It had already been discussed at length just where exactly the new Dark Garden was going to go, and where all of the dark elves were going to live. Since they were a vassal community sworn to Kara directly, the simplest solution would be to give them a piece of land held directly by House Nukem, rather than cut a deal with a count to give up some of their land for it, which would in turn require that the count be given something in exchange for that land.

Plus, we felt it was pretty obvious exactly where the new Dark Garden should go, and the discussion was mostly about the feasibility and the impacts it would have on the local economy.

Kara's first proper act as Duke Nukem was negotiating a deal with the lead shepherd sworn to House Nukem. The shepherd sold to her the rights to the hill closest to Manor Nukem, in exchange for a yearly sum of silk thread, equal in weight to the wool estimated to be lost by the revocation of this particular grazing ground, and a monthly sum of beef, to replace the mutton that the shepherds supplemented their diets with when they culled their flocks.

On this hill would be built the new Dark Garden, and already, three days later, it looked complete from the outside, and much of the inside.

The Dark Garden of Nukem was a big, cylindrical building, with two gates in and out, on opposite sides of the perimeter. The outer wall was, in fact, a great big ring of family dwellings and apartments in varying sizes, with layers stacked on top of each other, extending four floors above the ground... and five floors beneath it.

The bulk of the Dark Garden's most vital infrastructure was underground, with a big, enchanted chamber for turning their sewage and other random organic matter into a clean, non-odorous primordial sludge from which more useful organic matter would be made, like tea, food, silk, and paper.

Volex, a master alchemist, was unsurprisingly quite helpful in creating and tweaking the new setup, and- after Kara authorized such- helped uproot a few trees to add to the Dark Garden's organic matter reservoirs, and in exchange was granted residency by Queen Selva, allowing her to set up an alchemical herb garden, supplemented with Carbon's own knowledge of what would be most useful in an alchemical garden.

Carbon was also pretty busy, ending up having to make a shitload of scroll ink to help patch some unforeseen deficiencies in the institutional knowledge of the dark elves. She was always up and about doing something, and intermittently bitching about it, looking forward to the end of the resettling process.

I spent much of my time in the village that kept Manor Nukem fed, talking to old friends about what was going on, and helping swing people around to the next deal that Kara wanted to strike.

It was a straightforward deal: the sewage and waste produced by the village and the Manor would no longer be processed into fertilizer and given to the village once-yearly for the planting, and would instead be pumped directly to the Dark Garden's reclamation facility. In exchange, the villagers would no longer pay any taxes, and in fact, would have ample food provided to them by the Dark Gardens.

The primary resistance to this deal was the fact that the dark elves were new, foreign, and strange, but with the dark elves having been primed with a story about humans being worth knowing, if a bit slow to trust, I wasn't the only person hanging out in the village, talking to people and being neighborly. There were dark elves in the fields, helping farmers pull weeds and idly chattering. There were dark elves helping kids catch fish, and helping to look after the village kids as they ran around playing with their new friends, the dark elf kids.

And, of course, there were dark elves sitting in Siobhan's house around a wide array of textile machines, talking about the experience of having the process of clothing your community completely upended by Lucifer Morningstar and her goddamn machines.

But I think the biggest difference was something you wouldn't see from the village, or even from most of the Dark Garden.

"Your job is simple, cousin," Kara said. "You will attend the Queen of the Dark Garden in her duties; right now it is Queen Selva, but in a year it may be someone else. You will take careful notes of the business brought to Queen Selva, and especially the business that is most relevant to House Nukem. You will deliver to my office every night a copy of your notes, and every week a written report giving your informed opinion on what is happening, what the problems are, and what possible solutions look like. You will execute these duties with diligence and care, and you will be rewarded for this, or you will fail and be... replaced."

Kara didn't intend to have her cousin killed, of course; quite aside from the fact that killing people in cold blood was bad for the soul, there was the fact that Eris had surrendered and pledged herself to Kara, and killing Eris after that was... politically inadvisable. No, instead, if Eris fucked this up, through malice or incompetence, she'd simply be sent to the Grand Temple to become a nun, and the position would be given to Elendar, who we already knew to be an at least competent politician.

Eris, however, didn't know any of this, and so would behave as though her life was on the line if she fucked up. Between that, the way we effortlessly crushed her parents, and the fact that her day job was to be surrounded by people who thought quite well of Kara, in their village literally half a mile from Kara's residence, we were pretty sure that her fear wouldn't foment any kind of rebellion.

Finally, seven days after the Dark Garden of Nukem began construction, it was deemed complete, and a feast was thrown in the big, open, expanded-with-void-magic space at the center of the cylinder, hosting every alpha, omega, and child- well, and also betas- from the village, Manor Nukem, and the Dark Garden, and treating them to masterfully-prepared meals, alongside some complementary potions of Learning and Mana Growth courtesy of Volex.

