Chapter 3 : Walking the Wound
The main road through Ashwick snapped my ankle theory in the first ten steps.
Not literally—but the ruts were deep enough, carved by years of cart wheels and rain erosion and zero maintenance. Packed dirt, no drainage channels, no grading. Water pooled in the low spots and turned them into mud traps that sucked at my boots with every stride. The buildings lining both sides leaned at angles that told me their foundations had been settling for years: some toward the road, some away from it, all of them telling the same story.
Nobody maintained this. Not for years. The road is the circulatory system of any settlement and they let it rot.
Sera walked three paces behind me. She hadn't asked why I wanted to tour the town on foot. She'd simply appeared at the keep's gate that morning, sword at her hip, eyes already scanning.
"The eastern quarter first," I said.
"As you wish, my lord."
She thinks I'm going to look at the empty buildings and get sad. She's managing my expectations. Smart.
The herbalist's cottage sat on the town's western edge, tucked between the river path and a garden that was the only well-maintained thing I'd seen since waking up. Widow Merrin answered the door with her hands already covered in green paste—she'd been grinding poultices, and from the look of the mortar, she hadn't stopped in hours.
"Young lord." She looked me up and down with the practiced eye of someone who evaluated bodies for a living. "You're up. Good. You're too thin. Bad. Come in."
It wasn't a suggestion.
The cottage was small, organized with the ruthless efficiency of someone who couldn't afford wasted space. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling in bundles I could identify maybe a third of—rosemary, thyme, something that smelled sharply medicinal. Shelves lined every wall, packed with jars and bottles and paper-wrapped packets, each one labeled in a tight, careful hand.
"Medical supplies," I said. "What's the current inventory?"
Widow Merrin opened her mouth, but a voice from behind the drying rack beat her to it.
"Fourteen bundles of frostmint. Six jars of willowbark extract—one's gone cloudy, might need replacing. Three packets of wound-seal moss, enough for maybe ten applications if we're careful. Twenty doses of fever tonic, but the base herb is running low, so I've been stretching it. One roll of clean linen for bandages—"
A girl stepped out from behind the rack, small and sharp-eyed, her fingers stained green from the herbs she'd been sorting. She was young—fifteen, maybe sixteen—with dark hair pulled into a braid that was already coming undone. She attempted a curtsy that nearly sent her into the table.
"—and we're completely out of ironroot, which is a problem because that's the only thing that actually works on deep-tissue inflammation, and Goodman Harlan's shoulder needs it badly."
She stopped. Blinked. Her face went red.
"Sorry. My lord. I just— I keep the inventory. In my head. Widow Merrin does the real—"
"Lira." Widow Merrin's voice carried the gentle authority of someone who'd been correcting this particular behavior for years. "Let the young lord speak."
"No." I looked at Lira. "Go on. What else are we short on?"
She stared at me. Then the words came again, faster.
"Moonpetal. We haven't had moonpetal in two months. It's the best thing for infection prevention and it grows in the northeast grove, but nobody goes there anymore because of the wolves. And if we had a proper drying rack—not this one, a real one, with proper airflow—we could preserve herbs three times longer. I've been—"
The Lord System pulsed.
[Lord Ability — Talent Scout: Target Detected]
[Lira — Ashwick Citizen]
[Current Status: Untrained Civilian]
[Latent Ability: Magical Affinity — Nature/Water (Dual)]
[Talent Ceiling: High (Estimated: Arcanist-rank potential with optimal development)]
[Personality Assessment: Loyal, driven, self-deprecating, high retention memory]
[Note: Latent talent is dormant. Requires awakening catalyst and structured training.]
I dismissed the panel before my staring became conspicuous. The headache from yesterday's Resource Sense hadn't fully faded, and the Talent Scout ability added a thin buzzing pressure behind my left eye.
She's got magical talent. Nature and Water affinity. In a world where that combination is—what did the System say? High ceiling. Arcanist potential. That's not just rare. That's the kind of talent that kingdoms recruit.
And she's in a dying border town counting herb bundles from memory.
"Lira. The inventory you just gave me—is that from notes?"
"I— no, my lord. I just remember. Things like that stick."
"Good. I'm going to need a full written list of every medical supply in this cottage, quantities, expiration estimates, and replacement sources. Can you do that by tomorrow?"
Her mouth opened. Closed. She nodded so hard her braid bounced.
"Yes, my lord."
Widow Merrin watched me from behind her mortar. Her hands kept grinding—they never stopped, I was beginning to realize—but her eyes carried something sharp and assessing.
"Young lord," she said.
"Widow Merrin."
"Eat something before you leave. You look like a strong wind would carry you off."
She pressed a piece of dark bread and a wedge of cheese into my hands before I could decline.
---
[Ashwick — Mill, Midmorning]
Old Callum Voss explained the grinding mechanism while leaning on a support beam, his left hand pressed to his lower back in a gesture so habitual it had worn the fabric of his shirt.
"Stone's good. French-cut, or something near it—the previous lord's father imported it from the south." He slapped the millstone. "This'll last another thirty years if the mechanism holds. The mechanism, though..."
He pointed to the main gear. I'd already spotted it.
Stress fractures. Fine lines radiating from the hub, visible only if you knew where to look. The wood was old-growth oak, which was the only reason it hadn't failed already, but oak didn't last forever under torsional load.
"How long?"
