Jeb started grinding lenses as he reflected on what his grandfather had told him. Some small part of him was still annoyed that he hadn’t heard anything about the Capital, though that was overshadowed by wondering why his grandfather knew so many people who had become broken from their Classes. To Jeb’s disappointment, focusing on getting the angle perfect with his lenses did not take enough concentration to stop him from obsessing over the story his grandfather had told him.
He knew that not all of his family had been born as such. Every few years, some new aunt or uncle would be introduced to them. Now, Jeb was beginning to wonder whether they were the few people that his grandfather had managed to help.
The thought worried him. His mind drifted to his Aunt Sue. She had said that her last Class had been Carver.
At once, the different meanings of the word crystalized in her mind. Woodworkers and Butchers both were described as carving their products. Was he bound to the same position?
That thought haunted Jeb as he considered what he had been taught over the past few months. His grandfather mentioned that a common first Smithing project was making a dagger. How many daggers had his grandfather made, and how many lives were lost to those daggers?
He had learned the Schematic for a Wand of Fireballs. Though he hadn’t considered it at the time, that almost certainly meant that someone else had actually wanted a weapon. Thinking about the settings that it had been originally calibrated to, Jeb realized that the Fireballs it produced would easily blow through a tree, to say nothing of how hot they burned.
Would learning how to make a Wand of Fireballs push him into a Class that relied on making weapons? The fact that the Paragons had told him he was destined to slay a dragon had never felt real to Jeb. It was always something that seemed more like something out of a myth than a reality he would face.
Where his mind was now, though, Jeb was forced to confront the truth. He had been given his Class for the express purpose of ending the life of a living and thinking being. Jeb felt bile rising in his throat.
He forced it back down and tried to refocus on his grinding. His thoughts had distracted him too much. The lens was completely ground through.
Sighing, Jeb tossed the lens into the trash and left the shop. He needed to be somewhere else right now. The heat of the room was stifling.
Outside, the sun was setting. The way it set the sky ablaze had always calmed Jeb down. Today, though, it only served to increase his tension. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking of how easily he could set the sky ablaze if he focused his Class growth on that.
Following some tug that he only barely felt, Jeb made his way over to the hive. When he felt liquid running down his face, he looked up, confused. The sky was still clear. That was when he realized he was crying.
Some bees came out of the hive, clearly noticing the way that he felt. Jeb struggled to articulate what was wrong to even the bees. When he did, though, the bees danced their confusion.
Violence was not a virtue, they agreed, but it was also not a vice in itself. Jeb looked up from his own emotions, confused by their argument. The bees pointed out that they had needed to fight off birds that tried to eat them to survive.
Something about that felt different to Jeb, though he couldn’t say why. “How often are birds attacking you?” he asked the swarm.
They danced back that, especially since they had begun Attuning themselves, there were few predators who sought them. Seguing the answer into their previous argument, his hive tried to tell Jeb that the path to peace came from overwhelming strength. That did not resonate with him in the slightest. “If peace only comes when you are the strongest, what happens when someone stronger than you comes along?”
The bees danced something which Jeb could only translate as “bow.”
He had forgotten. Even though the bees were able to communicate with him, they were fundamentally different beings. Each individual bee had its value primarily in how it could serve the hive. If that meant stinging someone to drive them away, then they would gladly give their life to do that. After all, each drone was but a limb of the hive.
Try as he might, Jeb was unable to think of himself as either a drone or the swarm as a whole. The bees seemed to realize that, because they slowly buzzed away. He was left with the sure feeling of support. Regardless of what he decided to do, the bees in his bound hive would work to further his aims.
Jeb stared up into the sky as the blues of day slowly faded to the star marked darkness of night. Looking at the constellations he’d known for his entire life, he forced himself to think about what he would do when he left the farm. The stars would be slightly different, he knew. Even just visiting his Aunt Sue, stars were shifted slightly from where they were supposed to be at that time of year.
What would they look like from as far away as the Capital? How much further would he go than even that?
Jeb did not have an answer to any of those questions. As he fell slowly to sleep, though, he did find that his will was crystallizing on one point. He would not be reduced to a weapon that others could point. Whether or not any killing he did would be necessary was a choice he would make.
As the morning sun rose, Jeb returned to the forge. Inside, he took one look at the discs of glass he had cut and began working it into a lens again. As the light shining through it slowly formed into a clearer and clearer point, Jeb felt his own resolve focus as well.
The fact that his Class restricted Glassblowing was not something he was willing to tolerate. When he finished the lens, Jeb set it down and moved back to where he had stored the glassblowing rods. He picked one up and took a small portion of glass up with it.
“My name is Jeb,” he stated to the System, the Paragons, and anyone else who needed to hear what he had to say. “I have the Class of Least Mud Mage, but I am not a Mud Mage. I am the child of Farmers, and I will become whatever I will become by my own choices.”
