Weeks passed while I made slow but steady progress on my home and, more importantly, stayed out of any life-threatening situations. My major accomplishments during this time were a smokehouse and a pit trap to accompany it. Despite sturdier construction, the smokehouse was just as ugly as the outhouse, though that was mostly because I used a lot of dirt and clay for the walls. Additionally, while testing new ways to use my magic, I found a way to firm up the dirt walls of both my pit trap and the smokehouse. I basically just bound the dirt together, making it more like stone. This yielded a point of Earth Attunement as well as another Skill level:

Earth Manipulation has advanced to Level 2!

The evenings I spent making a new set of clothing out of the various hides I’d been collecting. It was frustrating work, made more so because the best thread I had was short strands of sinew from the groundhogs. I considered putting off sewing until I’d caught a deer or two, but between gathering food and all the construction work, my body and Mana were both exhausted by the end of the day, so my evenings would otherwise have been wasted. On the bright side, my constant activity gave me another point in Endurance and extracting the sinew gave me a level:

Animal Processing has advanced to Level 2!

* * *

“Whatcha doing?” The question came from behind me, making me drop my axe in surprise, though thankfully not on my foot. It was Zelkie, who had somehow managed to sneak up on me once again.

I sighed. Isn’t it obvious? “Chopping down some trees.”

“So it’s not some sort of an odd musical thing?”

“Uh, no.”

“It’s just that you don’t seem to be cutting into it very much and were mostly just making noise, so I had to wonder. Say, do you want some help? I can knock down trees no problem.”

Zelkie stuck a claw out, pushing a nearby tree that must have been at least three feet in diameter. Zelkie’s other claws dug deep into the ground. There was an ominous creaking sound as the trunk bent, then roots started pulling out of the ground, sending dirt into the air. The tree toppled over, along with two more behind it. Thankfully I was well away from all the carnage.

Zelkie shook the dirt off, then said, “See? No problem at all.”

“Right, uh, thanks. Those trees are too big for me to move or chop into firewood though.”

“Firewood, so lots of little pieces? Can do!”

Before I could reply, Zelkie lunged forward, flashing a row of truly menacing teeth before snapping down on the tree’s trunk. Wood chips started flying, so I shielded my eyes with an arm. When I lowered my arm, the tree was in two pieces and the ground was peppered with shards of wood, some as large as my leg.

Meanwhile Zelkie was spitting out more bits of wood. “Phtah. Wood does not taste good. Oh no, I seem to have gotten some stuck in my teeth.” I watched, stunned, as the dragon spent a minute tilting its head around, contorting its forked tongue trying to pick out the wood. Eventually it turned back back to me. “Would you mind giving me a hand? I can’t seem to get them all. I mean obviously I’m capable of it, but really it’s your duty as my vassal to assist with such matters.”

Vassal now, huh? I suppose it fits, but I’m still not eager to reach into a dragon’s mouth.

“Wait, nevermind, I’ve got this,” Zelkie said, tilting its head back toward the sky. Next thing I knew there was a giant gout of flame at least fifty feet tall. It lasted for far longer than I expected, longer than I could hold my breath for, let alone constantly exhale for. Is the fire being propelled by magic, or can dragon lungs really hold that much air? Maybe they can breath in through their nostrils at the same time. Eventually the fire came to an end and Zelkie turned back to me.

“Ahh, that’s better. How about I use my claws to tear up those trees instead?”

Again, Zelkie began tearing into the felled trunks without any confirmation from me. This time I had the wherewithal to duck behind a standing tree to avoid any wooden projectiles. Several minutes later, I emerged to find Zelkie standing in a circle of carnage. None of the toppled trees remained. Instead, the ground was littered with slivers of wood, none bigger than my leg.

Zelkie turned back toward me. “Hey, that was kinda fun. Need any more trees shredded?”

“Uh, no thanks. That’ll probably be enough firewood to last the winter.” Assuming I could gather it all, that was. “Did you come here for any reason in particular? I’m afraid I don’t have any more mushrooms for you, if that’s what you wanted.”

