Chapter 1418 (Patreon)

“Let me show you around,” Cassie offered, after studying me for a moment. “I’m sure you’ll be interested in what we accomplished here.” While I wasn’t as confident in my interest in their accomplishments, it had been quite a journey to get here, so I wasn’t about to just ignore her. Especially as she was likely one of the better sources of information I could access, making it doubly silly to anger her. Plus, I could use the time she took to show me around to ask some questions of my own, making it an effective use of my time, no matter how boring their little town may be. 

“Certainly,” I agreed. “But before that, how strict is your patron? You served Frigg, if I recall correctly?” I asked, just to get that out of the way. 

“She is a strict mother, but She has no quarrel with other mothers unless they enjoy abusing their children. Nor does She mind the Guardian of the Crossroads, or any of the other Gods. As long as She can raise her children in peace, She is content,” Cassie replied, and I could feel a trace of power in her voice. Not enough to create an actual spell, but more than enough to know that she wasn’t just talking out of her backside

“That is good to know.” I nodded, trying to recall the exact domain of Frigg, only remembering something about motherhood, the home and hearth, maybe with some agriculture mixed in, but even that was more a guess than an actual memory. Maybe animal husbandry, which might explain their success, but again, I was reaching here. 

“A while back, I started to set up a number of anchors, places I can reach quickly by travelling through the shadows. Since then, Lady Hecate, the Guardian of the Crossroads, asked me to modify them, enhancing their utility and allowing other beings access to these anchors,” I explained. “I believe that Lady Hecate is planning to open access to those anchors, maybe not granting it to everyone, but to many. Maybe even to those serving Lady Frigg, but I don’t know the details. Regardless, I would like to place one such anchor close to your village, as it might open up future trade between this place and another community I’m friendly with. That other community is in the Rockies, so there is quite the distance between them and you, at least when travelling normally.” 

“That does sound rather interesting,” Cassie admitted, “But I won’t give you an answer just yet. I barely knew you before you left the area, and I don’t know Lady Frigg’s will in this regard, nor can you give any guarantees on Lady Hecate’s behalf.” 

“Certainly,” I easily accepted her refusal, though I wasn’t about to let it stop me. Ultimately, if she stridently refused, I might just set an anchor a few miles away; it wasn’t as if I needed to visit this community. Not unless they showed me something good.” 

“Still, the Rockies, you say? They might have things we lack, like good timber. We have many things, but that is somewhat limited. To say nothing of metal and such, we haven’t even started to mine new ore, let alone set up a refinery of some sort,” Cassie mused, reminding me just how much work still had to be done to recreate a working society.

Sure, I could make a lot of things myself, as an individual, but my abilities didn’t scale all that well. To recreate a stable society, with a healthy exchange of goods, it had to be rebuilt from the ground up, not from the top down, not by people who could reshape reality with a wave of their hand. My power and abilities could support it, but the different communities had to do the work themselves, just as Maggie’s community had to carry out the health and maternity care efforts on their own. I could help, but ultimately, I was only one person, and there were only so many hours in the day. Hours I didn’t want to spend on a single pursuit. If I were forced to heal and treat people constantly, I would likely snap and do something ill-advised.

“Now then, you said something about showing me around?” I asked, shaking off my pondering for a moment. I was a little curious about what these people had accomplished here, especially since those sheep were interesting. They were, quite frankly, a little too large and looked rather formidable, making me wonder how the locals had managed to domesticate them.

But it looked like we would get to that only a little later. First, Cassie started showing us around what I considered the residential area, though there was no real separation. They didn’t have any commerce to speak of, just what appeared to be a communal granary and a few similar storehouses. At least for now, they simply had no real private property, beyond what could be stored in an individual’s house, and even that wasn’t truly private. 

As Cassie explained it, their community was still small enough that everyone knew everyone else, and, maybe more importantly, knew everyone’s business. So, if someone tried to hoard resources, people would notice, and that person wouldn’t have a good time. It sounded like they had some rather medieval punishments, which made sense in context. Their community was essentially medieval and required a high level of trust between individuals to function. Without that trust, people couldn’t specialise, which they already did.

Especially the sheep they raised required heavy specialisation, to the point that they had different weavers for different types of wool, as no single person, at least so far, had managed to learn to work with wool of different elemental alignments. Including shearing the fleece of the sheep, which also required special skills, to the point that I began to wonder what percentage of people here were actively required to focus on making wool. 

“Okay, I’d love to see those sheep from up close,” I admitted, after we had talked about them a little, and I didn’t have to conceal my interest any longer. 

“Know that they are smarter than you might expect. And, just like many beasts out there, they can be temperamental,” Cassie warned me, but she didn’t even try to dissuade my interest and guided me over. 

From up close, the sheep looked even more impressive than from afar. Not only were they big- that much had been obvious even from a distance- but they were also massive. They didn’t have the slender legs of a horse, or of a normal sheep; their legs were easily as thick as my torso, and wouldn’t have looked out of place on a hippo or a rhino. Maybe even an elephant; I wasn’t sure.

Maybe comparing them to a rhino, maybe an extinct woolly rhino, was most appropriate. Only that the sheep had additional fur, and the males had two sizable, curled horns. Looking a little closer, I could tell the horns had magical properties that matched their colourful coat, making these creatures an even more formidable threat than expected.

For a moment, I considered using Observe, but I quickly decided against it. Instead, I opened my personal senses as much as possible, studying their magical auras, their souls and as much of their physique as I could without touching them. What I learned was both intimidating and impressive. While I couldn’t nail down the sheep’s level, I was confident they were roughly between level fifty and level seventy-five.

Their physique, while not really designed for endurance, gave them massive strength and a fair amount of toughness in the short term, and their elemental abilities only added to that.

“Impressive,” I admitted, staring at the mauve, Earth-aligned sheep that had shown the biggest interest in us. “Are you not worried that they might decide to trample your community?” I asked, realising that I wouldn’t feel comfortable in a situation like that, not with that many powerful beasts right next to my home. 

“No, why would we?” Cassie asked, sounding supremely unconcerned. “We help them, they help us; it’s all good. We are good neighbours; we scratch their backs, they scratch ours,” she said, shrugging, making me goggle in disbelief.

Though maybe that was really all there was to it. I knew that dogs had a surprising amount of intelligence, especially after the Change; Silva was an excellent example of that. So, why wouldn’t sheep show something similar, an ability to reason and realise that it was in their best interest to work with humans? After all, opposable thumbs had some great advantages, and it wasn’t as if the sheep wanted to keep their fleece for the summer.

So, why not share what they didn’t need, in exchange for things they couldn’t accomplish?

It felt a little alien to me, but apparently it worked out just fine in this community, and that was really all there was to it.