Truth be told, I never really wanted children. I certainly didn't dislike them, no, but rather, I simply didn't want to have any, adopted or not. No matter how hard I tried, I would never be my mother, at least not in this respect.
My siblings had children.
I was not the only child adopted by my mother, though I was the only to follow in her footsteps and strive to become a Legate, just like her.
My siblings were good parents.
They raised their children with respect and diligence, gave them everything they needed to succeed and more.
My nephews and nieces and, eventually, grand-nephews and grand-nieces, were good people, capable in their fields. Peaceful.
They were the sort of people I fought for, that I thought deserved to inherit all the wealth and comfort the Imperium could give them.
When they were children, and I on my rare leave, I would visit them, shower them with gifts and all the love I could muster, and they would crowd around me as I told stories of their parents when they were the childrens age.
My family had been large, and I felt fortunate to have them.
But I never wanted children for myself.
Still, now that I had created life, I would treat them as such, as my children, and give them all the wealth and comfort I could, the same as I had for my nephews and nieces, and their children, too.
The Kobolds were industrious little things, clearing more and more of the mountain while I practiced my magic, and discussed our tactics with our 'war council'.
At the moment, my scaly children were arguing about what to call me, and it offered a good deal of insight into each one.
Fera and Chrys thought they should call me 'Lord' or 'Chief' or some other relatively neutral term, but Carna and Alva claimed they should append 'Mother' to the end of whatever Fera and Chrys argued best fit, with Paeona taking up the opposite position, saying that I was more fatherly than motherly, and my title should reflect that.
Of course, they were still children, and awful with using language to its fullest capacity, so it was nothing so eloquent, but they still managed to get their points across, and more than once it devolved into a semi-playful brawl.
Alvas reasons seemed to reflect that the child was feminine herself, and saw that reflect in me, but Carna was the opposite, masculine, but his reasons were much the same, seeing what made him masculine reversed in me.
Similarly, Paeona felt what made her feminine was the opposite in me, and my stern demeanor demanded I be called a father, not a mother.
Fera and Chrys countered with the notion I seemed uncomfortable with a gendered title, and I supposed that was somewhat true, but the reason I had been uncomfortable when Fera called me 'Master' was not that it was gendered.
The debate did not last overly long. Fera claimed they were all wasting time, and needed to finish constructing the living quarters as I requested, and, besides, the debate would not flee them. They could pick it back up on their next break.
They went back to work, and so did I, relentlessly practicing the healing array Tesha had taught me. What I could do wouldn't do much more than stop a wound from bleeding, she told me, but that would be enough for a real healer to reach the injured in the coming battle, so it was fine, for now.
While I was idly chatting with Enna, half my attention focused on properly drawing the healing spell, Alva called out to me, clutching something in her claws, holding it up for me to see.
[So, I- Ah, one moment,] I told Enna, and focused my attention on the Kobolds. [Yes, Alva?]
"Rock! Strange, friend-sprite couldn't cut!" she said, before dropping one hand to point at the wall of the cavern where it'd come from. "From there."
I couldn't tell what color the stone was, of course, but I could tell it had a different shape and texture from the stone they'd been quarrying, and there was more of it in splotches, semi-crystalline outcroppings jutting from the stone.
Mineral ore, most likely, I thought, and swiftly claimed the area of the wall beyond it that I could reach, only half a meter or so, for now, and found more in the stone.
[Apologies, everyone,] I said, speaking to the whole of the camp at once. [Are any of you familiar with metals? I believe my children have found an ore vein.]
During their breaks, while they laughed, played, and ate, I'd become accustomed to reading the facial expressions and body language of the Kobolds, and I could only describe the look on Alvas face as she registered what I had called them as 'joy'.
"Aye," one of the witch-hunters spoke up, and one of the magi joined him in the center of the camp. "My father's a smith."
"So's mine. Have the little one bring it out where we can see it?"
Once I relayed the request to Alva, the other four Kobolds decided to follow her out, as well, curious what it was.
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It only took a glance for the two to confirm it: "Iron," they said at once, and the magi continued. "Hematite, looks like. Good for smelting, and common, too."
"Aye, there's probably a few hundred pounds of the stuff in the vein you little ones found," the witch-hunter added, patting Alva on the head, causing her tail to swish back and forth a little. She seemed to enjoy it.
"Not to worry, Lord Lycoris," Davyn said from his campfire. "We bought some wooden boxes to put ore in, just in case. Hard to dig through a mountain as much as you have without finding at least a little."
[Thank you. Apologies, again, for interrupting your work. If you show my children where the boxes are, they'll bring them into the mountain.]
The witch-hunter grunted and waved off my apology, but quickly went back to his tasks, and a few minutes later, the Kobolds were also back in the mountain, Carna and Chrys shoveling as much of the ore the other three could dig out into the boxes. They needed to clear that section to finish this chamber, anyway, so I left them to it.
[Tesha,] I said, focusing my attention back on my guard/tutor. [Is there an efficient way to move distant objects with magic? Telekinesis.]
"Ah, well. That depends on what you mean by efficient, but yes," she replied, looking up at my Core with a sly, self-assured smile on her face. "It's actually my specialty as a magus. I'm even more skilled with it than the Archmagus is."
