The Crimson Road rattled with voices as much as wheels. Where silence once ruled, now goblins and humans spoke haltingly across the gaps in their tongues.
"Your meat… too salty," a goblin woman teased, chewing on a strip a farmer had offered.
The farmer laughed, shaking his head. "And your bread—flat as a stone. We'll trade. Salt for spice."
The kippers, huddled in the cart, squeaked laughter, their tiny voices squealing, "Stone bread! Stone bread!"
Even in hardship, laughter softened the edges. When mud sucked at the wagon wheels, humans pulled ropes, goblins pushed shoulders, and kippers darted about with surprising energy, scouting for firmer ground. "Together," one goblin muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. "Not bad. Not bad at all."
---
When the walls of Kai's city rose into sight, awe turned into chatter.
A peasant gaped. "Glass windows… here? In Vorath, even lords live behind shutters and rot."
A goblin boy tugged his sleeve proudly. "Our Kai made it. He makes stone sing."
The kippers squealed in their high, bright tones: "We live here? Not wagon wheels? Not mud?"
Inside, when Kai transmuted stone into new dwellings, the reactions came raw and unfiltered.
A peasant fell to his knees, pressing his forehead against the smooth wall. "This will not fall on me in the night. Gods bless you."
A kipper ran circles through the room, arms spread wide. "My roof! My roof! No rain!"
And a goblin elder, tapping the glass window, whispered, "Like frozen water… yet clear. Magic. Strong magic."
---
The chessboard became more than a game. It became a classroom.
"Horse moves like this," a goblin said, sweeping a piece in an L-shape.
A peasant scoffed. "Horse runs straight. You make no sense."
The kipper, bold enough now to join, chirped, "Let horse jump! Funny horse!" The group erupted in laughter, the rules bending with their joy.
Kai set down a second board beside them, this one with dice. "Then try chance," he said, his gaze fixed on the stone. "Not just strategy."
---
Around the fire that night, voices blended.
Daniel leaned forward, smile easy. "I've walked roads where shadows chase. But together, you've carried light here. Do you feel it? The dark will find us, but we've teeth now."
A goblin snorted. "Your teeth too small. You bite nothing."
The crowd laughed, but the farmer beside him lifted his mug. "Maybe small teeth, aye. But big heart."
The kippers clapped, chiming in a chant: "Big heart! Big heart!"
Daniel only grinned wider, firelight dancing in his eyes. "Maybe one day, I'll show you teeth for real."
---
The next morning, Daniel came to Kai, serious despite the grin he wore before the people.
"I'll go," he said. "There's a tribe—the Hollow Howl. Cave dwellers. Tough folk, but proud. They won't come unless someone bleeds the road with them."
Kai kept his gaze low, tracing lines in the dirt with his boot. "They'll follow if they believe. Don't reveal yourself. Not yet."
Daniel's grin flickered. "I'll manage. They live in the mountain roots—perfect for the underground city you keep dreaming about. If they come, they'll carve it out for us."
Flicker's dry voice coiled in Kai's mind. 'Send the wolf to fetch wolves. Clever.'
Before he left, Daniel clapped a goblin on the back and ruffled a kipper's hair, earning giggles. "Keep the games running while I'm gone. When I return, I want stories of who cheated."
The goblin huffed. "Humans cheat. Goblins win."
The peasant shot back, "We'll see whose board carries the crown when you're back."
The kippers squeaked, "We win! We win always!"
The laughter followed Daniel as he vanished down the road, toward the Hollow Howl caves and a new chapter of unity yet to be forged.
Daniel's tale of the Hollow Howl tribe carried a weight that stirred both dread and fascination among the villagers. The Hollow Howl were whispered about in taverns and roadside camps—wolves who preferred the echoing safety of caverns to the open wilds, their dens carved deep into stone, lit only by bioluminescent fungi and the gleam of their eyes.
Hunters unmatched, they were said to track prey for days without rest, their howls reverberating through valleys in a chorus that drove quarry to madness. To outsiders, they were savages, a nightmare that prowled the night.
To Daniel, however, they were something else. By killing one of their own and surviving their wrath, he had crossed an invisible threshold—blood spilled had turned to blood shared. The tribe had named him kin, a bond of violence and respect.
His connection could bring Kai's nation a formidable ally, but it also risked binding them to the tribe's feral traditions and unpredictable loyalties.
---
While Daniel set off on this dangerous mission, Kai bent his focus to shaping civilization from clay, copper, and will. The city needed water—clean, constant, and abundant. The Old Realm relied on crude wells, stagnant ponds, or streams choked with silt.
