Jonathon spent the next few days reading, although he took less pleasure in the activity than he would have a week before. He went to bed when the sun set, and woke when it rose again, simply by virtue of the superior light the sun - or whatever the source of the light through the accursed windows actually was - provided.
He then returned outside and started farming again, trying the small seeds this time, as well as a smaller crop of the purple coneberries. These smaller seeds grew into something like wheat; a tall yellow grass, sprouting dozens or hundreds - he wasn't going to count - of the seeds in dense florets on a thick head; again, he refilled the bags of seeds first.
Next, he tried grinding up one of the coneberry cobs - really, just pressed it between his hands and rubbed, the magical drying and/or aging, or whatever it was, that occurred in the storeroom leaving them brittle - and tasted it by licking a finger, and touching it to the powder, then to his tongue. Bitter, slightly nutty. He spat the powder back out, mindful of the fact that the cob was supposed to be poisonous.
The berries were ... well, edible. Slightly less bitter, with a sharpness, a flavor sensation he had trouble identifying - but with a strong astringent effect that left his entire mouth feeling numb after a few seconds. He found another bag and filled it with some fresh berries, leaving them in his room.
The not-quite-wheat turned out to be easy to find in the botany book; it was eldergrass, apparently a staple crop in a nation whose name he didn't recognize. It was used for fermentation of a kind of beer, which he hadn't heard of, and for flour, and little else.
Beer. Hm. Jonathon looked at the handful of seeds. Well, worth a shot. It took a couple of hours in the library to find a book, another couple of hours hunting through the kitchen for ... most of what he needed, and then he brought his pile of goods and the book to the storeroom.
And returned to the bedroom to collect some of the heated water from the bathtub; he'd been drinking it, for lack of any other identifiable source of water in the place, and it tasted sterile enough.
Next, he started grinding up the eldergrass seeds using a mortar and pestle from the kitchen; he had four glass jars, now full of still-hot water, and he mixed the flour into each, stirring using four different spoons. He crushed a handful of the fresh coneberries into one of the four jars using the allocated spoon, and then set the lids on each of the four jars, slightly askew to let air flow in. Not ... quite what the book had said to do, but he didn't have the materials to do it quite correctly. He then left, and returned to farming.
He checked back in another couple of hours later. Whatever time effect was at play wasn't something he knew how to predict; if he had a clock - not that he could have ever afforded one - he would be curious to see what would happen to it, left in the room for a few minutes.
One of the jars had developed a thick brown clump in the bottom. One had developed a thick lumpy greenish mass that was kind of straddling the entire jar. One had a thick brown foam, and the other a thick ... purplish foam. The two with foam also had masses floating loosely in the bottom.
The two jars with lumpy masses, he took outside and dumped near the fence. Those clearly weren't right. The two with foam ... filtering would be a problem. John considered the issue for a few seconds, shrugged, and used the spoon to scoop the foam - which had a thick, sticky texture - out and into one of the now-empty jars.
He couldn't do much about the sediment in the bottom, though, and there was a lot of it - probably because of the raw flour he had used, without even boiling. He took a careful sip of the purple coneberry beer, as judged by the color of the foam he had scooped out.
It was ... not great. Bitter and sour, with a hint of, well, the taste of vomit. And faintly astringent to boot, although not nearly so much as the berries themselves. He set the jar back down, screwing the lid back on.
The other beer was better. It lacked the sour note, and more importantly the vomit flavor. It still wasn't great, or even good, but it was better. He lacked the equipment to do anything more - he'd probably have better success if he just had hot air to malt the seeds first - but this was what he had, so he screwed the lid on the first, picked up both jars, and brought them to his room.
Dinner arrived, and he had beer with it; John found himself returning to the sour coneberry brew more than he would have expected. He read the brewing guide as he ate, the book propped up on a knee. He had not, in fact, made beer. He'd need to figure out how to malt the grains, and indeed how to boil the grains - he had no wood, unless he started ripping pieces off the building itself, which he really didn't want to do. The coneberries burned, but they burned too hot and too fast.
