When they got home Aida felt like she understood Harlan more, and Harlan felt like he understood how odd he was so often.
Balor was outside marking the ground where the farm would be waiting for Harlow to come back, Harlan went over to help.
After an hour of standing around while Balor looked over a series of notes and then finally being allowed to do something he remembered that normalcy was incredibly boring, it was nice sometimes to break the flow of his experiments, but he liked the actual doing more than the planning, when he built a golem for defenses it wasn’t just that it was some amount of increased safety for himself and his family, but he was building, constantly working, carving parts, testing designs, assembling, implanting a series of commands to make up the false mind.
Then that got Harlan thinking about what a mind was, every person around him, even Balor and Lugh showed up on his new mind sense, but soulsmithed items didn’t show up as anything at all, no matter how close he was it didn’t even set off that fuzzy feeling for a distant mind.
Balor started snapping his fingers, well, trying, instead it was just metal scraping on metal, causing everyone around them to cover their ears.
“Harlan, are you listening?”
“No. I was thinking about other stuff.”
“Right. As I was saying, if you used a group of golems we could make a stream that leads from the nearby river into a small pond which we can use as a reservoir for the farm. Our water needs will only grow as we expand. And there is something else. The guard wants to set up a post here because others are wanting to move here, you are not a baron and don’t really have the authority to be one, but you could let those people live here and pay taxes to Redwall.”
“No, the guard can come if they get Blackstone or Redwall to tell me I need them to be here, and I don’t want other people here. I’m not making a village, I just want to expand what I am using.”
“I understand, I will relay your words to those who asked. But, I think it would be a good idea to have a few guards who are actually people here. It could act as a staging area for the regular cleansings; we are between both Luth and another village to the south and the guards have refused to use golems, I could make a contract with them requiring that they use them, not to mention if you added even simple huts outside the walls hunters could rest and process game before heading back to another town or village, helping your public image.”
Harlan wanted to argue against adding more people outside of his direct control, but clearly Balor had put a lot of thought into this.
“Did you plan this?”
Balor was embarrassed, having overplayed his hand.
“I have been speaking with many people, I have made my own golems to deliver messages. The village to the south is Tole, they were established less than a decade ago and I hoped they would be small enough to manipulate into an ally, through them I hoped to also test a great deal of new items and golem designs. They are also a village that only acts as an inbetween of other villages, a rest spot, leaving them without much to do, leading to a high number of hunters and adventurers making up much of their economy.”
Harlan was… upset, but he was also glad. Balor’s plans could do a lot for him, but Balor could be both ruthless and naive.
“Alright. I will allow it, but… I don’t like you saying you are manipulating them into being allies with us.”
‘I do not want them to be a thorn in our side, a gentle hand guiding them will prevent this, though you seem to dislike this idea. Why?“
“I don’t like mind games, I don’t like subtle threats or insinuations of something bad happening if they step out of line.”
Balor sighed.
“I am sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up your paranoia. I meant to manipulate them with contracts and… well I don’t want to say bribes, but by giving them items to test, giving them a potential boost to their economy as a sole seller of things so long as they keep the peace. I am not going to hurt anyone, I don’t want to rule them like was done to you. I want to run this like a business, I’ve read a great deal about it, but this would be a real thing for me.”
“You want to be the carrot? I guess I don’t mind being the stick too much.”
“Harlan, I don’t want a stick, but. If they try to wrong me, if they try to harm anyone else here to force a deal. They will be dealt with to the full extent of the law and beyond if that is really what needs to happen, better to ask for forgiveness than permission sometimes.”
“I trust you. Sorry.”
“You have reason to not want more people you don’t know around. But you can’t avoid the world forever. I hope that I can help you get over that fear of the outside. I couldn’t help with your other problems, but maybe this time I can.”
Harlan bowed goodbye, it could’ve gone worse, but Harlan felt it should’ve gone much better.
Harlan walked inside, taking notice of the spies who still sat in the corners of his kitchen and living room. He checked every other room in the house, luckily not finding any in the bathrooms or bedrooms. That would be too much of a breach of privacy for him to ignore.
Then he checked all the rooms in the bunker, with the excuse of asking Amber if she wanted a tour and talking about telekinesis with her.
There was no one in the bunker at all other than Lugh, Harlan thought it was odd that Lugh was down there by himself, but he wasn’t worried about it.
Finally he ended the tour by taking her to the private room.
“So. What were you really looking for?”
“I can’t tell you, and I do mean that I can’t, so don’t ask me again.”
“Fine. I won’t pry. Do you want to learn some telekinesis?”
“Yes. I’ll get Lugh to start cutting.”
Amber grabbed his arm and pulled him back to the chair he was in.
