"Coming through!" Jacob's voice called out a warning loud enough that Henrietta looked up from the crane she was working on and peered over the edge, to the settlement below.

Clark was scrambling away from the bridge to make way for the returning hunter, who was himself heavily weighted down with the results of his latest hunt and staggering into camp, the very bridge allowing him access swaying uncomfortably with every overburdened step.

"I'm putting this right where you are, move!"

Clark kept scrambling. Henrietta formed her wings and hopped off the edge, gliding down to the forest floor to get a better look at what exactly their hunter had brought back in. Jacob grunted, then let the carcass roll off his back and onto the rocky ground with a thud.

"Is that another droopnose?" Henrietta asked, "Smith's going to be thrilled. He's been wanting more copper for a while now."

"Which is why I target it," Jacob confirmed. "How much do you suppose can be made from this?"

"With luck, the rest of us will get a personal knife from it. Most of it's probably going into the tower, though."

"Does that mean he's finally going to begin work on it?" Clark eagerly asked.

"It ought to. The boy isn't stalling, is he?"

Henrietta shook her head, "He's been working on it when not busy or burned out from the mattresses. Something about the foundations required metal and he wasn't able to figure out a workaround yet. But with this," she pointed at the latest hunting haul, "That workaround is far less important. I don't have the proper grounding in ward-work or Technotheurgy to understand how much he'll need, or why, but I suspect it will be sufficient."

"Does that mean we'll need the ropes done soon?" Clark asked politely, but Henrietta could pick up on a bit of weariness in his voice. With Alyssa working on the wall as of late, the rope-braiding had fallen to Clark in addition to his normal cooking duties, and the noble had certainly struggled to make it at a decent pace.

But he'd managed it anyway, and Henrietta was fairly confident they'd have enough rope by the time it became necessary.

"It will. But don't worry, I'll give you a hand."

"Oh? You would do that? Marvelous!"

"Don't worry about it. Actually, you'll need to butcher the droopnose. I'll work on the rope while you're doing that. Veeran, would you provide Haleford assistance? Assuming you aren't too tired, I know your standard bedtime is coming in a couple of hours."

Jacob waved her off, "I require sleep when it is time to sleep, not before."

"Excellent." Henrietta tapped her leg in thought. Oliver would be waking up in about an hour or so based on his normal sleep schedule, and once he found out that they'd gotten him more copper he would want to create a new metal smelter. That would take him either a couple of hours or a solid day, depending on what his needs were. If he could make a small corner of the pottery kiln work, that would obviously be less involved than if he needed to be able to cast the copper inside the tower's foundations in some way, in which case he'd need to make a smelter right next to the build site, and would delay them once again.

Neither situation required the direct involvement of Jacob or Clark, and they would finish extracting the droopnose's bones before Oliver could actually utilize them, so she dismissed the pair to start on their work and began weaving cords herself.

As expected, Oliver was overjoyed to get another batch of copper to refine, and he began work on creating a copper smelter modification for the brick kiln. Even though he did need to cast molten copper into the tower's foundation, Henrietta had underestimated the man's current level of enchanting. Utilizing the copper fire ring as a base, he planned on creating an insulated crucible capable of keeping the copper molten even after it was removed. With the temperatures involved, it wouldn't last long, but the hopes were it would last long enough for Alyssa to convey the material from the smelter to the construction site.

Their Ranger had been somewhat less than thrilled to find out it would be her duty to transport molten metal up a hundred-foot rock spire over the span of mere minutes at best. But, if she weren't up for it, Henrietta could potentially fill the role herself. Her flight wasn't that good at going straight up, but Alyssa was no [Summit Ascender] either.

In the interest of helping both of them, Henrietta redoubled her efforts to create a length of rope long enough for their crane. While already planned as an indispensable part of hauling the bricks and other material needed to the top of the cliff, it could pull dual-purpose well enough to help get a person from the base to the summit quickly.

Ideally it wouldn't be used for anything too precious, so regular trips up and down would be a bad idea, because Henrietta really didn't trust the quality of a rope handmade out of reeds. It didn't matter how solid what they'd made so far had been, they couldn't afford a catastrophic failure. A rope nearly a hundred meters long, that would be in near-constant use hauling up loads of bricks just seemed like an accident waiting to happen.

But things came together quite well. The copper bones of the droopnose were pulled out and thrown into Oliver's smelter – which ended up being an enchanted ceramic bowl suspended directly over the kiln's fire. The rope was braided, hearty soup was made from droopnose meat, the construction site was cleared, and the crane Henrietta had been building was finished and tested.

