Two months had changed Brightwater Isle in ways that everyone on it seemed to barely believe.
Arthur woke before dawn, the way he had every morning since arriving, in the large timber cabin that sat at the edge of the lake on the centre of the island.
The cabin had started as a single room with a hearth and a cot, thrown together in the first week by Arthur and three of Orwin's sons using the tools he had brought from King's Landing.
Now it sprawled outward along the lakeshore wnd looked like a manse in its own right which wasn't surprising considering the man who made it had a combination of [Inventive Genius] and [Carpentry]. Arthur had always kept having ideas on what to add even up until the end of the two months, and with the manpower he had along with the skills he was able to do most of what he wanted.
A second room had gone up for storage. Then a covered porch when the rains came. Then a proper kitchen when Arthur grew tired of cooking over an open fire. Then a bathing room fed by a clay pipe that drew water directly from the lake, which had been the addition that finally made old Orwin stop calling the place a cabin and start calling it a manse, though Arthur still thought of it as temporary.
Everything was temporary until Camelot was built.
He dressed quickly when he got up, pulling on his boots, then buckling Sunset at his hip and stepping out onto the porch. The lake was calm that morning which was a far cry from last night where a storm from across the sea shook their waters. Mist curled along the far shore where the forest came down to the waterline, and somewhere in the trees a bird was singing.
It was a perfect morning, one he found to be a commonality on the island.
Arthur really couldn't wait until his family came here.
Quiet stood at the hitching post beside the porch, already awake, her eyes tracking him from the moment he appeared in the doorway. Arthur crossed to her and ran a hand along her neck.
"Morning, girl. Another beautiful morning isn't it," he said as he continuing stroking her mane. He then pulled an apple out of his side bag and fed it to her. "Today should be good enough though... I think we are finally done."
Without waiting for a response he then mounted up and rode out.
The path from the lake to the southern village was one of the first things he had built, and it was also one of the things he was most quietly proud of. Two months ago there had been no paths on Brightwater at all, only deer trails and fishermen's tracks that wound through the forest in whatever direction the terrain happened to allow.
Now a proper road ran from the southern harbour all the way up through the interior of the island wnd connected all four of the original villages, with a fifth branch that split off near the mountain and climbed toward the shelf where the keep would stand.
The roads had taken three weeks and the labour of nearly sixty men. It had been the first real test of whether the islanders would work with him or merely tolerate him. Arthur had posted the offer on the first day; good coin for honest labour, paid at the end of each week, no exceptions and no arguments about the rate. The rate itself had been set deliberately high, roughly double what a labourer in King's Landing could expect, because Arthur had understood from the start that the fastest way to earn the trust of people who had never had a lord was to prove that the lord was not there to take from them.
The first week, eight men had shown up. Mostly younger men from the southern village, curious and sceptical and watching him closely to see whether the promises matched the reality.
Arthur had worked alongside them from dawn until dark, hauling stone and clearing brush and digging drainage channels with his own hands. He had said very little during the day and let the work speak for itself. At the end of that first week he had lined them up and counted coin into each man's palm personally, the exact amount he had promised, with a nod and a thank you for each.
The second week, twenty-two men had shown up.
By the end of the first month he had more volunteers than he could usefully employ, and Orwin had begun to act as a foreman, organising the crews into shifts and assigning tasks.
Arthur turned Quiet onto the main road and rode south at a slow canter.
The first person he encountered was Brin.
She was standing in the middle of the road where it passed through a stretch of cleared farmland, one hand shading her eyes against the rising sun and the other resting on the head of a massive shaggy dog that came up to her waist.
Brin was the island's only blacksmith, a tall rawboned woman of perhaps forty with arms like ship's cables and a permanent scowl that Arthur had learned early on was simply what her face did when it was at rest.
She had been forging nails and hinges and simple tools in a shed behind her cottage in the western village for twenty years, working with whatever scrap iron the fishing boats brought back from their rare trips to the mainland, and she had been the first person on the island to look at the crates of iron stock Arthur had brought from King's Landing and show something that was not quite a smile but was definitely not a scowl either.
"My lord," she called as he approached.
"Brin. How are the new tools coming?" Arthur asked.
"The chisels are done. Twenty of them, good steel, they will hold an edge better than anything the quarry men have been using. The hammer heads are drying in their hafts, should be ready by tomorrow. And the nails." She reached into a heavy canvas sack at her feet and pulled out a fistful of iron nails, each one straight and uniform and gleaming. "Four hundred since last week. I have the boys keeping the bellows going in shifts."
