BT - Book 1 - Chapter 42 (Patreon)

The bell jangled on the door to Micah’s shop, causing him to look up from the Folio.  He’d spent most of the afternoon working on the design for a pendant that would increase its bearer’s strength.  An interesting combination of ritual and wood magic he’d been worrying over for the past two days without any real results.

Closing his book, Micah searched the small store for his customer.  Simple wooden shelves contained some of his earlier works along with placards detailing their effects covered the walls.  A pair of windows let in light, illuminating three pots with different flowers in them, colorful against the dark wood of their surroundings.

Nobody.

A voice giggled beneath the counter.  Micah smiled and stood up, walking around the edge of the wooden table.

“There you are Esther,” he reached out and tousled her hair.  “What are you doing here?  I thought Mom wanted you helping her around the house with chores.”

“Chores are boring,” she pouted, scrunching her nose.  “Mom just makes me clean the house over and over again.  As soon as I’m done, she tries to teach me how to read.”

“Don’t underestimate reading,” Micah smiled down at her.  “Pretty much everything I know I learned from a book.  The rest?  Well, I’m not sure you need to know it.”

“But Micaaaaah,” Esther ran to one of the walls, picking up a wooden flute enchanted to put low level monsters to sleep.  “I don’t like reading.  It’s slow and the words are too big.  Why can’t you just tell me what I need to know?  Then we get to spend time together and I can grow up to be big and strong like you and Trevor!”

Micah snatched the flute from her hands, quickly snagging an ivory carving of a dog and replacing it in Esther’s grasp.  He’d been meaning to enchant the carving later, but for now it’d found a higher calling as a knick knack to keep his sister’s nimble fingers occupied.

“I can teach you some things,” Micah replied, casting plant weave with a motion of his hand.  After enough skill levels, the spells incantation shortened.  Today? Micah didn’t even need his words for a first tier spell.

A leaf extended from one of the flowers, growing rapidly on a thin stem from the window until it reached Micah’s hand.  Gently, he plucked it.  In his hand, it twisted into the figure of a young woman made of vine and sap.  She began dancing, twisting and swaying to unheard music while Micah smiled on.

“Wooow!” Esther exclaimed, her eyes wide as she clapped her hands, the dog figurine forgotten.  “Teach me how to do that!  I want to be a magician when I get blessed too!”

“I can teach you the words to the spell,” Micah chuckled at her, extending his arm to allow the figure to prance and twirl its way toward Esther.  “But past a certain point, you’ll need to study what they mean.  How they interact with each other and the rest of the world.  At some point you’re going to need to read to solve the riddles I don’t have the answers for.”

The leafling jumped from the end of Micah’s hand onto Esther’s shoulder.  It spun toward her before grabbing onto her hair and climbing atop her head.  Esther giggled, reaching for the leafling.  With a wiggle of Micah’s finger’s the construct dodged past her hand and jumped onto Esther’s other shoulder.

“Are you ready to go home and do your chores now Esther?” Micah asked, a smile on his face as he watched her shriek and try to collect the dodging plant golem.  “Mom is going to worry if she can’t find you.”

“No,” Esther grabbed the leafling just as the spell ran out and it reverted into inert vegetable matter.  “I can learn to read later.  I didn’t get to play with you for almost two years, and then when you came back to the City you started spending all of your time at this shop.  I’m playing with you today.”

“I need to watch the shop in case a customer shows up,” Micah tried to deflect her earnest energy.

“There’s nobody here,” Esther furrowed her brow as she glanced back and forth.  “Actually it doesn’t look like there’s been anybody here for a while.”

“Fine,” Micah chuckled, reaching out to touch a crimson string that stretched into the back of the shop.  “If you want to play, we’re going to go and do something actually fun.  There’s no point in hanging around an empty shop all day hoping for a customer.”

Esther squealed and ran out of the store into the busy market district of Basil’s Cove.  Micah followed her, pausing briefly to bar the door and make eye contact with the Onkert that slipped out of the room to guard his shop.  

