Chapter 4 - Ashur

The next month was hard on the small family of two. It was like someone had taken all of Ashur’s hope and stolen it away. He lost interest in everything. What little free time he had was spent moping around the shop or staring at the walls. It was odd to see a seven year old that wasn’t getting into everything. The neighbors, after having watched the boy play in the mud non-stop for years, had already begun to think that the boy mentally incompetent, but now, seeing him staring at the walls, they were sure of it.

The problem was the exact opposite, in that Ashur was very smart for his age and was already thinking about his future, or rather the lack thereof. Having previously dreamt of being an archmage, a premier existence in the land, he realized that he would never even master a craft. In order to go past the rank of journeyman in any profession you needed to imprint specific trade related skills. It was one of the reasons his father had stopped moving upwards. It wasn’t because he lacked the intelligence or physical ability. It was because Adrian had never leveled beyond four and could not learn the needed skills like Imbue Leather.

His cursed soul meant that Ashur wouldn’t even be able to use simpler journeyman skills, like Mend Leather, which was already a huge disadvantage. Not everyone could afford or even wanted new boots if their ones were simply broken, and a large portion of Adrian’s business was using the skill to fix simple, mostly cosmetic problems with his customer’s shoes.

Ashur could tell that his father was mad at him for failing. It was quite apparent from Adrian’s frequent scathing comments. The man never said anything about it directly, but it was clear he was blaming the boy for his lost fortune. The constant underlying anger hung around the house like a bad smell, stinking up the shop and doing nothing to lift the boy out of depression.

Adrian put Ashur back to work making shoes immediately. In his father’s words, “I need to get some use out of ya some-how,boy.” Although he had some basic knowledge of the workplace, Ashur had been purely focused on his spell and had forgotten how to complete most of the old tasks. So Ashur was tasked with cleaning the shop and doing menial chores.

Eventually enough time passed that both the boy and Adrian came to terms with what happened. Adrian had long since settled back into his normal routine, cutting and riveting leather day after day, but now other than the occasional boorish comment, the man had stopped bringing up their lost future of ease. Ashur took far longer to recover, but the days full of hard work were very efficient at keeping him too busy to think about his problems, and eventually the boy began to return to normal.

It started with renewed interest in his father’s work, and pride in his own. Ashur was in charge of keeping the small residence and shop clean, so that his father could focus making shoes, and making money. While the mess had been kept to a minimum during his depression, the store was never truly clean. Not like before, when Ashur had ambitions of being a mage. He did everything his father asked of him and then some more. The old boards of the shop practically sparkled, and the customers noticed.

Tending to the shop day after day was mind-numbing, and after playing with magic constantly, the Ashur was not content. He started to want more again, and he recognized that he needed to focus himself on another task. He needed a goal. So for the first time, Ashur set his mind on truly becoming a cobbler. But being a just a regular shoemaker like his father wouldn’t be enough. There had to be something he could do. Ashur decided that if he was going to have to deal with stinking feet for a lifetime, he wanted to be the best at it. Maybe if he worked hard enough the inability to imprint wouldn’t matter. Maybe then he wouldn’t have to smell just any old foot. Maybe if he tried enough it could be a higher quality foot, a fancy foot, and the funk would that of kings.

He just needed to find out a way to do it. The boy couldn’t think of a way around the issue at that moment, so he focused on mastering every aspect of the profession that his father could teach him. The shop became a classroom as his father expanded upon his duties, and for the first time since he was born, Ashur actually tried to learn his father’s trade.

Making a simple shoe is not a complicated process, but it there are several steps to it that needed to be done well. Ashur was taught how to mark the outline of a man’s foot onto thicker pig leather using thin charcoal sticks, and then how to correctly cut it with heavy shears. It was important to get the most material out of every skin, so he thought ahead and measured everything twice to avoid making mistakes. Using the first cut as a pattern, a cowhide would be made to match. His hands were too tiny and weak to work his father’s heavy leather punch one handed, and without one hand free, it was impossible to keep the leather in place. He worked around the issue by using clamps and he quickly became proficient enough to keep the holes evenly spaced.