Arthur took one of the nails and turned it between his fingers. "These are excellent, Brin. When Camelot goes up I am going to need ten times this many. Would you be willing to take on apprentices. Properly, I mean. Not just bellows boys."
The scowl deepened, which he had learned meant she was pleased. "I have been thinking the same. There is a girl in the northern village, Maren's daughter, she has good hands. And Orwin's youngest grandson has been hanging around the forge asking questions every day for a month. I could use them both."
"Do it. Whatever you need for supplies, just ask me."
She nodded and then watched Arthur ride away before she continued walking to her smithy.
The road wound through the new farmland that had been cleared and ploughed over the past six weeks.
This had been one of Arthur's larger investments, both in coin and in planning. The original four villages had been growing enough food to feed themselves, but only barely, with small garden plots and a few fields of barley and root vegetables that produced a modest surplus in good years and barely enough in bad ones.
Arthur had spent a considerable amount of gold purchasing seed stock and young livestock from the mainland, several thousand chickens and two dozen flocks of sheep and four hundred good milking cows and two dozen draft oxen that had arrived on a barge from Duskendale.
He had also brought in a farmer named Godric, a
man from the Reach who had spent thirty years working some of the most productive land in the Seven Kingdoms and who had agreed to relocate to Brightwater in exchange for a generous salary and a cottage of his own.
Godric had taken one look at the soil and told Arthur that the island could produce three times what it currently did if the fields were expanded and properly rotated and the drainage was improved in the low-lying areas near the coast. Arthur had given him a free hand and a budget, and the results were already beginning to show.
New fields had been cleared along the gentle slopes south of the lake, ploughed in long straight furrows that Godric had laid out. The first plantings were already pushing up through the dark earth in green rows.
Arthur passed through the edge of the southern village and raised a hand in greeting to the knot of women who were hanging washing on lines strung between the cottages. Several of them waved back. One of them, a young woman named Dalla who ran the village's small bakery, called out to him.
"My lord, I tried that recipe you showed me. The one with the rosemary and the honey."
"And."
"My husband ate half the loaf before it had finished cooling and burned his tongue so badly he could not speak for an hour."
Arthur laughed and kept riding until he reached the harbour which was much more busy than it had been two months ago.
This was perhaps the most visible change that two months had wrought on Brightwater. Where before there had been a handful of fishing boats tied to a modest dock, there was now a proper working waterfront. Arthur had purchased an entire fleet of fishing boats, twelve of them in total, sturdy flat-bottomed craft with single masts and wide decks designed for net work, and he had distributed them evenly among the four villages with the simple instruction that the catch was theirs to keep and sell as they saw fit.
The only thing he had asked in return was that a portion of the surplus be set aside for the island's communal stores, which Orwin had agreed to immediately.
The dock itself had been extended and added to. Two new berths had been added at the deep-water end for larger vessels, and a warehouse had gone up on the shore beside the old fish house to store the increasing volume of goods that were now arriving from the mainland on a regular basis.
A fifth village had begun to take shape along the hillside above the harbour.
This was the newest addition to Brightwater, a small but growing settlement populated by the craftsmen and labourers that Arthur had recruited from King's Landing and the surrounding Crownlands. There were carpenters among them, and masons, and a pair of brothers from Duskendale who knew how to burn lime and mix morite, and a one-eyed man named Torren who had spent twenty years cutting stone in the quarries of Crackclaw Point.
Arthur rode past the new village and nodded to Torren, who was sitting on a stump outside his cottage sharpening a pick while his apprentice, a broad-shouldered island boy named Pol, held the stone on the grinding wheel.
"How is the quarry, Torren."
The one-eyed man spat into the dirt and grinned. "Good stone, my lord. Best I have worked in years. The mountain gives it up nicely when you cut along the grain, and the colour is a fine grey that will look well in a wall. We pulled forty blocks yesterday."
"How much do we have stockpiled now." Arthur asked.
Torren scratched his chin. "Near on eight hundred dressed blocks of various sizes, plus rubble fill and gravel. The iron mine is producing well too, we are getting good ore from the second shaft, and the assayer says there is silver in the deep vein, though we have not chased it far enough to know how much."
Arthur nodded. Eight hundred blocks that was more than enough to use the blueprint for Camelot. With a smile on his face Arthur spurred Quiet on and back onto the path.
