Vyxia’s face went from pink to scarlet to a shade of red that made her hair look pure white by comparison.
For a moment she just stood there vibrating, her mouth opening and closing with nothing coming out, and then the tantrum hit her like a wave.
She stomped.
Not a little stomp, a full royal dragon tantrum stomp, the kind that had probably cracked the foundations of her family’s palace when she was a hatchling.
The ground under her foot cratered, dirt spraying up past her knees.
She stomped again, and again, each impact punching a fresh bowl shaped dent into the yard while she shrieked wordless fury at the sky.
Her tail lashed hard enough to rip a sapling clean out of the ground and send it tumbling.
She was 985 years old and she was throwing a fit that would have embarrassed a toddler, but in her defense, nobody had ever made her this angry before.
Not even Nøx.
“How DARE you mock me!” she screamed between stomps.
“I am Vyxianna Elräänga! Daughter of Røøsell! Heir to a legacy you cannot even comprehend, you insignificant minute little worm in human skin! YOU ARE NOTHING! LESS THAN NOTHING! SUCH NOTHING THAT NOTHING DOSNT DO IT JUSTICE!”
Another stomp split a crack across the dirt that ran 20 feet.
She pointed at him with a trembling finger.
“You will BOW! You will bow down right now and beg for my forgiveness! You will grovel until I decide you have suffered ENOUGH, and I promise you, human, I have a very high standard for suffering!”
Gen watched the entire performance with his arms crossed.
When she finally ran out of breath, he let out a long sigh.
“Fine, fine, whatever.”
And he walked away.
Vyxia froze mid stomp with one foot hovering over a fresh crater and her mouth hanging open.
That was it?
No bowing?
No groveling?
No desperate pleading?
He just turned around and left like she was a mildly annoying weather report?
The sheer audacity of it short circuited her rage so completely that she had no idea what to do with her body, and before her pride could stop her, her feet were already moving, following him across the yard.
“Where do you think you’re going? I am not finished with you! Get back here and bow!”
Gen did not get back there.
He did not even turn around.
He just kept walking toward the stable, and Vyxia, who was absolutely not following him out of any kind of curiosity, kept following.
The stable was a rough lean to he had thrown together against the treeline, and he had barely pushed the door open before a massive shape uncurled from the straw inside.
A white wolf raised his head, sniffed once, and then launched himself at Gen with the force of a furry battering ram.
Baegun hit him chest first and knocked him flat on his back in the dirt, and then the wolf was on top of him, licking his face in long enthusiastic strokes while his tail wagged hard enough to make his whole body wiggle.
Gen laughed and shoved at the wolf’s chest.
“Okay, okay, I missed you too, I missed you too!” He got a hand on Baegun’s head and rubbed hard between his ears, and the wolf’s tongue lolled out in pure bliss.
“Seriously though, I still can’t believe you’re a guy. You act way too clingy for a male wolf. I’ve seen you roll onto your back for belly rubs, Baegun. You have no shame at all. Where’s the dignity? The pride? The fierce predator energy?”
Baegun answered by licking him directly across the mouth.
“Gross!” Gen wiped his face and hauled himself upright.
“Alright, alright, I need you to work, not slobber all over me. We’re going to the lake. You remember the lake?”
Baegun’s ears perked up so fast they almost looked like they hurt.
He bounced on his front paws, eager and ready.
Gen grabbed two of his largest bowls, heavy clay things he had shaped and fired himself, and lashed them onto Baegun’s back with rope.
Then he swung up after them and settled into the wolf’s thick white fur.
“Go.”
The wolf launched himself into the trees at a speed that had no business belonging to anything that size, and Gen’s talk about dignity died in his throat as he grabbed two fistfuls of fur and held on.
Branches whipped past his head.
Roots and rocks blurred underneath them.
Baegun wove through the forest without slowing, and Gen bounced on his back with every stride, gritting his teeth and praying the ropes on the bowls held.
They burst out of the treeline at the lake, and Baegun skidded to a stop at the water’s edge, panting happily.
Gen half fell, half dismounted onto the muddy bank and lay there for a second, catching his breath.
“Every time,” he wheezed.
“Every single time I forget you run like that.”
High above, Vyxia watched from the air, arms crossed and white hair drifting in the wind, far enough up that he would not spot her.
She watched him wade into the shallows and start scooping clay out of the lakebed, filling the bowls heavy and wet, working with the focused rhythm of someone who had done this a hundred times before.
Her eyes narrowed.
She hated to admit it, but there was something to the way he moved.
Purposeful.
He was not playing at work.
He was actually working, and the settlement behind him was proof that the work paid off.
