Chương 26: Chapter 27: All The Small Things

The first thing I did after waking was check whether the skill remained. I lay beneath rough wool blankets inside the eastern shelter while rain tapped steadily against the canvas roof overhead, staring upward through the dim grey light of dawn and half convincing myself exhaustion had invented the whole thing: the little broken bird, Merris standing beside the wagon, the humiliating skill name settling into my head like a joke told by a cruel god.

Then I felt it sitting there inside me, small and stubborn and unmistakably real. ACTIVE ABILITY Knickknacks: Common. Still there. Permanent. I closed my eyes briefly and exhaled through my nose. Around me, the eastern shelter woke into its usual miserable rhythm. Men coughed. Armour buckles clicked in the half-dark. Someone near the entrance swore after stepping in mud carried inside during the night patrol rotations.

Outside, the frontier continued surviving badly, as if survival itself had become a habit too ugly to abandon. The heat beneath my chest remained present, though weaker this morning after the carving. That unsettled me almost more than the skill itself. For weeks the strange internal pressure had worsened after battle, after advancement, after pushing myself too far against the frontier, yet while carving useless scraps beside the wagon fire the sensation had calmed for the first time since Iron (late) settled.

The thought that creation might steady me arrived unwillingly, and I disliked it immediately because it sounded too close to something Merris would say. Jory Pike wandered past the shelter entrance at that exact moment carrying two dented helmets and a half-eaten ration loaf.

"There he is. The legendary toy maker." I stared at him flatly.

"You told people already?" Jory ducked inside before I could throw something at him and dropped heavily onto the bench opposite, chewing with visible delight.

"You told Merris beside an entire caravan."

"That was one person." Jory raised the ration loaf like evidence.

"That was at least twelve people and two horses." He leaned forward with terrible solemnity.

"So. Knickknacks." I said nothing.

"Not even Woodcraft?"

"No."

"Artisanry?"

"No."

"Tiny Decorative Objects?" I kept staring. Jory nodded solemnly.

"Right. Fair enough. I'd also choose violence at this stage." Despite the mockery, the ferryman's eyes kept drifting toward me with open curiosity. Everyone in the eastern line understood the risk of bad skills. The frontier was filled with men who learned whatever happened naturally during hard years and then spent the rest of their lives trapped inside mediocre progression paths because abandoning skills meant throwing away months or years of advancement.

Knickknacks looked catastrophically stupid, and the worst part was that I could barely defend it.

"You really keeping it?" Jory asked eventually.

"I don't have a choice."

"You could hit Copper first." I looked away immediately. One abandonment per rank. The rule still sat badly inside me. I had already discarded Desperate Counter during Iron, and for a few uneasy hours had considered my recklessness in dropping Field Rigging. Those decisions, which had once felt practical and necessary, now looked thinner under daylight.

If Knickknacks truly became useless, I would carry it all the way to Copper whether I wanted to or not, and the thought left a constant dull pressure behind my eyes. Outside the shelter, the warning bell rang once. Jory stood immediately and stretched his shoulders.

"Come on then, rope boy. Let's go defend civilisation with knots and decorative birds." The eastern trench line smelled of wet ash and opened carcasses by sunrise. Rain drifted softly through the Greywash while workers reinforced collapsed barricades beneath low clouds that turned the whole frontier pale and exhausted. Beyond the outer wall, the forests waited in silence broken only by distant movement and the occasional echo of beast calls somewhere deeper among the trees. The attacks had changed again.

Smaller packs now, but more frequent. Less testing, more pressure. Bren Maddock thought that worried him more than the Greywash Stalker ever had.

"Something's pushing them," the older guard muttered while inspecting damaged trench supports near the southern line.

"Predators don't burn themselves out like this without reason." Wade Corbett hammered another brace peg into place nearby.

"Maybe the reason is they're beasts."

"Maybe." Wade glanced at him.

"That sounded unconvinced."

"It was." I worked beside them mostly in silence. The trench systems required constant maintenance now. Tendon anchors stretched beneath rain exposure. Hide wraps loosened. Mud shifted support pressure unpredictably beneath the heavier sections of wall.

Field Rigging still guided repairs instinctively, even though it was gone now, while Beastcraft suggested increasingly strange improvements involving bone reinforcement, claw tension locks, and tendon lines set at angles ordinary rope crews would have considered wasteful until the first impact proved otherwise. Useful. Always useful. I hated the satisfaction that accompanied successful repairs.

Every time one of the systems held against pressure, workers praised me again, and every time the praise landed, Knickknacks felt more humiliating. Near midday, one of the younger militia approached carrying a snapped support line.

"Vey, can you look at this?" Before I answered, Jory called loudly from atop the trench wall, "Careful. He'll carve little flowers into it." Several workers laughed. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. I pretended not to hear them. The support line itself had failed near the anchor hook where repeated rain exposure weakened the outer hide wrapping.

The memory of Field Rigging showed me several repair options while Beastcraft suggested replacing the entire tension point using barkback tendon instead of rope. I fixed it automatically, and that bothered me too because the work no longer required much thought. Competence, I was beginning to discover, could feel like a noose if enough people praised the knot. By late afternoon the eastern line settled briefly into uneasy quiet. Patrols rotated. Workers hauled fresh Ironbark braces toward the northern wall.

Somewhere beyond the mist, axes echoed faintly where additional logging crews attempted to keep pace with the camp's impossible timber consumption. I sat alone near one of the southern trench fires sharpening my axe while rain hissed softly against the coals. My hand drifted toward the small wood scraps piled beside the work table before I had fully decided to move.