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"Thank you, everyone," Kara said, standing up at her table at one edge of the circular space. "Not just for coming here. For everything. I'm proud of each and every one of you, and I'm proud that I can now call this place home.

"I'm proud of the dark elves, and their skill in building their own pocket city from a grassy hill in one week. I'm proud of their tenacity in coming to the surface. I'm proud of their cleverness and magical knowledge, in building the systems that have allowed us to have this feast on such short notice, with so little impact on us.

"But more than just the elves, I am proud of the villagers, who have called this place home for generations, who have opened their arms to the elves. I am proud of you for speaking respectfully to these foreign strangers, for allowing them to help you, for allowing their children to play alongside yours, for inviting them into your homes for tea." And if you hadn't done any of that, well... guess the Duke isn't proud of you, huh? Better get with the program, asshole. "I am proud of you for making the dark elves feel at home. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

"I hope that, from here onwards, we can all work together, happily and lovingly, for a better tomorrow, hand in hand, and never knowing want or deprivation. I hope that, one day, we will scarcely be able to imagine how we got on without our new friends. And-" Kara smirked mischievously. "-I hope that the next few years see the birth of a few half-elves."

There were a few cheers and wolf-whistles at that, and not all of them were from dark elves who'd never seen an alpha or omega before. In fact, one of those approving whistles was from a very smug-looking Allie, who sat between two very smitten-looking dark elves. Come to think of it, the dark elves hadn't just been all betas, they hadn't had any beta exemplars, either.

"And that's not all the good news I've got tonight!" Kara continued, grinning and shouting, like she was surrounded by friends. "We're not just finally fixing the damn roads! We're building new ones, and special wagons to go on them! By this time next year, you'll be able to go anywhere in Nukem in just a day of traveling! You can go visit distant cousins up in Jet or Kijeka, you can go shopping in Kotor, you can go anywhere and do anything!"

This was met by more cheers, especially from Rebecca Cartwright, who had a fairly reasonable expectation that she would be commissioned in the building of these 'special wagons.' Which... well, okay, yeah, but more because we were being nice than because she was an expert we needed to consult. Kara was a Sage of Mechanics, and I'd built a fucking Osprey knockoff from scratch. We could handle a train. And we would handle a train, because the poor quality of the duchy's roads had been a growing complaint of everyone who wanted to travel, which were a surprising number for people in a medievalesque society with vassalage and manorialism.

"And in the more immediate future," Kara said, "You can expect another feast like this one next week, in the Grand Hall of Nukem. You might be asking, what's the occasion? Go on, ask!"

"What's the occasion?" Allie yelled out from the audience.

I'd been spending a lot of my time- even while talking to people- grinding up my enchantment skill, getting it better and better, working stronger and stronger enchantments into smaller and smaller baubles. And, of course, in that time, I'd also slipped Volex some specifications and measurements, which she fulfilled quite handily with her alchemical skills and some fine-detail void manipulation. She'd finished up that project just this morning, slipping the finished product to me before breakfast.

I'd moved fast with my enchantment from there, putting in not just an improved version of an old enchantment, but something I'd never done before, spoken of only in legend, and confirmed to be possible by Carbon. And then, in Rachel's old room in Manor Nukem, where the two of us alone shared her old bed... I'd asked her a question, and made her cry.

Rachel and I stood up next to Kara, hand in hand, lifting those hands to the sky and showing off our rings for all to see.

"We're getting married!" Rachel and I yelled together, to a round of applause from the audience.

"It's about fucking time!" Carbon called from the other end of our table, where she sat next to Volex.

"Yeah!" Rachel yelled back. "Yeah, it fucking is! Who wants to hear a story?" A round of assent washed over the audience. "This dork, this beautiful blockhead, has already given me a ring before! Back when I was staying at the Grand Temple, studying to become a swordsage, she gave me an enchanted ring that would boost my Learning skill when I was learning swordsmanship. It was a great gift, and it helped me out a lot! So do you know what she did to top herself?" Rachel waited for the noise to quiet down, tears starting to prickle at her eyes again. "She enchanted my ring, not just with a better boost to my Learning skill, not just with a boost that would apply to everything I learned, but with an enchantment that hasn't been seen in three hundred years! Archmage Lucifer Morningstar, the light of my life and the woman I can't wait to love forever, enchanted both of our rings, so that we would share, every single experience point one of us gains, for the rest of our lives!"

The crowd roared with approval. This was a gesture taken straight out of legend, when the fourth Duke of Nukem proposed marriage to the Archmage of the Grand Temple. It was a deeply powerful gesture, and literally storybook.

"Hey, what was I supposed to do, not go all out on our wedding rings?" I asked. "You've met me."

"I have met you," Rachel said. "And everything I've seen, has convinced me... that yes. Yes, Lucifer Morningstar, I will marry you."

We kissed then and there, and though the crowd continued to cheer for us, I didn't care.

All that mattered right now was Rachel.