The next three days were all pretty good approximations of each other, and none of them pointed towards me being rich in the near future. Miun I already knew wasn't going to have the cash to give me for random things--if anything, once there were several pipe sections to deliver, I would get a portion of those proceeds, but not a large share. Nim, likewise, paid me a bit every other day, but the extra labor I offered wasn't enough enough on its own to pay much for. The tools, yes; but now that I'd fixed several things and hardened his chisels, he wouldn't need help with those for a bit.

Heglid didn't so much have anything immediately valuable for me to do when I came by, but he did ask me to do some things like fixing squeaking floorboards and making some shelves more presentable. I think he mostly just wanted me to feel appreciated, and I appreciated that, but there wasn't much work that he needed, and what there was dried up almost immediately. He introduced me to Orren, the hostler of the inn, who had some old brushes and riding gear that were broken. Orren, in turn, introduced me to Sil, who did some hunting and foraging in the nearby grasslands and was fastidious about retrieving all his arrowheads and shafts. Sil didn't actually want help with repairing those--he was also a fletcher generally, and took money to do for others what I could have done for him, save only repairing the arrowheads themselves--but he had an favorite old knife that had broken some years back, and he didn't trust the blacksmith not to botch the repair. Orren had pushed me to bring that up with him, and I did, but I watched Sil throughout the exchange.

Sil was a man of few words, and given how thin he was, he must not have eaten much. He had no family or hunting animals, and seemed reluctant even to bring forth said knife despite Orren's insistence that he would be interested in having it repaired. When he finally did bring it out, it was fairly clear to me why--the knife's handle was elegantly hand-carved and the blade expertly engraved, with Sil's full name in the local equivalent of cursive script on one side of the blade's spine. Although he didn't say anything, and I didn't ask, my immediate thought was that he'd been romantically involved with a smith or craftsman that had made the knife, and... well, for whatever reason, Sil had no family now, so that told me all I'd probably find out anytime soon.

Unfortunately, Sil's knife had clearly been used to block a sword strike, and from a heavy blade. There was a deep gash in the blade, and it looked like what was left of the blade had bent and been straightened, and not well. There were traces of one existing repair attempt--the fact that it was a different metal was obvious, though, and most of it had been filed out, very carefully.

I studied the knife, and Sil studied me. I could feel, even without the bracers, the heavy weight of history on his heart as I handled something precious to him. I could fix it, of course... but in my heart, I felt a little icky. Because in the end, part of what made the knife special was who had made it, and if I remade it... for almost anyone else, for anyone who wasn't being ultra-sentimental, that wouldn't matter. But in this case, I feared it would.

I looked up at him. "I could fix it," I said, and although it was hard, I met his eyes. "But do you really want me to?"

He stared into my soul, and I stared back. It's not so much that the bracers gave me some kind of extra psychic mojo to resist the generally creepy sense of being seen through; I think if anything, me understanding him meant that I was looking into him more than he was looking into me. The more I matched his eyes, the less what I read in them was something along the lines of he doesn't understand, he can't understand, nobody does. Eventually, he broke the eye contact by looking down, and just said, quietly, "No."

"If you ever need me to, I will," I promised, returning the knife. "But right now, it means more the way it is, I think." I had no doubt he had other knives. For practical reasons, he wasn't using it, to say nothing of the fact that he wouldn't risk breaking it any further.

Sil just nodded, not seeming to want to believe that I'd actually chosen not to meddle. A moment later, though, he nodded to himself, and said, "Wait here." He retreated inside, to return a few minutes later with two banged up pans, a torn-up tent, and a cloth and leather hunting cap of some kind that had been nearly destroyed by time.

"You can fix these," he said, as though offering me the chance to fix things was doing me a favor--which, since, I was looking for work, I guess he was. So I did, and he paid me a bit for it, and we parted, and I left it at that.

That evening, there were dark clouds off in the north, clouds that turned out to be a rainstorm that went by on the horizon without coming close. I watched it for a while, reminded of Miun, but didn't have much to say or do about that.

