When they finally reached home and went upstairs, Daniel remembered he had a question to ask.

"Grandfather, what's the point of the town walls?" he asked, "The back gate isn't even guarded."

"Good question!" Grandfather grinned, and Henry, who he had been talking with, groaned.

"Maybe we should be going," he said to Carissa.

"Nonsense, your children need to hear this as well," Grandfather said, leading the way to the corner where Henry's children were sitting with Grandmother and Beatrix.

"Why would you ask that?" Henry asked Daniel.

"Quiet, Henry!" Grandfather barked, "Now, gather round, grandchildren, and let me tell you the story of how the walls of Laston are a testament to the cowardice and stupidity of the priesthood."

Daniel, tired from all the walking, went to sit with the others. Behind his grandfather, he could see adults shaking their heads and rolling their eyes, but some smiles were going around as well.

"My grandfather used to tell me stories of his childhood in Lisirrast," Grandfather started, "There were many things there that you won't see much of nowadays. There were brave noble houses that had real backbone, there were the wonders of steam power, and there was the Goddess Salidera to watch over everybody. Last and definitely least was the Lisirrast Guild of Engineers. A bunch of builders in love with numbers, my grandfather used to call them. And after numbers they loved walls. They built walls everywhere, even on top of other walls, they loved them that much. They said the walls of Lisirrast would never fall. And then the monsters came, the walls were useless, and the engineers were the first to run for Sanctuary."

"Now tell me, boys and girls, what do you think was the first thing they did after running all the way here?" Grandfather asked, looking around eagerly.

"They built more walls?" Daniel's cousin David answered nervously.

"Exactly!" Grandfather declared loudly, practically pouncing on the response. "They were scared, so they built more walls. They even came to Laston to build walls. But you don't need walls in Sanctuary. The walls were useless, and they were starting to be scared that the engineers guild itself was useless. Which it was! So what do you think they did then?"

A pause, with no one wanting to venture a guess.

"They turned to religion," Grandfather said, shaking his head "They looked down on Salidera, but then they got frightened and rushed to look up at Kyburad. They started to build churches instead of walls. They built churches everywhere, even on top of other churches. And that's how the priesthood started. Just as our line goes back to the brightest and bravest of Lisirrast's survivors, the priesthood was founded by the biggest cowards and idiots. And Laston's pointless walls are a monument to that fact."

Grandfather seemed inordinately pleased with his story. Daniel just wondered if the engineers guild being overconfident about the walls protecting them wasn't the same as people in Sanctuary currently assuming they were safe in a country with monsters on the border. That and the mention of steam power. Mostly he was thinking about steam power. He'd be needing a steam tank, and maybe a zeppelin or some kind of airship.

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His father's departure snuck up on Daniel. It was earlier in the morning than he was used to, and he was still half asleep as he stood with his mother just inside the front door. He looked at Beatrix, who was being held on his mother's hip. That had used to be his position, and he was struck by how odd it was for him to be walking around with those memories in his head. He yawned, wondering if he could go back to sleep afterward. Despite the early hour, the rest of the family had all shown up to say goodbye and were crowded around Dad.

In the yard itself, Daniel could see a large wheeled wooden wagon waiting. Even without tentacles, the size difference between Daniel and the horse hitched to the wagon made it intimidating. And he was making sure to stay out of range just in case the tentacles decided to reveal themselves. Maybe it was a town horse and would start growing bricks to chuck at people instead. The gate to the outside was swung open, and there were ten other members of the guard in attendance, with their own friends and family seeing them off. Enough people for them to spill out into the street, and Daniel knew this was less than a third of those going. Each man had identical armor and a long polearm that he judged to be about 3 Daniels in length. Beyond that, he saw other smaller weapons of much greater variety strapped here and there, or being chucked into the back of the wagon.

"They're all young men," Daniel said, noticing that his father, who was in his early twenties, looked amongst the oldest of the bunch. He would have thought there would be at least one grizzled veteran to take charge, but apparently, that was his father's job.

