The first meeting of the Royal Council of Khilux lasted eleven in-game hours and produced exactly one law.
In fairness, it was a very good law.
Jane ran it. Of course she did. I sat at the head of the long table in the castle's great hall, because apparently that's where kings sit. She sat at my right hand, with Martimer behind her taking notes. Down both sides of the table sat every named golem in the kingdom who wasn't on a hunting rotation.
Torva had her notebook. Zuriel had blueprints. Purah had a cup of something that was slowly freezing over. Izarail had promised Jane he would use his indoor voice, and was trying so hard that he'd gone completely silent and was vibrating slightly. Shade sat in the corner, where nobody had put a chair, because Shade had put a chair there herself.
Juliet was supposed to be in the princess's seat. She was under the table, braiding Crimson's ears.
"First item," Jane said brightly. "What does a golem kingdom need laws for?"
There was a long silence.
"...So that we know what we're allowed to do?" Joul offered.
"Wrong!" Jane said, still beaming. "So that you know what other people aren't allowed to do to you. Hun, write that down."
I wrote it down.
Then everyone had ideas. All at once.
"The forge should be open every hour of every day," Torva said, "by law."
"It already is," Martimer said. "You're in it."
"Then it should be illegal to close it."
"Nobody wants to close it, Torva."
"Then it should be very illegal."
Izarail raised his hand, very slowly, trying not to make any noise. When Jane called on him, he whispered, at a volume that rattled the windows, "IS YELLING ILLEGAL?"
"No," Jane said kindly. "But apologizing to doors is now officially optional."
Izarail looked like he'd been given a gift.
Purah proposed a law against anyone touching her frozen drink. Gladius proposed a law that swordsmen get first pick of the training yard. Jarn proposed a law that swordsmen share the training yard, and Gladius withdrew his proposal so fast it left skid marks. Zuriel proposed fourteen laws about building codes. Jane told him he could be the building code, and he looked happier than I've ever seen a golem look.
From under the table, Juliet proposed a law that every golem gets one head pat from the King per day, minimum.
The table went completely silent.
Then every golem in the room turned to look at Jane. Jane turned to look at me. I opened my mouth.
"Passed," Jane said, before I could speak. "Unanimously. Hun, you're going to need more hours in the day."
That one doesn't count, though. Jane calls it a 'royal custom.' It isn't on the books. Everyone knows it's the most strictly enforced rule in the kingdom.
It went on like that for hours. Then, somewhere around hour ten, when everyone was tired and Crimson had fallen asleep under the table with his braided ears, Haven spoke up for the first time.
"What about the ones outside?" she asked quietly. "The ones nobody made. The ones somebody made badly. Do the laws protect them too?"
Jane looked at her for a long moment. Then she picked up her pen.
That first law became the foundation of everything after it. Jane called it the Charter of Making.
The First Law of Khilux
No golem shall be made to be thrown away.
Any golem found within or beyond the borders of Khilux, made by any hand, may claim the protection of the Golem King, and shall receive it.
Haven cried when she read it. Then she asked if she could be in charge of it. Jane said that was the idea.
She enforced it for the first time two days later.
She came back from the forest's eastern edge with a golem walking behind her. A wild one, made of mossy stone and old roots. It was half the height of a door, missing an arm, and it had been wandering the woods for who knows how long, ever since whoever made it had stopped caring. When it reached the city gate, it stopped and stared at the walls, and the lanterns, and the golems going in and out, and it would not go any farther.
Haven knelt beside it, and said the First Law out loud to it, word for word.
It walked through the gate.
The cook fed it. Torva made it a new arm. It doesn't talk much, but every morning it goes and sits at the foot of the First Law, carved into the wall of the guild hall, and runs its stone fingers over the words. The people of the city voted to name it Moss. It seems to like that.
The rest came over the following week. Slowly at first, then all at once, the way things always did when Jane decided they were happening.
Currency. I argued for golem coins. Little ones, with my face on them. I had a whole design. Jane let me finish explaining it, then pointed out that the kingdom's entire income came from selling things to players, and players use gold, silver and bronze, and so would we.
"But the little faces," I said.
"No, Hun."
We use gold, silver and bronze.
Jobs. Every golem would have one, and every golem could choose and change it. Builder, adventurer, scholar, explorer, farmer, smith, fisher. (The fishing golem chose 'fisher', which everyone found very brave.) Most golems can fight. Specialists like the blacksmiths and builders would be protected by everyone else instead.
