Arc II – Births and Blessings

Juliette V

PA 0 (3rd month)

The past three months had been much less hectic than the first week.

Perhaps that was partially her own fault. Early on, she’d been focused on securing her own position and creating a buffer zone between herself and her enemies, but now that she didn’t have anymore rivals in the area, she’d decompressed a bit. Instead of fighting, she’d spent the last few months developing what she already had.

Her people had deforested the local area, replacing their old fur tents with wooden cabins and huts. They’d set up a wall around the village, at first by simply stacking logs on top of each other as high as possible, but recently they’d started expanding it, adding a second layer and some ramparts between them. They’d gone from just serviceable to looking actually functional.

The most impressive addition had been a bridge from their own side of the river to the other.

It was a massive construct, requiring nearly as much wood as all the cabins in the village. She couldn’t get any accurate measurements of the river, but it had to be at least 5 kilometers wide. So instead of building it directly at her village (where the river was at its widest) she instead built it a bit further upstream, using the natural islands of the river to build a series of smaller bridges across the river.

It was originally built as an easy way to get across the river without boats, since she’d still been having trouble making those at the time. The other side of the river wasn’t that different from this side, but it was crucial for scouting, gathering resources, and eventually expansion.

As far as her scouts found, the south was unending swampland. While it wasn’t impossible that there were other God-Kings hidden in the swamps, there was too much risk of disease and wildlife to investigate too deeply. Instead, she was looking further down river and north, where there were more normal forests and plains.

In terms of other villages, she’d found two—one to the far west, which said they followed a God-King, but who apparently didn’t live there, and one which sat to the far east, which had apparently killed their God-King after he’d offended them.

The first was an immediate existential threat, as it implied that there was another conqueror in the area. The second was a reminder that just because she was now immortal, didn’t mean she couldn’t get dethroned. She had to keep her people happy if she didn’t want to meet a horrifying end. Bread and Circuses, and all that.

The threat to her west was worrying, but she wasn’t willing to throw the first punch. She had no idea how powerful they were, and she’d learned her lesson the first time. Running headfirst into the unknown was more dangerous than it was worth—she’d do some more scouting before she delt with them.

She’d also been working on other, less physical matters. For example, she’d been working further to develop a writing system, which had gone… well, it had gone alright.

It turns out it was a long, long process trying to create a written language from scratch.

For one thing, Juliette was speaking a completely different language from her people. And while that normally wasn’t a problem, due to the translation magic, it still meant they weren’t speaking the same language.

This showed the most when she tried writing.

Earlier on, she’d tried writing letters into the mud. Then she’d had some of her people try to read it—which was her first problem. Apparently, despite auto-translation being a thing, none of that mattered if they didn’t know how to read in the first place.

So, before she could write, she’d have to teach her people how to read.

The one positive that she’d figured out was that she did translate writing—she’d tried writing a bunch of English and Spanish words and watched as the words instantly translated in her mind. It was interesting, because despite knowing instinctively what the words meant, she still saw them as written in a foreign language. It gave her a bit of a headache when she tried to focus on them too hard.

Basically, if this worked out, then everyone would be speaking Chinese but writing in French.

So in between teaching Wei—her future scribe—how to write, she’d spent the last few weeks trying out different ways to write. She’d started with trying to carve onto stone, only to realize that while carving simple letters into stone was simple, rocks large enough to be useful were too heavy to be used. Then she’d gone for a wood approach, carving words onto wood planks. And while that worked, storage was another issue—wood rotted and molded easily, and she’d lost the last month’s records after a thunderstorm last week.

They needed to invent paper, pronto. And find somewhere to store it.

So many problems, so little time.

But until then, she still had to find a way to write. So now she was on carving large shells—turtle shells, to be specific.

They had a lot of turtle shells. Too many. They ate turtle soup every other day—she was sick of turtles.

Ruining their shells with her bad carvings was incredibly cathartic.

