…Chop…Chop…Chop.

“Done” I exclaimed.

With that last piece of wood chopped, all my wood for the Winter was sorted out for the coming season and I didn’t have to worry about going cold in the upcoming months.

I chucked the wood onto the pile under the little firewood shelter I had built some years earlier, right next to the side of my shack, nice and convenient.

Now done for the day, I left my fresh pile of wood where it was and went off to return my tools to the barn. As far from any sort of reproach that I am, I don’t let myself become slovenly.

As I walked back from the barn to my shack to make dinner for tonight, along the way, I gazed over my land, all that I had done in the 12 years I had been here, and felt the swelling satisfaction of pride that comes from anything you make yourself.

My fields were ripe and growing as they filled most of the area I’ve worked on over the years. Covered with many various types of produce, all of which I have mixed and matched as long as I’ve been here too, into as many different dishes and meals that I could come up with.

Besides the fields there was my barn, my workshop, my well and my animals out grazing in the wild grass paddock I had fenced off, but had yet to tame. Not like I needed to though. I had prepared well all those years ago and everything I had ever done since has already made me well above self sustainable.

Life was good. Quiet, but still very good. No one ever visited this place as no one knew me, and I never saw anyone except for on the very rare occasions where I left the farm to pay taxes, buy or replace a broken tool, or whatever else I might need from the outside world that I couldn't find or make myself.

Now stepping through the door of my shack, updated from the first one into this new mud brick upgrade that kept out the elements much better, I went over to my pantry and picked out a few vegetables, some water, some herbs, and a fish I had caught and smoked afterward from the river a few days earlier. With these farm fresh ingredients, I went about making a fish stew.

Cooked and ready after about an hour, I cleaned everything up while I left the stew to keep warm over the fire. Once the kitchen was in order again, I ladled some out into a bowl and took it outside onto my porch to settle down and eat as I watched the sunset over the farmstead.

The ending hours of the day still had a summery warmth lingering about and in a rocking chair I had built for myself some years prior, I sat down and enjoyed my dinner. A delicious dinner if I must say so. After dinner, I fished out a flute from a chest beside me and went about playing a tune that I had only recently composed myself.

As I had planned out many years ago, I was now a fairly able musician, capable with flute, Klo (the metal xylophone thing) and my own smooth voice, a gift passed down to me by my mother that I had finally made good on.

I blew the tune over the fields through my lips and watched as the moths and other bugs buzzed about in the dying light of the day, and felt at peace.

Much had changed since I had first arrived.

The first few years had been tough, no other way of putting it. When cultivating a new piece of land for the first time without the luxuries of modern technology, not to mention no one else around to help you out, everything can be a struggle.

At the beginning, I just focused on clearing out farmland so that I could have bare soil, enough of it to grow enough food for myself before my initial supplies ran out.

I lopped trees, removed vegetation, uprooted grasses, cleared stones, ploughed dirt, planted seeds, pulled weeds and killed pests and all the other animals that came at my crops for the coming years until finally, I had managed to bring it to the level it’s now at today.

I of course still have to do these things everyday, however it's now done in a much lesser and easier manner compared to before now that the groundwork has been laid. But all that work was simply the first step in the raising of my new farm, the next few being not any less tough to accomplish.

Next I ventured out further into my land and set up a perimeter, now all marked out by strong and sturdy wooden fences. After which I built the barn, my workshop, made my new mud brick house, dug the well (the winters were just too cold and all the streams froze too much for me to go about cutting through the ice sheet) and did everything else that lay in between.

It was only 5 years earlier that all of the groundwork was done and the farm finally started looking respectable. After that… I started investing my time into other projects.

The one thing I had plenty of was wood, all around me. And so when the days started having spaces in the middle of them I began starting my long onhold, long planned and long awaited new vocation. In my free time, I began cutting down trees to use in my opening attempts at making my own bows and arrows.

It was tough at first because I naturally had no idea where to start. I remembered from the before that there were four main bow types; the longbow, the recurve bow, the compound bow and the crossbow.

Compound bows were immediately out of the question. They were the type of bow modern professionals used back on Earth for competitions and were way too fiddly for me to configure, made from specific parts manufactured by special machines, way outside my grasp. I didn’t even bother thinking about how to try and figure out how to make them.

Crossbows may be possible down the line, and might be a necessity if I ever cross paths with any sort of magical beast, something that I’m sure with my lifespan is simply an eventuality somewhere down the line. But I put it on the backburner for later when I had already made some headway with my new craft.

Longbow and recurve bows though, I could work with those.

For longbows all I need is to basically fine tune a curvy piece of wood. Recurve bows, with their sorta of “S” shape at both ends might need a bit of tinkering and fiddling around, but the means to manufacture them I’m sure I can reason out eventually.

So, with my goals in mind, I set off to go out into the surrounding wilderness and collect as many different types of wood as I could find. The next few months were spent collecting somewhere short of a hundred different types of wood all from the surrounding area, which was then followed by a slew of tests conducted on all of them.