“No, you are not. I’ll show you how I was taught at the academy. For starters, take off your shirt.”
She took off hers as well.
“We are going to sit back to back, skin to skin, what you need to do is feel when I poke you with my telekinesis. This should eventually let you feel your own soul being displaced. Well, not your soul, but the stuff people just let off into the air when you’re full of mana. They call it aura.”
“Alright.”
It only took 15 minutes before he got the feeling, and then he thought of something.
“Can you just feel other peoples aura?”
“When my telekinesis passes through someones aura I can feel it resist mine. So, kinda?”
Harlan ran and grabbed Lugh, then his coat.
“Tell me, does my jacket have any aura around it? And does Lugh.”
“Alright.”
“Lugh has one, but your jacket doesn't, what was I trying to find?”
“A mind.”
“Explain.
Harlan told her about what he learned from The Mother, she decided that she would ignore the whole talking with a god part until later.
But his explanation of mind magic and his new ability to sense things, pull in emotions, deaden or heighten his own, she wanted to learn how to do it, and was very annoyed about the whole sealed abilities thing. Then she thought about everything else.
“3rd age? What does that mean?”
“Ah. Aarde cleaned the world of everything because they did something very bad.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
She shivered at the sheer scale of what would be needed to clear the world.
“W-what did they do?” She gulped as she asked.
“They let the Fae in. I don’t know where from, but she called them interlopers.”
“No, I am moving past that. I am going to pretend the world wasn’t destroyed at least twice in the past. I am going to pretend I don’t know that Fae aren’t even from Aarde.”
“Well, that is really that weird when you think about it, werewolves are because they made a pact with Aine, the goddess of the moon.”
“What is a pact?”
Harlan had fun teasing her with the sheer scale of information that as far as either of them knew, was highly secret or even outright lost to the rest of humanity.
“So Ibery is… Was? A human?”
“No, the pact is like a bloodline, only the very first of her kind were human. Every child after that was born a Tytoan.”
“Can vampires give birth to vampires?”
“The pacts of Aine can be transferred from person to person. The pacts with the lesser gods of Aarde are between a god and the person who takes the pact and then their descendants.”
“So you didn’t get a choice in this… That just seems so, unfair? Unjust?”
Harlan thought about his answer, did he want to tell her about what he was asked to do? About what his mother was put through? That he would one day likely kill the rest of his family by blood?
“It is on the low end of injustice.”
“How? You were taken away from all of us for years because your great great great however many times grandfather made a pact with some dark god. What part of that is fair?”
“I didn’t say fair. But it isn't as bad as… Nevermind. I don’t want to talk about that.” When he thought of his mother he got that feeling, that desire to see someone punished for something, even if it was just for being around him. He was starting to lean towards one of the options he really disliked about who or what that other The Dark Mother mentioned was.
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“Are you sure? You know you can talk to me about anything, right? I’m your big sister.” She reached over to give him a hug. But he stepped away.
“I know I can. But I don’t want to talk about this, not right now. I want to have more fun with these last couple of days of freedom.”
“I’ll drop it, but I hope you will talk about it with me someday. And there is plenty of freedom at the academy. Sometimes I feel like they could teach people in 3 years instead if they didn’t give us so much time for experiments and jobs and social ladder climbing. Though I guess the first year is denser than the others.”
Harlan cringed at the idea of such a thing, he liked some time for leisure, but too much just wasn’t for him.
“Do you want to have a water fight? We are going to be making a creek with golems tonight so I want to check out the river anyway.”
“I’ve looked into moving rivers, I wouldn’t bet on it just taking one night.”
“Why would you know that?”
“I am training as a warmage, remember? You can’t do large scale water magic without a lot of water, conjuring it is a pain and you can run into enemy warmages setting up large scale arid spells.”
“Well, do you still want to water fight? As long as you don’t hit us with large scale spells.”
“Way to take all the fun out of it.”
They roped Ava into it by calling it a creative training exercise where she was restricted to water spells.
They regretted this when she started a rolling fog and froze them in place before hitting them with high speed water balls that left welts on their chests.
Harlan turned this against her next round by fighting for control over the fog next round and feeding her false information by shifting it around while hiding Amber’s casting of a small tidal wave, knocking Ava off her feet as it came in then sweeping her into the river as it returned, letting them claim the victory.
They decided to set up some rules on what they were allowed to do.
Harlan’s welt was already starting to heal but Amber had to use a bit of light magic to stop the swelling.
There were no hurt feelings, though there were some other kinds of hurt. Ava and Amber sniffled as they walked back to Harlan’s home, they flushed their system with light magic, it wouldn’t heal someone who was already sick, but someone who was just getting a cold would be able to stop it from being an issue.
