Kyuse was getting better at the whittling. Not so much at catching fish, but he wasn't sure how much better he wanted to be at that - he was getting very, very tired of fish. He needed to find some edible plants and start growing those out.

Strictly speaking, he could probably just start eating things, and see what happened; at the seventh ascension, even as a magus, he should survive most any natural poison, if unhappily and maybe unconscious for a while while he recovered. But that wasn't something he wanted to try doing unless he found no other choices, and it certainly wasn't something he was inclined to do just because he was tired of eating the same meal, day after day, week after ... how long had he even been out here? Two weeks? Three? Had it been a full month yet?

At least he'd know when the season changed, as the leaves falling, or even an early snow as sometimes happened in the central forest, would be a pretty good giveaway, regardless of how poorly he'd done so far in tracking time. Thomas examined the small row of wooden figures he'd been whittling; he'd put the older work into the drying pit.

That, at least, had been a success; each fire dried out the wood for the next. He'd also started producing some charcoal from the bits and pieces of dried wood he didn't fully extract, which, while it was the basis of the design for the pit, he hadn't actually expected. For now he woodwarped himself a lopsided, bark-covered barrel, as well as a heavy cover that sat on top of it, which he was storing the charcoal in.

He'd taken to wearing only a simple loincloth; he definitely didn't want to go naked, but between the strip of cloth, his fur, and his tail, he thought he wouldn't be entirely inappropriate if somebody might happen by - not that they wouldn't try to kill him anyways, as he didn't look human, but it was his standards, not theirs, he cared about. Besides, the fur was kind of warm. He'd cut all his spare clothing apart to make the simplest garments, using a claw, as his knife blade was now perpetually sticky with sticky sap residue, which he couldn't entirely remove. He had kept the clothes he'd arrived in, however, kept folded on a shelf.

His other major project now was creating a more solid boundary for his little section of forest. He had an idle thought that maybe somebody would pause before hitting him with an arrow, if they thought he was somebody's animal, and he'd begun with a fence of living wood that encircled the area, following the trees on the outskirts. He couldn't exactly make a gate, so he'd left a gap where the forest went between glade and river, as well as leaving himself a path to both the glade and the river.

He'd also spent several hours casting Nurture, over and over, on the brambles of the glade and river, leaving his own paths into each area alone, so the brush was thinner and traversable there; other than those two paths, which now formed trails from his constant passage, the brush was impassably thick now. His time in the glade was mostly spent hunting for some kind of recognizable edible plants; he thought he'd found something that might be one of the many varieties and cousins of mint - it smelled right, and tasted right, although he spit it out - but it didn't exactly go well with the fish. Other than that, he'd found three varieties of berry, but hadn't ventured to try eating any of them yet.

He did feel like he had worked through some of the past few years, but there was a lot of baggage to unpack there, and he mostly avoided thinking about it. Silvas had been increasingly terrible as she had grown more and more comfortable with the power she held. Right until that comfort had led to a mistake, and her death. He felt guilty about the relief he felt that she had made that mistake; the whole thing had been his own fault. His hand moved to the chain around his neck, and jerked away again.

---

Avers left with four jars of now-filtered beer - it did indeed taste much better filtered - and a shopping list. John had been correct in assuming the jars would be worth more than the beer itself.

And back to the manor, which felt ... empty. John had found he could pick the landing of the tower the door opened into, if he had been there before, and spent his evenings climbing the stairs. It got easier, as he went up; these were muscles he wasn't sure he'd ever given this kind of workout before. John could walk all day, but an hour of climbing stairs left him completely bushed in a way walking through the actual bush had never managed.

John didn't have a particular goal, he just enjoyed watched the sunset through the windows, completely unobstructed by anything, the horizon forming a smooth disc in every direction. It was also interesting seeing the shadows of clouds on the forest. Maybe seeing the top of a cloud could be a goal? If the tower kept going. So far it showed no signs of stopping.

He continued farming, albeit only eldergrass - he had a very healthy stockpile of his fuel pellets now - and stockpiling the grain. John tried a few more experiments with trying to make bread, but had no luck at all there; he just ended up with hard, dry biscuits, or, when he tried cooking it for less time, hard but still wet biscuits. That had been an interesting culinary experience which he had no desire to repeat. Maybe he should hunt down a baking book, but he really couldn't bring himself to care that much about the failure to make bread. Instead, he stockpiled the grains against the day Avers returned with barrels, and filled a couple of large stew pots with flour, having nothing else to store it in.