When I came back from the inn that evening, the goats in their pen were generally closer to my hut than normal, and the goat kid I'd interacted with in the past perked up when it saw me. I got a sense that it was very nervous, but it approached me hopefully, and I moved to the fence and offered a hand. It smelled me, and I got a weird impression through the bracers that was, again, difficult to decipher.

Not-family? (maybe-new-family?)

I cocked my head and looked at it. "You want to be my friend?" I asked, a little confused.

Friend-not-family, was the thought that returned, and I thought there was a disappointment, and also a wave of confusion. It backed off a step, but not more than that.

I heard the door to Malla's cottage close and looked up, to find the old-looking woman watching me. "Kid likes you," she called. She didn't have to yell, not as quiet as it was, but it still took projecting her voice to cross the twenty-odd yards between us.

"Yeah," I tried to project my voice at roughly the same volume, but I wasn't sure if I did it right. "He seems nice."

"She," Malla corrected, and I had to admit I hadn't really tried to find out, but a casual glance at the goat's underside confirmed that. "Her momma doesn't like her much. Noil was willing to feed her, but she doesn't treat her like family. She doesn't look at me like that, either." Malla took something vaguely like a tobacco pipe and lit it, smoking something I hadn't identified and didn't plan to. "Poor kid could use a family."

I looked at the young goat. "I don't know anything about raising goats," I said, feeling pretty dumb to be saying something like that.

"Shame you don't have someone to ask," Malla replied, her voice as dry as the grasslands I'd marched through.

I just laughed, and sent the goat a gentle thought of maybe (maybe-no), that I hoped answered her earlier question about family. "They much trouble?"

"Wouldn't make a living raising them if they weren't trouble," Malla cracked back, and I grinned, although she couldn't see it. "On a good day, sure, all I gotta do is lead 'em to grass and back again. But everything gets sick, and a herd will eat all the grass in an area and leave nothing to grow back. A single goat," she made a little shrug, so small it was hard to see at the distance. "Long as you change where she's tied up every day, you might not even have to travel, but they also need to run and play, as all young ones do. Adults, too, but less running and more walking, same as all old folks do."

I chuckled, since I was definitely old enough to not qualify as a young one anymore, if not so young that I had started feeling my age, even before the portal between worlds and divine artifacts took some years off my frame. I hadn't asked if the other heroes were older than they looked, but at least a couple of them seemed naive enough to be teens. In the end, it didn't matter much, since we'd gone different ways, and I couldn't help them much even if I wanted to.

So I just extended a hand to the young kid again and projected a thought of maybe (maybe-yes). She seemed a bit excited, and moved up closer to the fence, smiling and projecting a vague hopeful, encouraging emotion that was difficult not to adore, in that way that animals have. I scratched her head a bit, and she nuzzled into it. I was starting to understand that there was a minor echo to the thought-speech, but it wasn't entirely clear to me how it worked or why it was there, except that it had to be either a part of the ability or the nature of telepathy in general.

With everything else going on, feeding one young goat wasn't going to affect anything else, and it might be nice. It was a silly thing to even worry about, to be honest. So I talked with Malla for a bit, and she let me in to pet the kid for a while. The young goat seemed pleased to be around me--maybe not lovestruck, but comfortable, and well, we'd just met. We'd find out in a few days or a week if she really wanted to be around me.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The morning found things much as they were, though I came by Miun's pottery and found that she was firing another length of clay half-pipe in her newly repaired kiln, along (apparently) with a load of other things. I used the power of the bracers to study what was going on inside the kiln, and tried to explain to Miun how the flow of air inside the kiln seemed a little off to me on account of how it was over-full, though I wasn't sure if I was just being paranoid or what a kiln was supposed to be like when it was working properly. She seemed unimpressed by my meddling, but when I left, she did seem like she was thinking about the kiln, staring at it with a different look on her face than when I'd arrived.

