Location: Various sites in Armathane and beyond Time: Day 138-162 After Alec's Arrival
There was no fanfare when Alec began assembling the minds that would change the world.
No banners. No trumpets. No proclamations.
Just quiet invitations, sent with blank seals and signed only with his name. Some were delivered to scholars cloistered in candlelit rooms, others slid beneath the door of disgraced academics, failed alchemists, and scribes whose last commission was ignored for a decade.
The messages were brief:
"You are invited to speak to the future. I only ask that you bring your mind, not your titles.— Alec"
By the third day, they started arriving.
The temporary hall was a gutted grain house at the edge of Armathane's trade quarter acting as temporary recruitment post.
Alec stood in the open interior, chalking sector markings along the floor.
Eight desks. A circular table. Two empty blackboards. Everything else, dust and promise.
Vaelora had offered him chambers in the palace.
He'd refused.
This space — raw, stripped of noble weight — felt right. The work would begin among the dust, not above it.
The first to arrive was a man in plain scholar robes, his silver-rimmed spectacles cracked at one hinge. Early 30s. Dark hair.
He didn't bow.
"Aston Mathes," He said. "You summoned?"
"I requested," Alec corrected. "You chose to arrive."
He narrowed his eyes. "You know I was expelled from the University of Carowen?"
"I do. For unorthodox mathematics. Decimal inversion theory. Ledger-based logic."
His eyebrows lifted. "That was burned."
"I have my ways" Alec said. "You were right. And you didn't go far enough."
He stared.
Then He took a seat at the chalk-marked desk labeled Survey Planning – Quantitative Analytics.
He didn't speak again for an hour.
But when He did, he redrafted Alec's ledger flow in four strokes that would halve grain transport inefficiency by 22%.
Alec said only: "You're hired."
—
By midday, five more had arrived.
A cartographer with one eye and a memory that could recall every bend of every river he'd ever walked.
A former Church-licensed scribe who'd been excommunicated for proposing that the lunar calendar was astronomically flawed. He now designed a rotating schedule system Alec would later use for shift-based factory work.
A whisper-thin man who introduced himself as "Iven the Chemist" and smelled like boiled copper. He brought diagrams for a water purification apparatus. None of them worked yet. Alec approved all of them anyway.
A man in his mid 40s — no name, only ink-stained sleeves and a sketchbook of mechanical devices far beyond anything the duchy had seen. he didn't speak for the first two hours. When Alec finally looked at one of her schematics — a hand-cranked drafting press — he handed him a permanent desk.
"You have no guild mark," he said.
He shook his head.
"Do you want one?"
"No," He whispered.
"Good," Alec said. "You'll build ours instead."
—
The work began not with tools, but with ideas.
Every wall in the hall was soon covered in parchment. Diagrams. Ink lines. Scribbled equations. Supply chain routes. Crop patterns by season. River depths. Population clusters. Probable resources locations.
Alec moved among them, speaking little. Measuring the room's rhythm.
When someone asked what title they'd be given, he said only: "None yet. You don't need names to think."
When asked who governed the company's purpose, Alec replied:
"Vision. And function. Not legacy. Not creed."
They asked if there would be pay.
"Yes," he said. "But not yet. First, we build what will be worth something."
No one left.
At the end of first week, He had employed quite a number of brilliant minds.
Second Week
The first candidate arrived late.
Alec didn't look up as the heavy door to the council room creaked open. He sat at the head of the table, hands folded, pen resting on a sheet of parchment filled with scrawled diagrams. The room was quiet, lit by a single oil lamp on the desk. A map of Midgard hung behind him, shadowed by flickering light.
The man shuffled in, clutching a weathered satchel. He was thin, older than Alec had expected, with ink-stained fingers and a nervous stoop. His robes were frayed at the edges, and his boots suggested long walks on muddy roads.
"Master Ferin" Alec said without looking up.
"Yes," the man replied, his voice tight. "You requested me. Forgive my delay, Lord Advisor."
Alec gestured to the chair opposite him. "Sit."
Ferin obeyed, fumbling with his satchel before finally setting it on the table. He glanced around the room — sparse, utilitarian, with no symbols of faith or nobility. Just books, charts, and the cold presence of the man across from him.
"I've read your treatise on herbal distillation methods," Alec said.
Ferin blinked. "You've… read it?"
