My lessons are proceeding faster and faster as my teacher is becoming better able to supply me with ever-increasing quantities of information. My teacher says that after roughly a week there will be nothing left for him to teach, assuming everything is more or less steady.

Tiddol and Par’s kids turned up today, well, most of them anyway. Umi was fine, a little bruised and battered but otherwise in good condition. She ended up getting completely buried in some unfortunately compacted ash. It took her a couple days to dig herself out, could have done it faster if she didn’t need to conjure fresh air for herself.

Ednar, not so much. We found his top half-buried under a thin layer of dirt, blood long since drained from his body. The wooden armor he had was scorched but otherwise intact, and the cut was very clean. Very few people can cut through that stuff so easily. It’s likely he was targeted intentionally by one of the enemy’s powerful people. Why? I have no idea. It doesn’t matter too much anyway, they are going to die regardless, if they aren’t already dead.

Is it wrong that I hope they are still alive? I want to give them as a gift, all tied up and helpless, to Tiddol. Her clockwork eyes hold less warmth than her originals.

In happier news, we have found out what the results of that explosion the other day were. Three of their council died, between that explosion and the recent attack we managed to cull all but three of their members. That is the majority of their heavy hitters.

No one is quite sure who caused the explosion, but descriptions of it remind me strongly of Talus’ fire.

Their population and their standing army is admittedly doing a lot better than ours. It will be a very long time before our numbers reach a point where we can go to war again, but at the same time, very few of our heavy hitters died in the fighting. A couple of Par’s generals died, and my dad and his personal soldiers are all missing, but we are doing a lot better than them.

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If we had an army we could crush them right now, end this threat for good. but we don’t. I’m churning out Ents as fast as I can, but considering the scales we are working with that isn’t likely to make a big enough difference. And Azrezel is doing what he can to expand his supply of undead, but again his soul can only recover so quickly. I should probably teach him those exercises I learned to help him increase how quickly his soul recovers. I’ll see if he has the time for it tomorrow, but everyone has been really busy recently.

We had a party of adventurers show up today, very competent ones. If they weren’t I wouldn’t be talking about them as adventures show up all of the time. I wish my dad was here to help us turn them towards our side, but based on the stories he has told me we are in a perfect position to recruit adventurers to our cause. A group of people reeling from the recent attack by a powerful enemy that destroyed everything they could was a somewhat common theme, I’m under the impression that adventurers love to cast their weight behind people like that.

Par was quick to rope them into the rebuilding efforts, he told me a bit later that my dad gave him some lessons on how to deal with adventurers. Give them work with the people, make the people like them and feel like they can depend on them and endear the locals to the adventurers. Turn the place into their home, make them care for the city and its people. Do it right and the adventurers will face down any threat in the world to protect their home, even if it means certain death.

Other than that, most of my time was spent doing what I could to rebuild. The holes in my forest are mostly regrown, about half of the people have housing. Somehow Pearlhold’s pearly white walls are still standing, but nothing inside of them was. I rebuilt the city as well as I could remember it using wood, going as far as mimicking the color and texture of the original stone as close as I could. I’m sure we have some of it laying around, but it would take months or even years to properly rebuild a city like this using stone. The people seemed to appreciate having something close to their old homes back, though I couldn’t possibly recreate the contents. Well, not without a ridiculous amount of effort that would be better spent rebuilding elsewhere.

To think, someone from Pearlhold was the first person to try to murder me. It’s kind of nostalgic honestly.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.