The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic (5 page)

“I notice that those we invited from long-lived races have far fewer other friends and family with them than the humans we invited, but that makes sense I guess.  I suppose a dragon isn’t missing much of another dragon’s life in twenty-four years.”

“All in all, they should provide all our children with a good variety of neighbors!” Talia laughed.

When everyone was settled Mark stood at the edge of the patio overlooking the lawns, augmented his voice to be heard by all, and spoke;

“Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us!  We hope that our time apart from the world with you will be a beautiful respite from our troubled times.

“The first question to be decided was; where would we spend it?

“After an hour of research in the Hilian Library, and after consulting with Falgaroth, we’ve chosen an isolated archipelago called The Evergreen Islands some five thousand two hundred kilometers west of southern Membitra.”

He then cast a dwarven Revealing showing what he was describing.

“It’s a dense cluster of islands on the flat top of a huge and isolated ancient volcanic seamount, in an area of the ocean known as The West Debivinian Abyss.  The area around the seamount and in the shallow and narrow channels between the islands is a bountiful oasis of sea life in the midst of a gigantic expanse of ocean that’s almost lifeless, due to its extreme depth and the lack of any major currents through the area.  Most of the life on the islands is similar to the flora and fauna of southern Membitra, having been seeded from there by a dominant east wind and the general flow of the sea to the west, which is due to the world’s rotation and the pull of the moons.  Much of the islands are covered with big hills or small mountains, and as their name suggests, many of those are covered in pine forest.  They’re quite similar to the forests around Shinosa Valley and The Nine Valleys, but simpler.  Most of the trees are a variety of fir that reaches about fifty-five meters in its natural state, so they’re already big enough for Nine Valleys-style tree homes.

“The cluster of twenty seven islands form an oval two hundred and four kilometers long and a hundred and thirty-eight kilometers wide.  Only narrow channels averaging a third of a kilometer in width and about twelve meters deep separate the islands, so as this map of the archipelago shows, it’s an almost-solid oval of land.  It’s ringed by a barrier reef, which protects the beaches from the worst of the great swells that roll across the deep ocean.

“It has very mild weather most of the time.  The heat of summer should never be unbearable, and it’s only likely to have snow on the ground for a few hours on two or three occasions each winter.  In the spring it tends to warm rains every night.  Only the early autumn brings the chance of extreme weather in the form of the occasional hurricane sweeping up from the south-east, which range from inconvenient to catastrophic in intensity, particularly on the south side of the archipelago.

“The islands were legally part of The Kingdom of Membitra, though they’re completely uninhabited, undeveloped, and pristine.  A spell that Yazadril cast revealed that they hadn’t been visited for over one hundred and seventy-two years, when they’d been surveyed by a flotilla of elves of The Sea People of Debivin.  The elves had subsequently sold their claim to a king of Membitra who wanted to build a vacation residence there, but had never gotten around to doing so.  Though the record remained in the Membitran archives, no living Membitran was even aware of the archipelago’s existence.

“So, when we dropped in on him, King Raznoran of Membitra was delighted to learn that he owned those islands, and doubly delighted to learn in the same minute that The Principality of Hilia was offering him ten thousand one-ounce gold Hilian Crowns for all ownership, sovereignty, and rights to them!”

He paused while a chuckle went around among those listening.

“The purchase was complete a minute later; the payment made, and the papers signed.  We spent a while chatting with King Raznoran and his family and retinue, and they wished us well in this fine enterprise we’re embarking on.

“We’re renaming the island group Hiliani, which means New Hilia in Elvish.  It’s now part of the Principality of Hilia for all purposes of government and law.  We chose it because it’s extremely isolated, which makes casting the time-bubble easier, and because it’s bountiful enough to support many times more people than we’ll have living there, even if we didn’t have magic to help.  And because it’s a lot like where me and Talia are from, to be honest.  But with better weather.