One of the elders flagged me down as I was wandering towards Nim's quarry, and directed me to a ditch-digging project that could use more labor. It was essentially just a repair; it was a feeding ditch, not a waste ditch, that took the town's spring water and fed it to a small grove of trees, and not kipears but something more like olives, from what I could tell. A cart had gotten too close to the edge and dug a rut that pushed dirt into the ditch, and had kept doing that for a long distance without noticing. That might not have been so bad, except that a lot of the dirt had flowed downstream into a series of dams, and some of the dams had forced water into the wagon wheel rut, making everything even more messy and softening up the roadway itself.

It wasn't anything like an all-hands emergency, but the owner of the little grove was a grouchy old man who was willing to pay decent coin for people to help him, even as he got down in the mud alongside us and griped constantly about the cart driver. I made some minor improvements (I said it was repairs) to the shovels we were using. That got a couple gruff thanks from the laborers, but they were mostly not interested in talking to me. In fact, I got the impression they'd been talking more before I arrived, for all that the owner was the only one talking after.

Of course, I'd half-expected that kind of small town stuff, but I couldn't help wondering if I'd done something wrong nonetheless. I tried to engage the closest laborer in conversation--he was a chubby fellow who said he was related to the barber and did seasonal labor, but he really didn't seem eager to speak much to me, or at all.

Half a day's worth of labor with a total of five people was more than enough to finish all the ditch work. Even with it being probably a mile or two of damage, all the repairs were simple; it just took labor, and nothing more complicated than that. I got a few coppers for my trouble, and another bit for repairing the shovels (a second time when we were done, because one of them hit a rock hard enough to leave a chip in the blade).

I went back to check on my new goat friend, but she was still a bit skittish around me, though once she recognized that I was being friends, she was eager to come over and receive affection. She butted her head into my leg like she wanted to play, but I wasn't entirely sure how to play with a goat, especially lacking anything like a toy. I considered making something, but in the end, I knew that would give up the game in terms of my being special.

Having worked hard through the morning, I decided to take that afternoon off, and indulged my curiosity by walking out to the edge of the single mountainous plateau that was near the town. The ground there got very rocky fairly quickly, but it was still a surprisingly sharp transition from flat ground into sheer cliffs. I wandered around for a little while, looking up at the mountain, wondering just what sort of geography had produced it. If it were a normal volcanic mountain, I was sure there was no reason why the sides should be so sharp, but I didn't know nearly enough about geology to say for sure. Glaciers, maybe?

It took a couple hours of hiking over rocky terrain to completely circle the mountain, and in doing that task, I found that there was a bit of a shielded area on one side of it, like full-height bite had been taken out of it, though nowhere near that neat. Standing in the center of the area, nearly half of the approaches to where you stood were blocked by the cliffs, and more if you moved in closer to the wall. Somehow, as I stood there, I could envision a tower placed just perfectly in that cutout, so that there was a narrow gap between the tower and the edge of the plateau. It could serve as stairs to the top, or a home, or both--or a mage's tower, though I was more of a psychic than a proper wizard of any kind.

I studied the floor of the little cutout, not really surprised to find that there were remains of a campfire here. I wasn't sure if that was townies, travelers, or bandits that had camped out here, but it was old, and there were no footprints around but my own as far as I could tell. It seemed to me like a decent enough place to, at least, place a cottage, as long as the elders and townies didn't object to it. If I could do that... well, the cottage would only serve to hide my intent to build something bigger there, later.

In the meantime, I continued my walk. I decided that at some point I'd fly myself up to the top of the plateau to see if there was anything to see, but I thought that the chances of someone seeing me up there were too high--I doubted I'd be able to resist the urge to look on the town from above, and I didn't need anyone asking questions. So, for now, I fought off the urge and just came back.

I let the goat kid come into my cottage a little for the evening after dinner, regretting it when she pooped on my floor, but cleaned it up and spent some time with her anyway. I found myself feeling remarkably comfortable with her, and when she curled up on my bed, I decided to let her. I... didn't think much about it at the time, and ended up entirely surprised when I had another night of definitely not-dream dreams.