The cabin, the stable, the garden, the walls, all of it built by this one idiot human and his strange magic.
She caught herself almost nodding in approval and crushed the feeling on sight.
“Primitive human monkeys have been doing the exact same thing for thousands of years,” she muttered to herself.
“Mud and sticks and fire. This is nothing. He is nothing. At best he is a slightly more advanced monkey, and even that is generous.”
Gen hauled the heavy bowls back to shore, muscles straining, and lashed them onto Baegun’s back.
He climbed on and the wolf tore off through the forest again.
Vyxia drifted after them, silent and unseen, curiosity winning out over pride.
Back at the settlement, Gen slid off Baegun’s back and dropped the bowls of clay onto the ground with a wet thump.
Vyxia settled onto the roof of the cabin, tucked her legs beneath herself, and watched.
Whatever he was going to build with that clay, she wanted to see it.
Gen grabbed his shovel, the one with the cracked handle he kept meaning to fix, and walked to an open patch of ground near his workshed.
He dug a hole 12 inches deep and about 3 feet in diameter, a clean round basin in the earth.
Then he climbed down into it and carved at the bottom edge with his hands, shaping a narrow channel from the center of the floor that sloped up through the side wall and broke out at the rim.
Air flow for the fire.
A kiln.
He was building a kiln, Vyxia realized, and she leaned forward despite herself.
Gen wiped his hands on his pants and went into the workshed.
He came out with a sheet of his rough handmade paper covered in dense writing and precise diagrams.
He sat cross legged in front of the hole, spread the blueprint on the ground, and studied it the way a general studied a war map.
Then he looked at the clay.
Back at the paper.
Back at the clay.
The problem hit him.
His blueprint magic could rearrange materials into a finished structure and handle every step of the manual process, but a structure 3 meters tall made out of wet clay was not going to stand on its own.
The moment that much wet weight tried to stack itself, the walls would slump and the whole thing would come crashing down before the top even formed.
He needed something to hold the shape up while the clay was still too soft to hold itself.
He could build it in sections and let each layer dry before adding the next, but that would take days and the joints would risk cracking where wet clay met dry clay.
Or he could brace the outside while the magic worked, then pull the supports away once the structure was standing.
For a clay kiln.
Gen walked over to the pile of leftover logs near the stable and picked out four straight ones, each about 3 meters long.
He hauled them back and drove them into the ground in a rough square around the hole, angled inward so they would brace the walls from the outside.
He stepped back, checked the angle on each beam, and nodded.
Good enough.
He pressed his palm flat against the blueprint.
“ZAAAAAAA BLUEEEEEPRINTTTTTT!”
The paper blazed with light.
It raced up his arm and arced out into the clay, and the wet mud rose out of the bowls like it was alive.
It flowed and stacked and smoothed itself into shape, climbing the support beams while the walls formed around the empty space above the hole, a chimney neck rising out of the top.
The beams groaned under the weight but held.
In seconds it was done.
The structure settled, and the light faded.
A 3 meter tall kiln of perfectly smooth clay stood in the middle of the yard, and Vyxia’s jaw dropped.
Gen stood there grinning at it, and then he broke into a small victory lap, jogging a circle around the kiln with his fists in the air.
Baegun watched him with his tongue hanging out, tail going.
“Baegun!” Gen called.
“I’m covered in clay. I need a bath. Lake. Come on.”
Baegun’s ears perked up and he trotted over, ready to run again.
Gen swung onto his back and the two of them disappeared into the trees, leaving the fresh kiln standing in the yard like a monument.
Vyxia dropped down from the roof and landed softly beside it.
She circled the structure once, running her fingers along the smooth clay walls, and she hated how even it was, how solid, how clean.
A primitive monkey should not be able to produce something this well made.
Her eyes fell on the blueprint lying where Gen had dropped it.
She picked it up.
She scanned the diagrams first, the measurements and construction notes, all perfectly legible in the universal language of numbers and lines.
Then her gaze snagged on the writing itself, rows of symbols covering the margins, and she assumed it was some human language she simply had not brushed up on in a few decades.
She squinted.
She tilted the paper.
She turned it sideways, then upside down.
Nothing.
Not a single character she recognized.
Her mind spun.
She was 985 years old.
She had spent centuries studying the mortal world.
She knew almost every human language and dialect that had ever existed.
She could read the cursive of emperors dead for a thousand years.
She could decipher merchant shorthand so sloppy it looked like a chicken had walked through wet ink.
She had once translated a treaty written in three dead languages just to win an argument.
She could not read a single word of this.
“WHAT FUCKING HIEROGLYPHICS IS THIS HUMAN WRITING IN?!”