“No, no reason. It’s just… it’s so boring out here, you know? There’s no one else to talk to. Well, I suppose there’s that one-handed guy, but he’s so serious all the time, no fun. Oh, what was his name? That’s going to bother me. Grub? Gruff?”

“Griff?”

“Yeah, sure. Anyway, I was just looking for something to do. You can only eat roasted bear so many times before it starts to get old, you know? I mean, it’s not like I even need to eat to survive anymore. Well, of course I still eat, there are so many tasty things around, like…” Zelkie proceeded to ramble on about all the various foods around (dragon foods that is—I assumed most of them would kill me), while gesticulating wildly and occasionally prancing about.

When Zelkie finally ran out of foods to talk about, I tried to steer the conversation to some questions that had been nagging at me. “Well, some of those certainly sound delicious. If you don’t mind, I’d like to learn more about dragons, seeing as I don’t know all that much. Would you answer some questions?

“Ooh, sure, I’m quite the expert, go ahead.”

“So, I’ve noticed you don’t really use your wings to take off, do you still need them to fly and is that unique to you, or just a general dragon thing?”

“Definitely unique to me, because I’m awesome and all, you know, and learned a whole bunch of magic. My wings still help to maneuver and when I’m doing loops and stuff, but mostly I just like to stretch them out in the wind. They look great, too. Other dragons have to dive off cliffs or run around flapping to take off, but I have more dignity than that.”

Right, dignity, the first think of when I think about you. Flying would be great though, maybe I could ask for magic lessons? No, not now anyway, Mana is too much of a bottleneck already and none of my attunements would help.

“Of course,” I said. “Anyway, next question: how do you tell male and female dragons apart, or are there even male and female dragons?” Hopefully that wasn’t offensive.

“Dunno,” Zelkie whispered, sitting down and curling their tail around their body. Well, said at a normal human talking volume, but that was practically inaudible compared to Zelkie’s normal speech.

Oh no, I thought, but couldn’t help myself from stumbling on. “So, does that mean you don’t know if you’re…” I trailed off.

“No.”

“How does that even happen?” I really need to learn to hold my tongue, that was not the question to ask.

The silence dragged on, and I worried I’d dug too deep, but eventually Zelkie responded. “I was… I was alone when I hatched, and it was a long time before I found any other dragons. I tried talking to them, but there was all sorts of posturing and fighting for dominance, and I was still young and weak and couldn’t win a single fight, so all I got from them was insults. So I left and got strong. Too strong, apparently, because when I returned I beat them all easily and none of them would talk to me because they were all scared. So I left again, and now here I am.”

“That’s rough.” I had no idea how to respond in any sort of a positive way, and I certainly wasn’t about to try giving advice. Instead, I struggled to think of another subject. I can’t believe I’m trying to cheer up a dragon. “So… what do you do for fun around here?”

Zelkie brightened up a little. “Well, there’s eating, which I already talked about, so I won’t repeat myself.” Thank the gods. “Then there’s flying, which is always fun but not really exciting anymore unless there’s a storm. And… umm…” Zelkie shuffled back and forth a bit before continuing quietly, “I like to carve things out of stone.”

“Like statues? What of?”

“All sorts of stuff, really.”

“How about your most recent work, then?”

“Well, I was going to shape the top of one of the mountains into a statue of myself, because I’m magnificent and all, but any carving out of mere stone would pale in comparison to me, so it didn’t really seem worth it. It’s not like I’m planning on dying anytime in the next few millennia, so it would always be overshadowed by my true gloriousness. Anyway, then I wanted a statue of my friend Svidra, but the mountain wasn’t big enough to make it lifesize. So I settled for making a giant lumbering luphet, ‘cause anything that tastes that good deserves a statue too.”

A friend bigger than a mountain? You know what, I’m not sure I want to know. “Nice, I’d like to see it sometime. Uh, actually, these mountains are a bit too tall for me, maybe I could see some of your other work?”

“Of course, of course,” Zelkie was now back on their feet, ready to start prancing again. “Oh wait, you don’t have wings. You might have some trouble getting to any of them. You know what, these cliff walls are nice and smooth, I bet I could carve something real nice into one if you want.”

