At noon, under the light of two suns, one natural and another magical, prince Aslanbek gathered the knights and commoners in the square to hear to his speech and proclamation.

"People of Honeywitch. Long have you suffered under the unjust rule of Count Honeywitch. The traitor feigned to give the fief to our neighbors in Coriander, only to double-cross them as well and attempt to establish an independent Duchy. They brought great calamity to our lands and forced our neighbors to do things they did not want to. At my side stands princess Serena of Coriander, my personal friend. We both were caught by this web of treachery and misinformation.

"But no more!" He paused to let the crowd cheer. "Together, we unraveled the plot and captured the mastermind. This woman, Hye-Sung, disguised as a merchant, poisoned the ears of the Count with dark whispers of sedition! She shed not a single tear for her dead nephew, instead of turning on the very city and its citizens! It was by her order that the city burned. Your houses! Wretched scum!"

A round of jeering served as the background music for another round of stoning. Hye-Sung was resilient, probably on the fourth of fifth tier. The stones threw by commoners didn't damage her body but she still felt the humiliation as each stone struck her exposed fur. A few lucky shots drew beads of blood but those were rare. Aslanbek raised his arms and roared. The crowd shifted from jeering at the usurper to clamoring the crown prince's name. Their savior arrived at the city's darkest hour.

A more skeptical eye would tell it was scripted. That Aslanbek chose the day of the raid. How far did a Farseer saw? Nero didn't know.

"But today! Today is a day of rebirth!" Aslanbek continued after the people ran out of stones. "Today Honeywitch shall rise again. A monument to the fallen shall be erected here in this square. And by my dear friend Nero's hands, a new city shall rise before your very eyes!" Aslanbek drew his arms from his waist and up as if he was commanding the earth to rise.

Nero groaned. Give a Royal an arm, they'll claim your soul. He glanced at Crystal for support but her face was as impassive as a cliff battered by the ocean waves. He shifted his gaze and found Sir Botolf next to him.

"Adequate compensation will be paid for your services, Nero. But His Highness begs you understand that the people need homes."

"They can live in the keep," Nero pointed out with a flat tone. "But I'll do it. You'll be also paying for my wife's mana potion services though. I don't use another [Chemist]."

Botolf let out a single chuckle. "Fair enough. Mrs. Altia, we're counting on you."

Altia leaned next to Nero and whispered. "Did you tell Botolf that after yesterday the supply of potions in Honeywitch suffered a sharp drop? The market reacted wildly to the news."

"Sir Botolf?" Nero nudged the knight. "The supply is low."

The knight captain shook his head with a grin. "That's expected. The [Chemist] whose potions His Highness himself praised won't sell for cheap."

"I'll need materials," Nero told Botolf. "I assume all your knights have a dimensional pouch. I'll open a portal to a mountain, you'll bring me the stone."

"It will be as you say," Botolf agreed.

They shut up to pay attention to Aslanbek's speech. The prince didn't stop talking while they were having their private conversation. Nero tuned out the speech and the roaring catharsis of the crowd while Aslanbek rambled on with a completely fabricated version of the fight.

He was full of these power games. Ever since he met the princess in Rafflesia it was a wild sled ride downhill for everyone. From Holmes' machinations to Tyre's manipulations, and now this fugitive life. It all worked out in the end but the wait for all the cogs to turn the correct amount of times was gruesome. He wanted a break. A holiday. Vacation. Spend time with his family, not worry about assassins, about powerful people tugging him one side or another.

From the silence of the crowd, it seemed the prince reached the climax of the story. Did he just say Tyre was stabbed in the back?

"... and thus, Sir Mayleefa, the hero of the Battle of Six Traitors and Shame, avenged prince Tyre who fell into shame by slaying the traitorous elf!" He finished telling some completely distorted tale and the crowd went wild.

The eyes of the people changed. They no longer looked at the nereids and tritons with suspicion. They "knew" that a conspiracy deeply rooted in Honeywitch drove the two countries to fight each other, almost resulting in ruin for both. The only survivor of that battle to still walk the earth didn't rectify the story. Nero could see some people with pens scratching scrolls taking notes of the prince's speech. There were even two troubadours with their lutes trying to find the perfect lyrics to tell the epic ballad.

"Huzaah! Glory to Bast! Glory to Prince Aslanbek!"

A cat-kin knight with a black hood brought down the hatchet on Hye-Sung's neck. The crowd, thirsty for blood, cheered.

The butcher's bill was an expensive one. less than a third of the original population remained. Those that didn't flee the war perished in the fire, the magical conflagration caught most unaware during dinner. The official version was that Hye-Sung herself coated the city in a massive [Siege Fireball], the big sister of what Nero liked to use. With the right metamagic Skills, it was plausible.