The words felt flat compared to what he was feeling, but he could feel the Currents of Fate pushing him as he put the rod to his mouth. With an effort of will he did not know he was capable of, Jeb pushed his breath through the tube. A distorted blob of glass began to shape at the other end of the tube, but he couldn’t find it in himself to be bothered by that fact. He had blown glass on his own accord.
He dropped the piece of glass into the trash and moved back over to the grinding wheel. Even as he sat down, though, Jeb felt his head begin to throb. The slightly flickering light from the forge fire sent a new jolt of pain through him each time it danced. Stumbling out of the room, he collapsed on the floor of the closet.
When he woke, Jeb found that he did not feel recovered. Through foggy thoughts, he tried to put a name to the feeling that he was experiencing. As best as he could describe it, Jeb felt as though he had discovered a new muscle in his soul. Then, instead of carefully feeling out the limits of the muscle, he had immediately tried to lift the heaviest object he could find while only using it.
Strangely, the feeling cheered him up slightly. At least now he knew where in his soul his Class resided. Some part of Jeb was incredibly curious if it would move or grow as his Class changed. Still, that was a question for later.
He shook away the last cobwebs from his mind and returned to the grinding wheel. Sitting down, he shook his head. “I don’t want to stop for anything but the need for a break,” Jeb said to the empty room. He quickly cut a rod of glass down into discs and took them by the wheel.
He still hadn’t fully come to terms with where he fit into the world and his grandfather’s story, but he was done obsessing over it. For now, he would work on making light move how he wanted it to. Jeb’s grandfather had told him about how the path a beam of light took could be changed when it entered lenses.
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He was curious if he would be able to make it wrap back around into a circle. Each lens he cut went into place beside the small charred mark where he kept casting Least Create Fire. Slowly but surely, Jeb grew more comfortable polishing the lenses.
As with the panes of glass he’d blown, Jeb learned that moving smoothly made the end results far better and let him work through the lenses far more quickly. To his surprise, before he needed a break, he had gone through the entire pile of discs. Then again, his last few lenses were ground at almost the peak speed that the wheel could pull material.
Jeb turned around and nearly ran into his grandfather.
“Great job Jeb,” he said, gesturing to the arrangement of lenses he had made on the floor. As Jeb had grown more skilled in lens making, he slowly replaced the older lenses for new ones he had made. He quickly gave up on the idea of making light bend into a circle and was instead just enjoying the ways that he could rearrange it, even without using any mirrors.
“I feel like this project might be improved by the use of mirrors, though,” his grandfather said, somehow reading Jeb’s mind. “That wasn’t going to be in the list of skills I taught you, but I suppose that it couldn’t hurt.”
Thankfully, making a mirror was far easier than any of the other ways of working with glass he had learned. Once Jeb was able to polish a piece of steel to a perfect shine, he learned how to mix reagents to coat any surface he wanted in a mirror finish. His mind was rushing through all of the ways that he could change the tracking of light when his grandfather moved on.
“I think that now would be a good time for you to try working with colored glass.”
Jeb nodded and watched his grandfather began to work. Once his grandfather had demonstrated how to add colors to the work, he walked out of the room, leaving Jeb to decide what to do. He stood paralyzed for a moment, unsure what he should work on.
His grandfather ducked his head back in the room. “Make a clear window that’s at least ten inches square,” he directed Jeb. Jeb nodded and got to work.
Jeb’s Status Sheet at End of Chapter:
Jeb Human Age: 16 Class: Least Mud Initiate Level: 1 Experience: 6457/100
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Total Statistic Load: 352 Physical Load: 127 Strength: 29 Dexterity: 22 Endurance: 31 Vitality: 41 Presence: 4
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Mental Load: 225 Intelligence: 47 Willpower: 52 Magic Affinity: 55 Mana Depth: 37 Charisma: 34
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Mana: 1070
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Glyph Attunement: 26 Least Shape Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Shape Earth - Efficient (Modified) Tier 3 Spell Least Shape Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Conjure Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Move Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Move Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Mud (Modified) Tier 2 Spell Attune Earth Mana (Modified) Tier 0 Spell Attune Water Mana (Modified) Tier 0 Spell Attune Water Mana - Efficient Tier 2 Spell Attune Air Mana (Modified) Tier 0 Spell Attune Fire Mana (Modified) Tier 0 Spell Attune Sand Mana Tier 0 Spell Least Create Sand Tier 1 Spell Attune Sand Mana - Efficient Tier 2 Spell
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Bard Songs Known: 1 Lute Enforcement
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Skills: Least Mud Magic Meditation Mana Manipulation Spell Glyphing Improved Glyph Groking Gift of Gab Running Identify Soil Savvy Animal Handling Fertilizing Lifting Athletics Lute Playing Singing Musician Pollination Brewing Distilling Bardic Magic Smithing Wood Identification Woodworking Soil Improvement Enchanting
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Achievements: Focused Meditator Student of Magic
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Quests: Major: Slay the Dragon of the West (Progressive)