“Yeah, I’d like that.” I wasn’t about to turn down some dragon-made artwork to spruce up my home. On second thought, it might not be safe to be around a dragon taking bits out of a cliff face. “I’m planning on excavating some of these ruins though, so please don’t do anything too close to them.”

“No problem. Plenty of cliff here to choose from. It’ll take a while, anyway. Say, why are you living out here, away from the other humans, anyway? They too smelly?”

“Ha, no. It was a bunch of things, but mostly I just didn’t really feel safe or welcome there, what with having no Skills and all.”

“No Skills?”

“Yeah, some people stole all my Skills and memories, and I was dumped here with nothing.”

“Oh, that’s awful. You’re like, basically a hatchingling now, huh? No family either,” Zelkie said, head and tail drooping down before immediately perking back up. “But you’ve got me now, so it’s all working out for you. Really, what more could you possibly ask for?”

We chatted for a bit more, about inane stuff mostly, then Zelkie left, probably to go eat something.

Right, now what am I going to do with all this wood? I wondered, surveying the debris and sighing. Guess I’ll move it all under the overhang. After I make some gloves though, it looks awfully splintery.

So that was how I spent the next few days. During that time, I also managed to catch my first deer in the pit trap, which motivated me to build another pit. The weather had well and truly turned to summer by then, too, so I took to dunking myself in the ice cold lake to cool off during the afternoons.

After that, it was finally time to tackle something I’d been putting off: building myself a permanent house. Just kidding, I put it off even farther. Sort of. My curiosity had finally gotten the better of me and, now that I had a steady supply of food and was at least partially prepared for winter, I wanted to unearth some of the ruins. And whatever was left standing had survived for however many centuries or millennia it had been, so it would clearly make a good start for my home. Or so I rationalized.

Of course, before I could begin large-scale excavation, I needed better tools. What I really wanted was a shovel, but I couldn’t figure out how to make one out of just flint and wood. A wheelbarrow was possible to make with just wood, but with my lack of Carpentry experience or tools, I supposed a basket would be better at least for the short term. Therefore I wove one out of some thin branches and reeds. I didn’t get a Skill, probably because the basket was a real work of art—the sort that makes you stare and question all your life choices. It held dirt, though. Most of the time.

The real advancement I made in my digging technology was a pickaxe. Well, it was more like an adze than a pickaxe, but it’s the thought that counts, right? Apparently not, because when I Identified it, the System called it an “Improvised Stone Tool” (Crude, of course), but what did it know, anyway? I could hit the ground with it and move dirt, and that was really all that mattered.

And hit the ground I did. It was payback, really, for all the times it had tripped me up and bruised my poor behind. I picked a tall but skinny mound by the meadow and just started whaling away at it, occasionally pausing to carry the displaced dirt to the edge of the forest.

Progress was slow, given my inexperience, suboptimal tools, occasional rainstorms, and the continual need to gather food, but eventually I uncovered a structure. It was granite, smooth and seamless. Soon, it became clear that the surfaces I was uncovering were not flat, but rather curved and undulating. Furthermore, the walls and the roof flowed into each other without any clear divide, forming strange organic shapes that reminded me vaguely of a fungus.

Unfortunately, large portions of the roof were caved in. At least that gave me a good look at the walls, which turned out to not be as solid as I had first assumed. Instead, there was a thick outer wall and a thin inner wall connected by a finely honeycombed section. When I first uncovered a cross section, I couldn’t help but marvel at it.

How did they make this? Magic, clearly, but I can’t imagine using Earth Manipulation for things on this scale, nor this intricate. Perhaps they had a spell specifically for creating these walls? Hmm, I am assuming the other buildings are the same, but that could be wrong. Perhaps the others are simpler.

Where’s the granite coming from, anyway? Without this stuff in the middle I would have thought the building was carved directly out of the ground, but maybe they cut slabs elsewhere and melded them together somehow. They can’t have manufactured the stone, especially not so perfectly matched to the natural stone, can they? I’ll have to see if I can copy their work somehow. Later though, for now it’s more digging.