Outside the shop, he closed the shutters on both windows as a pair of horses clopped by.  No need to advertise the presence of a daemon to the entire downtown.  The Church of Luxos was already trying to make trouble for him, constantly asking nosy questions about where he’d acquired his wares.  

“Micaaaah,” Esther’s hand on his shirt brought Micah back to the crowded street outside of his store.  “You said we were going to do something fun.  Where are we going?”

“We’re going to tell Mom that you’re tagging along with me for the day first,” Micah scooped Esther up and put her on his shoulders.

“I don’t want to go home,” Esther tried unsuccessfully to struggle free as Micah held her in place with his enhanced strength.  “Mom will yell at me for not cleaning my room or washing the dishes.”

“You can clean and wash later,” Micah began walking toward their home at a steady clip, weaving in and out of the busy marketplace foot traffic.  “I just know better than to let you spend an entire day hiding from your chores with me without telling Mom.  She’ll get worried and yell at me until her face turns red.”

Above him, Esther’s tiny frame shook as she laughed, squirming against his shoulders.  Micah smiled.

“Sure,” he feigned outrage, “it might seem fun to you.  You’re not the one getting yelled at for helping his kid sister run off without saying anything.”

The walk home was relatively uneventful.  At one point, Micah and Esther had to step out of the street to allow a carriage to pass, but other than that there was no damper on their cheerful banter.  After alerting their mother and quieting her concerns, Micah brought Esther to city gates.

A quick chat with the guards later, and they were on their way toward the cave, Micah barely able to hold Esther’s attention as her wide eyes took in the countryside.  Eventually he just gave up trying to talk to her as his sister ran back and forth, pointing out squirrels and birds. 

After ten or so minutes, the excitement began to fade, and Esther stopped chasing every small and cute animal.  Before too long she began nagging Micah, complaining about the distance of their walk.  Finally, they reached the cave.

“We’re here,” Micah set Esther down after carrying her for the last half of the journey to quiet her complaints.  “This is where I come in my spare time.  It’s easier for me to get work done out here away from the bustle of the city.”

“Is it like a fort?” Esther perked up, the boring walk forgotten once she saw the signs of Micah’s campsite.  “This is where you came to play while we were working?”

“I don’t know about playing,” Micah chuckled, watching Esther run over to the cave.  “It was actually brutally hard work.”

Micah glanced up at the snap of a twig from the forest.  Telivern walked into the clearing, slowly chewing on a mouthful of moss.

Esther squealed.  Turning from the empty fire pit, she sprinted toward the great white deer.  Almost before Micah could say anything, she grasped onto its fur and pulled herself up onto Telivern’s back with the agility of a monkey.

The deer turned its mournful eyes to Micah, cocking its antlered head to the side in a silent question.

“Esther,” he laughed, “this is my good friend Telivern.  Telivern, this is my sister Esther.  She was curious about how I’d been living my life so we took a little trip out here to meet you.”

“Wow!” Esther’s eyes were wide.  “It’s like it can talk to me, but only in feelings.  It just keeps saying confusion and amusement.”

“That seems like a fair emotional response to a little girl climbing on your back to me,” Micah shook his head, smiling at the two of them.  “I suppose it’s better than Esther being terrified of you, but it was hardly the reaction that I expected.”

Telivern snorted back at Micah before lowering its head to eat some grass near the edge of the clearing around the cave.  Maybe it was the fairly constant campfire that he kept lit when he traveled out to the cave to inscribe his enchantments, but the grass was yellow and patchy.  Whatever was in the soot, twisting and killing it.

Someone coughed gently, prompting Micah to spin, an air knife half formed in his hand before he recognized Jo at the woodline.  She averted her gaze, spending a solid second looking at the firepit and the cave before looking back at Micah as he watched her silently.

“Gods,” Jo smiled weakly.  “This is a lot harder than I imagined it.”