Where John's mornings were spent farming, evenings were spent climbing stairs; his afternoons were spent reading. Mostly fiction, of which there was an ample supply, because he was reading for entertainment. He was listless, however, and interrupted his readings frequently to go outside, and just walk in the sunlight; too much time indoors, he knew from personal experience, wasn't good for his mind.

He finally forced himself to investigate the foul-smelling orchard, and was relieved to discover that the rotting scent, against all his expectations, came from the trees themselves; they had odd bulbous flowers which exuded an awful, offal stench. John was surprised to discover that the flowers somehow trapped flying insects inside; not so much that the tree was eating insects, which somehow fit this cursed place, so much as that there were insects at all.

He hadn't noticed any insects in all his time in the estate, including in the considerable time he spent farming, and the discovery that there was a more or less mundane explanation for the fact came as a relief to him.

---

Kyuse listened to the patter of rain on the roof of his treehouse. It was muffled - even the comparatively thin wood of the roof was still considerably thicker than the thin wooden shingles of the Three Isles - but still a pleasant sound. He had to remind himself it was pleasant, because three days of slow but continuous rain had gotten to be a bit much; he'd skipped fishing the first day, but on the second hunger had gotten the better of him. The rain was cold, and his pelt offered little protections.

Worse, the rain collected on the canopy above, and when it fell, it fell in globs as leaves gave way to the weight and tipped down, rather than nice little raindrops. The sensation of one landing directly into his ear had been thoroughly unpleasant, and had made him drop a fish.

It also made it impossible to build a fire, which was the real issue; his dried and drying wood was fine, elevated and under the cover of his house, and he could even get more wood fairly easily. The issue was that the only dry place to start a fire that wouldn't immediately get put out was also underneath his house, which seemed like a spectacularly bad idea.

So he was eating the fish raw, which left him a thoroughly unpleasant mood. The taste was okay - not great, but okay - but the texture was disgusting, as was the thought itself. Not that he hadn't eaten raw meat before, but that had been one of the ways Silvas had tried to undermine his sense of humanity, and the experience had put him more off of raw meat, rather than less.

So he sat in his house, watching the rain fall, tail lashing behind him in an irritation and restlessness that grew worse by the hour.

---

A week passed, and Avers didn't return. John stopped farming, having run out of usable space to store the grain, and his mornings became duller; he began watching sunrises on the tower.

Another week passed, and Avers didn't return. John stopped climbing higher up the tower. He still stepped into the landing to watch the sun rise and set, each morning and evening, but he had lost the urge to see how high the tower went.

Another week passed, and Avers didn't return. John knew he shouldn't be waiting like this; the lad had his own life, and his own work to be doing, and besides which, he had known that the barrels would need hoops from the blacksmith. This wasn't unexpected, he was just bored and lonely.

John headed back to the thirty second landing, and sat on the sill of one of the windows; this one happened to be low enough for him to sit on without climbing. It partly inspired him to stop moving up the endless stairs.

A deep breath in, a deep breath out. He hadn't tried this in a while. Focus on the breathing. Focus on the feeling of the air, of lungs inflating. He felt the air on his skin. He was aware of his clothing. He became an observer.

Time began to pass.

---

Kyuss sighed, sitting up. He hadn't been able to meditate properly in ... well, years now. At least the interminable rain had ceased, and it had brought with it the wonderful chill that marked the beginning of autumn. The leaves were starting to turn, far overhead, but not yet to fall; the endless dark green shade had begun to take on a new radiance, and the canopy itself was a prismatic array of brilliant colors.

He was in a better mood. Part of it was the chill; his fur was been hot, indeed was still warm, and he was getting more comfortable, the colder it got. Part of it was the new colors in the air. Part of it was the scent - he had been in the Three Isles since his ... transformation, and he hadn't tasted the scent of fall with his newly improved sense of smell.

It was glorious. The new colors, the new smells, the weather - he found himself dashing between the trees just for the joy of motion. It was, as he had found himself thinking when he had been trying not to, perhaps the first time he'd been actually experienced anything like joy in years.

Perhaps he had spent too much time indoors, during those long years, and particularly the last four, when his life had been a single room. But even that thought didn't bring him down as it had. The forest was there - his house was here. His house, indeed, had only one problem - and that was that it was below the canopy of the trees themselves.

And so for the first time in weeks, he began on a new project in earnest; he began growing himself a set of stairs, complete with railing. He'd had to start by cutting one of his windows open into a doorway, and then he'd run the stairs up alongside his house, up to one of the three trees supporting his house. There, he ended the stairs in a platform, and grew from the tree a new set of extensions, forming the stairs up to the next tree.

