As it turned out the Baron was more than a little upset about how Harlan had more or less ignored him and stayed not only out in the woods in a cabin that was far below what any noble should have, but also that he just gave the message of him going back in a few more days to the guards instead of a proper letter.

The baron had realized that Harlan could be described as anti-social and erratic at times, so he sent an architect to bother him and get a nicer home and workshop set up on the lands.

The baron didn’t know how much more anti-social Harlan was getting, the adventurer refusing his job in such a way had left a very bad impression on him. He barely saw anyone at all now that he had golems to pick things up in town.

“What is this… Mess? A bunch of twigs made into an orb of some kind? We will need to tear it down. Square is the only proper shape for a base.” The baron had heard that Harlan really did like that guest room he made. So he sent Tom knowing full well the man was a brutalist at heart and had no room for such flair.

“That is a guest room, I grew all of those branches from the main logs of my cabin and it is supposed to be like a flower bulb.”

“Awful.” The man formed and shot a brick directly at the room, the walls were not strong enough to hold out against it.

“If you were attacked it would be a death trap for anyone inside. Complete demolition is needed. I will build a fortress here, the likes of which won’t be broken by anything short of an army. Now, you will be acting as muscle here. Use those golems that you used to bury us to tear down all of this and start over. I am thinking 5 floors, 10 feet tall at least for each of them.”

“Wouldn’t a big tower be worse for defense?”

“Who said a tower? We are building DOWN. Keep up. My men are all mages but with those golems we should be able to get this done well ahead of schedule.”

“What is your schedule? I was about ready to head back to my parents farm.”

“3 weeks, that should give us time to properly compact the dirt into a good strong stone, give us time to ward it, and time to start on furnishing. But that will be mostly left to you, I do know some good carpenters however. We should be done in a week and a half if they can help us. That trick they pulled was actually quite impressive, we couldn’t use unstructured magic to escape, and yet it happened so fast we also couldn’t use anything stronger to take control of the ground back from it.”

For Harlan the next week was mind numbing, he was mostly sitting near a tree and commanding it to shift and compact dirt until its admittedly massive mana pool was at around half, he refused to leave himself open to an attack without all of his defenses. The men were nervous of not only him, but the foxes. By the end Harlan made 65 of them, then the man shaped golems. All of them were sitting on the walls, watching front and back to catch any threats. Dearil’s birds were still sticking around, and they didn’t seem to care for the work being done if them scratching at the blueprints were anything to go by.

The only spot of excitement was when a group tried to scale the wall.

As soon as they placed their hands in the holds they had added, the trees reacted harshly, crushing them and pulling them into the wall where they screamed and shouted. Until Harlan came out with his armor on and Lugh in hand.

But even that was just a group of thieves who had planned to steal his golems. They were quite lucky the trees stopped them first. He had already set the golems to self immolate if they were ever captured and couldn’t escape. But he was pretty sure the golems would’ve just ripped these idiots to shreds.

He covered them in blocks of stone and had the golems, led by Balor, escort them to town.

Though Harlan didn’t realize that they would’ve been better off being killed by the golems.

To try and steal from a noble most often lead to either slavery. But people who could use magic were killed because trying to contain them was an exercise in frustration.

To steal weapons from one, one which has already suffered attacks by the theocracy would lead to them being tortured for information to make sure they were truly operating on their own.

And with the little distraction out of the way, Harlan was back to the most tedious task he had ever had. The actual builders were the ones who finished all of his work, so for him it was nothing but a brute force task without any real workmanship in it.

But he did at least learn how to do some of the work himself in case he needed to add new rooms or set up fortified shelter in the wild.

Day six rolled around, he had worked around the clock, doing the work with the help of Balor and Lugh while he let the trees regain their lost mana, though Harlan had noticed that they were recovering far faster than he could’ve predicted. He just didn’t understand why they could.

When dawn broke the men went back to work, smoothing out and further compacting the walls which were made the night before. Finally Tom was walking towards him.

“Great work, sloppy but my men have had to work with worse. Fastest we have set up something like this however. Now you need to leave for a few days.”

“What? After all that? Why? And SLOPPY?”

“Warding is a true art, and you aren’t allowed to see us laying the runes. I don’t even want your toys around while we work. And yes, sloppy. It is great that it got done so fast. But if anyone had so much mana and didn’t sleep they could get it done in that timeframe. Oh, and you are supposed to go to the redwall mansion in 2 weeks, something about hiring help for maintaining your lands while you are away.”

“What about the trees? Also, you cannot tell anyone about them.”

“Trees don’t just walk around, we can cover them up and not worry about them seeing anything. And I would never give out the defensive secrets of a client.”

“Good, thank you. Oh, and how much am I paying you?”

“Royals called this a gift. Redwall just sent me, but they are paying for it.”

The royals just couldn’t risk him being killed in his sleep, Dahlia only had so much time to watch him and waking potions lost effectiveness after a couple of weeks. It was cheaper to build an inverted tower of warded stone than to pull people away from their other work just to protect a relatively safe person. Especially with how things were going in the battles between the kingdom and the theocracy.

