“Okay, so this is a problem,” Elijah said, looking at the spatial anchor, then across the grove and to the dense forest surrounding it. The anchor itself was just a rod that had been driven into the ground, though now that it had been activated, it was impossible to move without ruining his previous efforts.

He’d spent the past few days loading the ring with fifty multi-ton rocks. Hopefully, that would be enough for Carmen’s project. However, his current issue was that he couldn’t unload the ring without crushing a quarter of his grove. It just highlighted the fact that he hadn’t quite thought things through when he’d placed the anchor, but if he deactivated and tried to move it now, he’d lose the attached interdimensional space and all the stone in it.

“Uh…Nerthus? Little help here?” he called. “You around, man?”

“I am not a man,” Nerthus stated, having climbed out of a nearby tree. He leaped down. “I am a spryggent.”

“Right. It’s a colloquialism. So, here’s the deal,” Elijah started before explaining the situation. He ended it with, “And now I need to get the blocks from here to at least the beach without tearing anything up.”

“You have two issues. First, you need a path.”

“But what about emptying the ring?”

“One at a time.”

Elijah started to say something, then stopped. “I’m so stupid,” he muttered. Indeed, he’d lost the forest for the trees as he focused on the problem. He’d never even considered not emptying the ring all at once. But there was nothing stopping him from withdrawing each stone individually and carrying it to where it was supposed to go. As Nerthus had said, though, he needed a path through the forest. So, that was task number one on his list.

“What’s the second thing?” he asked.

“Getting the blocks across the strait,” Nerthus said. “The people of Ironshore have ships, but you have no apparatus through which to load them. The shallows cannot accommodate such large ships, either. So, you need to build a dock.”

“Ugh.”

That was something Elijah very much wanted to avoid. However, he didn’t really see any way around it. That didn’t mean he needed to build it himself, though, so without emptying the ring, Elijah shifted into the Shape of the Sky and flew to Ironshore, where he met with Ramik and enlisted the goblin’s help to hire a couple of Builders who would be willing to construct a dock.

As it turned out, the process was easy enough, and before long, the group of goblins, gnomes, and dwarves had sailed across the strait armed with a bevy of materials from which they began to build the requested dock. Elijah didn’t miss the fact that they were all terrified, but that was unavoidable. So long as they did the job, he wouldn’t interfere.

Meanwhile, he left them to their task and got to work clearing a viable path through the forest. At first, he tried to work with the landscape, but soon enough, he grew too frustrated with the process and just started ripping trees out of the ground. It wasn’t exactly druidic of him, but it was his island. He would do what he wanted, regardless of how loudly his instincts screamed at him to stop.

Eventually, he’d ripped his way across the island until, at last, he reached the beach, where he saw that the Builder crew had nearly completed his new dock. It was an impressive wooden structure that jutted out from the beach for nearly two-hundred feet.

“Maybe I need to get a yacht,” Elijah said to himself. Or at least something better than a rowboat so that Miguel and Carmen could cross the strait more easily. Whatever the case, he only had to wait another hour before the Builder foreman approached and announced that they were finished.

As Elijah paid the goblin, he couldn’t help but marvel at how productive people could be, given the right skills. In addition to the dock, the Builders had cleared a large area of the beach that would serve perfectly for his blocks. So, once they were gone, Elijah wasted no more time before returning to the grove, where he began the process of transporting the blocks to the dock, one giant hunk of stone at a time.

Even though Elijah’s attributes were more than up to the task, the whole ordeal took far longer than he would have liked, and it was well into night before he’d finished. Still, he was no stranger to work, and there was a certain satisfaction he experienced upon seeing the white-and-green Dragonstone stacked upon his beach.

But he didn’t intend to move it until morning. While he had no issues personally crossing the strait at night, something told him that it would be inadvisable for Ironshore’s boats. So, with that in mind, he retreated to his grove, where he checked on his coffee. The cherries were currently soaking in a vat of water, where they would ferment over the course of the next week before he removed the pulp and set the beans out to dry.

It was one of two methods of processing coffee cherries, but from what he understood from his limited knowledge of coffee, it was the one that resulted in the highest-quality coffee beans. It also took advantage of the dense ethera in his grove, which created all sorts of interesting situations when it came to bacterial growth.

Regardless, it would be another couple of days before it was read for the next step, so Elijah spent the next few hours cycling the ethera in his Core. Then, he went to bed, where, for the first time in a while, he slept completely soundly all through the night. The next morning, he awoke feeling refreshed and ready for the coming day. So, after engaging in his normal morning routine, he flew across the strait and hired one of the ships to bring the Dragonstone across.

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Once he’d taken care of that, he headed to Carmen’s forge, hoping that she had completed work on his wok. When he reached the building, he was a little surprised to find that Miguel was there, and he was actually engaged in an argument with his mother.

“You can’t keep doing this, mom,” he said.

“I’m your mother. You don’t get to tell me –”

“What’s going on, guys?” Elijah asked on approach. That earned him a glare from Carmen and a pleading expression from Miguel.

His nephew said, “You need to tell her to stop, Uncle Elijah. She hasn’t been home in three days. I don’t think she’s slept more than a few hours in that time, either.”

“I slept,” she argued with a roll of her eyes.

“Please, mom –”

As they continued their discussion, Elijah backed away and pretended he couldn’t hear them. The last thing he wanted was to get involved in that sort of argument, so he busied himself by engaging in a thorough inspection of a nearby furnace. His head was deep inside the apparatus when he heard Carmen clear her throat behind him.

“Uh…sorry? I’m just really into furnaces,” Elijah said.

“You have soot on your face.”

“That’s…how I like it?”

Carmen shook her head. “Go ahead. Say it.”