It was slow and very careful work, and not something that could be completed in one day, or even one week; he began with something more like a limb, starting as wide around as he was, and growing straight towards the next of the three trees, moving clockwise. Then, once it was resting on a platform grown from the next tree in line, he began growing the steps up from it, and the rails on either side. Then he began again from the next tree.

He had made on complete loop in the slow spiral, and, looking up, guessed he had another four or five to go, until he started to approach the canopy. He'd need to make the limbs thinner as he ascended, but he had a plan for that, and each day he grew a little bit more of his stairs.

Eventually he wanted to build something in the canopy itself, perhaps pruning and regrowing branches to have something open to the sun itself. Granted it would likely be winter by the time he reached that point, but it was something to do, each day, besides mope and think about the miseries that had brought him here - miseries it was increasingly hard to focus on, with a purpose in mind.

Purpose was what Kyuse needed, he had realized, but he hadn't been able to really get behind one until the season had changed, and his spirit had improved. And then it had kept improving when he had something to fill his time.

He was stockpiling dried wood as quickly as he could, in the evenings, taking wood from more distant trees, as he wasn't sure how much strain the stairs would place on the trio he had designated for his house; it couldn't exactly be good for them.

He had other plans, as well, one of which was what he was currently occupied with, taking a couple of days away from the stairs; he was growing a tube of wood towards the trio, beginning from the tree he had judged closest to the river, just slightly overhead. Kyuss started back from his house, where he had been trying to meditate - the rest still helped with his mana regeneration, even if it wasn't quite at the same level as proper meditation.

His living wood staff helped in the enterprise, and he walked along, tapping the wood to give a burst of woodwarp every few seconds, concentrating on the shape he desired. The tube was much larger than the ones he had made for airflow for the wood drying operation; he could stick his head inside it, like a hollow treetrunk, and it took a constant stream of woodwarp to extend outward.

It bent this way and that, of course. He couldn't do much about that; he didn't want to overburden any one tree, and so it had to run from tree to tree as he went. Kyuse paused, as he reached a tree and made a join, and walked back to the river. The pauses let his mana regenerate a little bit anyways. Kyuse dipped a bucket he had grown in the river, and, climbing up on a little wooden platform he had made, he dumped the bucket into the tube; the end of the tube was open on the top, rather than the end itself.

He sprinted along the tube, then, watching the joins he had made as the water made its way along the tube. Drips fell from overhead in the tiny holes he had left in the bottom of the construction; he didn't care about small amount of water loss so much as what would happen to the tube if there was water in it when a freeze hit. It might still break apart some bark where the rough surface captured some water, but he thought that might just pull the bark up, rather than damage the tube itself. Not to mention insects breeding in it come summer. And besides, it was watering the trees a little bit, which was part of the point.

The newest join between two trees didn't drip water any faster than expected, and Kyuse continued the work. Another tree, another join; he repeated the jog back to the river to run some water through the tube.

Water gushed out from the join; the bark made it difficult to get the seams right. He grew one tube out over the other, and ran the test again. It worked this time. He might need to replace that particular join, later; it was more likely than most to trap water and crack in the winter.

Kyuss began shaping the next buttress in a tree trunk, like a more organic triangle, sloping up out of the trunk of the tree, to form a solid wedge. Then, with a tap of his living wood staff, he started forming the tube, running it back towards the last.

Five more iterations - and a couple of hours to break and try meditating again - and he formed a final buttress, above a large barrel - if the cylinder of wood, still covered in bark, could properly be called a barrel. This was the other purpose, of course - a ready source of water in camp that he wouldn't have to lug back and forth. He walked back to the river.

As he filled the bucket, climbed onto the platform, lifted the bucket over his head and dumped the water in, climbed back down, refilled the bucket - well, as he did that, another project started seeming pretty important. He halted, studying the river. It was moving swiftly enough.

How hard would it be to make a waterwheel in that thing? Could he even make one, using just wood, without grease?

Another task was added to his growing list; Kyuss smiled - or, with a glance down into the water at his reflection, he bared his teeth. Close enough.

---

Avers still hadn't returned, and John was starting to worry about the safety of the lad; it had been more than a month, now. He dressed in his full adventuring gear; he'd taken to wearing more casual clothing about the estate, as there really wasn't call for the cloak, or spun silver at all for that matter.

He walked out of the manor, steeling himself. He had the skill points to spare. He concentrated on Discipline, the skill which governed the application of his strength, and felt the pull as he drew from his sixteen remaining skill dedications. Again. Again. Again. Again.

