by the standards of a person who was not pregnant. Aunt Theressa had briefed him on this before, in the thorough way that Theressa briefed people on things she considered them likely to be underprepared for. He had thought he already understood the gravity of it after witnessing it over and over again in this household.
But understanding it intellectually and experiencing the actual velocity of requests that came from a woman in her sixth month who had been somewhat patient for three weeks while he was away but had now decided that patience had already done its service and it was time for the system to deliver — these were different categories of experience.
She wanted specific things. But those things could change dramatically. Some of them were not obviously available and required creative interpretation of what the kitchen currently contained. He went back and forth across the house more times in three hours than he had moved in a deliberate direction during any equivalent period of the guerilla campaign, and without the benefit of using his wind buffs because the context made it so that the wind buffs seem like a disproportionate response.
He did not complain. He did not feel the urge to complain. He had carried enough of the alternative image in his mind — the version of the day where the fight went differently and he came home to a different news — that the reality in front of him, the specific and somewhat demanding reality of his wife's pregnancy cravings in their home, was a gift he intended to treat as one.
Besides, there was something genuinely satisfying about watching her eat something she had asked for and seeing the look on her face when it was right. He found it useful information about her that she had apparently been conducting internal research into which specific flavors she wanted and had opinions that were both precise and non-negotiable.
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The Others
Later that day, when Angeline had moved into the phase of pregnancy management that involved resting after eating, August made his rounds around the house and village.
Adam was still under house arrest. The term was Adarna's — she had not used it officially, but the combination of her presence at the door, Hiraya's presence at the window, and Aunt Theressa and Uncle Red jointly delivering the instruction that he was not to stand up for anything that was not the bathroom for at least three days had produced a set of conditions that were functionally identical to a formal restriction of movement. Adam was in good spirits, which under the circumstances was both impressive and characteristic. He had asked about everyone when he first woke up after collapsing and had been told that everyone was alive and accounted for, and that information had done for his recovery what no potion could replicate, genuine joy. August sat with him briefly. They did not need to say much. They had been in more life and death situations more dangerous than the one at the valley altogether. That was its own language only they could understand.
He went to the others — Rael Sundfang and Daret the Battleborn and the rest of the team members who had come home injured and were now in various states of managed recovery across their own spaces in the village. He thanked each of them in the direct way that the situation deserved. He told them that appropriate rewards would follow when everyone was in a condition to receive them properly.
He also told them about the week off. One week. No operational duties. No training. No reporting. Whatever they wanted to do with their time was what they were supposed to do with it. This news was received with the particular quality of relief that came from people who had been operating continuously for long enough that the permission to stop felt almost unfamiliar.
He stopped by the team's unofficial base of operations on his way back — the space outside the village that served as their training ground and staging area when operations required it. It was functional rather than impressive, built for purpose rather than permanence, and it was going to need to be relocated eventually as Zone 4's expansion moved into the western territory. He had already asked uncle Sibus to begin sketching a design for something more permanent, something that would serve both as a proper training facility and as a base that reflected what Talon One and Two had become rather than what they had been when the space was first laid out. Sibus had made the particular sound he made when a commission interested him, which was different from the sound he made when a commission was merely acceptable, and had gone to find graph paper.
The design was already in the works and the building would come after. What they needed for now was to free up most of their major projects and prepare for the needed materials beforehand. For now the unofficial base did what it needed to do, and that was sufficient.
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Guest House Expansion
The preparations for Lord Millhaven's visit had been running in the background of the village's operations for the past several weeks, with the people responsible for them doing the work without requiring August's involvement except for the decisions that only he could make.
The guest house that had previously accommodated Grandmaster Miles Daemon, Count Ronaldo Bradmoore, and Grandmaster Mirabeth Flamespyre — who was still occupying one of the bedroom spaces while her tower was being completed, which was projected to be completed sometime early next year — had been expanded in anticipation of the visit. A new wing had been added to accommodate guests of high-ranking status, built with the same materials and standards as the original structure and designed by Sibus with the particular attention to detail that Sibus applied to anything that would carry the village's name on it.
The Earl and his wife should be comfortable in their stay and everyone else that would follow. That was the practical conclusion of what had been achieved so far.
The challenge that could not be fully solved in the available time was the accommodation for their retinue. Four hundred soldiers, two hundred logistical personnel, council members, minor nobles, and a merchant group attached to the party was a number of people that the village could not accommodate inside its walls without displacing its own residents, which was not an acceptable approach to hospitality. The solution was making the camping ground on Zone 4, which was the most cleared and level space available at the current stage of the zone's development. It was not the guest house standard. It was organized, properly supplied with water access from their aqueduct network, and positioned with enough distance from the village center that the presence of four hundred soldiers would not feel like an occupation.
It would do. And the feast would be inside the walls, where the village could show its guests what it had built over twelve years in the Great Forest of Lonelywood.
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The Imperial Peacekeeping Force
The empire's garrison had settled nicely into the village's life with the comfortable inevitability of things that had been present long enough to stop being noticed as something unusual; they are now a mainstay and a regular occurrence at this place.
They are officially designated as Maya's Imperial Regional Peacekeeping Force, the rotating complement of soldiers had developed something that was not quite a permanent relationship with the village but was significantly more than a temporary posting. The rotation system meant that no individual soldier was here long enough to put down the kind of roots that would make the assignment permanent, but the collective presence of the force had been consistent enough that the village had developed its own relationship with what the soldiers represented rather than with specific individuals.
