Homestead Builder 1 by Clay Whitlock (.ePUB)
File Size: 433 KB
Homestead Builder 1 by Clay Whitlock
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 433 kb
Overview: They traded their Grandmaster [Builder] for a [Wallcaster], a mage whose stone walls rise in a breath and are gone by dawn.
So Anson Galt walked into the Wilds to build the first thing in his life meant to last: his own home.
For seventeen years he built for an S-rank adventuring company: camps at dusk, palisades, mine shoring, bridges over rivers on a deadline. Every one of them was struck by morning.
The company let him go fairly, with a full share and a handshake. At thirty-five he is the best field builder in the kingdom, and he has never built a house anyone lived in.
His ground is the Farwild, three days past the last road, where every settlement in living memory fell within a year.
A half-grown wolf limps out of the pines and beds down on the rock beside a spring. He builds his cabin on that rock, lights the fire, and the system opens a panel it never showed him in seventeen years of camps.
[Settlement: Kettle Spring. Standing: Homestead.]
It counts hearths with someone living at them. More hearths, higher Standing. Homestead is the bottom rung.
Grandmaster in [Timber], [Earthworks], [Fortification] and [Bridgework]: he lifts timber a crew of twelve would need tackle for, and builds a log cabin with his own hands in nine days. He can drop a hundred-foot spruce exactly across a gully and roll a loaded cart over it the same afternoon.
Novice in [Hearth and Flue]: his chimney smokes him out of his own cabin.
The Farwild breaks everything people build. What Anson builds stands, and people with nowhere safe left follow his smoke. You can see it two valleys over.
Morwen, a widow whose last house burned from the chimney down, cooks outside rather than trust his, and feeds everyone who turns up. An old sawyer arrives with the pit saw he meant to be buried with. He tells her the stew wants salt and eats three bowls. A very large, very quiet young man from a broken timber crew stays for the food. And Hesper, a half-elf ranger who has watched every settlement in the Farwild fall, tells Anson to leave before the Wilds take him. Then she keeps coming back.
The trouble is the boar. It is the size of a hay cart, it ended the last two settlements in this part of the Farwild, and it winters on the very shelf where Anson built. The first snow brings it down.
Nothing he ever built was meant to last the night. This time he means to build one thing that is still standing when he is old.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Free Download links: