The Dark Lord of Crafting

Dongle, much to the relief of everyone who knew him, returned on the eighth day after our arrival at the site of what was, despite my mild protests, now generally known as Williamsburg. He came bearing gifts, including a dozen wagons laden with wheat and oats, dried legumes, and even a quantity of cheese. Lillits crowded around him, and before Boffin, Esmelda and I had gotten there, he was already handing out sacks of supplies like an agriculturally minded Santa Claus.

“Wait!” Boffin shouted. “We need to take inventory! Everything has to be rationed.”

He was ignored. Dongle was laughing, basking in the praise and thanks of the lillits, and tossing out sacks to the crowd as he went. His son and the lillits Boffin had sent with him were further back with the other wagons, which were soon under siege from hungry people demanding their share. It was a welcome sight, given that our food stores were running low. My farm had expanded to six plots, and most crops would mature in a day if I stayed around them continuously, but I had other things to do.

The rate at which plants grew around me was phenomenal, but not instantaneous. I'd harvested cabbages, peas, and beats, but it was still short of what we needed. Lillits, fortunately, both because of their diminutive statures and subtly supernatural constitutions, could survive on a lot less food than a normal human. My aura, or whatever caused monsters to spawn and plants to speed run through their life cycles in my vicinity, extended well over a hundred feet in every direction from wherever I was. That meant that when the area around my shelter was fully utilized, I would supercharge more than an acre of farmland. If I stayed in one place and kept adding to the plots, it would be possible for me to support the entire community as it was on a subsistence diet with the farm alone, especially if I figured out how to stack on a second level without killing all my plants. But we weren’t there yet.

The wagons were being pulled by a mix of horses and oxen, and there were a half dozen cows leashed together at the end of the train, so it looked like Dongle had taken it upon himself to provide us with more livestock. What use six cows would be to a thousand lillits was an open question, but it was a start.

The crowd made way for me, and Esmelda kept close to my side as we reached the lead wagon. Dongle paused in his Santa Claus act to greet us.

“Baron,” he said, waving a hand that was once again studded with rings. “I have returned.”

“I can see that,” I said. “Do you think we could do this in a more organized way?”

“Aha,” he clutched his ample belly. “I’m afraid I got caught up in the moment. Listen up!” he called to the crowd. “The Baron and Mayor Boffin are here. They say we need to wait before I give anything else.”

There was considerable grumbling at this, and a few sour looks around us. Esmelda scowled.

She turned around to address the group. “Everything’s going to be brought to the great hall,” she said, “and we can begin distributing rations in an hour.”

Her voice didn’t carry as well as Dongle’s, but people got the idea and dispersed. There were a handful still trying to get food from the wagons further back, but Boffin’s people were fending them off. Dongle was grinning to himself, and I hopped up onto the wagon beside him. The sudden movement startled him, and I grabbed his arm to prevent him from falling off.

“We’re incredibly grateful to you for doing this,” I said.

“But of course,” Dongle said, “I am only doing my part.”

“We can work out your compensation later, but for now, I need you to go along with the program. Don’t make us look like the bad guys.”

“What?” Dongle said, feigning shock. “I assure you, that was not my intent. I just want to help our people any way I can.”

I had spent little time with Dongle personally, but he had always given me sneaky vibes. Dongle's attitude during his initial introduction to me had bordered on hero worship, but I suspected that was a veneer. If he was giving away his wealth, it wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart. This was a way of establishing himself as an important figure in the new community. On the whole, I was fine with having him play a big role in the growing town, but not if he got there by undermining my authority.

“Good. I’m glad to hear that you did this with no thought to the cost. As your Baron, I am happy to accept this generous gift, and I will look on you with favor in the future.”

“Oh, well.” Dongle said quickly, “you did mention compensation.”

“I did, but that’s contingent on you not stirring up conflict where there doesn’t need to be any.”

“Of course,” he adjusted his tunic, which looked new, “let’s get all this to the hall where it can be distributed properly.”

With hundreds of lillits at work every day and all the materials I had taken from the way station at our disposal, our various construction projects were proceeding at a galloping pace. The longhouse was complete, its walls filled in with wattle and daub, and Boffin had designated it as the town hall. The well was in operation, and the shacks around the mine were shored up and refinished. My role in these projects had been less direct than I was used to, aside from crafting more tools and dropping raw materials. I’d also made Duad an anvil, and his forge was coming along.

As insufferable as Dongle might be, if his actions meant we could make it through this establishing phase of the town with no one starving to death, I was happy to have him around and play whatever role he liked. Esmelda, Brenys, and a few others were quickly at work sorting through what he had brought from Henterfell, and I was briefly left alone with nothing to do. Or rather, I had so many things I could do that I wasn’t sure where I was most needed at that very moment.