That story didn't convince Nero, but he didn't go after the truth. Too bothersome.

Now that Aslanbek had secured Nero's aid in rebuilding the city and ferrying people around, he put the young minnid to earn his Essence. The first service was to renovate the whole keep. All the furniture that survived the crown prince's onslaught was donated to the citizens. Nero knew most knights kept furniture with them, but he didn't expect Aslanbek and his men to have enough to furnish the inner keep entirely.

Serena's soldiers and knights took control of the barracks and Nero built his network of portals there. He used two portals for each passage, one linking to a transition box that was nothing more than a dark tunnel and then another on the end of the said tunnel connecting several places. The first was a tropical ocean where the nereids and tritons could relax in their favored environment. The second opened as a portal high up in the mountains, a plateau in the middle of the range out of sight. Nobody would miss a few tons of stone there. The third one opened in the basement of the royal palace garrison back at the capital.

Altia, Crystal, and Nero took the apartments of the garrison officers and commander. There he put a portal to the shelter so they could come and go whenever they wanted. Altia had a brand new garden shelter to harvest and brew from, Crystal had to don the mask of princess Serena for a while more as she participated in meetings and made a show of supporting the rebirth of the city.

Urban planners, masons, and other specialists necessary to create a city from the ruins were brought to Honeywitch blindfolded through the portal. Some Historians and specialists from the Lyceum came as guests of the prince to help, document, and generate goodwill between the two institutions. Dwarven miners were sent to the plateau to quarry stone while the knights with larger dimensional pouches carried the boulders to the city. And Nero was the leader of the team of earth [Mages] that were reshaping that stone into houses, buildings, and other urban features.

Like sewers. Honeywitch was an old city that never went through the renovations to receive mass sanitation facilities. With a literal clean slate to work with, there was no reason to not build them. Nero also had the opportunity to do some large-scale [Gadgeteering] by helping lay a state-of-the-art grid of Essence conduits and lamps for public illumination. it would only illuminate the main roads and the high-class district and would cost a few thousand Essence - more than if each lantern had its own power supply but that would only invite theft and vandalism -per night to power but it was a worthy investment.

Days became weeks, whole days were wasted with meetings and bickering as each specialist wanted to leave a bigger mark than the other. Nero usually excused himself from these meetings, opting to spend his time turning the stone into standard-sized bricks. A nearly infinite amount of stone blocks were required to make a new city. Plant mages joined the task force to grow trees, grass, shrubbery where necessary.

The other earth [Mages] working with Nero showed him how much of a hack he was. None of them could move as much stone as fast as him, but they all could do more with the stone than Nero. Sculpt, reinforce, even cosmetic changes as shifting the minerals to draw a pattern. And Nero's mana expenditure was through the roof. With specialized high-tier Skills, the other mages could do more for less. He relied on Altia's [Potion Toss] to keep him going.

Nero allowed Huron to work as a supplier for the city, the perceptive merchant traveling miles with each stride through the map room which his son-in-law granted access to, bringing goods and tools from all over the country and its neighbors. To avoid forcing the bereaved townsfolk from selling lunch to buy dinner, he kept his profit margins modest. Modest enough to scare off the vultures dressed as merchants that came to fleece the refugees.

A month after Hye-Sung's execution, Amaryllis used the portal to bring a task force of Adventurers to clear the diseased monsters prowling in the valley. Bast offered two hundred soldiers to retake and man Tyre's castle. Nero later learned that the kingdom's plan was to turn the valley into a March, expanding its borders and claiming that area.

Two months and the city was reborn. Whole blocks were converted into farms, gardens, orchards, and parks. New Honeywitch was a modern, dashing, and beautiful piece of cutting-edge modern architecture. The specialists were paid in Essence or with ownership of some choice buildings in the craftsmen district. Under orders from Aslanbek, Nero waited for those that wished to return to the capital cross through the portal blindfolded before he dismissed the whole setup.

Reading the signs in the air, it didn't escape Nero's awareness that the King hadn't appointed anyone for the fief. Honeywitch had no lord. A deluge of lower nobility and wealthy people threatened to invade the city and claim a slice of it. Two months was too long a period to keep the portal's existence a secret. Work on repairing the train tracks would still take a few months and probably would stop through winter.

Another service Huron did was the introduction of livestock in the shelter. Since Nero had no need to connect his main shelter to a Dungeon anymore, the problem with having livestock no longer existed. Nero's herd grew with each trip. When the first snows of winter fell, he had almost a thousand beasts grazing in the shelter among sheep, cattle, and pigs. A few horses, goats, and a coop with a hundred chickens.

Before more opportunists arrived, prince Aslanbek called a meeting.

They gathered in the meeting room of the keep, the prominent figures in the city, the few crafters, merchants, and high echelon that endured what was coined as "the months of madness" in the annals of the city's century-old history joined with knights of two nations, Nero and his entire family.