The crane had been one of the most nerve-wracking things to make, and she had taken the task mostly because she could actually install it without being in any danger. Even Alyssa, if she fell off the cliff, would likely break her legs regardless of her [Leafstep] having leveled a couple times. Calling it a 'crane' was honestly overselling it somewhat. It was a mass of some of the strongest reeds they could find carefully notched, drilled, and lashed together to suspend a bar over the steepest edge of the cliff, which was of course right next to the river, so that they could toss a rope over that and use it to haul a platform loaded with bricks on it up to the top, where they could be unloaded and relocated to the construction site proper.

It just looked so unsafe. Not that they could really be picky, but even having built it herself, it was just unsettling to look at and realize it would be carrying hundreds of kilos of bricks entirely over the edge of the cliff.

Her nice, safe testing methods all worked just fine, and then Alyssa had to go and nearly give Henrietta a heart attack by jumping out to the bar itself and swinging on it like a gym bar, absolutely heedless of the forty-meter drop below her.

While she hadn't fallen, the additional stress her gymnastics had put on the device did show a couple of places where it could be further reinforced, so Henrietta couldn't truly scold the woman for it.

With the crane set up, one end was attached to a platform designed to hold bricks, and the other was attached to the winding station that would be responsible for lifting the bricks.

Because they were next to the river, they could harness its power, and Jacob had managed to rig up a basic waterwheel. It even had a lever they could use to engage or disengage it from the bound set of reeds that were in use as a spool.

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The way it worked was fairly simple – a waterwheel in the river was always turning in the current, which spun an axle. That axle had a dowel stuck through the far end, which could be engaged into the spool simply by pulling two reeds – nestled into larger reeds to allow for movement – out and into the path of the dowel. The turning dowel turned the locking reeds, which in turn rotated the rope-spool and hoisted whatever was on the other end of the rope up.

When stationary, the wheel obviously had to be disengaged lest the entire system pull itself apart, but to keep the heavy loads of bricks at the top of the cliff, Jacob had also included another set of reeds that could be pulled out to fix the spool in place, bracing it against a truly impressive amount of structure meant to keep the spool on the ground instead of carted into the air.

The top didn't have any kind of fancy pulley system, just a set of smooth reed bars that would hopefully not introduce too much friction into the system.

Fortunately, everything worked not exactly first try, but certainly within the first handful of tests. Just about everyone was surprised by that, other than Clark. Though admittedly, he'd been asleep at the time and as such didn't have much of a chance to be surprised.

While Oliver was still working on his preparations for the tower, creating his enchanted jar capable of holding copper molten for several minutes at a time, Henrietta lead the rest of them to start hauling bricks up to the top of First Tower, now that they could.

Because she'd already directed her inklings to change where they were storing bricks, and to move over the already-fired ones to where she had known the crane would be, there was no first step to using the crane beyond moving bricks from their pile directly onto the platform in question.

Their first few loads started light. Clark and Alyssa loaded four bricks onto the platform at the base of the cliff, then Alyssa would operate the crane itself, engaging the waterwheel and keeping an eye on the contraption as the bricks were oh-so-slowly hauled up the massive climb.

Unfortunately, there was fairly little to be done about the time. Without any kind of gear ratios, a single turn of the waterwheel meant a single turn of the spool, and while the river they'd built next to wasn't slow, it wasn't especially rapid either.

Nonetheless, their first productive try reached the top eventually, and Henrietta reached out with a tendril of ink and brought them to the rock. Her flying might not have been strong enough to bring literal tons of earth to the top, but her ink certainly could snag a few bricks at a time without putting her in any danger. They never had figured out a truly good way to actually reach the platform from the top, as any ropes or similar constraints were limited by the fact they'd still need to lean out over the edge to grab onto anything.

But Henrietta wasn't constrained by her center of mass or her armspan, so she could quite easily scoop up the bricks and deposit them onto the stone. At that point, Jacob would carry them over to the actual construction site, where he would also be assisting Oliver with the actual construction.

Well, all of them would be helping with the construction at some point or another, but Jacob was assigned to be the primary assistant for Oliver thanks to his Strength and experience with fortifications.

Accordingly, he and Alyssa were presently finishing up the last sections of the wall. Contrary to Henrietta's vague imagination of a giant row of reeds, all of which were stuck into the ground directly for an old wooden fort-type construction, Jacob had presented an arrangement more effective for them. The end product had buried far fewer in the ground, but in clusters of parallel reeds. Those clusters served to hold horizontally-stacked reeds in place, giving them sections of wall that were easily seven meters long. Much longer than that and the difference in diameter between the top and bottom of the reeds was too great to be easily stacked even in an alternating pattern.

