The sun’s rays peered through Sol’s window, slowly moving across his room’s floor, jumping onto his bed, and finally, coming to a stop on his face. His black hair absorbed the heat from the sunlight, eventually waking him from his slumber.
Forcing his body up in an attempt to completely erase any lingering drowsiness, he quickly gave up, sinking back into the sweet embrace of his pillow, and covering his face with his sheets, so as to block the sunlight from disturbing his sleep again.
On the verge of falling back asleep, his bedroom door violently opened, smashing against the house’s stone walls, and further chipping off paint from the already almost completely bare doorknob.
“GET UP,” Aurelia yelled, “We’ll be late.”
“5 minutes,” Sol inaudibly murmured, his head smothered beneath his blanket, face smushed into his pillow.
“Sure,” Aurelia agreed, switching off the running Lightstone in his room, “But you’ll say the same thing in 5 minutes, so get up,” almost shouting, and beginning to clap by the end in order to get his attention.
Seeing the boy remain unresponsive, and continue to stay in the bed, Aurelia fumed.
Buried in bed sheets, laying on his stomach, and not hearing Aurelia’s voice anymore, Sol smiled to himself, thinking she had left, before an ice cold, fleshy hand gripped his ankles.
Yelping in shock from the sudden ice cold sensation he felt from his legs, he yelped again, louder, when he felt his body being pulled out of his bed, and onto the hard wooden floor, completely exposing his once warm, toasty body to the air.
“Get up,” Aurelia repeated, beginning to leave his room, “Food’s going to get cold.”
Drowsily rubbing his eyes, Sol got up, tying his hair back with a band as he did so.
In freshly changed clothes, Sol entered the small kitchen, as Aurelia, already sitting down, cut a medium bread roll into two unequal halves. Honey was evidently applied on the bread partway through the cooking process, as a hard, caramelized shell covered the roll’s exterior, crunching as the bread was cut. Pulling the cut bread apart, steam rose from the interior.
“What time are you going to close up shop today?” Sol asked, reaching for the smaller half.
Slapping his hand away, and handing him the bigger piece, Aurelia answered, “In the evening, 3 if we sell well in the morning, 5 at the latest, why?”
“Just wondering.”
Sol chewed the roll. Light, airy, and slightly crisp and sweet from the honey, it was perfumed by small sprigs of blue rosemary baked into the dough itself, and as it was still warm, the flavors of grain, honey and herb were further amplified.
“When the weather gets warmer,” Aurelia began, after swallowing a bit of the bread, “Do you want to go fishing? At the South Pond.”
Sol nodded, before stuffing the rest of his loaf half into his mouth, making his cheeks swell like a squirrel’s whose nuts were stored in their mouth.
Faintly chuckling to herself at the sight of Sol’s puffed up cheeks, she got up to wash her face, “You’re going to choke to death one of these days,” admonishing him as she did so.
“No I won’t,” he asserted with a mouthful of bread.
Leaving the Stygian Blackstone house, Sol stretched, and immediately jumped from the top of the front steps to the bottom, onto the freshly fallen snow.
“Careful,” Aurelia reminded, while locking the house door, “You’ll break your neck.”
“Yes, yes,” Sol flippantly answered.
Watching Aurelia slowly lock the house door, Sol tapped his foot on the gray stone paved road as he waited, before becoming impatient at just how long she took.
“I’m going ahead,” Sol called out.
Hearing the boy’s words, Aurelia frantically turned around and yelled, “Wait, it’s not safe,” but Sol had already begun to sprint.
“YOU LITT-” Sol, turning around a corner, heard Aurelia’s shout get cut off, and started giggling to himself, before slowing down to a casual jog.
He knew how dangerous it was for children to walk alone in Frosthelm, but compared to the past, where even grown men would be snatched off the street in broad daylight, the difference was night and day, and the city guards were mostly the ones to thank for that.
More specifically, a small faction of the city guard had begun regular patrols around the city, and summarily executing anyone they deemed to be involved in criminal activities, evidence be damned.
As long as Sol didn’t fall asleep in the streets, blindly wander into an unknown, dark alley, or go to the seedier parts of town where the city guard rarely patrolled, nothing would happen.
Sol felt the snow beneath his leather boots crunch, as the sun continued to rise over Frosthelm, lightening up not only his surroundings, but refracting off of the floating crystal structure, and illuminating the mountain tops.
Sol rubbed his hands together, and even put them into his pant’s pockets, but to no avail, he was still cold.
Resigning himself to continued suffering in the cold, Sol, absentmindedly staring forward, walked on the stone paved road, when he suddenly spotted an enormous vent in the ground from which steam exited.
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Practically sprinting over to the vent, and nearly tripping for his efforts, Sol directly placed his hands directly over the opening in the ground, warming himself up.
He shuddered, feeling a near orgasmic level of pleasure from the contrast between the warm steam enveloping the front of his body, and the icy air blanketing his back.
Sufficiently warmed up, he began to cross one of the many bridges over the western Frosthelm river, but unable to resist the impulse, he stopped, and absentmindedly stared up at the great pointed crystal octahedron in the sky.
With it still being barely past dawn, the city streets were completely devoid of people, and the usually ever busy bridges were completely empty, or so how Sol justified his standing in place.
No matter how many times he looked at it, he still felt like he could stare at it for an entire day, getting lost in just how radiant, and beautiful it really was.