The results of my tests weren't too bad. The wood I needed needed to be strong but also flexible enough to bend and not break under stress. I found four different types of wood that fit the criteria well enough and at the next opportunity cut down some of their tree branches to go about carving into some bows.

I spent the next months, when I wasn’t farming, doing just that. While also carving and whittling down other types of wood that I had found that I thought fit well with how an arrow should be like.

The arrow tips for these were a bit of a conundrum to tackle as I didn’t have any metal let alone a forge to cast and temper them with, so I had to resort to the old ways of using bone and stones, sharpened to deadly points for my new arrow heads, at least for the moment anyway.

With the passage of time and a bit of hard work a few bow prototypes were finally made and ready sitting in my workshop, along with a stockpile of arrows to test them all out with. However, I was still missing the last thing to make the bows complete.

I was missing the bowstring.

This was a bit of a problem for me. The material I needed had to be thin, strong, not elastic so as to force the bow to bend (preventing the string from snapping), and also be resistant to the elements.

Out in the boonies, I had nothing like that at all. So reluctantly, after I stocked my livestock with enough food and securely locked away all my property, I left my farm to return to the big city with the hope of finding something that matched my requirements.

The next two weeks were spent on the road, all the time hoping that nothing untoward would happen to my farm while I was away. But ultimately at the end of my journey, I was standing on the outskirts of my old home.

It had been 7 years by that point. 7 years since I had left the city to its ruin and wreckage, to recover and lick its wounds from.

Despite the calamity it had endured only a few years earlier, the city was actually faring quite well to be honest. It was certainly not back to the state that it once was, but just as the two times it had been hit before by monster waves the city was recovering quickly, coming back to life, better and stronger.

The reason this was happening was because though the Coalition was all powerful here in Calzyn, it could also be all merciful. Monster waves had occurred in sums of millions across the world over the millennia, leading to the Coalition having a good disaster support fund and policy for when these events occurred. A policy they upheld, a way of them keeping humanity and their settlements alive and strong in the face of magical beast insurgencies.

I didn’t really care about that though. I only hoped that the economy had recovered to the point that the shops that were around were selling what I was looking for.

It took me a few days, navigating the changed streets and the new layout of the city, but I found what I was looking for in the end, a string made out of a magical sort of hemp that had all the properties I was searching for.

I jumped at the buy and bought as much of the string as I could much to the seller's delight, and the deal we agreed on wasn’t half bad for me either.

Happy with my prize and eager to leave, the next day I left the city at daybreak, carrying my bowstring in my pack as well as a good few bottles of liquor and spirits to last me on my farm for a while and to add to Elde’s flask.

When I did get back, after making sure that the farm was alright, I immediately set about completing the construction of my first round of bows with the addition of their bowstrings. Proceeding to then take them out along with a couple of self made quivers full of my personally made arrows and try my aim out on a few trees.

I was excited. This had actually been the first ever thing that I had actually crafted with my own two hands (excluding the barn and other farm structures) and who as a young boy didn’t fantasise about archery anyway.

I know I did. I made a rough looking one out of a rough looking branch and a few dozen rubber bands as a kid and had a hell of a lot of fun with it, firing off sanded down twigs in the backyard at targets painted on backyard fences.

Good times.

And this was just the same. Only a few lifetimes later.

Finding a tree with some clear distance between it and myself, I set down my quivers and withdrew an arrow. I laid it across my, admittedly, imperfect bow, held the arrow against the string, pulled it back, aimed… and fired.

The arrow… completely missed.

But of course I was naturally expecting that.

So I tried again, and again, and again. Before I moved a bit closer and tried again, and again, and again. Before I moved closer, tried, moved closer, tried again and kept doing it all again and again until when I was only a few metres away… I hit the tree.

The suspense had most certainly disappeared by that point, but I was happy anyway.

It was a start.

I tried out the other bows I made along with the other arrows, mixing and matching them all together into all the different types of combinations until the time came that the afternoon light began to disappear and dinnertime was soon approaching.

I picked up my creations and carried them back, reviewing all the things I could change and the adjustments that could be made and what felt right while I was shooting and what didn’t, the deliberations not even ending as I laid down in my bed for the night, excited for the next day.

Obviously the next day came around as did the next week, the next month and the next few years, and in all that time I have been improving my bow and arrow craftsmanship as well as my own skill in archery.

That hasn’t been all that I’ve been doing of course. I’ve worked on my musical aspirations as well, writing and practising songs with the flute and the Klo alongside my own baritone.

I’ve also been working on the side making a kind of lute/guitar. My work with it is progressing along too, helped by some of the books on musical theory I had read developed by the musicians and musical sorcerers of the Pleasure Association while I was at the Side Branch.

But of course, there’s something I haven’t mentioned yet, the most important thing you might even say.

When I left for my new land I had four goals; work the land and make myself sustainable, craft bows and arrows and develop my own skill in archery, work on making myself a capable bard and even develop my own stringed instrument, and of course…

…perform Baptisms.

Unfortunately on that front, there have been some issues.