The soul equipment had radically changed how the forever war had been going, the front line was no longer being held, but rather pushed back. They had pushed all the way back another 30 miles, leading them right to the true border of the theocracy. New walls were being built and needed to be filled with soldiers as well as building an invasion force for the theocracy. Such a conflict last happened nearly 200 years ago when the had been decimated by the fall of a seawall letting creatures from the deep into the country.

Harlan made his way back to his parents farm, once again it had grown some while he was away for that month. There was a wall made of trees, cut down to make a flat top and with a space built above the gates to have a few guards sit.

“HALT. State your business.”

“This is my parents farm. Just call them over, I don’t want to hear anything else.”

The guard started shouting something about respect but Harlan just tuned him out, tapping his fingers on the wooden ox. Eventually his father came over to see what all the yelling was about.

“Oh, I heard you had been off tinkering in the woods. Come on in and explain yourself to your mother.”

Harlan was on edge, something was wrong.

He had his foxes stay near the gate as he walked to the house.

He stepped inside, waiting for something horrible to happen, to find his parents farm overrun with skinwalkers, requiring him to kill the things that now looked like his loved ones. To find spinal spiders controlling them, at least they could recover from that.

The threat was far more mundane. His mother saw him as he stepped inside, her face was joyful, then wrathful.

“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU HAVE DONE? RUNNING OFF INTO THE WOODS TO DO WHO KNOWS WHAT.” His sixth sense had only gone off because of her anger and worry. He swatted him with a wooden spoon on the hand but he didn’t mind, she couldn’t actually hurt him. But that only made her more upset, and that hurt him inside so he started to act like it hurt, receiving a knowing nod from Harlow.

After 5 more minutes of yelling and pointing fingers Aida seemed sure he had learned his lesson.

“Can I explain now?”

“No. sit and eat, then you can explain, have you been eating well out there? You probably just had whatever was easiest to make and didn’t give a thought to anything else.”

Harlan had to admit she was mostly right about that. But those sandwiches were really quite good.

“Now, explain yourself.”

“I was building things, I got kicked back here since my place out there is being warded.”

“That doesn’t explain anything.”

Harlan whistled and the house was suddenly full of his fox golems as well as the human like golems, now covered with hooded cloaks to hide them.

“I thought you could use more protection. I had to do something.” Balor decided to jump in, he didn’t like the edge of Harlan’s voice.

“What he meant was he was worried after you were hurt and decided to help that to never happen again by bolstering the defenses of the farm with additional soldiers.”

“See, Balor could explain it just fine. So who are they then?” She pointed to the man shaped golems.

“They are my golems that look human. You couldn’t even tell under their cloaks. Stonesteel skeletons, specialized for defense over offense, they should be competent with the swords I gave them.”

“Should be?”

“Well I could only test them against myself and themselves. Not a lot of people willing to fight a golem, not that I bothered with people.”

“Pff. You sound like Redmond did. There is nothing wrong with asking people for help with things.”

“Everyone at the adventurers guild now thinks I am some kind of monster. And I don’t care to explain any difference, those people are scum anyway. And the local guards wouldn’t be good enough for any real data.”

Aida wanted to say otherwise, but she knew of a few adventurers who used the village as a homebase of sorts. She had to take it from a different angle.

“Why not find someone else? Surely Jaramis would want to help the uncle of his children.”

“He hates me, and I don’t care about him. I would rather avoid talking with him.”

“Oh, he doesn’t hate you. He is just tightly wound.”

“I can grow things, I wanted to ask about getting a few vegetables to test things on.” Nobody in the room missed his blunt change of subject.

“Sure thing, I got a few new plants in. hot peppers from the confederacy. They aren’t ready to harvest right now so we can’t really test them side by side. But that should be fine.” Harlow had no intention of lingering on a pointless topic. He figured Jaramis did hate Harlan. But so long as it was kept to snide remarks and glares he just didn’t care much. Words were just words unless a fae hears them was his motto.

“That sounds great. I want to talk with Kass too while I am here.”

Harlan had fun working with his father on the plants, they found out fairly quickly after some tests with potatoes that while he could grow them just fine and they didn’t taste off in any way. The energy it took to grow food was never enough to cover the mana he burned to grow it. In hindsight Harlan realized that he should’ve known that from the start, if it was so easy to just have mages grow food all day then the confederacy would’ve done that instead of selling a number of its people into slavery.

The weeks passed quickly, he could’ve gone back to the woods to see his newly warded home, but instead he just stayed at the farm. It gave him plenty of time to explain the golems to his parents, as well as sneak around at night and make the trees around them into his false mimic trees.

He was satisfied that by the time he left for the academy he wouldn’t have any reason to worry about his parents at all. But he still needed to talk with the Baron about a few things. So back to the mansion he went.

Though there were some people who would be very worried, in the time since Harlan left his place in the woods scouts from smaller illegal mercenary groups had vanished. Never to be seen again. Their bodies fed the trees.