「Ellie, can you stop sulking?」 Agwyn nudged the boy lightly with her forehead. But Elrhain ignored her. His face was buried into the cushion while his body writhed in indignation.

He had the right to pout whenever he wanted, for however long he wanted. Especially since,

‘Ahhhh!’

Elrhain quickly screamed over the memories in his stupid brain.

「It’s fine. Kids puke on people all the time!」 If Agwyn was trying to comfort him, she was doing a terrible job.

「B-But Cati keeps telling everyone she meets that I bullied her, that I puked on her. How am I supposed to show my face to them tomorrow!」

「Well…」 Agwyn stopped. She twirled a lock of her hair before answering, 「Um, how about you apologize to her? Or give her a present, perhaps? You know, playing cute like this is a privilege only adorable kids like us have. We have to thoroughly take advantage of it.」

Elrhain remained reticent, and Agwyn didn’t bother him anymore. She put her own pillow beside his and rested her tiny head on it with a giggle.

It was nearing midnight. The two would have already been asleep at this point, but Elrhain kept groaning and shuffling left and right, so Agwyn could not sleep either.

The occasional critter of crickets and swish of the breeze had already taken over the call of the birds and murmurs of dhionne. The ambient sounds of nature had not an enemy to clash, so their force remained mild, their tone remained soothing.

It made Elrhain’s girly groans even more annoying.

But he had already stopped his exasperating guttural complaints that didn’t cease for hours after Cyra had teased him silly during today’s dinner. To Agwyn, this was a big plus.

Five, or perhaps ten silent minutes passed, and Elrhain finally unburied his face from the cushion.

He looked at Agwyn’s beaming face with his big blue slit eyes. The girl laid on her side watching him, before nearing closer for a snuggle.

Elrhain sniffed.

「It was…. So bad.」

「There, there.」

「It stank like the armpit stench of a million obese gamers. My nose, I feel like I have been violated, wah!」

「It’s okay, Ellie. Sometimes, everybody makes horrible mistakes.」

「D-Do we have to continue cultivating and pushing stuff like that out from our bodies? What if some come out of the inner walls of our nose? That’s like… Cultivation is suicide!」

「Aww. I’m sure it will be fine.」 Agwyn moved even closer and pecked his forehead, hugging him tightly. 「Uncle Tudor said today would be the worst. We are so young that our bodies don’t have that much impurity. So I am sure the intensity of it will go down from now.」

「R-really?」

「Yup! Trust me. Dhionne who cultivate later at life discharge so much of the stuff, it comes out gunky black! Ours was really transparent, right? And before bringing it up way close to smell it, we could not notice the stink at all!」

「Yeah! That’s right. We gotta be vigilant!」

「That’s my Ellie. God, I love you so much.」

「Thanks.」 Elrhain felt as if a thousand tons of wet socks had been pulled out from his mind. He was tired; he wished to sleep now.

So the boy completely let himself go in Agwyn’s soft embrace and took off on a journey to the dreamlands. This time, any nightmare, whether ghastly or stinky, was fought away by a superheroine who appeared in his dark visions with magical lights.

The cutest little girl scared silly all the nasty, putrid monsters with her selection of high impact Eau De Parfum!

***

“God.”

“What?”

“I had the weirdest dream last night.”

““Eh! What is it? What is it!”” Agwyn, Cati, and even Ysbail, who had somehow snuck her way up to the platform, kept pestering him like three chipmunks.

Before he could answer though, a sullen old servant stomped his way to them and dragged the wailing Ysbail away from the manna saturated cultivation stage towards a small gathering of children down below the stairs.

Apparently, they had Uorian alphabets to learn. Both the noble and the servant toddlers.

Cati looked sad for precisely three seconds before she and Agwyn resumed bombarding him with questions.

Elrhain sighed, then re-taled the tale of how he was chased around by a giant multi-mouthed frog made out of fish poop all throughout Lochuir. Then suddenly, when all hope was lost, Agwyn came in from the sky and finished off the Lovecraftian terror with essential oil from Kokutar sweet blossoms.

Now, his audience, including Siani and Cadough, laughed along with every wonky step of his frightening dream. Though he must admit, he played up some parts a tad too much.

…but as long as it got laughs, right?