His parents asked Harlan to send them back to the farm so they could get some things ready for tomorrow, the rest of his family decided to go with them to help. Ava and Amber also just wanted to see the house, it had been longer than either of them realized.
It was just Zella as the last guest.
He went inside, thinking how quiet it was now, it didn’t bother him at all before. But things had been nice with the rest of them here, it reminded him of back when he was younger. He wanted to say when he was a child. But he still was one, even if those nicer days seemed like decades ago.
Sara and Isha were talking about something with Zella in the kitchen, even Lydia was there. Only Garad was missing.
“Hello. Do any of you want anything?”
“Uh… No?” Isha was confused.
“Alright. What are you talking about?”
“Girl things.”
“That’s nice.”
Harlan went to his library to look over the books he had, there was very few, some manuals on farming, some on business, the big book of nobles as he called it, he had 3 of those since the kingdom was very sure to keep it updated if someone died or gained a noble title.
He barely made it through half of the book just skimming it for crests and names.
Eventually he made his way to his bedroom.
He thought about what all he had, about how he wouldn’t see this place for almost a year.
Just a few days remained until he was leaving, and he was starting to feel homesick already. He was aimless, everything he wanted to do either took too long or just wasn’t important enough. He could go and build new golems, but why? He already had 50 of the foxes just sitting around mostly unused, after the creek and pond were made they were going back in storage. There were over 100 of them wandering the woods around his home, he didn’t need any more of them, either his paranoia was wrong and they weren’t important, or the royals were as good at protecting him as Blackstone said. He almost expected something to happen, a gate to open and pull him into some new plot against him, a noble to come here and try to start a fight or scam him, a roving band of orcs somehow getting through every other part of the country to end up at his doorstep, maybe for Dearil to just stop by all of a sudden.
But nothing happened, he was at a lull, and it just made his paranoia worse. Something was always happening in the shadows, someone was always out to get him. He just didn’t know who yet.
He stood in his room with his worst enemy, himself without a distraction.
A knock at the door.
Harlan opened it to see Zella.
“Hey.”
“Come on in.”
She stepped inside.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“I’m just waiting for the next mess to start. For it to be the one that goes wrong, that… Nevermind.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nah. it is just background noise, I can stop thinking about it when I’m talking with you. Did you want to talk about something?”
“Do you… Like me? Love me? The others said I should just ask you. You talked with Isha about it, but you haven’t done that with me. I don’t want you to get any wrong ideas. We are just too young.”
“Oh? That’s all? Nah, I just don’t care about that stuff. I never have… Well there was once. But she nearly tore my face off.”
“Who?”
“When I didn’t come back that night, I went and fought, riled up a crowd, they brought in a gold rank to put a stop to it before it got worse. Her eyes… I felt something in them. But I don’t know if it was infatuation. I don’t have any other experience to draw on for that feeling.”
“How did she look?”
“I’ll show you. Maybe you can understand it.”
He grabbed her hand only after she held it out for him, then he replayed the memories of Gilly, making sure to include the feeling he got from her.
Zella jumped back when she saw Gilly rush at him. He didn’t have any memory beyond that, but it was almost like she was there. She was somewhat jealous of how clear, how real memories from him felt.
“Sorry about that, I didn’t realize I had gotten so good at that.”
“That is… weird, really weird. You should find out how to actually make it less clear. But looking at her, she is very pretty… and very large. But that feeling is… I hate saying weird so much, but it is. It was, nostalgic? Longing? Faintly familiar? Maybe it is one of those guy things, maybe you are feeling it in a different way. Maybe it is because she is from the desert? Those people are… different.”
“I guess I can show dad. He already knows about the fight.”
“Wait. hang on a second, you said she tore your face off? That was just a turn of phrase, right?”
“I said nearly. I was told it was only around where she hit me.”
Zella hugged him.
“I’m sorry you aren’t more upset about that. I… nevermind. We should eat dinner, it should be ready soon.”
Harlan could feel a tumultuous blend of fear and hate as she was about to speak about something else.
“Are you ok? I… well I can feel other peoples emotions, if you are afraid of talking about someone, you can tell me.”
“Don’t do that. Do not do that. I hated it when Relly did that. I don’t want to talk about that, drop it.”
Harlan realized he had stepped on a pitfall, and had no desire to push himself further onto the spikes.
“I won’t talk about it again”
They went down stairs together.
“Sara, can you make me a cup of tea? Vanilla please.”
“Rejection that bad?”
“No. I just want some tea. Lydia, do you want to eat in here, or will you take your food out to eat with Garad? Isha, would you like to invite Mara? It feels so… empty with everyone gone now.”
“I will ask Garad if he would like to eat with you.”