After many sweaty and dirty hours, and more than one morning waking up with a sore back, I finished clearing off the roof of the building, as well as a perimeter by the top of the walls. Luckily the roof seemed to have started caving in sometime after most of the dirt had accumulated, probably because of the weight of the dirt, so the inside wasn’t completely full. Of course, that did mean there were places where nothing but roots held the earth in place, which I found out the hard way: falling. I guess the ground wasn’t happy with my attempt at revenge and felt the need to reassert dominance.

Anyway, as I was clearing out the inside of the building, it soon became apparent that any internal dividers and furniture there once had been had long since crumbled or rotted away. There were still a few windows in the walls. At first, I mistook them for glass, but closer inspection revealed them to be quartz, which prompted further musing about their construction methods. It was the placement of the windows that made me realize the building had at least two stories, and that the builders were probably shorter than humans. In retrospect, the lack of a door should have really given away the fact that I wasn’t on the ground floor, seeing as I kept climbing over the wall to get in and out, but at least I figured it out in the end.

I was disappointed to realize that if I wanted to live there, which I did, I couldn’t excavate to the original ground level, where most surviving artifacts would likely be. If I did, water could start pooling inside and I’d have no way of pumping it out. Instead, I leveled off the dirt slightly above the height of the surrounding meadow.

I wasn’t left completely empty-handed on the artifact front, though. There were stone shelves built into some of the walls upon which I found bits of unidentifiable scrap. Well, they were technically Identifiable, but all the System told me was they were scraps made of various Common alloys, which was supremely unhelpful. I still gathered them, figuring I could trade them to someone in town. Telling some story about finding them on the outskirts of town would probably satisfy anyone that bothered to ask questions. Worst case scenario was being called a thief, but with no victim, even that seemed far-fetched.

In addition to the scrap, I found a handful of copper coins and one silver one. Their faces were all the same: an emblem on one side and some sort of a palace on the other. There was no writing of any sort. Unfortunately, they were utterly useless to me unless I could melt them down on my own. There was no way people wouldn’t notice a foreign currency and ask questions, even though the materials matched the Imperial standard for some strange reason.

The real find, though, was a children’s toy:

Light Bauble (Common): A basic quartz construct that will light up when fed Mana. Frequently used to teach young children to control their Mana under the guise of play.

It was a multifaceted crystal with strange shapes carved on each face. When I channeled Mana at it, the carvings lit up and the whole thing emitted a dim white glow that brightened with additional Mana. However, when I directed my Mana to a specific face (or combination thereof), it would change colors. I confess that I spent much longer playing with it than was strictly appropriate for someone of my age (whatever it was—I had no way of knowing, other than that I wasn’t a “young child”). The real reason I was happy to find it wasn’t the entertainment value though. No, it was because I no longer had to rely on torches to see in the dark. In fact, on the very day I found it, I made a strap to attach it to the back of my hand.

All in all, I was quite pleased with my first foray into archaeology. I gained a couple of potentially useful items and a building that, with a few modifications, could become a home. Not only that, but I had also managed to improve myself at the same time, notably gaining points in Strength, Earth Attunement, and Space Attunement, as well as making steady progress toward Level 8 and in my Mana Regeneration rate.

Status Obfuscated Status Name Keagan Murray Sean Holman Level 7 4 Progress 210/358 122/207 Statistics Health 72/72 39/39 Health Regen (/hr) 3.2 1.8 Mana 124/124 60/60 Mana Regen (/hr) 7.4 3.7 Strength 12 12 Endurance 11 11 Dexterity 12 12 Intelligence 17 12 Perception 11 11 Charisma 10 10 Abilities Identify III Identify III Obfuscate III Observe I Observe I Skills Spear 3 3 Forestry 2 2 Trapping 2 2 Wilderness Survival 2 2 Animal Processing 2 2 Foraging 2 2 Dodging 1 1 Leatherworking 6 6 Carpentry 1 1 Earth Manipulation 2 2 Spells Mana Bolt 9 9 Teleport 12 Create Portal 6 Warp Space 7 Create Pocket Dimension 2 Attunements Space 18 Time 10 Earth 10 10 Fire 7 7 Resistances