As she spoke she gestured towards the desk Callahan used when writing his reports, and an impossibly thin tendril of color snaked through the air to wrap around one of the books as I watched. A moment later, the thing lifted into the air steadily, and flew towards her, as if pulled by wire, and the magus caught it easily.
[Interesting. How does that function? I was under the impression that using unguided mana was very inefficient.]
"It is, normally, but for this, a good deal of the mana returns to me, as you saw," she explained, a few more tendrils growing from her palm as she held it up, the book lifting from her grip and steadily floating in the air, supported by the lines of mana. "You can simply create a wave of force, too, but the mana doesn't return to you in that case. Still, it has its place. You never know when you might need to throw a few people away from you."
[Ah, that, I can confirm. That was the only known use of telekinesis by magi in the Imperium.]
"I see. Why do you ask?"
[Well, beyond the practicality of being able to touch and move things again, I thought it might be useful if I could pass bolts to the witch-hunters on the walls, or some other task to free up more hands. How do magi typically train telekinesis?]
"Mm, well, we don't. Even the Archmagus only learned because I was interested. It requires line of sight or truly advanced mana senses to use properly, so it's not very useful for most magi," she said, shrugging. "For you, though, your mana senses are beyond anything I've ever seen, so you might find it to be an essential skill... I trained with a series of cast iron rings and balls. Once I was strong enough to lift the heaviest ones, I would juggle them, to practice coordination and response time."
[I see. I wonder if the village smith would make some for me if I asked some of the witch-hunters to take some of the hematite to them?]
"I don't see why they wouldn't. Why don't we start practicing making the mana thread to start?"
[Right. Better to know if I'll be able to make use of them or even need them first. How do I start?]
"The idea is mostly to draw your mana out of your body in the shape of a rope or thread, and wrap it around things, really. For me, it helped in controlling them at first if I imagined each thread to be a hand," she said patiently, pulling the threads of mana back into her body to let the book drop with a thump into her hand.
While the young magus answered my questions, I stopped drawing the healing array for the moment, and followed her instructions. It was difficult, grueling work, and if I still had a body, I would likely have given myself a headache in the process, but my Core could not feel, so I was comfortable in pushing it further.
At first, the best I could do was thick, misshapen ropes of mana only a few centimeters long, sticking out of my Core at odd angles, but by the time Enna was replaced by another witch-hunter, I had managed to halve the diameter of the things and extend them half a meter out.
"You're a very quick learner, Master Lycoris," she told me, and I had to quash my irritation at the title. To these people, the word 'master' meant the same as in the phrases 'master of the house' or 'master of their craft', not what my people usually meant when they said it. "You're picking this up even faster than I did."
[This is not... entirely unfamiliar,] I told her, and saw her brow raise a little at that. [My people had advanced mechanical prosthetics, and, often, they could be considered improvements over the natural body. This is not my first time controlling prehensile tendrils. Your experience of treating them like hands gave me the idea.]
"I see... These prosthetics, do you know how they worked?"
[More or less,] I replied, drawing the threads of mana back into myself before starting again, this time with only one. [Tiny machines called nano-surgeons would splice something called a 'jack' to the nervous system. The jack itself would be the interface between the prosthetic and the body while locking the former in place, and therefore allowing it to be controlled by the mind.]
"Fascinating..." she muttered, and sent the book back to the desk with her own threads, much more quickly than I could even begin to summon mine, and pulled a piece of charcoal and some folded papers from her pocket to begin taking notes. "Did you have a prosthetic that was made of something similar to these threads, then?"
[No, no. All of my prosthetics were standard body shapes for Humans,] I replied, managing to extend the singular thread out a few more centimeters before I had to withdraw it again to avoid wasting the mana. [I had a neural jack, and a spinal jack, however, at the base of my skull on the right side and the seventh vertebra, respectively. Those two allowed me to, more or less, merge with some specialized equipment to control it better. My armor was one that used the spinal jack, and my helmet took advantage of the neural jack.]
Her eyes widened at the idea. "Merging directly with your equipment? Is that truly possible?" she asked, more to herself than me as she scribbled the idea down in her notes. "So, some of the equipment you used were like these threads, then?"
[Only a few times. The device was in trial to see if it could be useful. It... was not, not for the problem the engineers were attempting to solve with it, but it was an interesting novelty, at least.]
"Were you a Legate yet when you tested it?"
[Oh, Dragon, no, absolutely not. No engineer would ever ask a Legate to test their device until it was proven to be utterly safe. No, I was... Not much older than you, I believe. 33? 34? Around there. I had signed up to test it as a way of gaining respect among my peers and superiors.]
"How old are you, anyway? If that's not rude, I mean. I've heard talk around the camp about you being the oldest person here by far, but no one's ever given me a number."
[Three hundred and twenty six, though I don't know how much time has passed since my death.]
"Stars, that's old even for a Dwarf. And you said you were Human?"
For hours, Tesha asked her questions, and I answered them, as best I could between practicing the telekinetic threads and the holes in my self and memory, and she only paused to give me further instruction and advice on how to proceed.
I already had a hundred ideas on how I could utilize these threads in the future by the time my tutor retired for the night.