“I can ask my mother. She has been doing better, but she is still… Well you know her.”
“I barely do. But yes, I know how she is.”
After a few minutes Lydia returned with Garad.
“It has been some time since last we spoke, Master Harlan.” Garad bowed to him.
“Are you enjoying your retirement?”
“Very much. Things are slow and small, I simply do most of the work just before bed. Though that 30,000 gold transfer is going to be an issue. I know you said before that you want all gold to be here in your own vault, but would you consider an exception with this?”
Nearly everyone had a look of amazement at such a massive sum of money. Sara even tried counting how long she would need to work to make that much even if she never spent or gambled away any of her wages.
“Nope. I control my money. I don’t trust anyone else, I don’t trust banks. And I am glad you have so much free time, if you need anything else just ask.”
Garad had spoken with him many times about it, but Harlan refused to use the noble banking system. He had no desire to only keep some of his money around. It was his so he wanted to be able to walk down to the vault and just look at it if he wanted.
“Very well. It will be arriving the day you leave with a dozen royal soldiers and 2 royal guards. Such a large transfer being done physically is… Odd. even with gates they can’t trust that something wouldn’t go wrong.”
“I am sure it will be fine. Everyone who wants to can be inside the bunker just in case they are worried about it.”
“I would advise against such a thing. It would show a lack of faith in the royal family’s ability to safely transport valuable goods.”
“Good, so we agree that I don’t need to worry about it.”
“Yes, Sir Fomoria.”
Everything was being put on the table when Isha walked in, shockingly for most of the others was Mara behind her.
“I am here. Master Harlan.”
“You don’t work for me, even if you did. Just call me Harlan.”
The only ones who still couldn’t get over their own learned manners and just call him Harlan were Garad, Lydia, and Mara.
Being around her made everyone nervous, Harlan was pretty sure if he had that emotional feeding active he would be sweeting already.
Instead it was just a little awkward, she was slightly better about it this time, but he could see her eyes moving all around checking the room for anything.
He wondered if that is what he looked like to other people sometimes.
Harlan saw that Sara was about to burn herself on the stove and reflexively telekinetically placed a barrier between her elbow and the stove.
He hadn’t even tried doing really anything with telekinesis yet, but his aura/mind moved like another limb to him. He thought about what The Mother said about learning to control his empathetic powers would help him with the other thing he wanted to learn.
Though she wasn’t burned, the sudden invisible blockage caused her hand to slip, dropping the pan of roast chicken and vegetables. Harlan was physically out of his chair to catch that one, a quick unstructured casting of some cooling magic kept his hands from being burned as he quickly placed it on the counter.
“Smooth moves, don’t know what I hit there though.” Sara complimented.
“You almost burned yourself. I put up a little invisible wall there to stop that, but then you bumped into it.”
“beast magic.” Mara grumbled.
“Oh, so you have encountered it before?”
“You can’t make me talk to you.”
“Alright then. Sara, do you need any more help?” Harlan wasn’t sure if it was better or worse that Mara was starting to realize that she didn’t need to fear Harlan unless she said something really bad.
Even when she did say such a thing Harlan simply left the room after telling her not to repeat the statement.
A few minutes had passed with everyone eating and making small talk. Isha mentioned the maiden festival, Mara made a comment about why doesn’t the kingdom just assign every woman a husband like Reino, but most oddly Sara was giving out some nervous and sad feeling when the maiden festival was brought up. Harlan stepped in one pitfall already, he wasn’t going to do that again.
“Mara, do you have any recipes for rice dishes? We are just starting on the farm, but in a few months we should have some.”
“I will only pass those to Isha.” Harlan was expecting something more. But she had said her piece and was back to eating her chicken.
Aside from Mara, Harlan thought it went pretty well, it was nice that everyone could eat, not quite as a family, but as a group anyway.
Everyone was done and it was now just Isha, Zella, Harlan, and Sara left cleaning things. The others were told that there would just be too many people if they all tried to help.
Harlan noticed Sara kept glancing at him whenever she thought he wasn’t looking. But he wasn’t sure if it was a “I want to talk” or a “I hope he doesn’t ask me anything.” It was made all the more confusing by looks shared between the rest of the women, as if they were speaking in sign.
After he was done instead of going to the bunker and seeing what Balor and Lugh were doing he went to his bedroom to see if he would be getting anymore visitors
But no one came.
He felt a presence outside the room pacing back and forth, but they never knocked. Once it was past midnight he decided to go visit with Balor and Lugh, and tried to check if they had any empathic powers since they were born of his soul.
Unfortunately they didn’t display anything of the sort. Lugh seemed quite upset about it, complaining that it would make it so much easier to understand people. Harlan argued that it really didn’t, Balor found the whole thing amusing.