“Say what? You have a nice furnace. A little cold right now, but I’m sure it gets really hot when you –”

“You’re going to tell me that Miggy is right and that I’m working too hard,” she said. “Well, you’re right. I get so obsessed when I get into a project that I sort of just lose track of time.”

“What project?” Elijah asked, neglecting to point out that he hadn’t actually said anything about her work habits. In his experience, it was better to just stay out of it.

“Your wok, of course.”

“You’ve been working on the wok for four days?” he asked.

“Sort of,” she said with a slight shrug. “Most of the first day was spent creating the alloy. It’s called faythium, by the way.”

“Sounds fancy.”

“Fancy?”

“Yes?”

She shook her head. “But it has to be cast instead of forged. No beating it with a hammer, you know? Instead, it works off molds. Anyway, I don’t have as much experience with that, so I screwed up the first try. I thought it was pretty good when I first saw it, but…well, it wasn’t. I was half asleep at the time, and I made a lot of mistakes. So, I had to melt it all down, make a new mold, then try again. And another ten times after that.”

“It’s just a wok.”

“It’s never just a wok,” Carmen said. “If I’m going to make something, I’m going to do it to the best of my abilities. Nobody tells you how to tend to your grove, right? So, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t remark on my process.”

Elijah nodded earnestly, knowing that he had no interest in getting on Carmen’s bad side. So, he said, “Sure. But you’re finished?”

“Just,” she admitted. “I was just polishing it when Miggy came by.”

After that, she headed to the back of the smithy. Elijah followed, his eyes locking onto what looked like a bundle of rags. Carmen reached it, then uncovered a huge wok. It was bronze in color, though with an azure shimmer. There were two wooden handles – one on each side – as well.

“Looks nice,” Elijah said. “May I?”

Carmen handed it to him, and he nearly dropped it. “Wow. Heavy.”

“Yeah. That’s the issue I’ve been working on. The first attempt was at least five times as heavy, and each version after that was the result of me trying to lighten the load,” Carmen said. “It’s way thinner than any normal wok, but that material is functionally indestructible unless you’re trying to wear it as armor. Even then, it would take quite a shot to even scratch it.”

“Are you thinking of making armor out of it? For Miggy, maybe?”

Carmen shook her head again. “Not a chance. He’s getting something better than this,” she said. “Plus, a full set of this stuff would be too heavy for him until he gained quite a few attributes. And I hate working with it.”

“That bad?”

She shrugged. “It was a fun experiment, but it’s not my thing,” she said. “I prefer banging metals with my hammer, not creating casts and molds.”

“Fair enough,” Elijah said. “So, what’s the end result? Is it Simple-Grade, at least?”

“Mid-Complex.”

“What? Seriously?” Elijah asked, looking at the wok in a new light.

“The alloy alone was Low-Complex. The end result is actually a little disappointing, given that. But I’m going to chalk it up to my inexperience with the process,” she said. “I bet if I started over, I could get it to High-Complex.”

“No need,” Elijah said, stepping back when he saw the gleam in Carmen’s eye. Her perfectionist nature was probably why she’d had so many sleepless nights since he’d given her the project. “What’s it do?”

“Other than being almost indestructible? It has a trait called Savory. Helps preserve flavors and provides a constant stream of ethera to anything cooked in that little pan,” she said.

“Amazing. This is exactly what I was hoping for. But it does bring to mind something I forgot,” he said, setting the wok down. Then, he reached into his Ghoul-Hide Satchel and, over the next minute or so, retrieved the collection of low-quality weapons he’d looted back in Valoria. “Atticus said that some crafters have a skill that lets them disassemble finished products. So, as the highest-level crafter I know, these are probably best in your hands.”

Carmen let him know that she had access to just such an ability, but added, “It’s not as good as it would be for someone who specializes in that kind of thing, but I can get something out of these, assuming you don’t want to just sell them or give them away.”

Elijah said, “Do what you want with them. Also, I have this.”

Then, he pulled the cursed False Dragon Fang out of his satchel. He hadn’t forgotten about it. Rather, he’d hesitated to give it back to Carmen because he knew it would elicit an emotional reaction. And he was right to expect that. Carmen’s eyes went wide, and he could see her muscles trembling as she said, “I hoped to never see that again.”

“It’s cursed, you know,” Elijah said. “Anyone who binds it will experience delusions of grandeur, according to Atticus’ appraisal.”

Then, he went on to explain that curses were something of a safeguard against forcing crafters into servitude against their will. “If you do that, you might get a cursed item,” he finished. “Kind of keeps people from being taken advantage of.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Carmen asked.

“That’s up to you. It’s yours, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Get rid of it.”

“You don’t want to –”

“Just bury it. Or toss it into the ocean. Or a volcano. I never want to see it again,” she said.

Elijah agreed, shoving the sword back into his satchel. Finally, in an attempt to change the subject, he said, “I got the Dragonstone back. I hired a boat to bring it over from the island. They’re going to deposit it near the town, so you can do what you want with it.”

“Thank you,” she said, her voice subdued. Clearly, she was still wrestling with what had happened.

“I…uh…I was thinking. I have a couple of days before my coffee is ready for roasting,” Elijah said. “Do you mind if I take Miguel somewhere? Just out into the wilderness a little. I think he’s got a nature attunement, just like me, and I think it’ll be good for him to connect, you know? I wanted to show him something.”

“That’s…that’s fine,” she said. “Just…be careful.”

“Are you okay? I didn’t mean to upset you…”

“I’m fine. Just a lot of emotions right now. But go ahead. Miguel would probably love to go on an adventure with you,” she said.

After that, Elijah backed out of the forge and went in search of his nephew.