Location: Armathane → Southern Midgard Coast Time: Day 53–58 After Arrival
The Selection
It began not with soldiers, but with craftsmen.
Alec stood in a stone courtyard behind the lower palace stables, surveying the small group assembled before him. Eight men, one woman. All had calloused hands, sharp eyes, and expressions forged in decades of solving problems without praise.
They weren't nobility. They weren't knights. They were Midgard's engine room — masons, millwrights, waterwrights, and forge-trained builders handpicked from across the duchy.
He looked each one in the eye before he spoke.
"My name is Alec. You've heard of me by now. Some of you think I'm a trickster. Some think I'm a prodigy. Most don't know what I am."
A few exchanged glances. One man spat to the side.
Alec continued. "I was given a task. Grendale — broken wharf, flooded farmland, a river choked with salt. I'm not here to talk about rebuilding it."
He paused.
"I'm here to make it better."
Silence.
Then, from the middle of the group, a broad-shouldered millwright with ink-black beard and one clouded eye stepped forward.
"You know rivers?" he asked.
"I understand them."
"You ever fix one after it eats twenty acres of farmland?"
"No," Alec said. "But I've studied how to make water obey."
A second voice: "What do you want from us?"
"Brains. Skill. Patience. And no allegiance to failure."
The woman, a short and stocky roofwright with gray in her braid, crossed her arms.
"You lead us. But you don't outrank us. We do what we do, and we do it right."
Alec nodded once.
"Agreed."
She smirked. "Then we'll see what you're made of, sky-man."
Departure
They departed Armathane on the morning of the forty-second day — nine in total, Alec riding at the head on a dark-coated mare, the others following with carts laden with surveying tools, chalk, stone gauges, plumb lines, sacks of lime, rolled parchment, timber templates, and a dozen other trade-born objects of logic and structure.
Kaelyn Dros was not part of the escort. Instead, a courier rode with them — a thin man named Teren, all pale eyes and unblinking stillness. Alec knew he was less an escort and more a recorder.
He didn't mind.
Let them watch.
The Journey South
The road southward was wide and curved along the lower Midgardian valley — marked by limestone hills, apple orchards, and irrigation ditches lined with brush. But the deeper they rode, the more neglected the land became.
The farms here were cracked, not from drought, but brine rot. The wind carried the salt with it. Trees leaned like the elderly. The birds changed, too — gulls replacing robins.
On the third day, Alec walked alongside the carts as they entered a wide basin of dead fields.
"There," one of the masons muttered, pointing to a distant gray line along the horizon. "Grendale."
Grendale
It was worse than he expected.
The town slouched against a series of cliffs like a drunk against a crumbling wall. Buildings leaned. Salt devoured paint. The wharf had collapsed in three places, timbers fallen into the surf like snapped bones. A church bell lay cracked in the dirt beside a broken tower.
And the people?
They watched Alec's group arrive in silence.
No cheers. No jeers. Just tired stares and the suspicion of those used to being ignored.
The courier dismounted and passed a sealed writ to the village reeve — a narrow man named Corden, who read it slowly and led them to the longhouse with the pace of a man certain nothing would change.
First Impressions
That night, the engineers unpacked. Alec walked alone through the village with a leather-bound notebook, sketching the river's mouth, checking current speeds with a floating inked reed, inspecting damage patterns on the town's outer walls.
The flooding had not come from inland. It came from below — salt carried upward by wind and tidal surge, funneled by a narrowing delta that accelerated each high tide like a battering ram.
Fixing the dock was a symptom cure.
He needed to reshape the flow.
Alec returned to the town square and sketched a three-tiered catchment system into the dirt. A local boy watched, then blinked when Alec raised a brow.
"Get me ten stones," Alec said.
"What kind?"
"Any. Smooth."
The boy nodded and ran.
Alec smiled faintly.
He didn't return that night.
The First Meeting
The next morning, Alec gathered the team beside the edge of the collapsed wharf.
He spoke while gesturing at the sea:
"The old dock followed the waterline. That was a mistake. Every high tide runs unchecked straight into the village. We'll need to build an upper basin — angled walls, packed stone, sluice gates. Catch the surge before it climbs."
The old millwright — the one with the clouded eye — grunted. "You want to tame the tide?"
"No," Alec said. "I want to redirect its hunger."
He turned, pointed to the southern cliff edge.
"We dig a pressure channel there. At low tide, it empties. At high tide, it siphons force away from the main current."
"And the farmland?" asked the roofwright.
Alec nodded. "Irrigation trench rings. Three-tiered. One above, one middle, one drainage. We seed reedgrass first. Salt-resistant."
They stared at him.
Not hostile.
Not dismissive.
Just…
Measuring.
Finally, the old mason chuckled. "You speak like a heretic with a map."
"No," Alec said. "I speak like someone who doesn't accept ruin."
The People
He met with the reeve that evening.
"Your writ says you speak for the duchess," Corden said, pouring two cups of yellowed mead.
"I don't speak for anyone," Alec said. "I build for results."
Corden looked at him long and hard.
"Three crews from Armathane have come here in four years. All left after a week."
"I'm not here for comfort," Alec said.
"No," the reeve said, "you're here to prove yourself."
"And you?"
"I'm here to see if you can do what they couldn't. Fix what isn't worth saving."
Alec drank the mead.
"Everything is worth saving," he said, "if you know what to cut away first."
The First Marker
By the fifth day, Alec stood on the cliffs with four of the workers, hammering the first foundation stake into the earth.
The wind tore his sleeves.
The salt stung his eyes.
But the stake went down — clean, straight, precisely measured.
Alec stepped back, wiped the blood from his palm where the wood had bitten.
"This is the line," he said softly. "Everything changes from here."
Behind him, the engineers stared at the sea.
It roared back, endless.
But now?
It would meet resistance.
It was only a matter of time.