The former Baron still hadn't made an appearance. He might have been waiting until I sent someone to collect taxes to make a scene. Midway through our first week in the settlement, a messenger from Henterfell had brought documents detailing the specifics of my holdings. Baronies divided up into smaller regions called manors, which could vary in size but averaged around three thousand acres. It was hard for me to visualize in my head what that translated to, but Godwod had been kind enough to include a map with the relevant territories noted and labeled. I was now officially the Baron of Eastmine, which included three "manors," which worked out to something like fifteen square miles of land. Only one of those regions had been developed, the previous baron’s home and the hamlet surrounding it. It was a lot of room to work with, and I had to wonder if this was a sign of Godwod’s trust in me or whether he was just making the best of an underutilized territory.

If we established ourselves here, it could only benefit him. If we failed, he hadn’t really lost anything. I wasn’t fond of being in debt to people who had the authority to strip property out from under me, but giving him what he wanted was a nonissue. Otto would be by every couple of weeks to collect the margrave's share of gold, and as long as I didn't start throwing my wealth around, the amount he expected was minimal.

I spent the next hour at the crafting table producing building materials, mostly planks and shingles, and the lillits gathered around the hall for their allotment of foodstuffs. Boffin had completed his census, and he had our entire population recorded by household. Each family designated someone to collect their portion of the food, and that person got checked off his list as they went along. Dividing up resources in a way that would both keep everyone happy and alive was an impossible task, and there had been more than a few heated exchanges over the last few days as supplies ran low.

It rarely required my input, but lillits had been coming to me with complaints and requests whenever I was in sight. The miracle of my crafting process was now commonplace to them, and over the course of the hour I was regularly interrupted by men and women who were concerned that families who had already gotten bags from Dongle would end up with more than their fair share when the rest was distributed. I directed them to Esmelda, who, though she had a kind heart, was very good at shutting people down when they were wasting her time. Dongle's behavior was annoying, but there was nothing we could do about it now.

Pastor Tipple approached me as the rationing came underway. He actually looked healthier than he had in Erihseht. While being captured and marched off to Dargoth couldn’t have been a pleasant experience for him, it had forced him to at least temporarily give up drinking, and he’d lost a good bit of weight.

“William,” he said. “I was planning on holding a service after the food is given out. Will you be able to attend?”

I glanced up at the sun. There was still plenty of distance for it to travel before it sank below the horizon. Not for the first time, I longed for a watch. The lillits had various means of keeping a relatively accurate track of time; sundials and water clocks and hourglasses, but there wasn’t much of that here, so we were mostly functioning on best guesses.

“I need to get back to the farm,” I said. “The longer I spend there, the better.”

He nodded. “I understand the importance of what you are doing. But our faith is important as well, and the citizens of Williamsburg would benefit from seeing you there. I can promise it won’t be overlong. Esmelda has mentioned that you promised her to join us at some point,” he winked at me, “why not today?”

Esmelda had previously insisted that I attend church with her, and thus far, I had largely avoided it. Though she hadn’t done more than tease me about the agreement, I knew that lillit traditions, and their faith in particular, mattered a great deal to her. It wouldn’t hurt for me to sit through one service.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll be there.”

“Praise the goddess. It won’t be long now. I’ll let you get back to your work.”

As the last of the sacks was handed out, the crowd was dispersing. Esmelda came to find me and we took our seats on one of the wooden benches in the hall. Though it was primarily a community center, and many people were sleeping in there, it had the air of a church. The structure was essentially a nave, a big rectangle with a high ceiling and a place at one end for someone to stand and address the congregation. Being that it was newly completed, up to now, Tipple had been playing the role of an itinerant priest, wandering among the camps and giving people comfort where he could. He wasn't the only pastor, but the community viewed Tipple as a leader due both to his own personality and his relationship with Esmelda and me.

Somewhere around a hundred lillits had shown up for his inaugural service, a fraction of the total population, but plenty for the size of the hall. He began by thanking them all for coming, and saying a few words about the necessity of faith in hard times, and the usual stuff about gods working in mysterious ways. On earth, I had been a lifelong atheist. Religion had never made sense to me, even as a child, and being dragged to church had done nothing but make me resentful of the institution. As I got older, I had learned to appreciate the value it had for others, for society, and I no longer begrudged people for their beliefs, but I had never shared in them.

In prison, I had attended a variety of religious services, more out of boredom than anything else. Whatever people were supposed to feel in those situations, entering a church, or bowing their heads in prayer, I had never felt it. Being that I'd met a goddess and reincarnated in another world, strict atheism was no longer a tenable position for me to take. But that gods of some kind clearly existed didn’t mean that anything people said about them was accurate or useful. Did Mizu hear the lillits' prayers, or even care whether they worshiped her? Were the other gods, the ones humans worshiped in Drom, real as well, or were they just social constructs? I didn’t have any answers to those questions, and given everything else that had been going on since my arrival in Plana, answering them had not been a priority for me.

Esmelda sidled closer, smelling like flowers. “You aren’t listening,” she whispered. “Listening is the point.”

She had me there. I tried to be more present.

The building held the scents of fresh timber, mixed with the earthier notes of the clay and grass that had gone into the walls. I’d filled out the floor with planks myself, and a pair of Eternal Torches hung on ropes from the rafters. One of them hung just ahead of Tipple, who was standing on a bench to give himself some elevation over the congregants, and it bathed his heavy face in light.