He finished his meal, and enough of both jars of beer that he started getting sediment. Jonathon needed to figure out how to make fuel out of the coneberries that wouldn't burn so quickly, and he had no idea what book he might find that information in.
He laid in bed thinking through the problem. The cobs weren't dense enough, basically; they burned quite well, but he needed to compress them somehow. Maybe he could grind them up, add water, and put weight on them? He needed a mold.
The following morning, he started experimenting. He began the morning by replanting, then retrieving a couple of pots that would stack inside each other from the kitchen, as well as another jar; he detoured to his room on his way to the storeroom, and filled the jar with water.
He ground up a few of the cobs from the shelf until he filled one pot to the point where setting the other pot inside it rested on the finely ground powder, then poured water in and mixed it with one of the spoons. He then left to collect more coneberries and eldergrass seeds, carrying two baskets back with him.
On his return, the powder was, as expected, dry. It was, however, still powder. He needed glue, or something like it. He looked at the basket of eldergrass seeds. Flour was sticky when it got wet, right? And this stuff was used to make bread.
He left again to give the seeds time to dry out, taking a bath to relax and pass the time. Time was something he had no shortage of. As he relaxed, pondering on the time, a thought struck him. Did time pass differently for him, too? How long had he been in this estate, from the perspective of the outside world?
He dressed again in the same clothes - did he actually need to wear clothes? No, no, he wouldn't go down that path. He wanted to rejoin society at some point. The seeds were dried out when he got back to the storeroom, although the jar that had held his water was also dry. He made a round trip to refill the jar, and sat down to grind the seeds up in the mortar and pestle.
He dumped some of the cob powder out into one of his jars - it still held sediment, now powder - and added the flour, pouring hot water over it once again, and mixing it. Yep, it was sticky; it should hold a shape. The pot was placed back over the mix, and he once again went out to harvest another batch.
It ... kind of worked. It formed a cake, of sorts, but it wasn't quite as dense as he had expected. Also, it had developed a white fuzzy layer of some kind of mold. John had to break it apart in the pan with the spoon to get it out, but it did come out, albeit in chunks.
He dumped the chunks in a jar, grabbed a couple of cobs, and detoured to his room to pick up his steel and flint on his way outside. He arranged the chunks in a rough pyramid, one of the cobs set underneath it, and ground up the other cob around it. A few tries later, and the powder ignited, followed by the cob; then the little chunks lit up, and he sat back to observe.
They burned for a few minutes - longer than the pile. And notably, produced glowing embers, although they didn't last as long as a wood fire would have. He just needed to compress it more; it had too much air in it.
John continued through several more batches as the day progressed, but ended up settling on a fairly simple improvement - filling the top pot with dirt. This, finally, produced long-burning embers that outlasted his patience to wait and see. He got two more pairs of nesting pots out of the kitchen, emptying it, and started producing his fuel bricks in earnest.
That evening, he had something more palatable with dinner. Boiling the flour really helped. He'd need to fashion some kind of kiln to malt the seeds, so he searched the library until it was time for bed, collecting books on metallurgy, pottery, and baking. The pottery books ended up being the most helpful, and he made plans to try looking for clay for the following day.
Which he promptly abandoned when he walked into the kitchen. No, the baking book had been the most helpful, because he now recognized the odd metal dome over a furnace as a bread oven.
The morning was, again, spent replanting the crops. He had a sizable collection of fuel, which he loaded into both a regular oven, to boil water, and the bread oven. He didn't start that just yet, instead taking a bucket he found in a corner to his bath, cleaning it out, and bringing it back, to begin soaking seeds.
Some experimentation followed, as the first batch he came back to had sprouted, died, and began rotting. He got the timing down after a few tries, using smaller batches; it took leaving the kitchen, walking outside, counting to twenty, and returning, to get the seeds to sprout.
The sprouted seeds were then spread over a pan and placed in the bread oven, which he lit. This took a few tries before he managed not to burn them.
