Gifted

The embrace couldn’t last forever, and I walked down the stairs, each step careful as the wounds on my back tugged and pulled with every movement. I had walked past my bedroom and found the corpse of the goblin gone, but the bloodstain on the floor and broken glass at my window remained. In all the stories, they always talked about the battle and the fighting. Rarely did they focus on the clean up that came afterwards.

On the ground floor, the common room was still half full. The Kellins had remained, nestled in a corner with Jennifer feeding their baby son. She had scratches and bite marks along her exposed arms, but the baby boy looked pristine. Frederick lay next to her, softly snoring — his leg bandaged with bloodstains decorating the fabric and his arm in a sling.

The same sorts of wounds were repeated across the room. Those who remained in the outpost were covered in bites and scratches. Those who fought outside bore slings and bandages marking where they had been struck.

I tried not to think about it too hard as I walked past a large bloodstain on the floor just by the kitchen door. I’d barely known Soren, but seeing him die had still hurt. A life cut short, and a brutal reminder that the world I found myself in was not a gentle one. Gramps and my life here in the mountains had shielded me from much of the darker side of life within my new home.

In the kitchen, I found Etta and her family sitting around the table eating some freshly cooked spiced eggs. The side of my best friend’s head was swollen and purple from where it had been smashed into the kitchen table. Despite being injured, she smiled brightly at me as I walked into the room with Gramps and Mum on my heels.

George had one arm in a sling, but other than that the only mark that was abnormal was the fact that he wasn’t clean shaven. The swordsman sporting a slight stubble that I had never seen on him before. I guessed shaving with one hand could be a little challenging, or maybe he just hadn’t had time.

“You’re okay!” Etta yelled, wincing at her own words as her hand snaked up to gently touch her face.

“You are too,” I said in agreement, eyeing the spiced eggs hungrily.

“I made extra,” Kaylee interjected, noticing where my gaze went and standing to serve up three more plates.

Without thinking, I went and filled a jug, getting Gramps to heat it as I prepared him some tea. Normally I couldn’t tell when he used his aether like that, but I sensed it the moment the spell formed within the jug. My Path ticked up in response, and I hid a smile.

“Where’s Griselda?” I asked as I joined the table, interrupting the quiet conversation between Kaylee and my Mum.

“Her and Martin are still asleep. They umm… were up a little later celebrating their victory. It’s an orcish thing, I think,” Mum answered carefully.

I could read between the lines, even if Mum probably didn’t know I knew about things like that. Still, that meant the blacksmith and his wife might not be up for another hour or two.

“So, what do we do now?” I asked.

“Clean up as best we can. Magatha should be by soon to see if we survived the night. We’ve already used all the Greater and Lesser Healing potions she left with us,” Gramps answered between mouthfuls of egg and tea.

I looked at my empty plate and food, realising there would be more Scar Rejuvenation potions in my future. The sweet berry flavour had always gone so well with breakfast that I thought I might see if I could teach Mum how to make pancakes.

In silent agreement, we all started drifting away from the table as we finished our food. Kaylee and Lucille focused on ferrying furniture back to their nearby home. George had tried to help until he had been forced to sit down by Kaylee. Instead the swordsman was relaxing near the obstacle course and watching over Etta who had decided that she would help by picking pieces of bone out of Mum’s garden and collecting them in a basket. I jumped in to help her so I didn’t miss it when George started casually smoothing out the backyard and removing the earthen bulwarks and pits. The process was slow as he was clearly conserving his aether and taking his time, but the shifts were obvious. Either way, it was more steps in my Path of Aethersensing.

Griselda and Martin joined us not long afterwards, working the wooden stakes out of the ground and piling them off to the side where Griselda took a hatchet to them, breaking them up into firewood.

When Gramps arrived, he and Mum went into the field beyond the Bulwark and started piling bones into baskets of their own, making trip after trip as they brought them back towards the outpost only to pile them into a pit that George had carved out for them. Etta and I added our own small offerings to the pile, though my eyes did keep drifting up to the sky — just in case.

Two of the mining families had come back to help clean all the dead rats out of the outpost as well as scrubbing up bloodstains. I had been worried that the wood wouldn’t give up the splatters, leaving them forever as reminders. Once again, I was shown how little I knew about this world as I got to witness one of the women literally pull the blood remnants out of the wood and into a wet rag. Lifestyle Skills were a thing, and everyone had at least a Minor Aether Core, so of course there would be people with simple quality of life Skills.

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I was just thankful that I wouldn’t have a constant reminder of where Soren had been killed or how I almost died in my room.

Magatha did stop by, though only long enough to check on everyone. When she left, she promised to return with some Minor Healing potions to help finish off any remaining wounds; some Scar Rejuvenation potions for any who wished to buy them — which Mum and I did; and finally some basic Disease Warding draughts for anyone who had been bitten by a rat. That was over half of us and surprisingly the Hedge Witch had offered them for free.

