When I woke up, neither Sophia nor I mentioned the conversation we had had last night. We’d both said everything that needed to be said after all, and dredging it all back up would probably just be awkward. I stopped by my shed and waited for Ash to let me know it was time to head out. While I waited, I headed over to my loom and started working on refilling all of the spools of thread and recharging the mana battery. I had come up with a fairly ingenious workaround for the loom if I do say so myself, as I didn’t really have enough time after my watch ended and before it was time to leave to really get a lot of weaving done, so I had set up a pseudo-automatic loom. How did I accomplish that you ask? Through the wonders of rotation.
I had already had my loom set up so that all I would need to do is alternate activation of two switches, so all I really needed to automate was that selection process. To do that I had carved a disk out of wood, and enchanted it to rotate once every second. The enchantment that finally managed to actually somewhat tell time without distorting it was a circular arrow with Hz in the middle. Literally translated to one cycle per second. Could I have just written that out, and used the words themselves as an enchantment? Well, yes and no. The thing about enchanting using words, is that words often have unspoken contexts to them, or have alternate meanings. For example, take the word ‘second’. The word itself could not only be a unit of measuring time, but could also mean ‘the one after the first’, as in Second Place. And then even as a unit of measuring time, colloquial usage often changes how long a second actually is. Take for instance, the phrase, ‘be back in a second’. Everyone who hears that is fully aware that you are not going to return in one literal second, but that in this case ‘second’ is a metaphor for a short period of time, which will probably end up being closer to a couple of minutes.
For these reasons, using words in enchantments are extremely inconsistent, and oftentimes making the same exact enchantment twice on two different objects will result in completely different effects. For this reason, I was trying to come up with the symbols for my own original enchanting language, in the hopes that I would be able to form far more complex enchantments later on down the line.
Along with the rotation enchantment, I also added a length of thread from the center across to the edge of the disk. As it turned, the end of this thread would move along the edge of the circle, and the beginning of the thread in the middle fed through and connected with a battery enchantment that I had placed nearby. I also stretched two lines of thread leading from the two switches down to opposite sides of the disk, so that with each revolution, one switch would form a circuit with the battery and become activated, and then the other, providing the alternation that the loom operation required. The best part about this setup is that as long as the loom stayed filled with thread and the battery was charged, it would be able to run completely automatically while I was down on Earth. This adjustment that I had made had taken place only a few days ago, as that was when I finally had spun enough thread to actually completely fill the loom. Due to the way I had designed it, I could modify the size of the cloth that I ended up with by only filling a few of the spools with thread, which is what I had done to make enough cloth semi-manually for the four small articles I had been able to create.
This pace would increase soon however. Along with the loom, my new rotation enchantment allowed me to also automate my spinning wheel, so that it could turn my clouds into thread without my direct intervention. I still had to pull and lengthen the cloud into one long and wispy stretch of fibers beforehand, then coil them all into a basket next to my spinning wheel, but I also had some ideas to automate that part as well. All I would need is to draw up some designs and craft up a new tool to do the job for me. Hopefully, soon my only job would be to separate out the gold and the white, then place the clouds into a basket, cut the thread into the necessary lengths for my loom and respool it, and refill the mana batteries twice a day.
For about half an hour, I went around refilling the batteries to my loom and wheel, and for the first time, I completely loaded my loom with thread, so that when I came home from traveling, I would hopefully find a complete large sheet of cloth, ready for me to use to start working on making bigger projects. I checked on the stock of cloud that I had gathered, making sure that I had enough pulled and separated enough so that the battery would run out before the material did. During this process, I heard from Ash that we were all getting ready to head out, so I performed my last final checks, and flipped the switches to engage both batteries, taking a second to appreciate the automatic movement and completion of time consuming tasks through the power of nothing but human ingenuity. “Damn I’m awesome.”
With a nod of satisfaction and a feeling I could only call arrogance filling my being, I warped myself back to the tent, being greeted by a pouting cat/wolf mutt girl. “Dang Mr. Bear, what took you so long?”
I decided to embrace and flaunt the arrogant feeling I was still experiencing. It was something relatively foreign to me, and actually quite pleasant. I’d have to do more cool stuff so that I could feel this way more often. “Oh nothing much, just had to take a minute to fully appreciate the scope of my own brilliance is all.”
Ash rolled her eyes and left the tent, with me following behind her, helping her take it down and pack it away. “How very humble of you to admit.” Once the tent was fully collapsed, she rolled it up and stuffed it into a bag, handing it off to me. Once I was able to come and go from the subspace as I pleased, Ash had started using me as her own personal inventory space, so that she wouldn’t have to lug around a bunch of heavy-ass equipment and supplies.
