Path of Dragons

Surprisingly, getting Wilhelm’s equipment back wasn’t difficult. It helped that word of Elijah’s deeds had already spread throughout the city of Khotont, but he suspected that the gambling den let the items go mostly because they had no use for the esoteric equipment. They were bound to Wilhelm, so even if someone else could figure out what they did, no one else could even use the pieces – at least until he was dead. Because of that, Elijah only had to pay a couple of silver ethereum to obtain the bundle of items. He also recovered the Explorer’s bicycle, which cost a few more coins.

The whole ordeal was completed while Wilhelm slept near the fire. To ensure the man’s safety, Elijah had deployed the tent he’d gotten from Lars, and when he got back, he was reassured to find that it had worked as advertised. Only then did Elijah climb inside and allow himself a little rest. He could keep going for quite some time without eating or sleeping, but it was never comfortable. So, the night’s rest – even if it was only for a few hours – was definitely beneficial.

The next morning, Elijah awoke just after dawn and quickly boiled some water for his daily cup of coffee. He had no intention of sharing with Wilhelm, though. Coffee was a limited resource, and Elijah knew he’d need the buff it provided when he participated in the Trial of Primacy. Perhaps there would be another harvest before it began, but until he was certain, he intended to preserve his store as much as possible.

Thankfully, he finished the cup before Wilhelm even awoke, so there were no awkward conversations about hospitality. When the Explorer finally did wake up, he was more than surprised to find that his equipment – and more importantly to him, his bicycle – were back. He thanked Elijah profusely, and soon enough, they broke camp, smothered the fire, and set off across the prairie.

As he had done outside Argos when he was searching for an appropriate place to build his first dolmen, Elijah followed his instincts. He couldn’t perceive ley lines, but he could feel the subtle variations in ambient ethera well enough that, at least subconsciously, he stood a good chance of finding the intersections. Still, it took almost the entire day before he felt something – just a twinge – that guided him toward the east. After that, it was only one more day before he reached the confluence of energy that came from intersecting ley lines.

Or the World Tree’s roots, as he preferred to think of them.

“What does your skill tell you?” Elijah asked, glancing at Wilhelm, who’d been riding his bicycle the whole time.

The Explorer closed his eyes, clearly focusing as he said, “This is close. Not ideal, but…it is worth marking.”

“No.”

“Not here. I’ll help you find another spot,” Elijah said. “This one’s mine.”

“I don’t understand,” Wilhelm admitted.

“You will.”

While it might make some sense for Wilhelm to mark the spot and move on, Elijah had other plans for the location. It might not be strong enough for the Conclave’s purposes, but for Elijah, it was more than adequate to power one of his dolmens. And while it was a bit frustrating that it would leave him with only one more potential dolmen – at least until he upgraded his core – it would give him the ability to bypass the swamp and access Khotont, which was the largest settlement in the expansive steppes.

Hopefully, he wouldn’t regret it.

After explaining what he intended to do, he shifted into the Shape of the Sky – which garnered quite a bit of shock from Wilhelm – then set off in search of appropriate materials for the structures. At first, he worried that there would be nothing available. After all, the region wasn’t particularly rocky. However, he only had to fly south for a few hours before the territory became a bit hillier. It wasn’t a huge change, but it wasn’t long after that that Elijah found a lonely butte formation that towered over the surrounding area. Upon further inspection, he found that it was composed of sandstone, limestone, and some sort of igneous rock he didn’t recognize.

“Perfect,” Elijah said, having shifted back to his human form. He ran a hand along the wall of limestone. It wasn’t a high-grade material like the dragonstone, but he didn’t need it to be, either. The dolmens drew their power from the ley lines, so the materials were far less important than with other important structures. So, while it was mundane, limestone was indeed perfect for his purposes.

So, he got to work quarrying appropriately sized blocks. Fortunately, it was a far less difficult process than it had been with the dragonstone, so it only took a couple of days – during which he periodically returned to the camp site to check on Wilhelm, who was perfectly content to monitor the ley line intersection with his equipment. Meanwhile, Elijah quarried the stone he needed, then proceeded to carry them across the plain.

That took a further few days, but that couldn’t be helped. The distance between the intended dolmen site and the butte formation was close to a hundred miles, so even with Elijah’s travel speed, which was enhanced by Essence of the Wolf, he could only cover the ground so quickly. Thankfully, as he could carry enough limestone for two pieces at a time, he only needed to make fifteen trips.

“How does this work, exactly?” asked Wilhelm once all the stones had been gathered.

Elijah told him, emphasizing that none of it would function properly without his skill. “But the structure of the dolmen affects the quality, though I’m not sure what the result will be,” he admitted. “I haven’t seen any changes to how my spell works.”

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“Perhaps it will be part of your Legacy. Or maybe it is improving, but at too slow of a rate for you to observe without specialized equipment,” Wilhelm suggested.