Micah sighed, trying to clear the memory of her back as she jumped off of that roof in Basil’s Cove from his mind.  It’d only been a month ago, but after his war with the Durgh and establishing his new peaceful existence, it seemed like a lifetime. He’d seen her a couple of times since then, but each time she managed to avoid him, ducking out of social gatherings and disappearing into the night before he could track her down.

“How did you imagine it?” The question didn’t come how Micah intended it.  Instead of the confidence and swagger that he’d tried to cultivate, the words were quiet.  Almost scared.

“Well,” Jo looked back at him for the first time.  “I imagined secretly following you out here to whatever secret base you had and giving you a piece of my mind for one.  I thought we were something more than a quick f..”

Her eyes flicked to Esther playing with a visibly suffering Telivern, and Jo’s sentence ended abruptly in a fit of coughing.

“I thought that things were heading in a more serious direction,” she finished, slightly flatly with just a hint of a blush coloring her cheeks.  “But now, none of that really seems to matter.  If we’re going to be something more, I can’t have any more of this ‘hero complex man of mystery’ crap.  It was cute at first, but that isn’t something you base a relationship off of.”

Micah smiled back at her.

“Before you ran off last time I was going to tell you everything,” as he spoke he walked toward her, his voice quieting so that Esther couldn’t hear.  “I fought most of the Durgh army in this area.  They were going to attack, wipe Westmarch and Basil’s Cove off the map.  I had a couple dozen daemons around level twenty.  They didn’t even last a full minute in the final battle.”

“Micah,” her voice was as quiet as his.  “I never really asked, but what level are you?”

“Forty,” he replied, a slight smile on his face.  “My class is a bit different though.  I gain three attribute points per level and I can maintain a lot of powerful summons at once.”

“Fo-” Jo burst out laughing.  “My class gives me three attribute points every four levels.  You’re literally getting more than twice as many attributes per level as me.   By the Sixteen, you’re probably more powerful than the guildmaster and you’re not even eighteen!”

“I am,” Micah responded evenly.  “In the final battle I had two summons that were the equivalent of a level sixty warrior and about a dozen that were the equivalent of a level forty.  Well over half of them died and I barely escaped.  If you’d come with me, you would have died.  I can guarantee that.”

“Gods,” she stared at him in silence for almost five seconds before continuing.  “No wonder you didn’t want people to know what you could do.  No one would ever leave you alone if they knew.”

“Or worse,” Micah agreed, a shadow flashing by his eyes despite his slight smile.

“So,” she sighed, not quite able to meet his eyes.  “I guess you did have a good reason to warn me off before you went on your adventure?  It wasn’t really some sort of masculine bravado?”

“Jo,” Micah shook his head.  “I’d never do something to hurt you.  I sent Telivern away at the end.  I don’t actually think there’s anyone in Basil’s Cove that could have properly stood with me in that final battle.  I really just couldn’t bear to see someone I loved die in front of me while I looked on, helpless.  Again.”

“Lo-,” Jo blushed.  “I.  Uh.”

“Look,” Micah smiled at her, taking both of her hands into his.  “We don’t have to be fast about this.  Why don’t we just start things over again.  This go around, I have all the time in the world for you.”

The afternoon went quickly.  Micah, Telivern, Esther and Jo played tag in the woods, much to Esther’s delight despite Jo always winning.  When his sister grew bored, they searched for herbs that Micah’s Mother had requested until the Sun began to go down.

After walking both Esther and Jo home, Micah walked back to his shop whistling.  Now that he had his own business, it wasn’t appropriate for him to spend every night at his parents house.  

Unbarring the door he walked in, a cheerful smile on his face as he sent the Onkert back to the small chamber it lived in behind the storefront proper.  

Micah hardly even noticed that all three of the plants in his window were wilted and yellow as he climbed the ladder to his lofted bedroom, as crisp and lifeless as the grass in the clearing.