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The more he worked at it, the better he got. The shoes he crafted were soon not only functional, but also appealing to the eye. Ashur also conquered the art of stripping out leather laces and straps, mastering the long sweeping motion required to keep them straight and smooth. He learned how to apply hobnails to footwear or sandals, for those working in the fields or woods, and how to apply special resins to smooth leather soles, so that they were less slippery on wet days.

Some apprentices would choose to imprint skills for these simple tasks, but for the boy it was not an option. Not that it was much of an accomplishment, because only the most untalented students would waste soulspace on a basic skill like Stripping Leather. For those who wanted to master a craft it was much more important to improve a related statistic like Dexterity or even Constitution. Any stat that let helped with your fine motor skills, or allowed you to work longer was far more beneficial in the long run.

The whole process was not terribly complicated or difficult, but it took a lot of effort and practice to craft quality footwear without imprinted assistance. The attention to detail needed to make sure that each hole was symmetrical to another, and everything properly cut and formed took practice. Still the process was tedious, and repetitive. It was extremely repetitive, and Ashur lost interest with each new thing he learned almost as soon as he had mastered it. Drilling holes over and over in leather just did not fulfill his mind’s craving for stimulation. Maybe it would have if he had never learned the joys of casting spells, but now he wanted something more.

The boredom of doing the same thing over and over returned Ashur’s mind to magic. No matter how many times he cast the spell, he would always notice that it was slowly getting easier. Unlike learning how to cut a leather strap, which could only be cut so straight and even, perfecting a spell seemed to have no upper limit. It also drastically reduced the monotony. Simply grabbing tools and pulling scraps from across the room added a spark of fun into the daily routine.

At first he just let his mana refill naturally, but then he started meditating again, mostly on breaks. After finishing a task he would pause at his work station for five minutes or so, not long enough to upset Adrian, but long enough to gain the energy needed for the next spell. Even the simple act of meditation was enjoyable. The peace of emptiness relieved his mounting frustrations and made him happier each day. The magic was addictive. The more he cast, the more he wanted to. The tiny slow gains returned, and he improved in both channeling the spell and regenerating mana. Tiny steps forward, but progress none the less, and it gave him hope for his future.

By the time he was ten years old the shoes Ashur made were already nearly indistinguishable from his father’s. Since his father was a bottom of the line cobbler it was not much to brag about, but for a child without any imprints it was simply astounding. Although his father never gave him praise in private, he had overheard the man bragging about it to his friends several times.

“The boy’s hand’s are as deft as a level 5,” His father claimed. Since the average for a civilian adult on the isle was 4, it was quite a bold statement, but it was nearly true. The reason was because the boy had learned a new aspect of his spell. Just prior to completing the incation, right when he was supposed to picture the object he wanted to grasp and what he wanted it to do, Ashur learned to pause the spell. It left him with a sense of his surroundings that spread out about five feet from his body. It slowly ate away his mana, and used up most of his brainpower while doing it, but the sense made him completely aware of everything within its reach.

Ashur noticed that when he could feel everything with the sense, including his own hands and body, it was a lot easier to complete tasks that required a lot of eye-hand coordination. Having seen jugglers at festivals in the past, Ashur tried it out himself in his room. It was simple to keep even ten items floating in the air when you knew exactly where each one would come down, and where your hand needed to be to catch them. That coordination made it extremely easy to cut simple leather, especially as his hands got larger and stronger.

Over the last few months he had reached a plateau in the shop. He was at the point where there was nothing left to be learned from his father, and he could not go any farther under a different cobbler due to his hardened soul. If he had access to better materials, he could probably learn to make fancier shoes to adorn higher quality feet, but no high-end shoemaker would take an apprentice with such limited potential. Older and wiser, little Ashur realized that his dream of shoeing fancy feet would be harder than he thought.

Still, he did not want to settle into a life like his father’s, that of mediocrity and tedium. There had to be something he could succeed at, he just needed to find it. It took months of begging, pleading, bargaining, and more than a few childish tantrums, but Adrian finally gave in to Ashur’s next idea. The boy was allowed to learn other crafts.