“We have a week to do most of the building of our new homes and other buildings before the time-bubble goes up.  During that week we’ll also have to bring in everything else we need.  We can finish construction after we’re cut off as long as we have all the materials we need, but we might have less power available for our spells after that, so we’ll be spending a lot of power to get as much done as we can before then.

“There are a lot of big healthy trees, and Theramin says we should be able to grow most of our buildings in them in the next week, using his elven horticultural techniques and a big expenditure of power.

“Given the resources there, we figure our diet should have plenty of variety.  There’s a big assortment of edible plant life whose growth we can accelerate, and we can grow some garden crops to make up the rest of our fruits and vegetables.  Our meat will be about two-thirds fish and sea life, about one-sixth birds and animals that we’ll hunt on the islands, and about one-sixth domesticated livestock.

“We think the best place for a settlement should be here; on the second biggest island, beside this joining of four channels, almost in the middle of the archipelago.  There’s this nice big flat area with scattered trees and minimal undergrowth between the beach and this semi-circle of small mountains.  It’s well sheltered from storms, there’s good fishing access, and there’s four streams that run through it from the surrounding mountains.

“Talia and I will be making our home here, north of the flats, in these three trees across this little pass to this little valley behind it, and we’re claiming the little valley as our back yard.

“We’ll build a gathering hall here in the center of the village for get-togethers and celebrations, and we’ll build a few floating docks along the water’s edge here at the south end of the flats, where it’s too rocky to really enjoy the beach anyway.

“Over the next hour or so we’ll finish planning the rest of the village.  Since we’ll be building with elven methods by growing our constructions out of the existing trees, Theramin here will be in charge of construction and community systems, and he’ll be approving all your plans to make sure that no one gets in anyone else’s way, and that everyone has a water supply to their property, and so on. He, along with Yazadril, Nemia, myself, Talia, and Alilia, are going to cast a better scaled model Illusion of the village site than this Revealing, and as you all tell us where you’d like to build and how much room you’ll need, we’ll add it to the model.  Even with all the garden space we could need, there’s enough room on the flats for ten times our number to live there, so there shouldn’t be any real disagreements over any one spot.  You can have your rooms up in the trees like the elves do, or we can grow human-style buildings on the ground, like they did with The Living Palace.

“West of the village here there’s this higher valley almost eight kilometers long, filled with lush meadows, and the pass between it and the village is only a half kilometer long and pretty easily passable, though it is steep.  Since it’s the only good grassland around, and unicorns prefer living on open grass to dwelling in buildings, we’ll be reserving that for our unicorn friends.

“There’s only four good caves suitable for dragon lairs in the archipelago, and none of them are big enough for more than one small Dragon.  Kragorram and Povon, since I assume that you and Karzog would prefer to share a lair, we’ll be glad to help you enlarge one of these if you wish.  And Quewanak, if you’d like some help altering a cave, we’d be glad to help with that too.”

“That will not be necessary, thank you.” Quewanak replied.  “I find none of these caves to be suitable, and all of them are too far from the village to truly share in the life of the community, as I plan to do.  With all of your permissions, I will excavate a new cave for my lair in this rock face here, facing the village from the south-west.”

“We would be glad to help with that, and Kragorram knows a thing or two about working stone.” Povon told him.  “If you don’t mind, we’ll also excavate a lair in that face, about three hundred meters south of you, halfway between your lair and the docks here.”

“That would be fine, and I would be glad to help you with it as well.” Quewanak nodded.  “If any of the rest of you would like some shaped stones to use in your constructions for fireplaces and whatnot, we can be quite specific in shaping the pieces of stone we are removing as we excavate, including uniform blocks of any size.”

“Thank you Quewanak, I for one will take you up on that.” Mark chuckled.  “I think some well-placed stonework could add some nice variety to the uniform wood of our new homes.

“Is there anything else anyone wants to add before we get started on that?  No?