“Indeed. Perhaps I should give lectures, allow the masses to learn from me how to embrace humility into their own lives. If nothing else, surely the subconscious comparisons to a superior existence such as myself will teach them how humble they truly should feel about their own petty lives.” To which Ash snorted as I slipped my hand into the subspace, placing her equipment in the separate shed that I had built for her stuff. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the one Sophia had made for my crafting, but I didn’t really want to ask Sophia to make it. I know my relationship with Ash isn’t really like that, but it would still probably be weird to ask my girlfriend…wait, no, wife? Partner to help me make something that another woman would use.
Once everything was all packed up and ready to go, we made our way to the other three, and I pulled out my map, telling them the same thing that I had shown Ash the night before, that we would most likely be arriving in town by the end of the day. The others seemed very excited at the prospect of being able to sleep in an actual bed again, while Ash once more turned quiet and subdued. As we started walking, Liz and the merchant pulled farther ahead as they usually did, leaving me, Ash, and Mike to cover the rear. As we walked, Mike also noticed Ash’s odd disposition, however unlike me, he seemed to know the cause behind it. “Are you gonna be okay? I know it can’t be easy for you to go to a human town.” Confused, I tilted my head to catch Ash’s expression in my field of vision. Had something related to human towns happened to her before? To be completely honest, I didn’t really know anything about Ash’s life before we met. Anytime we’d talk about our pasts, it would always be about me and the world I had originated in, as well as Hell and demons and whatnot.
Mike also seemed to notice my confusion, and pieced together that I had no clue what they were talking about. He apologized to Ash, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you were keeping it from Leo.”
Ash shook her head and denied, “It’s not like I’m keeping it from him, it just never really became relevant before now.” She then turned to face me and said, “I probably should tell you though.” She also sent out through the telepathic link, Sophia, you can listen as well if you’d like. I’ll warn you though, it’s not a particularly pleasant story.
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“You know that mutts generally live apart from any sort of pack or clan right? Well, that was also the case for me and my parents. When I was young, it was just me, my mom and dad, and my older sister Sam. We just traveled around, going from town to town, hoping to find a place that wouldn’t mind a group of mutts moving in. But no matter how many towns we went to, we could never really find a place for us. Human towns have no problems trading with us, or beastkin adventurers passing through, but they don’t tend to take too kindly to a family of beastkin trying to move in and permanently live in their town. A few towns outright kicked us out, while others would just make things more difficult for us, charge us more for the same wares, etc., so that we were forced to just move on.
“Meanwhile, beastkin settlements are generally going to be situated around what pack you belong to, and each pack is generally considered its own existence, and all of their trade is either done between the different clan leadership, or from the clan leadership to the rest of the pack, rather than just being open for anyone to shop like how human towns are. And so we ended up having to leave all of the beastkin towns we came across behind as well.
“Until one day, when we were staying in an inn in a human town, people broke into our rooms. I didn’t even realize it had happened, all I knew was that while I had fallen asleep in my bed, when I woke up, I was in a cage, and next to me was another cage with Sam in it. I was about 8 years old at the time, and she was 15.” Ash shuddered, holding her arms tightly around her body as we walked, as though trying to protect herself from the pain that the memories caused her.
“They were slave traders, and ended up selling us all to the town’s head family. They separated me and Sam from our parents, so I don’t know how their lives were, but me and Sam… I guess it was somewhat fortunate that the people who’d bought us weren’t entirely sick in the head, as I was spared from the… the worst of it, managing to get by with just beatings. Sam though…She was more grown than I was. More mature, in both personality and in physical appearance. They… The eldest son, he would summon her to his room and…” But she couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. Context allowed me to get the gist of what she was getting at.
“Every time she’d come back, she’d be limping, unable to properly move or relax, but the whole time, she’d keep up the same happy personality that I loved, telling me that everything would be okay, that she was fine, that the eldest son just had a job for her to do and she was sore from working so hard. But at night, when she thought I was sleeping, I could hear her crying next to me. She would stifle it with her shirt, so that she wouldn’t wake me up, not knowing that I was listening the whole time. A couple of years later though, something changed. Apparently, the bastard of the eldest son wasn’t satisfied with just Sam, and would regularly pay to have the local girls abducted. One night, the whole town rioted, and in the commotion, our parents slipped down to free us from our cages.
“Sam wanted to go join the rioters, to make the eldest son suffer for all the years of torment that he had put her through, but I was pulling her away, crying, begging her to just run, to escape that hell hole. My crying ended up alerting a passing guard that the slaves were getting loose and escaping. They already had enough on their hands with the rioting townsfolk, and if all of the people in the cages were let out within the walls of the manor, the family would be completely overrun. And so the guard made the decision to kill us, before we could let out any more slaves. He… My father, he rushed to the guard to buy us time to escape, and my mother grabbed me and Sam and started running. But I was a little kid, with short legs. And as a slave, I never really got enough to eat, so I was so incredibly weak, and slow. By the time we made it out of the house, another guard had noticed us, and mistook us for rioters that had made it inside the walls.