Callum shrugged. Winced. "A season? Maybe two if we're gentle. Parts are the problem. Nobody makes replacement gears this side of Thornwall, and Thornwall prices..." He trailed off.
I was already kneeling by the millrace channel. Silt buildup—two inches of sediment compacted against the water gate, reducing flow by at least a quarter. Beyond the gate, the foundation on the river side showed evidence of differential settling. The ground was saturated; drainage had failed here, same as the keep.
I picked up a stick and began drawing in the dirt floor. Callum watched.
"The millrace needs dredging. That's first—it buys you immediate capacity. The foundation settling is a drainage problem: water's pooling under the river-side wall because there's no runoff channel. We dig a trench here—" I drew a line "—angle it south toward the river, line it with gravel, and the water table drops. The foundation stabilizes."
I pointed at the gear.
"The stress fractures. Rod—the smith—can he forge an iron band to reinforce the hub? It's not a permanent fix, but it'll buy us a year."
Callum stared at the dirt drawing. His expression shifted through a sequence I was learning to read: skepticism, calculation, and something fragile underneath that I wasn't going to name because naming it would break it.
"The dredging I can do." He rubbed his back. "Slowly."
"I'll send help. Two people for a day should clear it."
"That trench line." He squinted at the diagram. "That's... that's sound. Where'd you learn water management, my lord?"
From a civil engineering textbook, a YouTube channel called Practical Engineering, and three years of arguing with the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services about stormwater runoff.
"My father's library. There was a treatise on hydraulics."
"Hm." Callum's expression settled into something cautious. Something that wasn't hope but lived in the same neighborhood. "Hm."
---
[Ashwick — Eastern Quarter, Afternoon]
Twenty-two empty buildings. I counted every one.
Former homes, most of them. Single-story timber-frame construction, daub-and-wattle walls, thatched roofs in various stages of collapse. A shuttered tannery with the vats still intact. A cooper's shop with tools on the workbench, left behind by someone who'd decided the tools were worth less than the time it took to pack them.
Each doorway was a family that had chosen to leave.
The Lord System overlaid population density data across my vision without being asked—color gradients showing where the remaining inhabitants clustered. The southwestern quarter, nearest the river and the tavern, glowed warm. The northern quarter, closest to the keep, showed moderate density. The eastern quarter was a cold void.
Twenty-two buildings. Salvageable timber in at least ten of them. The tannery's structurally sound—that's a future workshop space. The cooper's tools are worth money if we can find someone to use them. The housing blocks closest to the market square could be rebuilt as dense residential—close to services, close to defense, efficient use of the remaining population.
I pulled up the Building Menu:
[Demolition: Reclaim materials from abandoned structures]
[Cost: Labor only]
[Yield: Timber, stone (variable), salvaged fixtures]
[Note: Reclaimed materials reduce construction costs by 15-30%]
Ashwick doesn't need twenty-two empty buildings reminding everyone that the town is dying. It needs the materials those buildings are made of to rebuild what's left.
I walked the full perimeter. Three hours on legs that protested every step, cataloguing, noting, building the mental map that the System was simultaneously building in translucent overlay.
Sera followed without speaking. When I stumbled on a broken cobblestone, she was there—not catching me, but positioned so that if I fell, I'd fall toward her. She moved back the instant I steadied. No comment. No fuss.
As we turned back toward the keep, I caught movement at the edge of the street. Lira, following at a distance. She froze when I turned, like a deer in headlights—
No. Bad metaphor. No headlights here. Like a rabbit that's been spotted by a hawk.
She held something out. A sprig of pale green leaves with a sharp, cool smell.
"Frostmint," she said. "For headaches. You've been squinting all day."
I took it. The leaves were cold against my fingers.
"Thank you, Lira."
She turned and bolted before I could say anything else.
---
[Ashwick Keep — Tower, Evening]
From the keep's highest intact tower, Ashwick spread out below me in the fading light. The three moons were rising—the large silver one first, then the copper one chasing it, the blue one barely a smear on the horizon.
The town looked like a mouth with half its teeth knocked out. Gaps everywhere. Dark windows, empty lots, roads that led to nothing. The river caught the moonlight and held it, a silver thread stitching together a settlement that was more absence than presence.
I had a slate board propped against the parapet wall. Chalk in my hand.
Drainage system for the mill. Dredging schedule. Foundation repair priority. Timber reclamation from the eastern quarter. Food supply assessment—I needed to talk to Tomas Breck about crop yields, and soon. The farm blueprint from the quest reward could change everything, but I had to stabilize first.
The chalk scratched against the slate, and the sound carried across the empty air, and for a few minutes I was back in Portland, standing at a whiteboard in a conference room, mapping out a five-year infrastructure plan for a city that actually had the budget to build things.
The System pulsed.
[Quest Update: Stabilize Food Supply — 29 Days Remaining]
Twenty-nine days. Two hundred and three people. Twelve gold crowns.
I kept drawing. The diagram grew—connections between buildings, resource flows, labor allocation. The first real plan this town had seen in a decade, scratched in chalk on a stolen slate board by a dead man wearing a teenager's skin.
The frostmint sprig sat on the parapet beside me. I picked it up, crushed a leaf between my fingers, and breathed in the sharp cold scent.
Small things. Hold onto the small things.
I set the chalk down and flipped to a clean section of the slate. Wrote three words at the top:
Day Three. Begin.
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