Lieforged Gale

The Willow Guard. That was the name of our brand new guild, paid for with the money we made on the dungeon run. It was nice and lore-friendly, without being too edgy or anything. It was also a pretty damn good descriptor of who we were and what we did.

With the incorporation of our guild, the tree and a nice chunk of the area around it became guild property. The size of the area was a direct consequence of us settling out in the middle of nowhere. Perfect for our purposes right now, although we'd probably sell it back to the system later on. For now, though, we could rest easy knowing our tree was safe from griefers and a certain guild of assholes. Until we moved the tree, anyway.

I should really think of it was an inn now, though. In the two weeks since we created the guild, we completed the base building. That means the main taproom, the kitchen, the two private dinner rooms, the public bathroom, and fourteen guest rooms are all ready to go.

Right now the Howling Willow looked like three huge hockey pucks stacked on top of each other, the bottom two of which were made of stone, and the upper one was made of wood—All of them nestled atop the trunk of the tree. It looked kinda boring right now, if I was honest. Hopefully we could get some more finished over the next two weeks. After that, the expansion was dropping and we needed to get moving.

Actually, that was something else that happened during our two week building bonanza—The official announcement from Coven Games that the rumours were true. An expansion would, indeed, be released very soon. We didn't have much more information than that, officially, but since all the new classes and races were faerie related, we all sorta knew the expansion would be taking place in the faerie wilds, up north-west of the human kingdoms. Players from the other factions around the game world were going to be pissed at how far they needed to travel.

As for my personal character progress, money and a ring weren’t the only things I got out of the dungeon. The final boss awarded me a nice chunk of experience points, which bumped me over the line to level 28.

I put my two stat points into Dexterity, putting it at 21. My stat sheet was still unchanged in most places, but my new ring had doubled my Focus score. I had a feeling I’d be speccing into that stat more in the future too, considering the poison damage from ring’s ability would scale with Focus.

As for my ability point, I had one new skill unlock—Faerym Language Proficiency. It was a pretty uninteresting passive on the surface, but I placed a point in it just to be safe. Better to have it unlocked than not.

My Smithing skill was also coming along nicely. I’d finished grinding out the proficiency stat on all of my Novice level Patterns, including shivs, spoons, simple chisels, brackets, and six other such mundane, easy to hammer-out items. Well, five of them I’d gained when I made the push for Apprentice rank, but yeah. Most of the items that resulted from the grind were melted back down so I could reuse the metal stock, but brackets, nails, and all that were kept around. As for Apprentice level Patterns, I hammered out a whole bunch of knives and forks for use in the inn. Those were very much appreciated. What were not appreciated were the sixty or so little steel jingle bells I made and then tied up amongst the glowing green leaves of our pet Ghoulmother Widow. Nobody else could get them down—save for Noah, who also thought it was hilarious—So everyone was forced to deal with the constant jingling of little bells every time the wind blew.

Anyway, I got through a few other Apprentice level Patterns, and finally unlocked Journeyman rank which would hopefully allow me to explore Spirit Forging more and therefore bring Wispy the little wisp pet out from my pet inventory—Where it’d been automatically placed when I forgot about it for weeks and weeks. Whisperword’s little journal mentioned a whole ton of interesting experiments they’d done, but everything had been so hectic that I hadn’t had the time to follow along. I’d get back to work on that project, I promised myself, once the inn was finished and I had a proper forge setup.

Thankfully, it just so happened that our collective efforts had turned in that direction. We were going to build me a proper workshop. It took us a day or so to figure out where to put it. In the end, we settled on the rear of the tree, where a particularly long, stout branch could hold up a wood-reinforced stone structure. It was half a floor lower than the foundation of the main inn building, which made the tree look a little like a ship with a large central deck.

It was visually balanced at the front of the tree by two more huge branches that were almost like arms. Actually, if they were arms then the one at the back was like a tail. Anyway, that was the current project we were all working on. We were still at the stage where we were placing the foundation stone blocks and fusing them together with magic and moss. Which, if I were honest, still felt wrong on several fundamental levels. The architect had been right, building a treehouse out of stone was

At that very moment, Noah and I were in our small flying forms, holding up a huge chunk of stone while Paisley pinned and glued it into place. This particular chunk was set to be part of a supporting arch that would hold the structure up in the air.

“I will never get over the fact that our tiny little asses are on lifting and hauling duty,” Noah commented, shifting slightly to give his arms a bit of a rest.

“It’s because small is power,” I said, like it was some sort of deep and fundamental truth.