“Before any of us could react, he had killed our mother, and was lifting his blade again, to finish off Sam next. I pulled Sam out of the way, but I was too weak. She ended up getting cut across the back, but acted like nothing was wrong. She picked me up and ran with me to the edge of the nearby forest. I still remember the feeling of being carried, the smell of smoke in the air, and the thick trail of blood that Sam was leaving behind her as she ran, completely disregarding her own injuries. But she couldn’t just ignore them forever.
“Once we made it into the forest, she collapsed. She was dying, and it was my fault, my fault for drawing the attention of the guards, my fault for being too slow, my fault for being too weak to pull her out of the way in time. As she laid on the ground, slowly bleeding out, Sam…,” Ash took a deep shuddering breath. I’d never heard her speak this way. Never seen her act so…meek. So quiet. What was she feeling? Guilt? Sadness? Anger? Regret? How can I help her through this if I don’t know? What should I do? What should I say?
In the end, I remained silent, placing a hand on her head, and stroking her hair. I’d never been all that good at initiating physical contact, I never knew how to judge the right timing, or how much was too much. But I did know that any time Ash had ever been upset or scared, she would always rush in for a hug. Physical contact seemed to give her a sense of security, so it seemed the only thing I should do. She seemed to appreciate it, and grabbed my sleeve to feel more connected with someone, anyone. To not feel like a scared little girl alone in that forest, next to the cold body of the last family she had left.
“Sam smiled, the same way she did every single time she’d come back from the eldest son’s room, like she was still telling me everything would be alright. That no matter what happens, I’d be safe. And then she told me, ‘Learn how to hide. Stay out of sight, and go that way.’ She pointed towards the last beastkin town we’d passed. One that hadn’t outright kicked us out, but had made life difficult for mom and dad. It was only a few months walk away, along a river so I could have access to water. She told me to be safe, and to be good, that..” Tears welled up in Ash’s eyes as she remembered the last words her sister had spoken to her, “That she loved me, and that she was sorry she wouldn’t be around to protect me anymore. To run so that I wouldn’t have to watch her die. And….I did. I did what she told me to do, and just ran away, leaving her to die alone, barely a hundred feet away from where she’d been abused for years.
“For months I survived on nothing but river water and plants my parents had taught me to gather. Any time I heard something move I would do what my sister told me to and use magic to hide. When I got to the town, the first thing I did was walk to the adventurer’s guild and get myself registered, so that I could have a place to sleep. For a couple years I did gathering requests, before later specializing in hunting and subjugation jobs. One of them ended up taking me near the underground town, and that’s where I met Mike.” She gestured to the boy walking alongside us. “He noticed I was alone, and told me that he was putting together a party, and inviting me to join. By this point, my innate magic sense for people had really started developing, and I knew that I could trust him. He led me to his pack and let me stay with them for a while, despite how much the other members of his clan disagreed with that decision. And from there, well, you know the rest.”
We kept walking in silence for about half an hour. I had no idea how to respond to that. What the hell do you say to someone who’d been through so much, who’d opened up to you and showed you where they were most vulnerable. I had no way to know what she needed to hear, so just shared what was on my mind. “You’re amazing you know?”
That seemed to confuse her, as she wiped away the tears that had continued falling during our walk. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that my life sucked, and I turned into kind of an asshole about it, but you? Despite suffering just about the worst that humanity has to offer, you never let it change you, and became one of the best people I’ve ever met. You have every right to be callous, to be cruel, but you aren’t. You’re still so…nice, and pleasant. You’re way stronger than I am, even without the thousand years.”
She let out a chuckle at my awkwardly placed joke. As the mood gradually lightened, I considered everything I knew about Ash, realizing how much more sense everything made now. The reason we’d gotten along so well right from the start, at some level, I probably reminded her of Sam. I was an older sibling without a little sister, and she was a little sister without an older sibling. The reason she’d stayed in the underground town for so long despite how little they liked her there. The reason she had fallen for Mike, probably the first trustworthy person she had met since Sam, who had, even if just for a short while, let her feel like part of a pack, something her family had been searching for for her whole life. And the reason that she used to habitually attack with everything she had, despite the potential risks afterwards. She’d probably rather die than be beaten and enslaved again.
And also why she had reacted so adamantly when I’d saved her life, why she had refused to leave that spot until I was all healed up from the battle against the elemental, despite the alternative that I had suggested. She regretted leaving her sister to die alone, and refused to do the same thing all over again. Or maybe traveling without me would feel too similar to the months she had spent walking through the forest alone. I couldn’t help but marvel at the girl walking beside me, as I sent to her telepathically, Don’t worry. When we get to the human town, I won’t leave you alone for a second. That okay Soph?
Almost immediately, she agreed, as though waiting for me to make the offer. “I’ll have everything set up over here for her by the end of the day.” New tears rolled down Ash’s cheeks as she sent out, Thanks you two. Really. I gently flicked her on the forehead to remind her what I’d said about thanks between friends, and resumed stroking her hair in silence as we walked.