So he did, jumping onto, and sitting on the bridge guardrail, feet hanging over the sides, river running past him, just staring up into the sky, ignoring the cold, and without a thought on his mind.
Suddenly,
“Get down from there,” Aurelia panickedly yelled, pulling Sol down, and breaking him from his trance.
With a scarily calm voice, “How long have you been sitting here?” Aurelia asked.
Looking away to the right, Sol nervously kicked the ground, before shrugging.
“You idiot, you could’ve fallen off and drowned,” Aurelia angrily scolded, continuing to walk to the shop, “Even if you somehow managed to swim back to land, the water’s like ice, and you could’ve gotten sick and died. I’m not even mentioning how you jumped off the top step onto the snow, what if you slipped and broke your nec-”
Half-listening to her words, before Sol had realized it, they had reached the bakery, the morning’s tasks had been completed, and Aurelia had only just finished scolding him.
The yeast colonies had been fed, new dough had been made, and left to ferment, yesterday's fermented dough had been placed into the snowroom to proof, and the already proofed dough had been placed into the stone, wood fired ovens to bake.
Intently watching the tops of the baking bread to make sure there were no signs of burning, Aurelia sternly asked, “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes ma’am.”
"Are you ever going to do something so stupid ever again?”
“Which part are you talking about?” Sol genuinely asked, only for Aurelia to immediately slap him over the head, still intently focused on the ovens’ contents.
“No ma’am,” the boy reluctantly answered, though he had already promised such a thing numerous times.
“That’s better,” Aurelia complimented, before briefly embracing him, and opening the door, so as to allow the inviting scent of freshly baked bread to waft out into the street.
Quickly, the store filled with those on their way to and from work, and in need for a quick, relatively inexpensive relative to its quality breakfast or dinner.
Whether they were lumberjacks, blacksmiths, woodcutters, stonecutters, hunters, men, women, or children, Aurelia’s bakery had been open for a little less than a year, yet had already found success among the local population.
Sol, working in the back of the shop as the one who baked the bread, overheard the loud chatter of customers in line.
“Lein’s gone mad,” an incredibly large, and hairy man bellowed to his equally large, but not as hairy, smooth headed compatriot.
“What’s happened?”
“Thiey’r sayin the Lor’s aready taken the Plateau, and plans to marchen up the fiels, but Lein’s nah surrenderin.”
“Fuck,” the second man gruffly cursed, “we’ll still be paying 50% for the next cycle.”
“Whare you gona du?” The first man cynically questioned, slapping his friend in the back, “Not like yer gonna march 150 miles North an fight.”
“I just might,” the man angrily responded, fists clenched, face fuming, and genuinely considering joining the Baron’s army and ending the war in the name of paying lower taxes.
“Are ya? Gonna bust a coupl tribesman heads open? Yer canna even stuff yer fat arse in arma.”
“Not like you can either,” the bald man laughed, no longer as angry.
Noticing the stockpile of bread beginning to quickly deplete, Sol tuned out all other noises, and devoted all of his brain power into baking bread, and soon, within the span of an hour, the morning crowd had all but passed, and they were just about out of stock, with only 20 rolls of varying flavors, and types left unsold.
Aurelia, wiping the sweat off of her head, asked Sol to take over the front of the store, and manage the cash drawer.
Nodding in response, Sol sat at the front, slowly reading a book Aurelia had recently bought him.
Over the past year, Aurelia had taught him how to read and write Basic, and Sol could now proudly proclaim that he could do both, though not to a high proficiency, needing approximately 10 times as much time as Aurelia did.
“Excuse me, can I have one honey roll please?”
Hearing the voice of a young girl, Sol looked up from his book.
Wearing a brown cloak that obscured her face in shadows but revealed long, white hair, she was around Sol’s height, despite his having grown quite a bit in the past half year.
Slightly indignant at his still being short, Sol suppressed any dissatisfaction he felt, and maintained his polite, and courteous appearance, before passing a still slightly warm roll to her.
“Thank you!” the girl happily told Sol.
“That’ll be 2 copper coins,” but the girl had already turned around, and begun to walk out.
Running out from behind the counter, Sol quickly caught up to the girl just as she was exiting the shop, and grabbed her hand.
“You need to pay for that,” he directly stated.
Stunned, she briefly looking at his hand, before her head suddenly shot up, “Right!” she exclaimed, as if she had just realized that one needed to pay for goods and services with money.
Sol released the girl, and held out his palm, waiting for payment for the bread.
Holding the roll with one hand, the girl dug inside her cloak with the other, before eventually dropping a fistful of buttons and marbles that likely wouldn’t amount to even 10 Copper slivers onto Sol’s open palm. With a genuine smile across her face, she waved goodbye, turned, and walked away, biting into the roll as she did so.
Completely and utterly stunned by what just occurred, Sol was about to give chase to the girl, demanding she pay for what she had essentially just stolen with actual, physical money, when Aurelia, who had been watching the exchange from the start, began to laugh hysterically, even leaning over from where she sat, and slapping the wooden prep table.
“Just leave it,” Aurelia yelled, in between guffaws.
“Why?” Sol, walking back into the shop, asked, “She stole.”
“So what?” the older woman laughed, “It’s just a kid.”
“But she still stole, an-”
“Sol, seriously,” Aurelia smiled, “It’s fine.”
Begrudgingly accepting her decision, Sol looked at the buttons and marbles in his palm, before putting them into his pocket, and sitting back behind the front bakery counter to read his book.
He did have to admit, they were very pretty.