Kai envisioned pipes. Copper, drawn and refined through his tattoos, bent at his command into gleaming conduits that snaked through walls and foundations. He pressed them into place with surgical precision, every joint sealed with a shimmer of resonance.
As he worked, villagers followed in hushed awe, watching water flow not from a bucket but from a faucet hammered into stone. It was sorcery to them, but to Kai it was necessity—no nation could rise on mud and thirst.
A human farmer rubbed his calloused hands together, eyes wide. "My children won't carry buckets at dawn anymore?"
A goblin beside him bared jagged teeth in a grin. "No more stinky well. We drink like kings now!"
A kipper, barely a foot tall, squeaked in excitement. "No more sick-belly water! Pipes for us too, yes?"
Kai nodded. "Every home. Big or small."
---
The source troubled him, though. The stream feeding the pipes shimmered unnaturally, its ripples defying wind or stone. At times, the water seemed to pulse, as though a heartbeat thrummed beneath its surface.
Villagers whispered of water-spirits that stole children who lingered too long at its edge, or of drowned kings who dragged the living down to their halls. Kippers told hushed tales of silver-eyed eels with voices like priests, promising miracles in exchange for souls.
Kai knew enough of the Old Realm to believe legends often carried truth. He did not yet understand what moved beneath that water, but unease gnawed at him—a nation could be undone if its lifeblood was poisoned at the root.
---
Sanitation was another beast altogether. At the edge of the settlement, a foul-smelling outhouse leaned like a drunk against its own shadow, its stench spilling across alleys and fields alike. It was a blemish on the progress he sought.
Stone toilets would last, but they were crude and rough. What he envisioned was ceramic: smooth, strong, resistant to rot and disease. Clay would need to be gathered, fired, and hardened, a new craft altogether for this land.
It would be costly in effort but priceless in dignity. Civilization, Kai thought, was not only measured by how its people ate, but by how they lived clean. A nation with bread and pipes must also have toilets that did not shame it.
A goblin woman pinched her nose as she passed the outhouse. "Ugh. We need better. This smell worse than troll breath."
A human carpenter laughed. "If Kai makes toilets as fine as his roads, I'll build the houses to match them."
Even the kippers joined, squeaking in chorus: "Clean bottoms, clean homes!" Their joy made the crowd burst into laughter.
---
The kipper district proved a different challenge altogether. Their houses, little more than mushroom-shaped huts with tiny doors, looked fragile beside the stone structures rising elsewhere.
Disease had always stalked them—tainted puddles, stagnant water, infections that spread faster than their small bodies could fight. Kai crafted miniature pipes, his tattoos glowing as he shaped copper threads as thin as a reed, winding them through their huts.
When water poured clean into thimble-sized bowls, the kippers shrieked with joy, their high voices ringing like bells. They danced around the pipes, ears twitching, chanting about an end to sickness.
One kipper clung to Kai's boot, beaming up at him. "Big master make little water-rivers. We live longer now."
Kai crouched, ruffling its tiny head. "No master. Just neighbor."
Their loyalty crystallized in that moment; no leader in memory had lowered his hand to their scale. Kai had made giants out of them, not in size, but in dignity.
---
As the pipes reached every district, collaboration became the city's heartbeat. Goblins tramped back from the riverbank with clay packed in crude baskets, staining their green hands red.
Humans hammered supports into walls, testing pressure with cautious pride. Kippers wove tiny nets to catch leaves and grit before they clogged the flow.
A goblin smirked at a human builder. "You hit nails crooked."
The human smirked back. "And you spill clay everywhere."
The kippers chimed in, squeaking laughter. "Both messy! But good messy!"
The three races laughed together, their voices mingling in unexpected harmony. What had been separate fates was beginning to feel like one city.
Yet shadows pressed against the walls. Scouts returned breathless, whispering of strangers cloaked in symbols not their own. Some wore the sigils of Vorath's nobles, their greed ever-reaching; others bore the strange crests of the Academy, where magics were twisted and bound. If the Crimson Road carried riches and power, Kai's rising nation had just become the prize.
---
That night, the stream glowed under moonlight, its unnatural ripples silver and sharp. Kai stood alone at its edge, the air biting cold, his tattoos pulsing faintly in rhythm with the water.
Flicker's sly voice stirred. 'Water that moves without wind? Sounds like it has a mind. Careful, master—you may be plumbing a god's veins without asking first.'
Kai's gaze hardened. The Crimson Road was more than stone and dust; it was a spine of power, coveted by Vorath, whispered of by the Academy, cursed by stories older than the villages themselves.
If his nation was to rise, he would need to understand the river beneath the road as much as the road itself. For in water, stone, and shadow alike, secrets waited to drown the careless.