These were ground up and boiled, and then this product was what he finally put into jars, now in the kitchen. The success rate was still about half, the other half of the jars going completely rancid, but over the course of the day, and multiple harvests, he managed to start seeding the other jars with successful batches.
The final improvement, which took him another day to work out, was boiling the jars between uses - he'd noticed that the jars that had gone bad were more likely to go bad again - and he now got an actually palatable brew more often than not. Dried coneberries worked slightly better than the fresh ones, and he had two varieties of beer - he'd decided it was beer whether that was accurate or not, it tasted pretty close - to choose from.
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However much time was actually passing outside, from the perspective of his personal time, this was actually some of the fastest progress in anything he'd made in years. Since leaving the military, actually. He spent the next day drunk, celebrating the successes. And the next few reading, between his new daily chores, enjoying himself again.
It didn't last very long. John needed things besides reading to occupy the rest of his time. It was time to get into one of the towers, he resolved after reading a chapter for the fifth time, not having processed any of it.
He stepped outside, walking to the gate, and turned around to study the architecture from the outside. Four towers, one to each corner. The windows were irregularly spaced, like the entirety of the place, so who knew how many landings there were, but assuming the exterior matched -
"Hey there!" What? John slowly turned in place. A ... man stood on the other side of the gate. A young man, actively waving a hand at Jonathon. He was dressed in a threadbare brown hooded cloak that hadn't seen oil, probably, since its previous owner had purchased it, because the man, maybe in his late teens or early twenties, couldn't be old enough to have reduced it to that state. Underneath were simple white pants tied with a rope, and no shirt. "Hello!"
"Ah. Greetings, sir. Jonathon Eucole, at your service; what can I do for you?" John spoke more out of routine than anything else - it was only a moment after he said it that he realized he couldn't do anything for the lad.
"Could I beg a meal and some water? And maybe a bed for the night? Oh, sorry, my name is Avers." The boy pulled his hood down; he had the beginnings of a beard, perhaps four or five days since his last shave, and shoulder-length brown hair. His features were plain, and Jonathon thought, from his shoulders and arms, he was likely a farmer. "Avers Duness. Uh, at your service?"
John looked at the gate, considering for a moment. It had let him in well enough. Getting out was the problem. "Water and a meal I can certainly do, but I'd hazard a reasoned guess that you probably don't want the ... bed ... " John trailed off as the boy's hand moved up as he was speaking, as if miming opening the gate ... and walked through the metal as if it weren't there. Which, it took him a moment to consider, it probably hadn't been. "Ah. Right."
"Thank you much, and anything with a roof over it would be ... hey ... " Avers trailed off as he turned, staring at the gate. "Did that just close on its own?"
"Near enough." John groaned inwardly. Well, at least he'd have company. "Come along then, I'll show you to your room."
"Thank you much, sir. Say, why are the windows all funny?" The lad didn't even spare a glance for the half-dead everything around the manor.
"I honestly have no idea."
Avers gaped as they walked into the enormous foyer; John chose the right door on a whim, and had to slow his pace, as the boy spent too much time staring around at the oddly constructed, if elegant, building. Had he spent that much time staring around at everything when he'd first come here? Probably.
The lad was stunned when John showed him to the green room, right configuration - he had discovered he had to consciously choose a specific room, in order to get it to reliably show up when he went looking for it.
And quite ecstatic at the hot bath waiting for him. Jonathon left him to that, walking around a corner to get to the kitchen, where he had his supplies of the eldergrass. He ground up a batch of it, mixed it with a small amount of water, cooked it in a pan over the bread oven, and made - well, it wasn't bread. He tried a bit of it. Nutty. Needed salt. But it was food. He then got one of his water jars - he kept some around so he'd have cool water, instead of hot water straight from the bath - and grabbed one of the jars of beer as well, and returned to the room.
Avers was getting dressed, and looked up at the plate of breadlike something. "Food! Thank you. I'm starving." The lad took the plate and jar of beer, and looked around, before moving to sit on the edge of the bed. John took the implicit opportunity to sit in the chair.