"Friends. The work you did to bring this city back from the ashes was superb, and you have my gratitude," The crown prince exulted with a toothy grin. "Honeywitch is alive again and it needs a lord. My father, the King, decided to bequeath such honor to an unsung hero who worked in the shadows to ensure our Kingdom's prosperity. You've seen him downing potion after potion as he moved a literal mountain to rebuild Honeywitch."

Nero felt a dozen stares burning holes in his skin. Aslanbek resumed his speech in a deep bass that captured the attention of him.

"He aided my brother in stopping the invasion. He captured the mad usurper himself. The work of several years was done in two months. It would be impossible without him. By order of King Zander Alexander VI, we shall bequeath the title and fief of Count Honeywitch to Nero of Hom."

Nero fought to keep the groan from reaching his throat. The King surely wanted to bind him to the Kingdom. What better way than making him a vassal? That reward was the pipe dream of half the people in the room, but not his. Only the fact that the Marquess of Wolf Valley was already appointed and inbound to take his castle and the almost-entirely liberated valley kept him from thinking he was being made Count serve as a shield against Coriander's ambitions. But now Honeywitch was no longer a frontier fief. It was a smaller fief because some land on the west side was given to Wolf Valley but it was irrelevant.

While he stayed absorbed into thought without giving the prince an answer, the others in the room were whispering among them. It was Crystal that stood up, curtsied, and answered.

"Our family is overjoyed by the honor, prince Aslanbek. My brother is so stupefied by the offer he can't find the words. That is a big change. Would you allow us some private time to talk among ourselves?"

"Of course. This meeting is unofficial. The decree will arrive in a few days. Gentleman, let's leave the future Count to the counsel from his family."

After everyone left the room, the groan finally found its way into the world, multiplied by a dozen. "I can't refuse it, can I?"

"No," Huron answered. "In their view, only a traitor would refuse such an honor. The King got you roped, I'm afraid. And Aslanbek enjoyed each moment of this meeting. It was obvious from his breathing and heartbeat."

"Yes, we are cornered," Crystal agreed with the merchant. "But there's one way to delay it."

"Delay..." Nero repeated under his breath with a frown. "For how long?"

She made a coy smile. "Several decades, I hope. We can switch the nomination to our parents. This way, as the firstborn son, you'll be the heir. They will still have you bound to the Kingdom but there are several advantages."

"We wouldn't mind," Rhynne beamed. "And with that power, we would be able to settle everyone that's still living in the shelter here in the city. We minnids would have a place to call our own, free of persecution and prejudice. And it has always been Byron's dream to drink tea with the pinky finger lifted," she ribbed her husband.

"Yeah, sure," The [Armsmaster] groaned an octave below his son.

"Are we doing it?" Nero asked just to confirm.

"That or we flee the country to never come back," Huron stated realistically.

"What will you do, father?" Altia asked with a raised eyebrow. She knew the merchant had something in mind.

Huron laughed from his toned belly, "Become mayor, I guess?" He glanced at his inlaws for confirmation. "With my commercial savvy and Nero's portal network, we can make Honeywitch flourish. With a Count's backing, few would dare undermine us."

Crystal grabbed Nero's hand. "There you go. At least you'll know this city you worked so hard to build will be ours."

"You are so looking forward to teaching Nero court etiquette, aren't you?" Altia teased.

"As if you aren't looking forward to wearing fancy dresses and attending court balls," Crystal retorted.

Aslanbek was already expecting the switch and had no objections with making Nero the heir to the fief by appointing his parents Count and Countess Honeywtich. They traveled via portal to the capital where Byron and Rhynne were anointed into the position by the King. They spent the rest of the fall and winter building more houses for the villagers in the shelter, experimenting with making fake vegetables real in Nero's shelters, and establishing their rule over the city.

The city was ill-prepared for winter. With the waves of refugees running away from the invasion some farms were abandoned. Those that weren't suffered under Hye-Sung's brief rule and absurd tax rates. It fell on Nero's shoulders creating food for the city. He spent a lot of time delving the Goblin's Den for food cards and most of the day working his shelters. He barely had the time to admire his conquered loot. Hye-Sung's belt was untouched inside his dimensional pouch but the prince made sure to take the lion's share of the cards stolen by the quartermaster. Most of his time was spent using [Essence Infusion] on bushels of wheat and oats, large pumpkins, and other big vegetables. He found that infusing one ten pound pumpkin was as easy as a two-pound melon.

Some of his livestock was butchered for protein. With aid from another dimension, Honeywitch not only survived but thrived through winter. The population had only praise for their new lords. But winter gave place to Spring.

The season of new beginnings, flowers, card presses, and living with his fairy godmother. It was time to honor his side of the bargain.