The path climbed into the forest and wound upward through the trees toward the mountain. Arthur passed a crew of lumbermen working a stand of tall oaks. The crew boss, a barrel-chested man from the new village named Harmon, raised his axe in salute as Arthur rode past.
"Morning, my lord. We will have another thirty logs down by noon."
"Stack them at the upper depot. I will need them on the shelf by tomorrow."
"Aye, my lord."
The lumber operation had been one of the other things Arthur had established, and it had grown rapidly. The island's forests were thick with mature hardwood, oak and ash and elm and a few groves of dark pine on the higher slopes, and the timber was of a quality that had made Harmon's eyes go wide when he first sank an axe into one of the oaks and saw the grain of the wood.
They had been cutting and milling steadily for six weeks now, with two crews working in rotation, and the stockpile of seasoned timber at the upper depot near the mountain trail had grown into something that looked like a small wooden city of its own.
All of this was rather expensive so each day Arthur had also spent a portion of it in private doing something that no one on the island knew about.
Each evening, after the day's work was done and the crews had gone home and the island had settled into the night, Arthur sat alone in the back room of his cabin by the lake and created gold.
[Creation] demanded a price even when he had learned all he could about gold. Every bar he produced cost him a portion of his stored magic that left him drained and light-headed and occasionally unable to stand without bracing himself against the wall. Two bars per day was his limit. More than that and the strain began to blur his vision and make his hands shake, and he had learned from painful early experience that pushing past the limit was a mistake that took a full day of rest to recover from.
But two bars a day, every day, for two months, was a great deal of gold.
He had lost count of the exact amount, but he kept the bars in a locked iron chest beneath a false floor in the storage room of the cabin, and the chest was heavy enough now that he needed Hamon to lift it.
But just as much as he filled his chest he emptied it too, turning his gold bars into coins and paying for labourers and craftsmen and tools and livestock and seed and boats and iron and timber and the hundred other things that a new lordship needed to become something more than a name on a map.
None of it was wasted. Every coin he spent came back to him in the form of roads and buildings and cleared fields and grateful faces and the slow accumulating weight of a community that was beginning to believe in what he was building.
The trail emerged from the forest and the mountainside opened up before him.
Arthur reined Quiet to a halt and looked up.
The shelf.
It looked different from two months ago. The wild grass and scrub that had covered the m expanse of ground when he first found it had been cleared away, and the bare earth beneath had been levelled and graded by Torren's quarry crews into a smooth surface.
The natural cliff face at the back of the shelf had been cleaned of loose rock and vegetation, exposing the good grey stone beneath, and the spring at the base of the cliff had been channelled into a proper stone-lined waterway that ran across the shelf in a straight line before cascading off the eastern edge in the same silver waterfall that had first caught Arthur's eye from the summit.
Eight hundred dressed stone blocks were stacked in neat rows along the northern edge of the shelf. Beside them, arranged in careful order, lay the stockpile of seasoned timber from the upper depot, beam after beam of straight oak and ash and pine, each one stripped and squared and ready for use. Beyond the timber stood barrels of nails and crates of iron fittings and coils of heavy rope and sacks of lime morite and all the thousand other things that went into the building a keep.
The materials were ready.
All of them.
Arthur dismounted and walked to the centre of the shelf and looked at an old ntoifcation.
────────────────────
[QUEST COMPLETED]
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LORD OF BRIGHTWATER
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Objectives:
✓ Fully explore Brightwater Isle
✓ Find the ideal location for your seat
✓ Earn the respect of the island's villagers
Optional Objectives:
✓ Identify and catalogue all exploitable resources
✓ Discover hidden features and landmarks
────────────────────
Rewards:
• Camelot Blueprint (Legendary)
• Iron Mine Blueprint (Rare)
• Silver Mine Blueprint (Rare)
• Stone Quarry Blueprint (Rare)
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The blueprints had arrived in his inventory as a set of four glowing icons.
He had used three of them already.
The Iron Mine Blueprint had been activated on the western slope of the mountain where Torren's crews had found the first vein of good ore. The Silver Mine Blueprint had been placed deeper, at the end of the second shaft where the assayer had confirmed the presence of the precious metal. The Stone Quarry Blueprint had been set into the exposed rock face on the northern side of the mountain where the grey stone was densest.
Each one had come with a system notification.
────────────────────
[BLUEPRINT MECHANICS]
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Description:
Blueprints are a form of structured creation magic. When activated at a valid site with sufficient materials present, the Blueprint will construct the designated structure autonomously by converting available raw materials into finished architecture.
