I stopped to look at the Guild Hall for a moment before I started walking back to Feldrast Manor. The Guild Hall was the biggest building in Sableton, standing at three stories tall and about a hundred meters across. Four smaller shops could easily fit within the interior of the Guild Hall.
The inside of the Guild Hall was made up of a handful of offices for the merchants and higher-ranked officers working within. Most of the floor space within the Guild Hall was used for storage. Fundamentally, the Grimhold Guild was engaged in the sale and transportation of goods, so they required a significant amount of storage space.
Architecturally, the Guild Hall was nothing special. It was a squat stone building with wide wooden doors on the ground level to allow for wagons to enter easily. The streets surrounding the Guild Hall were constantly covered in a layer of mud tracked in by the constant foot traffic and waste expelled by the various beasts of burden used by the Guild. I tried not to step in anything as I left the Guild Hall.
Most nobles looked down on the Guild. The high-level officers took little effort to project an air of propriety, despite their wealth. Some nobles believed that anybody with significant wealth was burdened with the “noble obligation” to remain dignified whenever possible. Sendrick Grimhold disagreed.
Personally, I held a great respect for the Guild. They showed that, through ambition and hard work, even those of low birth could become successful in Ferrum. Sendrick Grimhold built an empire from nothing. I respected that a lot more than any King or Duke who merely inherited his empire.
The Guild Hall slowly disappeared behind other shops and houses as I hobbled my way toward Feldrast Manor. I soon reached a stretch of town that was mostly undeveloped. Near the center of Sableton was a square plot of land three hundred meters on each side that just contained trees, grass, cobblestone paths, and infrequent benches. This area was frequently used by the children of Sableton.
Off to one side of the park was Miriam. A smile appeared on my face as I started to walk toward her. It was only a hundred-meter walk, but I was completely winded by the time I reached her.
"H-hey, Thale," Miriam said to me with a shy smile. For as long as I had spoken Common, she had suffered from a persistent stutter. Her stutter typically appeared at the beginning of conversations and whenever she was in an unfamiliar or uncomfortable situation.
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Breathing heavily, I sat down and pushed through my next sentence. "Hello. How are you?"
"Well, school has been difficult ever since Dad moved me ahead a year," she said airily with her eyes pointed off in the distance. "I'm not nearly as smart as you, Thale."
The education system ended at the age of fifteen when the people of Ferrum were considered to be adults. If a student showed extraordinary aptitude, they would usually finish their education in the Academy of Hinnom to the south. Solana was a middling student, and Miriam was relatively advanced. It seemed as though high expectations had been foisted upon Miriam due to her relation to me. I had finished ten years of mandatory education in two years, and there was an expectation among the teachers that the siblings of such a prodigy would benefit from an increased workload.
"What are you working on now?" I asked, feeling as if her increased workload was partially my fault.
"Algebra and the history of the Cataclysm," Miriam said. "History is really interesting, but I just can't understand quadratic functions." With an embarrassed expression on her face, Miriam looked at me and said, "C-could you help me?"
"Quadratic functions?" I said with a smile. "Now you're speaking my language." As I spoke, I withdrew my journal from my coat pocket and started drawing a graph. "You see... ᛀ is the function's horizontal value, and ᚻ is the function's vertical..."
After about an hour of explanation, several pages of my journal were marked with simplistic quadratic diagrams, and Mir was able to explain the logic behind binomials and trinomials. Happy that she was starting to understand these concepts, she smiled happily.
"Wow, it was so easy when you explained it," she said. "It makes me jealous. Math, science, history, Common. It all comes so easily to you. I wish I was a genius."
The idea of actual children being compared to me once again filled me with guilt. Any moderately educated adult in my shoes would operate on the same level. To me, none of this was a challenge. It was all just a chore that I dealt with as quickly as possible.
"Please don't call me that," I said, trying to pass off my annoyance at the unearned title as gracious humility.
"Oh, right, I forgot," Miriam said. "I'm sorry."
"It's nothing," I said with a smile. "It's just..."
My sentence was cut off by a voice echoing through my mind. This was a voice that I had heard once before at the moment of my birth.
Protect her.
The voice spoke in a perfect copy of the original statement. It was as if no time had passed at all.
What? Where am I? Is she...? By the gods... How many years has it been?
In that moment, I realized that the outside force that had tried to take control of my body and the voice I heard in the moment after my birth were one and the same. After almost ten years of sleep, that entity which had been there from the beginning had returned, and I did not know whether the entity was friend or foe.