Chapter 463 - New Beginnings

With the bulk of his construction done, Simon spent a lot of the spring helping other members of the community with their herds. This wasn’t because he wanted to get on their good side, either. It was because this was a trade he knew very little about, and with Millie heavily pregnant now, she couldn’t exactly teach him about lambing or shearing.

While the valley had more farmers than herdsmen, it had enough of both that Simon was able to secure promises of enough ewes and rams to start his own flock in return for silver and labor. So, in those weeks, as the snows melted, he got a first-hand look at how to care for a flock, which was an interesting experience.

He helped to birth and shepherd them. He even learned to shear them, though he did more watching than doing there. The most involved he got was when three sheep vanished to goblin predations. Then Simon quietly hunted down the monsters to the little crag they were turning into a den, and smoked them out. Killing those who had chosen escape over suffocation had been a quick and nearly bloodless task.

The ears were worth a handful of silver to the count’s tax collector, which was enough to offset the minor wounds he’d received, but the real reward was in goodwill. Simon received countless beers that season, along with a parade of housewarming gifts from grateful families.

“It’s nothing,” he insisted. “Anyone would have done the same,” but that didn’t stop the other farmers and ranchers from gifting him slabs of smoked bacon, racks of lamb, blocks of shepherd's cheese, and hanks of yarn to show their gratitude. There was even some talk about forming a militia, so that he could train the other men of the region, though Simon deferred, insisting that he had no time for such a sweeping project until his first child was born.

In principle, Simon liked the idea of training a small group of men to fight, though given the shape that most of them were in, crossbows would have been a much better choice than longswords, but he didn’t tell them that. Instead, he leaned on their growing regard for him to expand his tiny herd.

It wouldn’t be enough to keep him and his wife fed this year, or next, but he could see how it could grow into a livelihood in short order, even if it felt strange to measure his wealth by the size of his flock. Of course, Simon had to build somewhere for them to stay, so they wouldn’t wander off at night. For that, he created a small stone pen with a shed and a wooden gate. It took weeks to build, but if he hadn’t worried about the discovery of his magic, he imagined that he could have built the low stone walls in a single evening.

It would just be an altered magic circle, he decided as he split stones with his chisel and heaved them onto his sledge. The ring would dictate the path with the word of boundary, and then the words of earth and creation would activate when I powered them, and boom, instant paddock.

He didn’t do that, but he promised himself he would when the time came to create his cellar. Now that he’d been learning from his fellows, he really wanted to build a small place to age cheese in addition to all of his other eventual goals.

Besides that stone pen, Simon got few long-term projects done during this time, which gave him plenty of time to brood about his Charian revelations. Since he’d discovered that Brin had gone to war with Charia on the vampire level, he’d wonder what could have possibly caused that, since some version of him was the king when it had happened.

A war with the Murani wouldn’t have surprised me at all, he thought as he watched the flock graze, but this?

The book provided a ready answer; Simon had been trying to civilize and modernize both nations, but one had decided to take a different path. He had no idea how much any of that screwed up Helades’ plan, but he was well past caring about that now. He was going to make the best future for this world regardless of her grand design.

Nothing good would come of letting the Murani win, he reminded himself, even if that seemed to be her preferred goal.

Despite helping him less with these things, Millie was always excited when he came home, and she was always thrilled at the work he’d done. They didn’t yet have a bathtub. However, each day, she would scrub him with a rag and a bucket of warm water while he told her about his day, and she was thrilled by each new development.

Their dog, Graven, was still quite young, but he could help Simon herd the animals now with some degree of success. The bigger sheep were immune to his bullying and barking, but they were perfectly happy to flee to the safety of their pen each night instead of risking the wind and the dark of the surrounding grasslands.

The official page where the author publishes the story has this chapter, while this copy was reproduced without approval.

It was a simple little two-room life, filled with affection and simple pleasures. Then the contractions came.

Simon had been waiting for that. He’d consulted a midwife, and Delora had been making regular house calls every few weeks. Simon knew a great deal about healing and had made sure to carve both a wand of healing as well as a talisman of strengthening and curing to deal with any possible complications that might come up, but even so, he’d rather put a professional with dozens of births under her belt and a warm aura in charge of such a delicate moment.

