CH156 Thera’s Perspective

Once again she’d woken up alone. Giving it a bit of thought, unless Ben was up late into the night working on something he would typically be up before her, out to her uncle’s shop with breakfast waiting on the table. It seemed like it was around noon though, so she got up and dressed before going out of the room to see what everyone else was doing.

It looked like she was the last up, with the others already recruited into work. Sachel and Ralia were tending to the fire, extracting tar from the wood that had been gathered while Skoe was back at the oil press.

She didn’t see Ben immediately, but felt him off to her right and found him at the side of the house, dealing with the most challenging issue of replacing some of the wood it was built with, without damaging the entire structure.

“You look like you’re having fun,” She said, as he was oh-so-carefully wedging a few logs into the wall to act as support for when he started his construction.

“Well, I wanted to put this off a bit longer, but then I inspected the house itself and decided this was a priority.”

“That bad?”

“If I’d known what it was like beforehand I would have insisted we get the shed. Only a couple places are rotten through and need to be replaced, but one is a major bit of support for the entire building, I thought I was going to have a heart attack seeing it.”

Thera winced, the thought of being buried under a collapsed building was far from an appealing prospect. “So how long will it take you to fix?”

“Who do you think I am? I’ll have it done in half an hour tops. Once I get the next bit after replaced, all I’ll have to do for the house is cut away any of the lesser rot and coat the outside with a mixture of the tar and oil to seal the wood.”

“And the roof? I don’t really want the ceiling caving in while we sleep.”

“Thankfully no issue. It uses wood shingles and they seem to replace those often enough to keep it functional. I just wish they had a proper craftsman in the village to deal with this. I know a place this small doesn’t need anyone with a dedicated construction skill, but the more I see the more there is to do.”

“You don’t need to do everything you know. No matter how good you are, a single person can’t rebuild an entire village.”

“At this point I’m just going to stick to improving enchantments, fixing fences, weatherproofing, and repairing anything that I think could get somebody killed. It’s probably manageable.”

Is it? She asked herself, thinking of what she’d seen in the village. There were about thirty houses around and none of them were in great states, she was almost certain he’d be working on every one of them if the villagers let him. At the very least he was lucky there weren’t more. It seemed like the dryads still formed family units together, even if there was no relation between them, and multiple generations might live together as well. It was definitely a close community, and thankfully in this one case that worked to their advantage.

“Anyway, now that you’re up, do you think I could trouble you to go with the others to go cut some more trees down for me? I got Skoe to do it before so he should know what to do.”

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

She grimaced a bit but agreed, not doubting that if they didn’t get everything he’d need he’d spend another night awake making and gathering resources to use, no matter how bad of an idea it was.

There were still hours before they commenced their hunt after all, and she’d have to get used to the most distasteful member of their group eventually if they were going to be working together for the next little bit.