Feb 73 min read

An Architect's Foundation

"When I was a kid, I used to fly high and far." "I suppose most would see it as running away from home, but I always came back, and more often than not it was just further down the tree, towards where that Yui capital, Loratzen, is. Looking back, it was usually whenever I was overwhelmed by something - maybe a crush on a girl I couldn’t figure out, a big festival taking place with a lot of noise and light. Regardless, what I’d do is I’d find another massive tree somewhere, preferably one of the old growths with a lot of twisted branches and a lot of leaves, and I’d sit up there with a sketchbook and some pencils I borrowed from my father’s workshop. Then, I’d pick out one of the buildings that were around, and I’d try to figure out how it was made up. By that, I mean that I’d try to figure out the layout of the building, where the walls would be, how the furniture would be best set up, how magic would allow for access to water and easy cooking fires." "My sketches were never very good, and sometimes the designs were the wackiest things you’d ever seen - I don’t particularly know what I was thinking when I put a bed in the pantry, but I still didn’t know what each room actually did. And when I was done, I’d either move on to a different tree and start again with a new place, or I’d fly home and hurry to find some leftover glue or nails so I could stick the drawings on my wall. Now, while we were a pretty open family, we tended not to really go into each other’s rooms. If there were clothes of mine that needed to be put away, I was the one that had to do it. It helped maintain trust between all of us, and let me feel like I had my own space." "Well, one day, my father had to go into my room to fetch something that I had presumably nicked, probably the nails I’d been using, and saw the sketches and drawings that I had been decorating my walls with. Boy, when I got home, I got a talking to! He wasn’t very happy that I had been stealing his nails and using them. But a few days later, he called me into his workshop, and he pulled out this old dusty book and gave it to me. When I opened it, it was the same sort of designs that I had been drawing, but done by him when he was younger as well. Turns out he did exactly the same thing when he was younger, and it had been carried on by each of the men in my bloodline. I guess woodworking and building ran in the blood of each of us."

"Now, my father didn’t typically work on anything like buildings, he worked on bows and arrows, and he provided for us fairly well with that, but he told me that he’d always wanted to work on buildings and build homes for people, or even work on airships one day, but he’d never gotten the education that he needed to be able to put together something proper. So, a few months later, the three of us packed up and moved down to Loratzen so that I could learn from other professionals that weren’t just my father, that handled construction of bigger cities. I learned how to make sure that stone would bind together with clay, how to lay foundations, how to set up the proper layout of a house on paper so that the workers could make sure they understood how the layout looked. It took years, but eventually I was the one who was drawing up those schematics, negotiating with the labour crews, and inevitably annoying them with my revisions." "Now I just want to help other kids in trying to pursue their dreams, so that they can continue to build in my stead." (Cole Winchester, when asked at a party what his reason for going into architecture was.)