“The marks of the past are with us still,” he said. “Mizu sent her heroes to bring us out of Dargoth, but in the peace we have enjoyed in the generations since she brought out of the dark lands, some have wondered why our goddess would grow silent. It seemed to many that we had been left to fend for ourselves, and that there was no more purpose in the old prayers and old songs. In my lifetime, I have observed that the Shui is seen less and less as a source of inspiration, and more a simple record of history that we no longer have cause to think about.”

His gaze traveled over the hall, and then fell. “I am forced to admit to my own doubts. For much of my life, I have felt a lack of purpose. Erihseht flourished, its people were productive, and it appeared that there was little use for a man in my profession. But even if we let ourselves slip away from her, Mizu did not forget us. When the Dark Lord stirred again and sent his demon across the wastes to claim us for his own, Mizu saw fit to intervene. She sent us a new hero, different from the ones who came before, it is true; but no less miraculous.”

I felt a lot of eyes on my back.

“It’s easy to lose sight of what matters most in days like these.” Tipple continued. “We have been tested, and will continue to be. Many of you are hungry, but the days of hunger will end. Our individual desires are insignificant in the face of the needs of the community, and if we are to survive what is coming, it will only be through unity. Unity of purpose, of will, and of faith. The Dark Lord stirs in his dark lands, and we have not seen that last of his aychar. Only one demon crossed into the Free Kingdoms to take us, and without Mizu’s aid, that would have been enough. More will come, and it is only with the guidance of the goddess, and that of her servant among us, that we will pass through this shadow in our history and into the bright dawn of our future.”

It was a better speech than the one I had been planning on making. If this is what Tipple had been going around telling people, then I owed him a drink as soon as we got around to distilling one.

He gave his words a moment to sink before stepping down from the bench. “Go forward carrying love for each other and devotion to the goddess. She is not only our past, but our present, and our salvation. Now, let us pray.”

The prayer itself was simple, reminiscent of the words I’d heard recited in Sunday school so often. But it was impossible to forget that in this case, there was incontrovertible evidence of the being to whom the ritual words were being directed. Mizu had played a role in the history of these people, and unless there was another divine presence mucking around in the background, she was the one who had given me my second life.

After the service, lillits came and went, thanking the pastor or asking for his advice. Most of them stopped to greet me and Esmelda, and though I lost track of how many hands took mine, she seemed to know every one of them by name. We spoke with Tipple for a moment, and he thanked me for attending the service, then Esmelda and I walked together toward the farm.

She said little on the way, and I had the impression that something was weighing heavily on her mind, but I let her have her silence. It was nice walking with her, and she would tell me whatever it was when she was ready. The night was almost upon us when we reached the shelter. I’d crafted and enchanted a new set of torches, and I was planning on starting two new plots before I retired, but first we shared a meal together. It wasn’t much; more flatbread and cabbage soup, but having her with me made it special.

As we finished, I felt her looking at me strangely.

“Is it the eyes?” I asked. “They’re weird, right?”

She shook her head. “They’re different, but they’re still your eyes.”

“Just don’t shine a light in my face. That’s when things get crazy.”

She smiled, still preoccupied. “William...” she trailed off.

“What is it?”

“I’m pregnant.”

I blinked. “What?" The first time we had known each other in the biblical sense had been what, two weeks ago? That was way too fast for her to be this certain. There had been no kids in my previous life, and I didn't not want one, hypothetically speaking. It was, however, a major complication, considering that we were expecting an invasion. The harpies had seen no armies on the horizon, but Dargoth had to have some kind of response brewing for the death of Beleth and the lillit's escape.

"How are you sure?”

She raised an eyebrow. “There’s a life growing inside of me. I know.”

"Is that how that works?" I was pretty sure it wasn't.

Esmelda looked at her empty bowl like it held the secrets of the universe. "I had another dream," she said. "There is still fire and shadow beyond the mountains, but now we have a child. I know it, even if I can't explain to you how I know it."

More meddling from Mizu. Could she really not just talk to people?

“But…humans and lillits. Can we, I mean, is it going to be okay?”

Esmelda nodded, and a weight seemed to lift off of her. “It will be. It’s happened before. Our kind are not incompatible.”

I was still having trouble getting my head around it. “We just got here,” I said, stupidly.

"I know." She laughed. “But you shouldn't worry. Whatever magic is making the plants grow around you hasn’t had the same effect on me.”

That actually was a relief. In Maincraft, both animals and villagers spawned juvenile versions of themselves a moment after being fed. That would have been horrifying to see play out in reality.

“I know you have to work,” Esmelda said, “but for tonight, could you stay with me?”

“I will.”

My stolen bed wasn't spacious, but it didn't have to be. I held Esmelda as she went to sleep, and my thoughts drifted to the future. A child, our child, coming into the world. Would he have powers like mine? That didn’t seem likely, otherwise, there would have been people with Systems running around all over Plana who descended from previous transmigrators. What Tipple had said was true. There would be more demons coming now that I had defied the Dark Lord. Maybe Kevin himself. It was a frightening thought, but there was something stronger than fear stirring in my chest, the knowledge that I had something to protect.