He walked down the path, breathing in and out in a smooth, continuous process. Clearing his head. Discipline, as a skill, was - well, discipline. Rage was like a fire; it was flashy, and it burned things. But the calm he needed was more like the embers left burning; far, far hotter than the wasteful flashiness of the flames, after the loose material had been ejected and burned away.

John stopped in front of the gate. Breathe in. Breathe out. Strike. His palm struck the metal with a noise like shattering glass, but the metal stood. Breathe in. Breathe out. Strike.

"Stop that immediately, young man." Zyet, who appeared in Jonathon's peripheral vision - either moving quickly, or literally just appearing, John didn't know and didn't care - was glaring at him, as John turned to regard the old man. Gone was the polite "sir", John noticed in his cloud of calm.

"I am leaving. I need to check on my young friend." Zyet's face slowly underwent a transformation, to something less furious and more ... solemn.

"The estate cannot be without its owner."

"I will return." John was surprised to discover he meant it. Zyet's expression didn't change, but his eyes moved to the gate, then to John, then to the manor itself. The old man slowly exhaled, then.

"Let me open the gate, then, sir." There it was. "Don't be more than a couple - and I do mean a couple - of days. Things still haven't ... settled down." John didn't know what that meant, but he had no intention of returning until he found out what had happened to the lad.

"I will make the trip as expeditiously as I may, but I sent the lad out, and I would not he come to harm on my account." Zyet slowly nodded, looking to the manor again.

"I will try to hold things down here, then. I dare not leave at the moment." John slowly revised his suspicious thoughts on the man. Maybe Zyet was human? But where did he spend his time, and to what ends? That mystery would have to wait.

The gate opened. John looked from Zyet to the gate, and gave a curt nod. He then started at a jog down the path he had traversed what now felt a lifetime ago, albeit at the time in a carriage he had not been able to see out of, going over the map he had consulted the evening before when he had begun his planning.

"Be careful, sir, and make haste. The Ingress Estate will not wait long."

The road followed a straight line back to the forest; John followed it until it forked, and took a right. The trees passed him as he moved; he could run, but the jog was sustainable, and he had a long road ahead of him.

Leaves fell through the air around him, dancing in the breeze. The birdsong was sporadic, and infrequent; most having migrated away already, in preparation for the coming winter. Even the usual buzz of insects that permeated the woods was muted and erratic.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Deeper breaths, but he kept a steady rhythm, that he had learned long ago in the military. It had taken a good half an hour to get the rhythm back, but it had come back. His legs had already begun to ache; he was older than the last time. But then, the last time, he'd been wearing heavy armor and carrying his field pack besides. No, he'd just spent too long indoors; even going up stairs, and the morning farming, and the walks he took, had been sedentary by comparison to his younger days.

The road forked again, and he took a left, not needing to think about it. He knew the route he was taking; he'd seen it from overhead, he'd gone over the map. Granted, he'd had to fill in some of the map; the estate, and the road leading to it, certainly hadn't been on it.

Breathe in. Breathe - motion. John didn't halt, didn't turn his head, just moved his eyes. And fell into a crouch, an arrow, loosed an instant later, flying overhead; too far overhead, that had been a warning shot. Bandits? Here? No, he decided, as he rose smoothly to his feet, studying the men and women who stepped out in front of him. Deserters. The way they stood was just ... right.

"Hand over your gold, and weuULK" The woman who started walking towards him had clearly not been expecting his wrist to meet her throat. Neither had John, actually; he'd been trying to use the side of his hand, but she'd stopped walking abruptly to start talking.

Well, that started things off right. One. A flash of light, and John stepped back again, the whistle of a blade passing through air. He stepped right back where he had been standing, and lunged forward, fist meeting stomach. Two.

John was already moving, hearing the whine of another arrow. He spun into a kick; a woman, who was checking on the choking leader, fell as her knee audibly crunched. One. He ducked under - was that a halberd? What bandit used a goddamned - pain. John stepped away, glancing down to the arrow in his thigh. Nothing vital, later. Count, dammit. One.

The leader had fallen to a knee, and John moved around her as a woman came at him with a sword. Two. John tucked into a roll - damn that hurt - to the side. There was a meaty sound, and the woman who had led them had an arrow through an eye. If she hadn't been - no, count. One.

He rose in an uppercut, blood spraying from the mouth of the woman with the sword, who had been distracted by the death of their leader. A bit of flesh struck him on the cheek; part of her tongue. Two. John let himself stagger to the side; huh. No arrow. He had a moment. He kicked sand towards the man with the halberd, who instinctively raised his hands in front of his face, and then kicked the halberd itself, the haft going straight into the man's nose.