Upon completion, all individuals within the local area will have their memories adjusted to believe the structure was built through conventional means. This effect is permanent and cannot be detected by non-magical means.
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The memory adjustment had been the part that unsettled him most.
He understood the practical necessity of it. A mine that appeared overnight where there had been bare rock the day before would raise questions that he could not answer without revealing the system, and the system had clearly been designed to avoid exactly that kind of exposure.
But the idea that the people around him, Torren and Pol and Orwin and Brin and all the rest, were carrying memories of construction work that had never actually happened sat uncomfortably in his chest in a way he could not quite put into words.
He had used the mine and quarry blueprints anyway and the results had been extraordinary. Where there had been rough shafts and exploratory tunnels there were now properly reinforced mineworks with timber supports and ventilation channels and ore carts running on iron rails, and every man who worked in them remembered helping to build them over the course of several weeks.
Now there was only one blueprint left.
Arthur stood in the centre of the shelf and pulled the last icon from his inventory.
────────────────────
[CAMELOT BLUEPRINT — LEGENDARY]
────────────────────
Description:
Constructs a full-scale fortified seat of power designed for the Pendragon bloodline. Includes keep, great hall, curtain walls, towers, gatehouse, barracks, armoury, stables, gardens, lord's quarters, guest quarters, storehouse, servants quarters, grand library, and room for expansion. Architecture adapts to the terrain and incorporates natural features of the build site.
Requirements:
• Valid elevated site with natural defensive features ✓
• Minimum 500 dressed stone blocks ✓
• Minimum 200 seasoned timber beams ✓
• Fresh water source on site ✓
• Iron fittings and hardware ✓
All requirements met. Ready to activate.
────────────────────
Arthur looked at the notification and activated the blueprint.
The ground beneath his feet hummed.
It started below, so below that he felt it before he heard it, a deep vibration that rose up through the soles of his boots and into his bones. Quiet stamped and tossed her head behind him, her hooves ringing on the earth, and Arthur reached back and laid a hand on her neck to steady her.
Then the stone began to move.
The first block lifted itself off the stack and settled against the base of the cliff with a grinding sound that Arthur felt in his teeth, and the stone of the cliff itself seemed to shift to receive it, the natural rock face adjusting and reforming at the point of contact until the dressed block and the living stone became a single continuous surface. A second block joined it. A third.
The construction then started in earnest.
It took perhaps an hour.
When it was finished the humming stopped.
After the dust settled Arthur looked at what the blueprint had built.
It was nothing less than sensational.
Camelot stood on the shelf like it had been there for a hundred years.
The castle was enormous, far larger than anything he had imagined when he read the blueprint's description. It filled the entire shelf from the cliff face at the back to the curtain wall at the front in a sprawling complex of towers and halls and courtyards that had been shaped to fit the natural terrain so perfectly that the cliff itself appeared to be part of the architecture. The grey stone of the walls matched the grey stone of the mountain behind it, and the dark timber of the roofs and the doorframes and the window shutters complemented the forest that surrounded the shelf on three sides.
The main keep rose ten stories against the cliff, its highest tower climbing above the rock face to command a view of the entire island and the bay beyond. The curtain wall ran in a curve around the front and sides of the shelf, studded with round towers at regular intervals, each one topped with parapets that overlooked the slopes below.
The gatehouse at the western approach was a fortress in its own right, with two heavy towers and an iron portcullis and a murder hole above the narrow passage that led through to the courtyard within.
The waterfall that had been the shelf's most striking natural feature had not been hidden or diverted. It had been incorporated. The water ran from the spring at the base of the cliff through a carved stone channel that passed through the centre of the main courtyard, but it also went down into an aqueduct that fed into the castle itself.
The castle and the mountain and the waterfall and the forest and the sea beyond looked as though they had been designed together by the same hand, each element supporting and completing the others in a way that was both strategic and beautiful.
Arthur stood there for a very long time.
Then a grin spread across his face that no lord in the history of the Seven Kingdoms would have considered dignified, the kind of grin that belonged on the face of a boy who had just been given the greatest gift of his life.
Camelot.
His home.
Their home.
Arthur drew a loud breath, rested his hand on the stone of the gatehouse wall. "Time to bring them home," he said quietly.
(AN: while I could've stretched out him doing all this island shit for better characterisation, it's not that important and the characters on the island won't be important most of it is basically filler that I only included so you could get a good idea of the island. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)
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