Still, it meant work had progressed far faster than Henrietta had anticipated, and she now felt substantially more secure as a result. Eventually, she'd have Oliver install some kind of defense or at least monitoring enchantment on the bridge, and then they could all but stop worrying about surprise attacks.

Not that they were that worried even now, but with proper security in place they could be unworried responsibly.

For now, Henrietta had something else to be worried about.

Oliver had made his crucible, capable of keeping copper molten for almost five minutes, and it was about to be all hands on deck to make it all work.

The smelter blazed hot, as hot as Henrietta had ever seen it. The copper fire ring Oliver had made to power the kiln was, from what she understood, entirely static and incapable of being meaningfully adjusted one way or another. But that just meant he had to get creative when he really wanted to ramp up the furnace.

Deadwood, dried firewood, and dry reeds had been piled high into the kiln while the fire pit had been blocked off, and while it had been absolutely sweltering inside, they managed to keep anything from catching ablaze prematurely. Then, Oliver had loaded up the smelter inside with the amount of copper he'd need plus margin, positioned everything such that it would be semi-reachable from the door, and set the insulating crucible on the floor right in front of it.

Henrietta summoned her wings and perched on the rocks above. Even with pots full of water on either side of the kiln should something go wrong, there were still countless ways things could go wrong. So, she had still placed herself on universal backup duty.

They were, after all, about to transport a decently-substantial amount of molten copper directly from a blazing furnace, in a crude potentially-fragile crucible up forty meters into the air on a rickety and undertested crane on homemade rope, then across rough and rocky ground for another hundred or so meters, whereupon the copper would be used in a magical ritual to redirect the nearby flows of magic in a beneficial way.

Oliver's immense skill did reduce the conventional danger of that final skill substantially, it was true, but they had also just a couple weeks prior seen that the magic around here could be volatile. And without understanding exactly what made the tree Jacob had killed special enough to spark the wild magic storm that had wiped out Shelter, they didn't know if this might end similarly.

But it needed to be done, so they were doing it.

A shout of surprise from Clark started everything. He'd opened the kiln to a gout of flame erupting outwards, and he'd jumped to the side in order to shield himself from the heat. However, even after a few minutes, the fires hadn't died down, and prepared to swoop down to intervene.

"It's too hot to get close!" Clark yelled over the crackle and roar of flames. "But the copper will still be cooling! I shall attempt something!"

He replaced the kiln door and ran off, then returned a moment later with a branch, one from the trees they'd felled, with most of the foliage already cut off. With that in hand, he removed the kiln door once more and poked around inside the kiln, outside the view of Henrietta.

"Got it!" he yelled, pulling the ceramic jar out of the kiln triumphantly, it hanging on the end of his stick. Alyssa stepped up, wrapped the jar in her reed-woven basket, and took off towards the crane.

Henrietta flapped her wings hard, rising into the air as fast as she could to reach the top of the cliff before Alyssa reached her destination. She managed it just as the faint call of "Ready!" reached the top, and as such caught the barest glimpse of Jacob dropping off the cliff, clutching the handle they'd threaded into the rope with a death-grip.

Jacob was heavier than Alyssa, and though it was not so much that their respective descent and ascent was wholesale foolhardy, it still seemed far faster than was safe. It took less than a minute for Alyssa to crest into view, and she bound off the platform with enough force to send it swinging wildly in her wake.

She dashed down the uneven rock at the top of the spire, far faster than Henrietta could keep up with, and despite nearly stumbling at one point, recovered with practiced ease and reached Oliver without losing her precious cargo.

Henrietta was too far away to hear what words were exchanged, but given the way Oliver recoiled from the basket, it probably had to do with the heat of the crucible. It shouldn't have been hot, the enchantments Oliver had put on it explicitly kept the outside cool by redirecting heat to the inside, but clearly something hadn't worked.

The duo were trying to arrange for some way to take the top off the jar without directly touching the container when Henrietta arrived, and with only a word of warning, intercepted their awkward fumblings with the reed-basket by coiling one wing around the jar and using [Refined Calligraphy] to coat her fingers with the ink from a basic scribble, copied from the dirt itself. Enough to make it an inanimate inkling, not enough to do anything beyond keeping her skin from feeling the heat as she pulled the lid off.

"Where do you need it?"

"There!" Oliver pointed, urgency redoubled.

Henrietta had to consciously not bound over with a flap of her wings, but still relocated as quickly as she could, and at Oliver's indication, placed the jar flush with the ground and poured the metal into the indent the Artificer required.

He immediately began chanting, and Henrietta retreated. Alyssa had already withdrawn to a safe distance, and the Technological and Arcane scents of burnished steel and incense respectively filled the air as Oliver began his work.

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