And promptly found himself on his back, pain wracking his thigh. Damned arrow. John scrabbled backwards, away from the man with the sword he'd punched in the stomach. Not quite quickly enough; the wild swing had sliced his shoulder.

This wasn't going very well, but he did have a couple of tricks. It took a moment to concentrate, but a glow erupted in the air, like a jagged shard of brightly lit glass, and thrust itself into the swordsman's face. There was no blood; that's not what aether did.

The man with the halberd was winding back for a thrust. Another moment of concentration, John's gaze whipping over, and the pointed end of the halberd came straight at him. Straight at him, but it emerged from the air twenty paces away, straight into the still-stunned archer's chest.

John let the spacial warp die quickly, and the halberd shoved hard back into its wielder's hands, sending him stumbling backwards. Another aether arrow caught the swordsman, who simply collapsed, and John grit his teeth, and threw himself onto the man with the halberd, who had yet to recover.

John wasn't elegant, he was in pain, and bleeding. He just beat the man to death, quickly and efficiently. And then rolled off of him, looking around.

The archer was ... well, he was dead. The leader was definitely dead. The swordswoman would probably survive, if she didn't drown in her own blood; she was on the ground, coughing. He crawled over to her, drew his knife, and slit her throat. She didn't even notice him until the blade bit. He resumed looking around.

The swordsman ... well, he was probably dead. And he'd just taken care of the fellow with the halberd.

John found some coins in their supplies, and took those. He helped himself to their rations, as well, as he dug through their things, before he found what he was looking for.

The spirits stung like a thousand bees, as he poured them over his shoulder. The cut was shallow, but the fighting had pulled it open wide. It should probably be stitched, but whatever his medical skills, stitching his own shoulder wasn't something he was going to manage. He settled for tearing the cleanest cloak he could find on a bandit into strips; he soaked a lump in spirits, and set that against the wound - damn and double damn, that really hurt - and then used the strips to bind the shoulder. It would do for now.

The arrow had struck muscle. Not great for his plans to jog, but he could make do. He considered the wound for a second, and then crawled a few feet. John yanked the arrow out of the leader's head as soon as he could reach it. He wiped the remnants of brain and eye on her pants, and examined the arrowhead. Bodkin, good.

He put his knife handle in his mouth, and pulled. Blinding, throbbing pain. He pulled harder, then gave a yank. With a disturbing biological sucking sound, the arrow pulled free. John only screamed a little bit.

Throwing the arrow to the ground, he pulled the knife from his mouth with shaking hands. He had to wait a moment to stitch anything. He pressed another piece of the cloak to the wound, awkwardly using his other leg to shuffle on his ass back to where he'd left the liquor bottle, and took a long swig from it.

Previous misgivings aside, that had actually gone pretty well. He set the bottle down and held the hand out again, and then took another swig; his other hand occupied with keeping pressure on the wound in his leg. It tasted ... cheap. Cheap, and strong. He wouldn't go blind, at least, one of the benefits of his new path in life.

His stitching, when he felt up to it, was quick and efficient. He washed the wound out with more of the liquor, and washed it again when he was done stitching. Then another gob of cloth doused in the last of the spirits, and another strip of the cloak to tie it all up.

He'd have to pull the dressing off before too long; the liquor would keep it clean, but the cloth would still get stuck in the clotting blood, and worse, the skin would even heal into it, creating a new wound entirely when he eventually had to remove it. He'd seen that happen.

Now that he wasn't immediately dealing with the problems, John wasn't entirely certain if an infection counted as a disease, and whether the hygiene was even necessary, but he'd rather find out that the pain was unnecessary, than find out the benefits of the dedication hadn't worked the way he expected. He liked his leg. And his arm.

And also he'd forgotten about that particular blessing anyways. Really he was just rationalizing actions that had been drilled into him years ago. It hadn't been necessary. Ah well.

John moved to a tree, and slowly, hesitantly pulled himself back up. The leg hurt. A lot. John sank back down. He should have brought the damned staff. His eyes caught on the halberd.

A quick hack job with one of the swords later, he had himself a walking stick. Well, a cane, but that reminded him of his age, so it was a walking stick. John looked at the bodies, debating the merits of pausing to burn them, and losing time, versus continuing on, and maybe adding to the ever-growing problem of the offworlder maggots.

Damned responsibilities. He sighed, and, after failing to get purchase to drag a body using his one good leg, started focusing, simply bending space to drop them in a pile. He'd need to collect some wood, if he wasn't going to half-ass this. So much for the two day deadline.