When the time came, she banished Simon from the cottage and took over the care of Millie with no one but her apprentice. That worried Simon, and he paced back and forth in their front yard along the fence edge while his dog followed a few paces behind.

Simon’s windows weren’t glazed, so he could hear the grunts of pain and occasionally shouted commands ordering Millie to breathe. Simon did a lot of breathing himself, following those same instructions in a bid to stay calm.

Because of the lack of glass, he couldn’t just hear what was going on inside: he could see it, to some degree, thanks to the way that the auras of those inside leaked out through the slats. He saw Millie’s fear and pain. He heard it too.

Giving birth wasn’t a quiet process, and even as he paced that much faster, Millie’s cries tugged at his heartstrings. He wanted to be there by her side, but the midwife wouldn’t allow it, and truthfully, he’d probably just be in the way.

Despite the fact that he knew none of the gods in this world, save the one that had put him here, was real, he offered many of them prayers over the next few hours. He even whispered a few words to Helades, hoping she’d be impressed by his humility and gratitude, if nothing else.

Gods didn’t answer prayers, though, and they didn’t intervene in mortal affairs. They have people for that, like me, he noted. Thinking about gods like that made him wonder a little more if the Oracle was a goddess. She stood outside of the world, after all, so as not to interfere with her grand vision, and the ripples she made sending people home with the prophecy were discrete and controllable.

“I need to be more like that,” he murmured to himself during a lull in the labor taking place a couple of dozen feet away. “She looks at the whole board and makes a single change, like a pool shark, rearranging the board how she wants it.”

That’s almost certainly how Helades did it, too, he realized. She just let people loose on the world to achieve her goal; he just didn’t agree with it. But what happens when someone reaches the end? he wondered, though not for the first time. What if someone gets to level 99 tonight? What happens to me?

Simon had no idea what would happen then. Would the world end? Would they all fold into one? Would things proceed as they were now, only for his pseudo-immortality to come to an end when he died? The contract probably spelled out that the reality knot would remain intact, he realized, though he’d have to review it. Somehow, though, he felt sure that if the Pit was over for anyone, then it would be over for everyone.

Simon found that idea disturbing, but before he could say why, exactly, his wife’s screams got louder, which derailed his thoughts entirely. He peeked in through the window and saw with his own eyes that everything seemed to be fine, but the labor was clearly reaching a crescendo.

The tension had built throughout the evening, but in those last few minutes it became tangible. That primal, fearful energy only dissipated when a high, thin cry split the night.

That was a relief for Simon. It wasn’t just the signal that it was over, or that everything was going to be okay. It was also when the midwife allowed him to re-enter his own home and see his wife and newborn daughter.

“She’s beautiful,” Simon agreed, stroking Millie’s damp, lank hair. He meant the little girl, but he said it with a soft smile and a direct gaze so that his wife would know he meant both women.

While they talked briefly, he slid his talisman of lesser healing under her pillow. She didn’t look like she needed it, but it would help her recover faster, and it was innocuous enough that if the midwife found it, it wouldn’t mean anything to her.

While Millie listened to him, she didn’t exactly hold up her end of the conversation. She was exhausted and barely looked at him. Instead, she was transfixed by the squalling infant. Simon didn’t blame her. Their daughter shone like a star, and while she dimmed visibly over the evening, taking on a more normal glow, Simon knew then and there that she’d never stop shining in his eyes.

He would have been content to stare at tiny Mirah clutching his finger all night if the midwife hadn’t shoed him away.

“You can visit them tomorrow,” she insisted. “The girls need their rest now, and we can’t be having the menfolk wear them out. You can come back tomorrow, and not before.”

“Of course,” Simon agreed. They did need to rest, and he didn’t need to stay; their auras already told him that. So, with a final kiss on the head of both mother and daughter, he left. Then he saddled his horse and rode into town. Some part of him wanted to sleep right there on the doorstep to make sure he was there for them, but he felt the need to share the news and have a celebratory toast or three with whoever was still up in Burlwick at this late hour.