This was a much less ambiguously magical journey, not least because I didn't end up in the morning with a case of the runs, but also because my dreams were essentially showing me the young goat's history from her own perspective. Something about her had bothered her mother, and although Malla had found another nursing goat to feed her, the surrogate was suspicious towards her. The goat herself was plaintive, just wanting to belong, but the others all seemed to agree that she wasn't normal.

When she'd seen me, she had been instinctively ready to harass me, thinking that the goat herd's unwillingness to be inclusive was just how they were supposed to be--how she was supposed to be. Her first thoughts in my direction, about me being a child, were supposed to be a mild form of abuse, an establishing of the pecking order, but I'd responded too well, and she was ashamed. Since then, I'd been nice enough, and she was smitten.

The thought she'd offered, not-family, was asking if I was going to form some kind of social group with her, some form of animal bonding that was more like puppy love than anything. And then, with me basically being caught up, I found myself more actively a part of the dream, as I and the kid shared a joint mental space.

I could tell, with a clarity that came directly from the bracers, that I could make some sort of psychic bond, or refuse; I had to assume it was something like a familiar, since I wasn't sure why else that would be a function of the bracers. I wasn't sure that was a great idea, but the dream seemed to suggest that if I didn't accept her right now, I'd never get another chance, not with this particular goat.

In the end, pity was the thing that made the choice for me. It's silly, I suppose; even if the girl had been something that was more... familiar-like to me, like a dog or, I don't know, a baby phoenix or dragon or something, whatever exists in this world, it would be a little impulsive to just accept it so quickly, but she was going to be alone if I didn't, and maybe would die, if the goats continued to dislike her. That wasn't really a problem, from a certain perspective; she was just one animal of many, one goat of many. But being directly faced with her feelings made it hard to ignore that even an animal was, in a sense, a person.

As it turned out, she became a lot more of a person once the bracers bonded her to me.

I could tell even in the first moments that her mind expanded, and strangely enough, something reflexive in the link made me a little stronger at the same time. I wasn't sure if the bracers, which were supposed to be some kind of ultimate psionic tool, had intend me to get a greater benefit from bonding to stronger creatures, or if I was supposed to bond with a lot of different animals, but it had definitely intended to reward me for making a bond in the first place. I found the whole line of thinking confusing, but all I could really do was accept it.

The kid's mind started to firm up almost immediately, like she was finishing her childhood in record time--on a mental level, at least. I felt her becoming more aware and... deeper, if I can say it like that, and after a few moments of thinking, she suddenly turned and butted heads with my dream self.

Name!

"I am Colin," I said to her in the dream, and the rest flowed without my really intending to. "And you are Carli."

Carli! The goat pranced in the dream, and then vanished, and I felt a warmth in my chest, but didn't wake or even vanish from the not-dream for a long moment.

"A goat." He was there, again, in his suit, leaning against a bit of fence, and He was grinning. "I'll admit I don't mind; your heart is in the right place. But the hero and his goat is an epitaph the gods will laugh over for centuries to come."

"Already writing my epitaph?" I shook my head. "What do you want from me, anyway?"

"Oh, I'm not here to judge. In fact, I'll warn you," he said, "that the others will interfere with your pastoral way of life sooner than later. I'm sure you'd want to know."

It was with that that the dream ended, and I was back on my moderately crappy bed snuggled up against a goat. Without trying, I could tell that Carli had changed, on a spiritual level; she had a... presence, I guess, far more like that of a human than that of an animal. A presence that suggested a precocious youngster, one who was likely to get into trouble, but also perhaps clever enough to get out of it.

And, unless I missed my guess, she now had some latent psionic or magic powers herself, and given the way my dream told me the link worked, I would develop abilities of the same type as whatever she gained. Goat abilities. Great.

Carli twitched a little, but remained asleep, and since it wasn't yet dawn, I let her. I lay there doing some serious thinking about whether or not what I just did was stupid, and had to adapt my thinking about how I was going to care for a goat kid to include the fact that this goat was probably going to end up wandering through town, making friends and enemies of her own, and was almost certainly going to blow my cover wide open in terms of me being more than just an average townsman.

Which, as it turns out, was going to be a non-issue very soon.