Taking a deep breath, she held up a small bone stylus in one hand and a turtle shell in the other. She began slowly applying pressure, moving back and forth to create a line. A smile grew on her face as she managed to carve an N… A… N… T…

Crack

Another shell cracked under her stylus.

She chucked the remains across her room with an enraged scream.

“Is everything alright in there?” the guard outside her cabin called, sounding concerned.

“I am—” she took a deep breath. “I am fine, Qian. Thank you.”

“Of course,” Qian replied as though it was obvious, his reassuring tone helping her calm down. “You’re the Queen—how could you be anything but? But the Queen shouldn’t have to bother with meaningless trivialities—if there’s anything you need me to do, please let me know, and I will complete it post-haste!”

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Juliette couldn’t help but smile. Qian’s Qian-ness always helped cheer her up. “I appreciate it, Qian, but I’m alright. Really.”

“As my Queen says!”

The smile was still on her face as she picked up another turtle shell, pressing her stylus into it to carve another—

Crack

The stylus snapped between her fingers.

--

Juliette hummed, dipping her fingers into the orange paint on her lap.

She needed an outlet. Something fun to do so that she didn’t go insane bashing her head against problems that didn’t want to be solved.

So she’d turned to art.

There weren’t many types of art available in the stone age. One type was sculpture, but pottery required a skill she didn’t have yet, and she was trying to get away from stone carvings, not subject herself too more of it. However, a much more technically difficult type of art soon revealed itself to her.

Finger painting.

Yes yes, laugh it up, the Queen was so inept that the only art she could do was finger painting, har har.

Honestly, at first it had embarrassed her too much to even consider. Wasn’t finger painting for children? How humiliating that an adult was so inept she was forced to return to paint like a child!

But fingers were the only paintbrushes these people had, and any attempts to create modern ones had ended in failure, so she’d bit the bullet and started finger painting.

And then it turned out it was really fun. She got why kids loved doing this, she was having a blast!

Juliette hummed, dipping her ring finger into the white paint, pulling it up to the new building they’d finished yesterday. The wall was as smooth as possible so that she could paint on it easily. With a slow flick of her wrist she highlighted the antlers, before bringing up her pointer finger—covered with brown paint—to dot a pattern across it.

There weren’t a lot of colors available right now. She had red—from blood—white—from ground bones—brown and orange—from mud—and some other shades of yellow and green from plant life. Mixing them together expanded her palate, but not much. She never would have guessed how much she missed the color blue.

Sticking out her tongue, she added the final touches to the painting. Standing up, she took a step back to look at her artwork.

It was… okay. She’d tried painting a deer—she’d seen one with an absolutely massive rack of antlers recently, and she found herself just itching to paint it. So when she needed a break from shattering turtle shells, she came out here to paint.

She frowned lightly, annoyed at all the little mistakes she could see. The head was too small, the body was awkward and unnatural, and the antlers she’d taken so much time to work on looked far too big for its head.

“Oh wow!” a childish voice exclaimed next to her. “What’s that!”

Glancing to her side, she smiled as Min and Chaoxing—Qian’s children—leaned over from where they were painting. Min, the older girl, looked to be making a large fish, while Chaoxing, the younger brother was… well… his scribbles looked like a snake! How auspicious! A burgeoning artist right here!

“A deer,” she smiled down at him. “I based it off one I saw earlier. Have you ever seen one?”

“Once once,” he hummed, wriggling onto her lap. She was forced to push away her paints to stop him from spilling them. “It was very big! Father killed it, and we ate it later. It wasn’t very good.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Fish is better,” he told her as if it were a truth of the world.

“Hm, indeed, fish does taste good,” she nodded back, just as solemnly.

“Could I…” the other child asked, causing her to turn to look at her. The little girl was blinking owlishly at her. “Could I help?”

“Hm,” Juliette hummed, glancing back at the painting. It was already done, but… “Have you ever seen a bird?”