Elijah could already see that the Explorer wanted to start running experiments. Apparently, the man had a background as a scientist, though he was a little cagey about precisely what field of study. Elijah could have probably pushed, but he chose not to. If Wilhelm wanted to reveal details about his past, then he had the right to do so on his own schedule.

Regardless, Elijah quickly moved to the next stage of his plan, which had nothing to do with the dolmen. Instead, he intended to multi-task by preparing the boar’s hide to the best of his abilities. Ideally, he would do so in his grove, where the ambient ethera was much higher, but he didn’t want to take the extra couple of weeks that would require. Hopefully, flooding the area with One with Nature, Healing Rain, and Nature’s Bounty would suffice.

So, flaring all three skills, Elijah set about fleshing the enormous hide. The boar had been huge, so the hide was nearly thirty feet wide and about half again as long. That meant that working with the piece was extremely time-consuming and more than a little taxing. Thankfully, Elijah’s endurance was nearly inexhaustible, and he filled the time with working on his core cultivation as well.

It took an entire day of strenuous work to complete the task of stripping the excess fat, flesh, and membrane from the hide, but when he was done, he felt quite satisfied. The next step was salting the hide in order to dry it out. Fortunately, Elijah had thought ahead and purchased quite a lot of salt in his most recent trip back to Khotont. He put it good use, generously covering the underside of the piece. He knew that it would take a few days for the salt to dry out the hide, so when he’d finished with that step, he shifted his attention back to the dolmen.

Elijah fell into the work, roughly carving the intended shapes. He went with a cuboid shape, with the heel stones being about ten feet tall and four feet wide. The capstones were a little narrower, but at least as long. By the time Elijah had finished carving the rough shapes, three days had passed, and the boar’s hide was completely dry.

So, leaving the dolmen’s components behind, he started on the next step, which was to remove the hair. With the bear hide, he hadn’t bothered, but for the boar hide, it was necessary for what he intended. Thankfully, he had enough knowledge to manage it well enough. Traditionally, soaking the hide in urine was how people loosened the hair from hides, but for a hide so large, that just wasn’t possible. So, he chose to employ a slightly more modern approach and used some of his discarded limestone to create lime. Doing so required him to heat the rocks to an incredibly high temperature, then mix it with water. That necessitated another trip back to Khotont so he could buy a kiln.

Armed with that, the process went off without a hitch, and he soon had enough lime to do the job. So, he mixed the substance with water, then soaked the hide in a large basin he’d dug. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough for Elijah’s purposes.

While the hide soaked, he went back to the dolmen, arranging the roughly carved stones into a circle he meticulously laid out. As he did so, he paid attention to the ambient flow of ethera, and he was happy to see that it adjusted to the new structure, flowing in and around it. That inspection told him that the layout wasn’t perfect, though, so he spent an extra day arranging the stones in such a way that wouldn’t impede the flow of ethera. Unsurprisingly, that meant that the dolmen was a perfect circle.

By that point, the lime solution had done its work loosening the tough hairs, allowing Elijah to remove them. It was monotonous work, but he managed it all the same. And after another day’s worth of work, he had finished.

That was when the time came to actually tan the hide.

Using the same method he’d used with the bear skin that had become his Cloak of the Iron Bear, Elijah concocted the tanning solution using the boar’s brains and some mineral oil he had acquired in Khotont. As before, it was a tedious process, made even more so by the sheer size of the hide. He’d thought about cutting it to pieces and tanning each one individually, but he felt that would compromise the integrity of the finished product. Perhaps he was only imagining it, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

In any case, once he’d applied a generous coating to the huge piece of leather, he went back to the dolmen and started to refine the shapes. Not only did they need to be as perfect as he could manage, but he also intended to add a host of embellishments that, when he got to that step, took the form of relief carvings of the mighty boar.

Back and forth Eliijah went, reapplying the tanning solution to the hide and carving the dolmen’s components until, at last, he’d finished. Overall, it had taken him over two weeks to complete the entire project, but he felt that it was time well spent. Wilhelm agreed, and he’d filled the hours by taking hundreds of measurements. He had found the process fascinating, and he was almost as eager for the final product as Elijah was.

In the end, Elijah gathered everything he’d used and shoved it in his Ghoul-Hide Satchel. It barely fit, which just told him that he needed to return home sooner rather than later. Once everything was accounted for and camp had been broken, he completed the dolmen by using Roots of the World Tree. The cast took quite some time, but when it finished, he got the expected notification.

Then, the next notification came:

The name of the circle wasn’t surprising, but he was a little disappointed that the enchantment grade was lower than the Circle of Spears. Obviously, Carmen’s contribution had helped quite a bit.

As soon as the circle was completed, Wilhelm let out a yelp and stumbled to his backside. “What was that?!” he cried, staring at his equipment.

“My spell.”

“Can you do it again?” he demanded.

“Not here. Did your equipment get your measurements?”

“It…it will take some time to go through the data, but I think so…”

“Awesome. Now, do you want to try it out?”

Predictably, Wilhelm’s answer was an enthusiastic affirmative.

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