"Every man only goes once," his mother responded. Daniel mulled that over, having mixed feelings over possibly dodging some sort of draft due to his gender. He was getting the impression that he should be more concerned than he was about his sex impacting his prospects. But even as a man he had always seen himself as his own separate category, one which didn't care about rules for men or women or any other group for that matter. Besides, children didn't need to worry about their sex or gender, so he didn't need to think about it. He was going to keep telling himself that until it came true.

"What do you actually do for work, Mum?" he asked, "Today for example, what are you going to do today?"

"Today?" Mum said, sounding distracted, "Well first I want to check on old Edgar, his wife died last spring and he has no family left here so we keep an eye on him. Then after that, Fern will need a break from the twins and a sympathetic ear. That's her over there," she pointed at a harried-looking young woman saying a tearful goodbye to one of the guardsmen. She had three children huddled around her, and none looked to be twins, so she probably had at least two more at home. "Then later, well Carissa is helping to organise her cousin's wedding, and I'm sure they'll take as much help as they can get with that."

"And that is a normal day?"

"Normal enough. Sometimes I just fill in when other jobs are short on people. I told you I help out where I'm needed."

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

That would make her somewhat of a mix of social and temp worker. A respectable enough profession. It sounded god awful to Daniel, especially the social worker part. If that was a feminine role here, it absolutely was not going to apply to him.

Daniel watched as Mum tried to put on a brave face when Dad approached. She went through a last-minute checklist, Dad quietly assuring her he hadn't forgotten anything. Daniel was being hit by the realisation that his father could simply not come back, and what that could mean for them. What happened to war widows and orphans here? Then looking up at his father, he found himself annoyed at the slant of his sympathies. Hey Dad, don't you know how hard it would be for us if you were horribly murdered?

"Take care of them," Dad said at last as the worries tapered off.

"I will" Daniel replied, although it clearly wasn't meant for him. His father responded by kneeling down and meeting Daniel's gaze. Daniel had meant what he said. He would try, it was the least he could do. After a moment his father nodded once, then rose and turned away, calling in a surprisingly loud voice for the men to set out. Daniel squeezed his mother's hand as they watched them leave.

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After a couple more days of flame practice, Daniel was happy that his schooling finally started to progress. Zachery even apologised to Daniel for leaving him to himself too much while getting things sorted for the new arrangement. As time passed, his education was anchored around learning a new skill every few days. Many of these lessons were fairly straightforward and tended to result in humdrum job-related skills. 'here do some cleaning to learn a cleaner skill'.

> Halfhearted Cleaning gained.

But the skills soon started to add up. Cleaning, weaving, laundry, gardening, tailoring, leatherworking, carving, meat butchery, and then for some reason chicken butchery as a separate skill, chandlery, carpentry, alchemy, basket weaving, embroidery, wool carder, winemaking, tanning, belt making, shoemaking, tinkering, cooking, the list went on and on. Daniel figured that he would eventually have a skill for every job in town.

Some skills encompassed an entire profession, and some were only a small part of one, and sometimes the two overlapped. Other skills seemed less job-focused, to Daniel at least. Mathematics came up and was again described by his status as eldritch, while several of the more mundane job-related skills had descriptors that reflected how dull he found them.

Learning the skill was enough, being able to properly perform the task it was named for was less important. But the option to explore a particular skill more was there if Daniel showed enough interest. Writing was taught to him despite Daniel admitting to already having it. Gardening, however, was canceled when he said he had learned it by helping his grandmother. Zachery had been planning to bring in a number of potted plants for him to tend to learn that one.

For some skills, Zachery would provide tools or materials, some of them appeared to be designed specifically for teaching. He was seemingly unbothered by any mess or disruption created, or by the risk posed by leaving Daniel alone with sharp implements. Other times Daniel would go to a different part of the church. Cooking, for example, he picked up in a tiny kitchen in a separate area of the church where the priests lived. Zachery said Daniel would be rejoining his class when older for the skills that were easier learned outside like farming.

Identify was a skill he learned by trying to judge the differences between items in a box of junk Zachery brought him. Zachery said the skill only helped you better utilize the knowledge you already had, rather than giving you new information. And that the skill was quite weak, but had many stronger specialised versions that could be gained by taking it as a profession skill. Daniel's mind was drawn into making comparisons to his compendium skill.

Between the new skill sessions, there was more practice in the skills of Daniel's choice. In between that, Zachery sometimes gave him lectures that could mostly fit into one of two topics, the mechanics of skills and the virtues of Lord Kyburad. There was even a lecture on how the two intersected. The priest claimed that people filled out their Kyburad domain skill list by 'worshipping Him and living life in pursuit of His virtues'. The flame skill was associated with the worship part and at the centre of the whole domain. Leveling it unlocked other Kyburad skills which were supposedly each linked in one way or another to his virtues. And you couldn't hold a skill related to an ideal you weren't living up to. The lecture seemed to be meant to inspire Daniel into Kyburad's warm embrace but had the opposite effect in the end.

Domains as a wider concept had also been explained, albeit again, in a manner clearly tailored to meet the church's interests. They were as Daniel had thought, similar to a second job. You picked a profession to get profession skills and joined a domain to get domain skills. Domains were one per person unless your name was Daniel. Individualist gave 'Reduced benefits and restrictions from Domains'. He figured joining more than one might count as 'reduced restrictions'. And 'reduced benefits' could be leveling annoyances. Possibly it meant getting stuck in a dead-end division for the landtrust guild as well.

Zachery insisted that Daniel was absolutely free to choose whatever domain he wanted. But he was also unwilling to give an example of an alternative to Kyburad and mentioned that people not a part of Kyburad's domain were not trusted. Suspecting Rory had a different domain, Daniel found it hard to disagree with the last part. Luckily Daniel didn't need to worry about domain choice as much, since he planned to sign up for as many as possible. A list of places to go looking would have been nice though.

A different interesting topic covered was leveling and affinities. Guidance skills didn't level but carried the practice over to normal adult skills. The major caveat was you couldn't level skills past your own level, even with guidance skill level banking malarky. This meant at best you could have level 14 skills waiting for you when you hit adulthood at age 15. It also explained why his compendium skill had briefly been stuck at level 5.

The other half of the equation was affinities. This was your talent with a skill, or potential, or passion, or well, affinity. The explanation got a little wishy-washy, but Zachery claimed that was because it worked differently for different skills. Better affinity meant quicker leveling with a higher peak possible. An idiot with no talent couldn't mindlessly smack a piece of metal with a hammer for 100 years and turn into a Level 1000 Alien Magic GodSmith.

The church's education seemed to favor work on affinities over levels. It made sense given the differences between the two. Affinities could be improved, but it was difficult and grew more so after childhood. Again different skills worked differently. When Zachery talked about some of the ways to raise your affinity, Daniel knew that was the hope behind his initial self-guided practice sessions. Affinities were also hard to specifically track, not normally showing in someone's status. But Zachery mentioned a way for guidance stones to reveal them, and a meeting with his parents at age 10 to discuss them. He talked about affinity quality being represented by color, but Daniel thought that the descriptors of his guidance skills had the same purpose.

Daniel put the dots together with other comments to come to an understanding of how education progressed here. Ages five to ten you would pick up any skills that were useful to the town and possibly yourself. In-between would be affinity study sessions for whatever skills took your interest, but wouldn't it be ever so great if that interest was caught by Kyburad. Then at ten years old, there would be a sort of parent-teacher meeting to discuss your affinities report card and pick your focus going forwards. There was mention of people taking something like an apprenticeship in the town, or even leaving for a city that could better cater to your talents.

To give Zachery his due, Daniel thought there were principles there that he was following, and could be trusted to continue to do so. But he was sticking to the letter of the law, with no qualms beyond that. He probably thought it was a moral good to push as many children as possible into worship. And Daniel wouldn't discount that in this world Zachery could be right, he just didn't think any of it should apply to himself.