“All right, we’ll cast the Illusion on the biggest lawn, so if we could get you there to please step back a bit...  Okay, there we go.  We’ve already got our place, Yazadril’s, and Theramin’s shown.  Everyone who already knows what they want can step up and tell us, and we’ll put it in.  We’ll add the rest as you decide what you want.”

“I like the look of your new home, actually.” Mark’s grandfather commented.  “It seems very practical.”

“And pretty!” his wife Sana added.

“Thanks.” Talia laughed.  “It’s a compromise between human and elven designs, of course.”

At first glance, it looked like two fairly normal human-style small wooden houses with peaked roofs and windows built between three great fir trees, each tree about five meters thick.  The trees were almost in a row but not quite, giving a slight angle between the two buildings that filled the spaces between them, one eight meters in length, the other a meter shorter.  A closer look revealed that the houses were grown from the wood of the trees they adjoined, and elven-style windows in the trunks of the trees revealed the presence of more rooms, reaching three stories high in the bottom of the trees, with another small isolated room equipped with a balcony about twenty-five meters high in each.

The front of the house faced toward the center of the community, while at the rear there was a strip of mossy open ground about twelve meters wide between the home and a steep rock face, with a narrow pass about four meters wide directly behind the center of the house, that led to the tiny valley they’d claimed as their back yard.

“We’ll have something similar to that here.” Sana decided as she pointed out her choice.  “Between these two trees beside the community center, facing toward the beach.

“Exactly.  That’s beautiful.” she nodded as the building appeared in the Illusion.

“I don’t see that we’ll need any high lookout rooms in the trees though.” Markhan the senior chuckled.  “I can’t see me climbing that many stairs.  Though I suppose one would be nice for the grandchildren.”

“Well then, we might as well build in the same style as well, to give the neighborhood some visual cohesiveness.” Dalia decided.  “We’ll build in and around this tree here, west of Talia’s place, with one of those little houses on each side of the trunk.”

Soon the locations and exterior appearances of one hundred and seventy-three buildings had been decided.  The homes were scattered throughout the site, with a greater concentration around the community center, and in a strip close to the beach.  A mill was planned beside the biggest stream where it emerged from the surrounding rock slope north-west of the village center, a marina of boat sheds was planned next to the docks, and Nek and Reen proposed a pub at the end of a short dead-end canyon near the docks, where the surrounding rock walls would insure that the village was never disturbed by any late-night revelry there.  Finally, following Nine Valleys tradition, an area was set aside beside the beach near the docks for an open market, and two small restaurants were planned in a great tree near there; at over nine meters thick it was the stoutest on the island.  Sana’s Kitchen would be built in the base and specialize in quick and hearty human fare, and Elven Delights would provide fine dining in the tradition of The People of Life, in a five story facility built in the trunk and on the branches between eighteen and thirty-four meters from the ground.

They spent a few minutes gazing with satisfaction at the completed model, then Mark spoke again.

“All right, we might as well go there now.  It’s early morning at Hiliani right now, seeing as how it’s almost directly on the other side of the world from here, so it’s a good time to plan interior rooms and get started on building.  We’ll be bringing food and drink, so don’t worry about that.  Talia and I will take care of everyone’s Translocation.

“Is everyone ready?  Yes?  Okay, here we go!”

It took Mark and Talia a moment to gather the power and prepare for such a mighty Translocation, then there was a flash and a brief moment of cold, and then all five hundred and two of them appeared on the beach beside the settlement site at Hiliani.

It was a bit colder here, which took a moment to get used to, but the light was about the same; the sun was rising at Hiliani just as it was setting at Hilia.

“This is so beautiful, my love!” Talia enthused as she slowly turned around, enjoying the entire panorama, as did most of the rest.

“It is, isn’t it?” Mark chuckled as he caressed her between her shoulder blades.

“That was a remarkable Translocation!” Theramin commented as he realized what they’d done.  “That was the most I’ve seen moved in a single casting, and the distance could not have been farther!”

“Thanks.” Talia nodded with a smile.  “It took both of us to do it, but we’ll be ready for work in a couple of minutes.”