"You are quite welcome. Let me know how the beer is, I've been experimenting." Hopefully Avers liked it, because there wasn't much else available. Would Zyet bring two meals, or just one? He'd just have to wait and see.
---
Kyuse slowly backed away, staring down at the blood. Splatters and droplets covered the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the curtains. Droplets staining the bookcase, splattered over the open pages of a massive tome, the pages soaked in it.
His eyes moved over the room, past the book, to the shattered bottles of what had been an expensive vintage of wine, the jagged edges of the glass a near black with a long-congealed mess, scattered over a table. A plate sat there, a knife and fork, and a napkin. The plate had ... his eyes moved on.
The bed. A face, pale and bloodless, frozen in a wide-eyed scream, stared up at him from the bed, framed by hair matted red and brown with drying blood. Her face.
His gaze jerked away again, to the desk, to the bookcase again, to the table. The small room, so familiar, so alien. The intact bottle of wine, now empty, filled with bad decisions. The tome. The tome, which would never be read again. Should never have been read.
A little bit of research. He had been careful. He had followed every precaution, save one. He had spoken it aloud. Three years, and he had regretted those words nearly every hour since. His hand lifted, and he forced it down again. It was still there, he knew.
He took a deep breath. It was too deep, his lungs took in too much air. It came out again with a jagged rumble, deep in his chest, somewhere between a growl and a sob. He looked again to the bed.
Her body was torn apart, entrails pulled out in loops. The flesh of her arms ended in blackened, burnt flesh at the elbows, the legs halfway down the thigh; the bones scraped messily of flesh and gore, lines of black in one inch increments where fire had cauterized. Strips of skin, sliced messily away piece by piece, in haphazard bloody piles around the bed, each slice burned one one side.
Kyuse looked at the bloody messy that had once been his dearest friend, and down at his hands, the still unfamiliar pads of his palms, the thick gray hair. The long bloodstained claws.
He remembered singing as he had cut.
His hands - his paws - trembled as he grabbed things, shoving them into a pack. He threw a hooded cloak over his shoulders - he was too tall not to be noticed, but if he could get out of the Three Isles without anybody attacking the obvious monster, that would be ... that would be good. He wrapped a leather skirt around his waist, silver buckles securing it into place, and grabbed his old iron estoc, sitting in its scabbard, from a life that was now almost forgotten. The belt didn't fit around his hips anymore, and he ended up fastening it around his stomach instead.
Kyuse looked around the room again, forced himself to look around, although he had been a prisoner in this small space for long enough that he had it memorized. The blood and gore was a new look for it, and he could find every droplet. He could smell every droplet.
The chain wound around his neck, dangling down his chest nearly to his navel, felt heavy, although it weighed rather little. The links pulled at his hair - his fur - as he moved, small sharp tugs. There was no abrasion, at least.
He turned, pulled the hood down further over his face, trying to hide the muzzle where a mouth should have been. Yellow eyes glinted under the hood as if they possessed their own internal light; he knew well that glint from the mirror that had shown him everything. He wrapped the cloak tighter around him - it didn't hide him entirely, but perhaps it would hide enough, in the darkness of night - and stepped out the door, ducking under the frame, closing and locking it behind him. He was free. He didn't feel free.
The apartment hallway was thankfully empty, the claws on his feet clicking on the tile floor until his consciously raised his toes, walking on the fleshy pads instead. He was ... sort of used to this body, now. It had been nearly a year, even if it had been spent in a single small room.
Down the hallway. A left he hadn't taken in months. A right. Out through the door, into the muggy heat of the night in the marshy landscape. Raised wooden planks connected the buildings, the ground a perpetual mud on the northeastern of the Three Isles. There were lights to the south, and voices, which he heard too well. He headed east, towards the river, towards the forest. Kyuse saw three figures ahead, no taller than his chest, for all they were ... probably normal sized, for humans. He hesitated, then took a sidepath, passing between two three-story buildings with fluttering orange firelight filtering out through closed curtains on their upper floors.