“A bird? Like a sparrow?”

“Yup!” she smiled, scooting back, Chaoxing giggling as he was bumped around. “Why don’t you try adding some bird wings to it?”

“Bird wings? Deer have those.”

“Nope!”

“But then why add them?”

“Because it’s fun!”

Min looked at her like she had just bestowed some profound wisdom on her.

Juliette patted the ground next to her, and soon the two of them were adding all sorts of weird appendages to their animals.

Heh, no matter how bad her painting was, the act of painting was fun.

These people had art—some of the women had beautiful singing voices, and while their pottery was simple and utilitarian, the technical skill involved was incredible on its own. But painting was something new to these people, and something several people had taken to copying as well.

Walls, rocks, trees, even the new bridge was painted by a collection of amateur but inspired artists, flexing their artistic muscles for the first time.

It was really fun.

Juliette smiled as they finished, the two kids running off to get their parents. Juliette herself ended up going to the river to wash the paint off her hands before dinner. As she walked, she considered her more pressing issues.

Specifically, the fact that bringing modern technology to the stone age wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t due to a lack of knowledge, but a lack of resources. It didn’t matter if she knew how to make concrete or gunpowder or whatever modern miracle if she couldn’t get together the materials to create the machines needed to make the machines needed to make it. She had about two hundred people under her command, but only a dozen could be taken off of necessary jobs like gathering food or making clothes.

So she’d backtracked. Big, world-shaking changes weren’t going to work right out the gate. Gunpowder was worthless if she hadn’t even discovered metallurgy, and metallurgy was worthless if she didn’t even know where to look for iron. Instead of changing the village, she tried to change her way of thinking. Don’t try to create a modern society out of a stone-age tribe—try to improve the stone-age tribe so that it one day evolves into a modern society.

And to do that, she’d developed her first new technology—boats.

Figuring it out was easier than she’d thought—she’d postponed figuring out writing to focus on bigger projects like boats and bridges, and managed to get all that done within a month. Comparatively, modern stuff like writing and bureaucracy were weird worthless things to these people that wasted their time.

That focus on the river had also caused her to realize how important the river was compared to the land, leading to her to focus primarily on the navy. Right now, it was just small crude barges, but soon she would figure out more complex and functional ships.

The focus on the navy had also made her painfully aware of how easy it would be to invade by sea. Er, river. They had no defenses there—in fact, that was the only part of the city walls that was open. So, once she’d realized that, she’d started building naval defenses.

The bridge worked for now. It was low—too low to allow boats to go under it, completely blocking off one direction of the river. And once she built a second bridge further upstream, she’d completely block off her city from naval attacks!

Maybe. She hadn’t found any good places upstream yet—in fact, the river seemed to be getting wider! She may have been closer to the ocean than she originally thought!

In the future the bridges might end up blocking their own ships, but right now defense was more important than offense. Forcing a naval invasion to turn into a land invasion now was more important than a mild inconvenience in the future.

It had also taken some time away from figuring out a writing system, but she was getting there! It was hard, okay! And honestly not that useful right now! She’d figure it out eventually! She knew how important it was! Honest!

Not that she was worried about invasions. Yet. After that war she fought at the beginning, she had spent the last few months consolidating, and focusing on her own holdings. She was like a loaf of bread—expand too little, and she’d never bake properly, but expand too much and she’d get burned.

One of the most important things she’d done so far was build a road from her capital of King’s End to the only other village she owned. It wasn’t an impressive road—more a dirt path, really—but just clearing a permanent path through the forest had done wonders for travel times. Now her people could consistently travel between cities in around half a day! Of course, river travel was faster, but only downriver. Trying to travel against the current was much harder.

But the road was useful, and she was setting up another plan to make one leading to the old location of Jamal’s village. Nobody lived there anymore, but the site was still a good place to set up a city of her own eventually.

So much to do, so little time!

Juliette sighed. Now if only she could finish figuring out her writing system.

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