"Yes. Your theory on separating active compounds from base matter through progressive heat levels is sound. Inefficient, but sound."
"I — I didn't think anyone outside the guilds—"
"No one else would," Alec interrupted. "Which is why you're here. Tell me, Ferin, what limits you more? Resources or imagination?"
The alchemist hesitated. "Both."
Alec's lips twitched slightly — not a smile, but something close. He slid a piece of parchment forward. Ferin glanced down and froze.
It was a formula — his own, corrected.
"You misunderstood how to calculate thermal thresholds," Alec said. "The ratios here will cut your process time by half."
Ferin stared at the paper, stunned.
"What do you want from me?" he finally asked.
"To make you useful," Alec replied. "You'll head the alchemy division for my venture. Your job is to innovate. To experiment. To fail fast and rebuild faster. You'll have funding, materials, and protection from guild oversight."
"And in return?"
"You'll give me results."
Ferin looked at him, wide-eyed.
"This… this is heretical."
"Not yet," Alec said. "But it will be."
By the end of the day, three alchemists had signed on.
Not because they trusted Alec, but because they'd never been given the freedom to fail.
The next morning, Alec visited the Scribes' Guild in the lower quarter of Armathane. It was housed in a crumbling stone hall, its windows clouded with dust. Inside, rows of apprentices hunched over wooden desks, their quills scratching across parchment.
The guildmaster, an aging man with spectacles perched precariously on his nose, greeted Alec with polite skepticism.
"Lord Advisor," he said. "To what do we owe the honor?"
"I need scribes," Alec said bluntly.
The guildmaster raised a brow. "Surely the duchess can provide—"
"No," Alec interrupted. "I don't need courtly historians or letter writers. I need data keepers. People who can organize knowledge, analyze patterns, and track large-scale operations."
The guildmaster frowned. "That's… not how scribes are traditionally used."
"Tradition is a prison," Alec said. "I'm offering the keys."
He gestured to the rows of apprentices. "Give me five of your best. I'll double their pay, house them in my facility, and give them work that will shape this duchy for decades."
The guildmaster hesitated. "And if I refuse?"
Alec leaned forward. "Then I'll train my own scribes, bypass your guild entirely, and make you irrelevant."
The man paled.
"You'll have your five."
By the end of the week, Alec had recruited:
Three scribes with expertise in cartography and archival organization.
Two arithmeticians who could calculate logistics and supply chains.
One linguist specializing in translating foreign trade documents.
Each was interviewed personally. Each left the room unsettled but intrigued.
The third phase of recruitment took Alec to the Collegium of Armathane, a modest institution compared to the grand academies of Edenia's capital. Its scholars were underfunded, overworked, and largely ignored by the nobility.
Alec found the mechanist in the library — a lanky young man with ink smudged across his face, bent over a contraption of wood and metal.
"What is it?" Alec asked, stepping into the dim alcove.
The mechanist startled, nearly dropping the device. "It's… uh… a prototype."
"For what?"
"A… an automated grain mill. Sort of."
Alec studied the device. It was crude, barely functional, but the principles were clear. Gears. Leverage. Kinetic transfer.
"Who funds you?" Alec asked.
The mechanist flushed. "No one."
"Do they laugh at you?"
The young man hesitated. "Sometimes."
Alec reached out, lifted the device, and placed it on the table between them.
"I'll fund you," Alec said. "But if you ever build something this poorly again, I'll dismantle it myself."
The mechanist blinked. Then grinned.
By the end of the third week, Alec had assembled the core intellectual team of the Midgard Company.
Ferin, leading alchemy and material innovation.
Five scribes, including a cartographer and an archivist, responsible for data systems and mapping.
Two arithmeticians, building logistics frameworks.
One mechanist, tasked with exploring rudimentary machinery.
Two scholars, specializing in theoretical design and structural engineering.
They were misfits. Flawed. Brilliant. And bound by the promise of freedom and results.
__
Alec standing in the empty central hall of the company's provisional headquarters — a cold, half-built stone warehouse on the outskirts of Armathane.
Vaelora joins him, her boots echoing on the floor.
"Are they ready?" she asks.
"They will be," Alec replies. "Once they realize what's possible."
"And if they don't?"
"They will," Alec says, his voice quiet but certain. "Or I'll replace them."
Vaelora studies him.
"You're building a world they can't imagine," she says.
"No," Alec replies. "I'm building a world they'll fight to protect."