Winter passed, spring began. I made new spells. The first spell was a kind of storage system for static electricity, kind of like a leyden jar. I ended up having to invent a leyden jar first, but that was too hard because I already had a rudimentary way of storing electricity made from my friction machine: a prime conductor.

A prime conductor was just a piece of metal connected to the friction machine which could store the electric charge as long as it was suspended in the air. By connecting that prime conductor to a simple metal and alcohol based leyden jar, I was able to store electricity. On another note, I distilled alcohol for this experiment, which was a fun little side-quest all on its own.

Of course, this wasn’t enough to bring electricity to the masses, but it was enough to justify my knowledge of electricity, which let me store electricity by charging it with a spell. Now, I could charge and then release electricity! This meant I could either give bigger shocks on direct contact or even shoot some electricity through the air!

The second spell was a medical spell. I’d already invented spells to help with cauterization and caeserian sections, but now I added a sort of vaccination spell. The humans of this world had not lived in urban environments before, so they didn’t have the sorts of evolved diseases that humans on my Earth had. Still, I decided it was important for them to have access to vaccination magic so they could quickly protect their community in case a dangerous disease did present itself. Better safe than sorry, after all.

The vaccination magic was fairly easy to justify, too. All I had to do was go around spreading weakened versions of diseases from one tamed monster to another. After a few weeks of letting the entire herd live together, it became clear only the ‘vaccinated’ monsters were still healthy.

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Roads had been built to the homelands of every single tribe except the Oko. The Oko’s homeland had been under ice until now, so now I led Elder Konri Oko and a party of humans to the Imm tribe’s lands, where the Northern road ended. We got to work building up the rest of the road far into the North, at which point I had a strange thought.

I took out my field map and spread it out on the ground. “Here,” I said as I pointed to the map.

“What do you mean, here?” said Kelser, who had tagged along with the crew.

“We keep going till here,” I said.

“But that would take us up the foothills and mountains!” said Elder Konri.

“Yes, right up to your tribe’s final base camp,” I said.

“Is that really necessary?” she asked.

I rolled up the map and looked at the elder. Even among the elders, she was among the wisest and most well respected. Her magic was about as good as Elder Kezler’s, which was impressive considering how much time and effort Elder Kezler had been putting into his magic over the past few months. I suspected none of these old fossils liked being upstaged by young Kelser. “So far, we’ve only been talking about using roads to connect different places and to bring in goods from farther away more quickly. But we can also think of roads as defenses. Defenses that help us get to the frontier as quickly as possible, to provide supplies to the front lines, and to help us retreat if the enemy is too powerful. We don’t know what the people on the other side of the mountains are really like. Once we make contact, you should have lookouts stationed on the final base camp.”

And so the Northern road was extended straight through the Oko tribe’s lands, through the hills and up the mountains to the final base camp. One day, I might connect it all the way to the Northern marker that I had left at the edge of the map, where I had left my words etched for all time.

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Now that the roads had been built, there was no reason for us to disperse once spring drew to a close and summer came upon us once more. Now that we had access to a good supply or iron, I was able to make sturdy monster drawn carriages that could pull people and cargo across the roads. The monsters had been through several generations already, and although they couldn’t be considered domesticated just yet, we were able to pick out some of the most docile ones to help us out on the roads and fields.

The fields were doing incredibly well, too. Aqueducts and canals brought water to the fields, which had themselves grown to over twice their size from last year. It was a little gross, but I’d done some experiments finding the best monster manure to use as fertilizer, and it was already paying dividends. It would also take a long time before most of these grains, fruits and vegetables would be comparable to the high yield kinds from my Earth, but just throwing out the bad seeds and replanting the good ones had already increased our yields after harvest.

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“No, no, you don’t say it like that. You say it like this!” said the princess.

“Princess, I’ve been over this. If you want to demonstrate something, tell me to disable my translation magic. Otherwise, you’ll only sound silly to me,” I said.

“Or you can keep it disabled and immerse yourself in my language!” she said. “I have to take my necklace off for these lessons, anyways. Do you know how frustrating it is seeing Kelser giggling like that and not knowing what he’s saying about me?”

I rolled my eyes. It didn’t help that Kelser was giggling right now while calling the princess names.

The solstice was right around the corner again. Another year had passed in the blink of an eye. Was it a characteristic of being an elf? Not feeling like a year was a long time? Or was it because I’d been having a relatively good time recently. Of course, I still had the mystery of ‘annihilation’ hanging over me, and I wanted to find Noel and the other elves which meant crossing dangerously tall mountains or passing through the insanely wide plains. But that kind of stuff kinda fell by the wayside while I was learning a new language, teaching another, inventing spells and tools, and bringing together a community of people. I’d also been listening to more stories told by the tribesmen and I had to say, they were inspiring.

The most popular stories were clever little trickster stories, especially ones with a little bit of comeuppance. Stories like the one about a ridiculed hunter who caught a large monster with a trap but came back with it slung over his shoulders so he could impress his tribesmen. Yet, all that did was make the tribe send him to fight a legendary speaking monster! The poor guy had to beg the monster not to eat him, and the monster agreed as long as the little trickster gave the monster some hide and sinew for clothes and shoes. Then the monster wore the clothes, thanked the trickster, and followed him to his tribe as his bride! Strange stuff, but oddly captivating.

The music was also way more complicated than I’d thought. A lot of it revolved around marriage and love, which wasn’t that different from my world, but I realized that the tribal structure made things very different from what I was used to. For starters, since marriages were between people from different tribes, and each tribe only met each other for a short time, there were a lot of songs about remembering sights and sounds and smells. Leaving gifts or sneaking out during the solstice, meeting behind a tree and behind your parents’ backs to spend time with one another.

And since marriage meant one partner had to leave their family and tribe, there were a lot of songs about that too. About parents who were happy that children had found love, but sad that they had to let them go. Marriages were pretty bittersweet, I realized. It was almost like most people only truly ‘grew up’ after they got married.

Then there were songs about hunting. First hunts, final hunts, retired hunters rescuing children, or valiant heroes sacrificing themselves for the greater good. These songs were wilder, faster, and with a lot more thumping and drumming.

“You know what,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“Do what?” asked the princess, who’d worn her necklace again so she could scold Kelser.

“I’ll disable my translation magic and immerse myself in your language,” I said. “But there’s a condition.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“You have to tell me stories from your homeland,” I said. “Oh, and you need to sing!”