The next three days brought surprises both pleasant and troubling.

Parry's false-laryngitis the first day gave his father--yes, father--a happy excuse to fill the shop with gossip, business, some very old jokes, and instruction.

Here's a sample: "Brace with your legs, Parry, this board is long, I have to cut against the grip of the vise. It's for a new sign for The Mystic Eye, you know, Emma's place. The stars told her river trade will pick up over the next year, which means more suckers passing by her 'Fortunarium.' Or was it the tea leaves? Anyway, double size, use the pricier pigments, make it stand out. She's still deciding on the words. I'll send you off to get it next week. While you're there, check on Phy and see if he's tanned those deerskins. It's not like him to be slow, I think his wife is throwing pots and pans again. When you're all recovered, I'm sending you into the foothills for quartz, it's high time you got to work on crystals. Only one river barge docked while you were sick, but it carried four crystal merchants aboard. Four! Has to mean something."

The one servant, Domo, had been with the family for decades. A quiet fellow with dark hair that marked him as possibly from the south, though when he spoke (rarely) there was no accent Parry could detect. Domo was happiest in the gardens, but enjoyed cooking and other domestic chores. In his youth he'd been in a militia (not certain whose) and had been "indulging" Parry with sword lessons.

In his room, which was quite the luxury--a room of his own, but he'd learned his father liked to spoil him--Parry found a few books on basic spell craft and shaping, very old and well-used, as well as a few histories (heavy on the adventure) and several mathematics, botany, geology and other texts. His room wasn't his only space: a corner of the large workshop was his, with its own shaper's bench, tools that fit his hand, all sorts of precursors he was destined to refine into usable ingredients for his own and his father's commissions.

The first night was a shock: the sun set and Parry went blind. It wasn't a true blindness, he saw fine around the hearth, when the flame was high, or when Domo broke out several candles. But it took four or five before anything registered, and stranger still, glow stones--even the family's strongest and largest--illuminated nothing.

Pharryl, his father, brushed it off as he had the "laryngitis," convinced it was a temporary weakness, a remnant of ochre fever. But there was a note of worry in his voice, maybe he blustered too loudly that "it was nothing, at least you didn't get any pock marks!" Perhaps the healer would make a visit?

That's what had happened two weeks ago. Returning from a trip to the foothills, Parry had contracted a fever that put him in bed for days. On the third morning he'd become delirious and his father, in a panic, brought him up to town, trusting to the local healer. What did that cost the man? How worried had he been? Eventually the healer had sent him home, something about quarantine, but likely it was to get the shaper out of her hair.

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I was wrong, Parry considered. I thought my stats painted one picture, but it turned out to be another.

His master wasn't some covetous, jealous shaper exploiting apprentice labor, keeping the secrets of the trade while working him like a slave to acquire and refine materials. His father was caring, indulgent even, and expected to have years to pass on his skills. He hoped to set Parry on a solid foundation by getting him to know the tools and materials of shaping before launching him into the complexities of the craft.

And trying to shield me from the magic.

Next to beast taming, shaping magic was probably the least dangerous of the magical arts, but sorcery always cost a price, and the younger you started, the more vulnerable you were to its dangers. His father seemed determined to make him into a skilled carpenter, lapidary, painter, sculptor, potter and every other kind of craftsman before turning him loose on the deeper arts.

"It's going to stunt me," Parry said to himself, laying on his straw-stuffed bed the second night 'home,' trying to get used to the utter blindness that struck him when the light was too low. He was determined to inoculate himself against fear, which was more dangerous than the actual night-blindness. "I wouldn't have raised a son that way. I never did. Throw them in the fire, get them started and used to the dangers, you don't coddle them, that's no way to build strength."

And Parry needed strength. The weakness of his position felt intolerable. There were opportunities back east he was missing, chances to re-live the last twenty lives, refining knowledge, catching future enemies while they were children, reshaping them, making better friends, finding stronger items before anyone else knew they existed. He had to find strong opponents to spar with, build muscle and reflexes. Most of all, he had to put himself in positions where power would find him.

None of that was going to happen here. This small country, thousands of miles from the areas he knew best, or at least remembered best. No great civilization had left its ruins here, no eldritch monsters lay sleeping deep below, to slay or enslave. No great colleges or libraries. It was safe here. Small. That made it a danger to his goals.

Maybe it was a subtle trap. The Creator would know I'd thrive in chaos, or anywhere the dangerous games were played, where I I knew the players and their secrets and schemes. So I'm sent here, with little happening and only humble resources to exploit, with no local memories and...ah. Running away, striking out on my own would be slow, because I can't see at night.

All of his father's "wealth" was in the relationships he had, with traders going up and down the river, with locals who counted on him for jobs, in the gardens and lands he'd cultivated, his workshop. The man had nothing portable, nothing liquid, nothing Parry could acquire, unless he remained and lived out this life taking over the shop.

"Honestly, I'd have a better chance as an orphaned urchin scrounging around one of the great eastern cities, or across the globe in one of the Bishoprics, or even as a minor noble."

And his father? Jovial, competent, successful in his small way, but preferring to work with his hands, shy to use what shaper magic he had and unlikely to possess anything powerful, let alone teach it to his son.

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. Every day here was a day he lost, his memories of the future becoming stale, counterfeit, unusable. It was stranding him without his best weapon.

"I need a plan."