Chapter Fifteen #2
“What?” I asked self-consciously.
“Only you could wake up to a shard of the Emberstone covered in blood, find out about an attempted attack on your farm, reseal a giant hole and deepen the roots to a wall of vines with magic, and then get straight back to work like it’s nothing,” my wife listed teasingly. “You amaze me, Noah Dawson.”
“I try.” I winked before I pulled out a carton of eggs. “I want you to come with me when I take the varmint rifle into town today. The thought of leaving you here after that attack doesn’t sit right with me.”
“Of course I’ll come,” Ellyn said as she walked behind me. “I’ll get dressed now.”
“Good,” I said as I fought back a sigh of relief. “Can you get me some clothes, too? My limbs are already trying to give up on me.”
“Did using your magic take that much out of you?” Ellyn asked as she wrapped her arms around my waist from behind.
“Yeah, it was pretty intense,” I sighed as I grabbed a pan and placed it on the stove. “But I’m not going to let it stop me from doing what needs to be done.”
“Ever the farmer,” my wife giggled before she pressed a kiss to my cheek and whisked herself away. “I want my eggs sunny-side up today!”
“Sunny-side up eggs, coming up!” I called back as I cracked two into the pan.
Fang sat patiently at my feet as he waited for me to cook him something up, too. I toasted a few pieces of bread for Ellyn and I, and once our eggs were done, I cracked some raw eggs into Fang’s bowl and threw in some chunks of ham, too.
I also poured a can of tuna into Nelly’s, but I knew the lazy cat would only eat it when she could be bothered to get up from wherever she was curled up.
Ellyn returned from the bedroom just in time to dig into our steaming eggs and toast, and she was dressed in a long yellow dress and a brown knitted cardigan. Her blonde hair was braided down her back, and with it pinned out of her face, her pointed ears were on show.
I smiled to myself as we ate our breakfasts together, and I thought about how lucky I was to call this woman my wife. I wondered what our kid would look like, and if they would have the same pointed ears as their mother, or have more human features like me.
Either way, they were destined to have some kind of magical ability. Half-elf or not, I had no idea what connecting to the shard had done to my biology, but I hoped it would pass onto my children in some capacity.
Once we finished ?our breakfasts, I headed into the bedroom and slipped on the clothes Ellyn had picked out for me.
She’d gone for simple, with blue jeans, a black shirt, and a brown plaid button-up.
I slipped my boots back on once I was fully dressed, and I quickly brushed my teeth before I made my way into the kitchen again.
As we approached the front door, I pulled on my fleece jacket and gave Ellyn one of my other thick-lined denim ones. Then we made our way outside just in time to greet the farmhands.
I filled them in on the situation that occurred because keeping them in the dark about something like that seemed wrong.
Of course, Brom insisted that they didn’t have a problem working as usual.
They felt more safe on my farm than anywhere else in Gladewood, and even when I told them I was heading into town to drop my varmint rifle off, they were comfortable sticking around with just the shard to protect them.
I got Brom to help me take the glass sheets from the back of the side-by-side before Ellyn and I hopped in and set off for Gladewood with my varmint rifle.
Alaek was at his house, as I expected now that the watchtowers were fully built, but the dwarf admitted Alden had asked for his help designing a barracks for the invaders we called King’s Hands.
Even though his attention would inevitably be snatched up by that, he promised he’d look into getting the schematics for the new bullets sorted as soon as possible.
I gave him a quick safety rundown just to ease my mind, and the dwarf had a number of questions about the gun.
I answered them to the best of my ability, but I didn’t really know how to make gunpowder myself.
I explained how it was supposed to work, though, and Alaek said he could figure the rest out himself.
After handing over my varmint rifle and a box of ammo, I decided to make a pit stop at the townhouse to inform Alden of the attempt on my farm.
The last thing I wanted was the King’s Hands finding out about the attack. That would just give them the perfect excuse to come onto my farm and sniff around for the shard, and I was hellbent on keeping them as far away from my property as possible.
Alden, although taken aback, swore to secrecy and made the decision to up the guards on patrol just in case a similar thing happened in town.
After that, Ellyn and I headed back home. The farmhands had already made quick work of the animals, which gave Brom some free time to help me with the greenhouse.
I decided to set it up beside my house near the silos.
It wasn’t going to be a huge, colossal space I could use to churn out more crops.
Instead, I wanted it to be a personal side project.
The crops inside would be grown by hand in the tedious and attentive way I’d grown them before I’d got my powers from the shard.
But, of course, in order to build the greenhouse in the quickest and most efficient way, I’d need to use the fragment of the Emberstone.
The walls offered us enough security, and even though I didn’t like having it out in the open, I knew I needed to risk it in order to do what I needed to do.
With the shard at my side, Brom and I started by holding two pieces of glass close to each other.
Then the shard did its thing, and roots broke through the earth beneath the panes and welded them together.
I could feel the strength of the plants taking over, and by the time Brom and I let go, the glass didn’t budge an inch.
That was the process for the entire greenhouse.
Brom and I made our way around in a rectangular formation until the base of the greenhouse was sealed together.
Then we moved up the layers in the exact same way until we reached where the roof would need to start.
Rather than placing them in the same rectangle, Brom and I angled them in at ninety degrees so the roof would end up slanted.
The vines slithered up from the ground and curled around the panels, inside and out, so they wouldn’t fall when we released them. The ceiling went up next, and when we finished holding the panels on the other side, the greenhouse was almost complete.
The only thing left to add was a door, but that was the one thing I hadn’t sourced out.
I had felt the exhaustion setting in as I used the shard’s power even more, but there was one more thing I needed to do before I called it a day.
I pressed my palm against my shard’s front face and felt it thrum under my touch. I didn’t need to voice what I wanted out loud. We had a weird symbiotic relationship at this point, and as soon as we made contact, the ground rumbled.
Brom took a step back as a larger group of vines burst from the earth right in front of the opening of the greenhouse.
The way they wrapped around each other was entrancing.
The vines formed a large rectangular shape flat on the ground, but then slowly lifted up until it fit perfectly in the doorway of the greenhouse.
Part of me was concerned that it wouldn’t be able to open, but when I stepped toward the barred entrance, it unfurled just like the gate on my farm and Gladewood.
“Thanks, buddy,” I said to the shard as I stepped into the spacious greenhouse. “This is awesome.”
“That thing just saved you hours of labor,” Brom commented as he stepped into the empty greenhouse, too. “So, what’s next?”
“I’ve got some racks in the other barn that didn’t get destroyed by the shard when it made its getaway a few weeks ago,” I said with a playfully sharp look at the floating crystal. “I’ll fill the trays up with soil and see what seeds I still have left.”
“Are you going to magic these ones awake?” Brom asked as he scratched his dark green head.