Laying Foundations
Ubys arrived with the sunrise.
He came ahead of the caravan — flying, somehow, the way clerics of the Raven Queen tend to manage when they have a reason to move. He found the rest of you at the edge of the crater, standing in the early light, looking at the pond where the dragon lived. You hadn't slept much. The ruins of Westbridge stretched around you in every direction, quiet and overgrown and waiting.
You had four days.
Four days before the caravan arrived — before the wagons and the refugees and Brick's wagon full of students and the griffon escort from Bellebranta came rolling up the last stretch of road. Four days to make this place into something worth arriving to.
You flew north.
Helvenblade House was five miles up the ridge, where the last foothills of the Sword Mountains met the edge of the Kryptgarden Forest. You came in from above and you saw it before you landed: stone walls half-hidden by decades of creeping vegetation, a main hall with a slate roof still mostly intact, outbuildings scattered across the grounds, and at the back of the property, cut into the cliff face itself, the old mews where the family had once kept their griffins.
The place looked like a house that had stopped, not a house that had died.
Umsheryoth had guarded it — not tended to it, not cleaned it — but guarded it, with whatever instinct a dragon retains even through the blight. Nothing had moved in. No squatters, no creatures, nothing nesting in the rafters. Just eighty years of vine and moss and old timber going dark in the corners.
The bones were good.
KeYs walked the perimeter. Crowley tested the stonework. Moist was already looking at the water — there was a natural spring behind the main hall, mountain runoff that had fed the house for as long as it had stood, clean and cold. Ubys stood at the cliff edge and looked down at Westbridge.
You could see the whole valley from up here. The crater pond at the center. The deer moving through what used to be the market square. The ruins on the outskirts, and beyond them, the long open farmland stretching out toward the Dessarin road.
This is what we're building toward, he said, or something like it.
Nobody disagreed.
You talked about what it needed.
A switchback trail from below, so people on foot could reach the house without wings. A proper wall around the estate grounds — Brick could build that in a week, maybe less, with his students cycling Wall of Stone around the clock. The mews had to be cleared and rebuilt for larger animals; Aurelion and Falkor would need somewhere to sleep that wasn't the middle of a courtyard. And somewhere inside, Crowley wanted a smithy — a real one, with a proper hearth and an anvil and room to work.
Down in Westbridge itself, you mapped out the rest of it. The crater pond would stay at the center of town. Umsheryoth lived there. You'd build around him — walls and streets and eventually houses radiating outward from the water, with the dragon at the heart of it like a guardian who chose to stay.
The quarry on the hill gave you stone. The forest gave you timber, if you were careful about which parts of it you touched. And deep below the ground — somewhere under the ruins, maybe sealed, maybe not — there was said to be a great forge. Old. War of the Lance old. The kind of place where dragonlances were made.
None of you had found it yet.
Ubys stood at the site of the old detonation — the crater where the bomb had gone off eighty years ago, whatever it was that had obliterated a whole town in a single act of destruction — and he picked up a shard of something from the edge of the waterline.
Dark. Glassy. Not quite stone, not quite obsidian. Fused by the heat of it, by whatever had been burning at the center of that explosion.
He had an idea for it.
A memorial. Something built from the pieces of what had been broken, for the people who'd been lost in it. Not just the Westbridge dead — but the Brookside dead too, and the ones from the war before that, and all the names that didn't make it through to wherever names are supposed to go.
The Raven Queen keeps them, if anyone does.
By the time the afternoon light shifted, you had the shape of it.
Not a plan yet — not walls on paper and dates and measurements. But the idea of a place. Stone walls on a ridge. A town that grew up around a pond where a dragon slept. A forge that might still be down there, waiting. A memorial made of glass that remembered everything it had been through.
You had four days, and the caravan was coming.
There was a lot of work ahead.
Next session: the caravan arrives, and the question of what to call this place.