He grinned over at me and nodded, trying to match my false-severity while failing utterly. I was particularly good at deadpan humour. Well, that or people were just particularly shit at reading subtle emotions on a face with my features.

“How’s the welding coming?” I called up to Paisley. “This isn’t exactly comfortable!”

“Not long!” was her reply.

Hours later, after many more blocks were welded and pinned together with metal rods, we finally finished the foundations for the smithy and workshop. It was going to be a rather cosy operation, unfortunately, with how many crafting disciplines we needed to fit in here. The whole place was about ten metres in diameter, meaning we’d have everything we needed to make things, but nothing big. No enchanted power-hammers here.

“God, this is taking so much longer than I thought it would,” Noah grumbled, kicking his shoes off.

“Oh, you thought building a small inn and supporting buildings on top of a walking necro-tree would be simpler, huh?” Paisley teased him, rolling over on the stone so she could look at him directly.

The stone foundation was nice and warm after the exertion of the day, so we were taking advantage of it to rest our tired muscles. Noah laughed in reply to Paisley’s teasing and groaned, then stretched languidly, shaking with the effort.

“All this strength training has me gaining stats even though I don’t really need it,” Noah pouted.

“There’s ways of adding portions of your strength total to other stats,” I said, rolling over to look at him. “There’s a hidden dungeon with a robe that does that.”

“And if you don’t like the robe, we could try and pay to have the enchantment moved to a different item,” Paisley continued.

Noah stared at her with a look of growing excitement. “You can do that?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s expensive as hell and requires an item of greater quality than the one that has the enchantment, but you can do it. Only people who have a build based around a niche enchantment ever do it, because usually it’s easier to find something similar from another source.”

“This game is great,” Noah said.

I had to agree with him. In the century since video games had been invented, design practices had gone through many phases, including too many hit games that forgot the quality of life improvements from the past. The devs of Rellithesh hadn’t made the mistake of forgetting history, so we had a great number of nice little improvements. It also helped that a great number of the developers were digital sapients, so they could fit way more hours into a day of developing—Literally. That said, the game wasn’t perfect, there were oversights and odd design decisions, as with any game.

“It’s pretty good, yeah,” Paisley agreed. “It has some less than great qua— ah! A raindrop just hit my forehead.”

“Let’s get inside, then,” I said, and hopped to my feet.

To get up to the main building we had to take a set of stairs that were still missing a roof and a handrail, and they were slick with the clouds that were rapidly collapsing—Dumping their contents onto the land below. I guess Noah and I could have tried to fly up, but I wasn’t confident in my wings. They were sluggish when they got wet.

The main room of our new inn was a warm and welcoming space, with wooden beams crisscrossing the ceiling and a large fireplace dominating one wall. Ethan was busy at the hearth, starting a fire that would soon blaze high enough to heat the whole room. Mum had already decorated the walls with colourful tapestries depicting scenes I didn’t understand but they appeared to be gaming related, while several rows of tables and benches filled the centre of the room. The tables were made of a special type of wood, taker’s oak. When enchanted with a spark of mana, it would slowly regenerate back to the state it was in when you enchanted it.

At one end of the room, a long bar stretched across the wall, waiting to be stocked with a variety of fine wines, ales, and spirits—Hopefully. Around the edges of the room a few small alcoves were set into the stone walls, providing private areas for our future patrons to drink and talk in private. We couldn’t let folks like Roth down, they needed places to brood properly, after all.

The three of us trudged over to the table closest to the fireplace and pulled up the rudimentary seats. They were the cheapest we could find until our workshop was up and running. Soon, someone would be making furniture to train their carpentry.

As the fire grew stronger and the room began to warm, Ethan finally stood up and dusted off his hands. "There we go," he said, grinning at us. His eyes fell on Noah. To anyone else, it’d look like his smile barely changed. I could see the interest there, though, and I noticed just how close he pulled his chair to the shorter boy.

"This place feels so cosy already," I said.

“It’ll be even more cosy once your mum is done decorating,” Ethan remarked, getting comfortable beside Noah. Not too close, mind you.

I tried not to laugh when Noah went bright pink and glanced up at Ethan, then down at the table, then over at me, then up at the ceiling before finally blurting, “Gods, I need a drink. Have we stocked this place with booze yet?”

"Let me go and see," Paisley said, standing up from her seat.

Oh dear. I’m pretty sure I did see some bog standard ale sitting down in the cellar. Tonight might get interesting.