When Magatha left, Martin went with her. I couldn’t help but notice he carried a very large sack on his back as he walked down the road with the Hedge Witch, and wondered what that was all about.

Gramps vanished inside for a while, and it was only when he returned for lunch that I realised he had gone to fix the window to my room. Piece by piece, with many hands making light work, we repaired the damage done to the outpost and its environment.

The same could not be said of the people. Our wounds and scars would take weeks to heal, even with the alchemical assistance of a certain Hedge Witch. I didn’t see any of the Pick Pack and wondered if the surviving miners might have had a change of heart about their silver mine after fighting for their lives.

I was dead wrong.

That night, with the common room once more returned to normal and the fireplace roaring, the whole community, excluding Magatha, gathered to share dinner. The tables were filled, but there were clearly people missing. Brin sat by her mother, and I realised she had lost a father as well as a brother. Her eyes were red rimmed from crying. Her mother looked similar, but kept her back straight, and I was wondering how that would play out with the mine. Would Brin and her mother leave our community?

I got my answer when I eavesdropped on a conversation between two of the surviving miners and Brin’s mother. The men had asked her to oversee the storage facility and manage the guards as her role for keeping her husband’s stake in the mine. She had readily agreed with tears in her eyes.

I was sitting by the fire with Etta when Brin joined us. Her orange hair looked like flames in the reflected light of the fire, and her blue eyes bored into me as she stared at me with a burning intensity.

“You killed it, the one that killed my brother?” she asked quietly.

All around us the adults continued to talk in hushed voices, celebrating that they were alive while mourning the ones we had lost.

I looked back at Brin, Etta clearly watching our interaction, and nodded. “I did.”

Brin tensed and I thought for a second she was going to try and punch me.

Then she blurted out, “Teach me!”

It was the dumbest thing I had ever heard.

“You don’t need me to teach you, you need Etta’s dad to teach you.”

My redirect was perfect as Brin spun on the fur rug to face Etta. “Would he?”

“Maybe,” Etta hedged. “I can ask him.”

Brin literally begged, and Etta stood up to go ask her Dad. I turned back to the fire letting the noise of the room wash over me as I considered what I would do next. I vaguely heard Etta return and say that Brin could come train with us, but I wasn’t really paying attention. The future beckoned, and I needed a plan.

My plans for becoming a mage had improved significantly, but a Lesser Aether Core was still the bare minimum required. I wanted more than that. My expanded capabilities with aether meant that my Path of Aethersensing, further aided by my Gifted attribute, could potentially be finished within the year.

My new problem was going to be my number of advanced attribute slots. I only had one free, which I would fill with Aethersensing. Gramps was pretty confident the fourth Tier of the Path of the Completionist would reward me with an additional slot. However, I would need five hundred steps in the Path to hit that Tier and even at a sixty percent bump from Gifted, that meant completing — I paused to do the math — something like twenty-two more Paths. That was not a small amount of work, and I had some serious doubts about whether I could manage that much by the time I turned twelve.

My mind returned to the Path of Soulstealing. So far it had purely improved things related to Aether. Was that all it did? Even if it didn’t do anything else, how would I progress it and did I want to? That thought made me realise that I was going to have to come clean with Gramps about the Path and my new Lesser Aether Core sooner or later. Eventually, he would notice my improved aethersensing capability. I resolved to talk to him about it once life had returned to something resembling normalcy.

The rest of the night passed in quiet solidarity. The Kellins were the first to leave, making the excuse that they needed to put their son to bed. The Horndale Mining Co families followed shortly afterwards, slowly drifting out to cross the road back to their homes. Brin demanded a promise from us that we wouldn’t start training without her. I couldn’t help but notice how hard she tried not to cry as she said it. Etta agreed while I just nodded.

Then it was Etta’s turn to go, waving goodnight as she left for home with her Mum and Dad, Grandma Lucille trailing behind. Finally, it was just Griselda, Martin, Gramps, Mum, and I. Their home was a bit farther, and they had decided to stay one more night and return in the morning. I thought I was about to be whisked off to bed when Griselda motioned me over.

Griselda stared hard into my eyes, her bare arms scarred with bite marks that seemed to bother her not at all.

“They tell me you fought an enemy alone, and won. Showed me the body, a knife, right here.” She patted her chest.

I nodded, not sure what to say.

She lifted one of her pale green hands to her mouth, biting down on the tip of a finger till it bled, then reached out and drew a red line down my cheek.

“You are a warrior now. We will train with axes again.”

It wasn’t a question, but a statement. All I could do was nod as I tried not to look at my Status and the Boon listed there. Griselda was more right than she knew.