Taxes. A tenth of whatever you earn goes to the kingdom. The kingdom uses it for materials, new golems, and anything a city votes it needs. Purah asked who would collect it. Shade raised her hand from the corner. Nobody has been late with their taxes since.
The guild. A hall where requests could be posted, by me, by the departments, or by any golem, and taken by any golem who wanted the work. Joul asked to run it, and she was so plainly suited to it that nobody else put their name forward. The very first request on the board was mine: as much silver mithril as anyone could bring back from Jane's dungeon, for the royal guard squads. The pay was so high that half the adventurers in the city left that afternoon.
The guild's first day was a disaster. Thirty adventurer golems tried to take the silver mithril request at the same time, and the guild hall's front door didn't survive. (Izarail apologized to it on behalf of everyone. Optional, but appreciated.)
By the second day, Joul had posted three rules in very large letters behind the counter.
One request per golem until it's finished.Teams may share a request. Teams may not fight over a request.Anyone who breaks rule two answers to Shade.
There has never been a problem since.
City names. Every new city and village would name itself by vote. The first new village, out on the forest's western edge, voted 'Rabbitholm' by a landslide. The rabbit legion had voted as a bloc. I'm told Crimson campaigned.
The vote was closer than the landslide makes it sound. Pick and the goblin miners campaigned hard for 'Stoneburrow'. They'd dug half the village's foundations themselves, and felt they deserved a say. They handed out flyers. The flyers were mostly drawings of pickaxes.
Then Crimson gave a speech. He stood on a crate in the middle of the village site, in his human form, with his long ears straight up, and said: "Rabbits did not build this village. But rabbits will defend it with their lives. And they are very, very cute."
The rabbit legion, assembled in the field behind him, all thumped the ground at once. It was very effective.
Pick sulked for three days. Then he quietly carved 'STONEBURROW' into a stone on the village's well, very small, in the corner where nobody would see it. Everyone knows it's there. Nobody has ever mentioned it to him.
The statue was not my idea.
I found out about it the morning it was finished, when Zuriel came to the workshop with plaster dust in his hair and asked, very formally, if I would come to the central square for 'a small structural inspection'.
The entire population of Khilux was in the square. In the middle of it stood me. Twelve meters of me, in polished stone, with one hand raised like I was mid-speech and the other on the head of a stone wolf.
It was the normal me. Not the Golem King form. Just me: not very tall, gray robes, glasses. Zuriel had even gotten the slightly rumpled hair right.
"The people voted," Zuriel said. "Ninety-eight percent. The remaining two percent wanted it bigger."
I didn't know what to say. So I said the most important thing I could think of.
"...Why am I wearing my glasses?"
"Because you always are, Father," said Fenrir, from beside me. "That's how we know it's you."
I had to go back to the workshop for a while after that. Jane came and found me there. She didn't say anything. She just sat with me and handed me a handkerchief she'd made out of who knows what.
I've since been told there is a small but steady trade in signed pictures of the King. Jane takes a cut.
That night, after the square emptied, Jane and I walked through Khilux together. The street lanterns came on one by one. Somewhere, the farming golem was singing to the crops in the underground gardens. Somewhere else, Izarail was apologizing loudly to a door he'd opened too hard.
"You built all this," Jane said.
"They built it. I just made them."
"Hun." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "That's what building is."
We walked a little farther without talking. Then she asked the question I'd been afraid of since the day she opened her eyes.
"Hun. Am I her?"
I stopped walking.
She wasn't upset. She was just looking at me with those blue eyes, curious and patient, the way Jane always looked at me when she already knew the answer and wanted to see if I'd be honest.
"I don't know," I said. It was the truest thing I had. "You have everything I remember. Every song she sang wrong. Every argument she won. The way you say Hun. But I only remembered the parts I knew. There were parts of her I never got to know. Parts I never asked about, because I thought we had time."
Jane nodded slowly.
"Then maybe I'm the parts you knew," she said, "and I get to find out the rest. Is that so bad?"
"No," I said. "That's not bad at all."
She took my arm, and we kept walking.
We stopped at the foot of the statue. Stone me looked out over the city with my stone hand raised.
"It doesn't look anything like you," Jane said thoughtfully. "You're much shorter."
"It's the exact same height. Zuriel measured."
"Shorter in spirit."
I laughed so hard that a passing patrol of guardian knights stopped to make sure I was okay.