Elrhain also noticed that Cati had none of the spite from the calamity the day before and once again thanked Agwyn in his heart.

Well, he did get up super early this morning and, with Agwyn’s ingenious help, drew the prettiest looking anime portrait of the three-eyed girl he could in a super expensive looking parchment.

The angry little girl was at first utterly unwilling to even talk with him this morning. But the present completely blew away any animosity she had. The two reconciled with a hug, as witnessed by Agwyn, who sported an extremely unwilling expression.

She had supervised the making-up process all the way through with bloodshot eyes. If Elrhain hadn’t let Cati go from the hug before those three seconds ended, he reckoned there’d be a bloodbath by now.

Or at least some biting and hair pulling, and perhaps not speaking to each other for the day before the two little girls inevitably made up.

At first, it was Ysbail and Cati who were the best doublets. Now it was Agwyn, Cati and Ysbail, the triumvirate of air-headed tiny trouble-toddlers with Elrhain the grumpy guardian tagging along.

Two of the three trouble-toddlers were showing off the portrait to all the cousins, uncles, aunties, and even servants they could spot with their five ominous eyes. Their chests puffed and noses flared with both glory and levity.

Hilarities aside, honestly, Elrhain was so proud of Agwyn. She’d been getting the hang of her emotions better lately.

Even today, after Tudor had commenced their second cultivation session, she had only tried to sit together with him in the same circle twice.

One less than yesterday! Which was a tremendous improvement!

‘Finally,’ Elrhain mused, ‘the baby girl’s growing up.’

******

Summer was ending, but the heat blazed hotter.

Looking up at the sky of Lochuir, one could see a firmament of brilliant blue. Yet the lustre of the heavens was harsher on the eyes now. The light was more luminescent. It was fiercer as if its fury would crash down on the disc any minute.

Recently, the frequency of rainfall had gone up. The new mountain trails were muddy and looked more like a bog, and the Aenraad river had spilt over on the shores of Lochuir. The forest vegetation all around refused to be disposed of even after being cut down again and again. Numerous critters and insects had found their way inside the township with a mission to vex the inhabitants to sleeplessness.

Even the fragrance of fresh flowering fruits could not take away from the dreary mood that covered the populace.

The clan had to hasten the pace of building new shelters, distributing resources, and electing leaders. Dingy huts and shabby houses now occupied a few of the peaks around some of the smaller lakes of Lochuir, which stuck out like sore thumbs among the lush jungle canopy.

It broke the beautiful scenery even further when the residents had to carry up buckets full of sludge and stones to mend the rickety new villages every few days.

Even with magic, there was a limit to how strong they could build them to war against nature. The high realm shamans and mages also had better things to do than settlement construction.

The manna-rioghs all around the territory were growing restless. Now, almost every group of evacuees that reached Lochuir came in with wounds and tragedy.

Death rose, and so did the demand for food.

The settlements nearest to the township and shire grew cramped, filthy, and had daily fights happening for reasons both small and large. More mountains had to be fashioned into new villages to suppress the rising conflicts.

But even with the chaos, there was a peculiar kind of order that kept the lid from blowing off. Was it Earthloch’s unquestionable might? Was it a sense of unity amidst crises?

Whatever it might be, it helped the upper echelon of the clan tackle the multitude of problems cropping up in timely manners, step by step.

So that even the noble kids could wander around the vast territory of Lochuir without too much risk.

Today, Eudav, Arfon and Vesiphis also accompanied the four as Cati, Ysbail, Agwyn, and Elrhain rode on top of Alleigh, the magic husky in their daily Lochuir spelunking.

The rest had something else to do. Apparently, Siani’s mother would take them to see the hunt of some rare gheist. The younger kids had also wanted to go, but the adults would have none of their grievances. They mercilessly stuff them on top of Alleigh and ordered the Pengyte to run around the settlements to keep the annoying brats busy.

Even puppy dog eyes were useless. Even when Ysbail and Cati joined in to buff their pitiful pleading, it could not leave a nick in Cadwell’s cold-blooded defence.

The shamanic duo wanted nothing to do with hunts either, while Vesiphis refused to let the heir and heiress wander around without proper supervision.

Thus, they could only grumble in resentment as they stepped foot onto one of the newest mountains where a make-shift village was being set up.