He could see better than they could, in this darkness, so they probably hadn't seen more than a shadow. They didn't raise an alarm, so they almost certainly hadn't seen him. There were people who possessed one of the powers to see in darkness even better than he, however, so he was cautious.
The blood on the walls, on the floor. Kyuse slowed his walk, looking around in the darkness, spots of red swimming in his sight. No, no. That wasn't ... real, not here.
He ducked into a doorway to avoid another pair of people. The Three Isles were busier during the day, but there were always people up and about, even though it wasn't particularly densely populated; perhaps eighty thousand people lived here, attracted either by the knowledge gathered in the capital of scholars, or the jobs that wealthy scholars naturally brought with them.
There were also refugees; the civil war that had erupted when Shy took over the empire had been brief, but burned farms and cities had caused some significant unrest, and in the year since the last skirmishes had ended, people continuing fleeing to this politically and militarily unimportant corner of the empire. The Three Isles kept the name, but now something like twenty islands were populated, albeit none so densely as the central isles.
Kyuse made his way to the brackish water, winding his way through the outskirts of the island, and stripped quickly, wrapping his skirt and estoc in his cloak, and holding it with his pack over his head as he waded into the waters.
He wound his way through the shallow river, feet sinking ankle deep into the silty bottom, avoiding the other islands as he made his way across the enormous river delta towards the eastern shores.
The sun was rising when he reached the grasses; the water dropped to his ankles. Kyuse didn't pause to dress, water still soaking his dense fur, but did lower the bundles to his chest, setting out across the thick waist-high grass. There was a fishing village to the south, the buildings on stilts visible over a rise between here and there, but nobody would attempt to farm the grass sea.
It was midday before he felt sufficiently dry to dress again, his arms aching from carrying the weight. He paused to eat some dried meat from his hasty preparations; Kyuse was somewhat dismayed to realize he'd been rather light when grabbing food, and had enough for only a few days. At least he'd remembered steel and flint, and a knife. Some of his other packaged goods were ... well, he hadn't been thinking very clearly.
Two vials of carefully packaged acid, some writing materials, three books, three lengths of rope, an iron pot. Most of the space was filled with food, and the pack was mostly full, but he ate ... rather a lot.
He settled the pack back over his shoulders, a stick of beef in hand, which he tore absently from. He started walking, continuing east, now angling north. He'd follow the Arne river to the forest, and find a place to set up camp there.
He halted, halfway into the evening, when a smell hit his nose; musty and sour. His ears turned, a peculiar sensation, upwind, and he lowered himself until his eyes were just over the tall grasses, listening. Snorting, grunting. An occasional growl. Boar, maybe?
Kyuse drew the estoc at his side, a lengthy blade intended for thrusting, and stalked towards the sounds, still listening intently and sniffing lightly at the air. The smells were intense and confusing, but ... maybe three?
As he approached, as quietly as he could manage, he started to see flashes of red through the grass. Emberwolves. Not wolves, they were in fact a variant on the common boar, notable primarily for their red pelts. They also weren't particularly aggressive; although they could and would eat meat, they were more pests for farmers than threats. Unless you were a child, anyways. Kyuse mentally cursed whoever named the simple beasts.
He leapt into a dash when they were just a few yards away - and they promptly scattered, emitting noises somewhere between a honk and a shriek. His estoc caught only air as dark red tails and haunches vanished into the grass.
Kyuse paused there, for a second, before finally straightening and sheathing the estoc. So much for fresh meat. He turned and resumed his northeastern path.
Night fell. He kept walking, eating a few more strips of jerky. He half-emptied his canteen, tilting his head straight up and pouring it down his throat; his muzzle wasn't made for sipping. He stopped to rest again, and rose an hour or so later, continuing away. His fur was uncomfortable, burrs from the grass tangling themselves up, and his tail was an utter mess. He'd deal with that later.
Kyuse reached the edge of the great Arne forest around dawn, and pressed through the heavy brambles marking the edge.