The benefits moved in both directions. The garrison provided a visible deterrent that the village's own security forces were not large enough to project power independently. But with the Imperial Banner at the gate hanging, it clearly communicated to any merchant or traveler or would-be threat that the settlement inside was under a form of protection that extended beyond the fence line. In return, the soldiers rotated through an environment that was not available in any other posting in the empire — the Great Forest of Lonelywood, its beasts, its terrain, its specific and unforgiving variety of combat conditions. The knowledge that came out of a posting here was knowledge that could not be reproduced in any of the Empire's training yards. The soldiers who completed rotations here went back to the imperial structure with a measurable difference in understanding of what fighting is like in a great forest actually meant.
The garrison had also quietly become one of the main reasons the village was receiving this much merchant traffic that it was currently receiving. The imperial flag had just that effect to be able to communicate that this place is safe to merchants who were calculating their risk against what they could profit. People who would have hesitated at the idea of going to a frontier settlement, that is so deep in one of the most taboo places to go, were now coming in regular intervals. Thus those who were hesitating back then simply because of that fact had stopped their hesitation, because this specific frontier settlement had an Imperial Military presence that assured that it is safe to visit.
That traffic of uncertainty had already grown past being a casual stopover. The village had become a permanent stopping point for those who wish to travel either north or south. Travelers who were moving from the south of the continent to the north along the land route, through this part of the Central Western Continent of Arkanus were now regularly stopping at Maya Village as a matter of practical logistics rather than curiosity. It was centrally positioned. It was safe. It was adequately supplied. It had great exquisite food, and services, they could provide shelter for the night, and they had things to trade that are rarely seen in the markets outside. The village council had recognized what this represented and had begun discussing it formally.
A transport hub. A proper one, with the infrastructure to support it — they would need an expanded accommodation for travelers, organized market access for visiting merchants, and a road connection that would link the village directly to the imperial highway connecting them directly to people who were approaching the village from the south, and rather than requiring most who came from the south to head to the current northern detour through the forest approaches, this would make the travel much easier.
The western or southwestern road was the specific conversation they all had in mind. August and Uncle Andy had shared their experience on moving through the northwestern territorial lands years ago and understood the geography well enough to know that a direct western or southwestern route would greatly cut travel distances significantly and open the village to traffic that currently bypassed it entirely because the approach was too difficult or too long of a detour to travel.
The problem was not engineering. Sibus had already made his preliminary sketches, which was his way of communicating that the engineering had been solved in his head and only the approval and the material allocation remained. The problem was territory.
A western or southwestern road would pass through the domains of two or three beast lords whose territory covered the relevant terrain. The village's governance of its own 8,100 square kilometers of forest land operated under a dual system that had evolved through necessity and survived through respect: human rule within the village's zones, beast rule over the broader territorial domain, with the whole arrangement operating under Aetherwing's authority as its Forest Guardian Beast of the northern region of Lonelywood. In human terms, one might call him a governor — or, given the scale of it, one of four kings of the forest.
Any road that crossed additional beast lord territories required Aetherwing's involvement. Not because the village could not negotiate directly, but because the process that would produce a durable agreement rather than a temporary one ran through the authority structure that the forest's governance had established. Direct negotiation without Aetherwing was possible. It was also the kind of shortcut that would've produced problems down the road several years later.
Aetherwing had been largely absent since assuming his position as the Northern Forest Guardian Beast. He of course returned periodically — the village indeed was still his home because it is where his mate and their third batch of eggs were at the moment — and when he returned, August intended to have that conversation.
For now the plan existed on Sibus's paper and in the village council's formal agenda. The implementation waited for the right moment, which meant waiting for the eagle who had grown to something approaching a dragon's proportions to come back from whatever the northern forest needed him for.
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Falling Asleep at the Desk
Later that night, when Angeline had been settled and the household had gone quiet and the celebrations in the village had finished themselves out naturally, August sat at the desk in the corner of the room where he did his planning and his correspondence and the administrative work that came with running what Talon One had become.
He had letters to write. Reward allocations to calculate for the team's service. A preliminary report for the village council about the beastfolk operation and what its diplomatic implications were for the relationship with the Southern Beastmen Tribes Chiefdom. Notes for Sibus about the outpost network design he had sketched out for Chieftain Midoka, because the same principles applied to Maya Village's own territorial coverage and he wanted Sibus's engineering assessment of what such implementation would actually cost.
He wrote about half of one letter before his body's exhaustion of the past three weeks asserted itself in a way that was not negotiable.
He put his head down on the desk for a moment.
The letter was still unfinished when Angeline woke up in the early hours and found him there, still at the desk, breathing in the steady rhythm of someone who had gone somewhere deep into their sleep and was not coming back from it quickly.
She put a blanket over his shoulders. She kissed his cheek and went back to bed.
The village kept going around them, as it always did — the overnight guard rotation, the night sounds of the forest beyond the walls, the occasional movement of Rexy checking her perimeter near the Finn household in the particular way that alphas moved through their territory when the pack was settled and the world was quiet. The aqueduct channels ran in continuity. The hearth inside the longhouse held its coals.
Maya Village, twelve years later from its previously half-ruined clearing in the Great Forest, was going about its evening in the comfortable and unremarkable way of a place that had decided that it was going to continue existing and had done it for long enough that nobody was surprised anymore.
August had slept at his desk with a half-written letter under his arm, and outside his window, the Great Forest of Lonelywood was entirely indifferent to the fact that the person who had refused to let it swallow this small piece of it was finally getting some much needed rest.