I picked one up with the guilty reflex of a man reaching for something he had no intention of admitting he wanted, and the knife appeared moments later, settling naturally into my hand as though the rest of me had been waiting for permission. I began carving again without purpose, shaving a rough edge from the scrap and turning it slowly in my fingers while the camp noise faded into something distant and bearable. The blade moved through the soft wood in short careful strokes.

Shavings curled downward into the mud beside my boots. The heat beneath my chest eased almost immediately, and that still frightened me because it was too clear to ignore. The shape that emerged under the knife resembled a tiny river boat, crude and uneven, with one side heavier than the other and a prow that leaned slightly as though already weary of water. I stopped once I realised how fully I had given myself to it. A grown man sitting beside trench fires carving toys during a frontier siege. Pathetic.

I turned the boat over in my palm and almost threw it into the mud, but movement near the shelter entrance caught my attention. One of the refugee children from the Cataract stood silently beneath the edge of the trench awning, wrapped in an oversized wool cloak. I recognised him vaguely from Garron's inn, though not by name. The boy looked half-starved and permanently startled, as though expecting every loud sound to become another disaster.

His eyes fixed immediately on the little carved boat, then flicked toward my face with the wariness of someone who had already learned that wanting things invited disappointment. I frowned slightly. The boy looked away at once, then looked back again. The silence stretched awkwardly between us until I held the carving out stiffly.

"You want it?" The boy hesitated, then nodded once. I passed him the tiny wooden boat. The child accepted it with extraordinary care, holding the little carving as though it were something far more valuable than a badly shaped scrap of wood. For several seconds he simply stared at it beneath the firelight, turning it once with his thumb along the crooked prow, and then, quietly, he smiled. The expression hit me strangely hard. Not emotionally, exactly.

More like sudden imbalance, as though some badly rigged thing inside me had shifted weight without warning. The child hurried away moments later, clutching the carving beneath his cloak. I stared after him longer than intended, and something stirred softly inside Knickknacks afterward. Not advancement. Not yet. Recognition. The sensation unsettled me enough that I immediately stood and returned to work. The fighting that evening arrived just before dark.

Iron stalkers hit the western trench line while scavengers poured through the lower drainage channels beneath the palisades. I moved automatically whenever the warning horns sounded now: axe in hand, weight forward, breach points assessed, first crossing beast marked for death before my feet fully reached the mud. The battlefield itself increasingly felt simpler than conversation. An Iron stalker burst through the collapsing lower barricade while rain hammered sideways through the trench. I intercepted immediately.

Guarded Blade shifted my footing instinctively while Axe Strike demanded commitment through the shoulders, yet the transition between them felt wrong now. Not weak. Wrong. Like stopping halfway through the same motion. The stalker lunged. I shifted sideways, blade turning the jaws aside while the axe rose almost simultaneously through the opening. The beast collapsed in one clean movement. Too clean.

Bren noticed immediately from farther along the trench, because the older guard had been watching the overlap between the two skills for days now. I felt it myself during every fight. Guarded Blade and Axe Strike no longer behaved like separate instincts. They crossed into one another constantly. Defensive movement bled naturally into brutal execution strikes. Spacing became aggression. Aggression became positioning.

The skills wanted something, and that thought followed me through the rest of the battle like a second shadow. The trench line held until midnight, barely. Afterward the eastern camp settled once more into exhausted silence broken only by repair work and distant patrol calls beyond the walls. I returned eventually to the southern fire pits where workers rested between rotations beneath patched canvas awnings.

The little refugee boy sat asleep nearby against one of the support crates, and the carved boat remained clenched in his hand. I stopped walking. For several long moments I simply stared at the sleeping child beneath the firelight while rain whispered softly beyond the trench shelters. The boy's fingers were curled tightly around the boat, guarding it in sleep with the same intensity others reserved for knives, coin, or bread. It was badly made. Crooked. Uneven. Useless in every practical sense.

It would not strengthen a wall, bind a wound, kill a beast, or hold a trench against rain. By every frontier measure that mattered, it was nothing. And still, somehow, held. Knickknacks shifted again. This time the movement did not fade. Warmth settled through my hands, not the violent heat that came with battle or rank growth, but something gentler and more precise. A quiet comprehension of small forms, rough edges, balance, comfort, and the strange dignity of useless things made useful by being wanted.

The skill opened beneath me like a narrow road I had mistaken for a ditch. ABILITY ADVANCED Knickknacks has advanced from Common to Iron (early). You now better understand small handmade objects, rough balance, comforting forms, simple shaping, and the value that can emerge when an object is wanted rather than merely useful. This ability grows through care, repetition, attention, and making modest things that carry meaning beyond material worth. I stared at the sleeping child.

The advancement should have embarrassed me. Instead it left me uneasy. Not repetition. Not carving. Use. The skill had not advanced because I made the object alone beside the fire. It advanced because the child took it, kept it, and slept easier with it in his hand. Meaning mattered, and that frightened me more than any battlefield because it implied the skill itself cared why something was made. Merris appeared beside the fire pit quietly enough that I had not heard him approach.

"You felt it." I looked toward the old merchant sharply. Merris nodded toward the sleeping child.

"Some skills build walls. Some remind people why walls matter." The words settled heavily into the rain-dark silence. I looked back toward the boy clutching the tiny wooden boat against his chest while the frontier groaned beyond the walls around us. A laugh rose somewhere in the camp and died quickly, ashamed of itself. Beyond the palisade, something moved through the wet dark, and guards shifted along the line without calling alarm.

The world remained exactly as it had been: cold, hungry, and pulling at every weak point. Only the boy slept. I looked at the little boat, then at my own hands, nicked by blade work and blackened by smoke. For the first time since awakening Knickknacks, I no longer felt entirely certain the skill was useless, and somehow that terrified me even more.