This morning I saw Talus holding one of the children. She was wearing my favourite dress of hers and the light hit her in just the right way, she was stunningly beautiful in that moment. Not that she isn't normally, but then even more so. I just watched for a couple minutes, smiling.

On the more practical side of things I didn’t make any quantifiable progress, but I did make progress.

In the evening I got a chance to hold both of the children, and they seemed to like me a lot. Talus was teasing me about how I couldn’t stop gushing over them.

While I was holding Ednar a rather large insect landed on his face, which made him freak out, a lot. Immediately a patch of Astrie basically flung itself onto the child, wrapping him up in armour, one of my designs. The shock of the situation was greatly diminished by seeing the young boy wearing a sundress. After a quick laugh, I reformed it to something more fitting for a baby.

The mere presence of the armour seemed to comfort the child, and removing it made him more nervous and skittish. That is something I understand perfectly, I get the same way.

It will be two weeks before Umi is able to walk around, four before she will be able to speak. Of course, that is assuming she was a normal hobgoblin, she is magically gifted and she might have memories of a previous life on top of that. Every other magically gifted creature born in my grove has recently.

As for Ednar, we have no idea. Humans are one of the last creatures created by Origin, and in fact have only been around for about a decade. It seems to take around twenty years to be fully developed, but unlike most creatures they are able to do things like walk, talk, breed, and even actively use magic long before then, and that last one is no easy feat. according to many people studying them, whose reports Mest has gathered since Tiddol’s evolution, they develop much faster than creatures of a similar intelligence, like elves and dwarves, though they don’t live quite as long as them. They are overall weaker than either the Dwarves or the Elves by an order of magnitude, in fact, they are closer in overall strength to more feral creatures than to other similarly intelligent creatures.

Their success, limited by their youth as a species though it may be, seems to come from their natural instinct to socialize amongst themselves, something almost completely unheard of. Most civilizations are created by intelligent creatures realizing that having a civilization would make everything better for pretty much everyone, or at least themselves, and working to subdue any instinct saying otherwise. Even goblins tribes follow this, with the brightest goblin usually leading the dumber ones. Humans don’t have those instincts to suppress, quite the opposite in fact. They naturally join up with each other and help each other out, even when objectively it would be better to work on your own to do some kind of sabotage. According to the Origin that made them the intelligence and the tool making were accidents that came as a result of that idea, which was later adopted into the final ‘mold’ for humans by the part of the world that governs evolution.

Anyway, enough of that tangent. Good Night Diary.