Chapter 14: Maya Village Updates
Personal System Calendar: Year 00014, Day 1-28, Month VIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6858, 1st to 28th day of the 8th Month
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Outland Waycamp
The current population of the Outland Waycamp sat at roughly thirty thousand by the latest count, not including the Imperial force keeping the place safe and organized.
That number stretched far further back than anyone had expected when the first bunkers went into the ground. What had started as a small emergency shelter for refugees escaping the worst of winter had become something closer to a small town, though still nothing permanent had been raised. Tents and underground networks, semi-permanent at best, but functional. Thirty thousand people sitting on a stretch of land that belonged to no kingdom was, by any honest measure, overstretched. It was a grey zone, a no man's land, the kind of place that should have spawned its own criminal element by now given the lack of formal law. But with the Empire's presence right there and the forest of Lonelywood close enough to feel breathing down everyone's neck, nobody was eager to test what was waiting for them if they tried anything. The blade of a soldier or the fangs of something out of the trees. Neither option encouraged bad behavior.
The camp stayed within the buffer zone, which was the only legal reason it could exist where it did. No kingdom could lay claim to it without disputing the Empire's own informal presence there, and nobody currently had the appetite for that kind of fight on top of everything else that is happening. For now there was a single main road running the length of it, stretching horizontally along the forest's edge.
The full footprint came to roughly three kilometers long and one kilometer wide, with comfortable room left for more if it came to that. At current count there were at least fifty underground bunkers, each holding fifty people comfortably, with everyone else living above ground in tents. It didn't feel cramped. Campfires for cooking, outhouses for the obvious, storage areas for food, and roads cutting through it all kept the place functional rather than miserable.
The camp was divided into six main sectors, with five thousand people each to a sector, each one watched over by its own contingent of imperial soldiers. One large road ran straight through the center of the stretch, with two more running parallel on either side at roughly equal spacing, the whole layout forming something close to a grid with cross streets connecting the three main roads. Each sector carried seven hundred and fifty soldiers for security and patrol. The remaining four thousand support personnel split out across logistics, medical care, and supply, with another thousand redirected specifically to help with construction projects back in Maya Village itself.
None of this was meant to be permanent. Thousands more refugees had already moved on past the camp, continuing north into Ogind and the kingdoms beyond it. The thirty thousand currently staying were largely people who genuinely had nowhere left to go, which made the situation harder rather than easier. A camp, however well organized, wasn't a life. Eventually they'd need actual work, actual income, somewhere real to plant themselves.
Maya Village, even sitting this close, still wasn't letting refugees through its own gates. Trade had resumed though. Merchants and travelers moved freely again, mostly people who'd already waited out their time at the camp earlier in the crisis. Word of Arwen's blockade had spread far enough now that almost nobody wanted to risk the southern land route regardless of whether it technically opened back up. The kingdom was too unstable, the people inside it too desperate, the variables too unpredictable. Merchants who would normally have pushed further south now stopped at Maya and turned back north along the old routes instead.
Arwen's collapse had effectively split the continent's two halves from each other. That was simply the reality at the Waycamp right now, and there wasn't much anyone there could do about it beyond wait it out.
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Maya Village Census
Inside Maya itself, the numbers had finally been confirmed. The village had crossed into Large Village classification.
Current population sat at approximately eight thousand six hundred sixty, working out to roughly fourteen hundred forty-three families under the standard count. That put them solidly within the Large Village range, a milestone that had been building for years and had finally landed. Nobody held a formal ceremony for it. The council simply updated the records and moved on to the next item on the agenda, which felt about right given everything else demanding attention.
Of that total, eight hundred were non-human residents. The breakdown ran as follows: four hundred thirteen from the Kotoko clan, two hundred eighty-seven from the Lokoroko clan, and one hundred dwarves settled into the mountain. The remaining seven thousand eight hundred sixty were human, spread across all four zones with the heaviest concentration still sitting in Zone Two.
Housing currently stood at just over four hundred longhouses and just under a hundred apartment-style buildings, spread across the developed zones. The beastfolk-specific communal housing in Zone Three had grown to eight separate structures, each capable of holding fifty people comfortably. Only two hundred ten beastfolk currently lived there, which left real room to spare, but the council had judged it better to build ahead of need than scramble to catch up later, a lesson learned hard from the early refugee crisis when scrambling had been the only option available. The remaining beastfolk, four hundred ninety of them, lived integrated within Zone Two alongside the human population, by choice as much as by circumstance.
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Zone Four Infrastructure
Zone Four kept moving forward on every front.
Water infrastructure now included four basins, with four more planned. Underground reservoir tanks, similar to what Zones One and Two already had, were also on the table, though that kind of undertaking would take real time and labor to pull off properly.
Grain storage had learned from the mistakes of Zone Two's original silo design. Zone Four's four current silos, with eight more planned, could each hold around fifteen hundred tons, built three-quarters underground and only a quarter raised above ground, a near-total reversal of Zone Two's fully raised stone structures. The plan going forward was to eventually replace Zone Two's older silos with this same upgraded design once resources allowed.
General-purpose warehouses were still being discussed, nothing finalized yet on exact numbers, so that piece was on hold for now.
The military barracks going up in Zone Four came in at twice the size of Zone Two's, positioned near the walls rather than directly at the planned western gate. It came with its own training ground and support facilities, including a dedicated hospital. The placement made sense once you thought about it, close enough to respond fast if the wall ever needed defending, far enough back that daily barracks life didn't interfere with gate traffic. An extension of the Imperial garrison's own barracks was also likely here eventually, which would mean the standing five hundred imperial troops currently rotating through the village would need to grow alongside it, a detail nobody had fully worked out the logistics for yet but that everyone assumed was coming regardless.
On the education side, Zone Four had at least two schools planned. An administrative building was also in the works, intended as a single central point where villagers could handle business across every department: architecture and construction, agriculture, business and commerce, health, security, immigration, and whatever else the growing village needed managed in one place. The actual seat of power, the Elder Council and Red's office, would stay put in Zone One. This new building was about convenience for the people, not a relocation of authority.
Everyone was working at full capacity to make it happen, and the momentum showed in how fast things kept rising out of the ground.
Sibus Dino had also proposed an upgrade to the apartment-style buildings, particularly relevant in Zone Two where usable land had mostly run out. His target was pushing capacity up to roughly eighty people per building, nearly double the current standard, by reworking the internal layout rather than expanding the footprint. Longhouses would stay the same in basic design, though August's own expanded longhouse, with its connected second structure and walkway, looked likely to become the new template for growing families who needed more room than a standard layout offered.
On the agricultural side, more fields were being planned specifically for the greenhouse-style growing method adopted from the Lokoroko clan. Orchards were set to expand as well, and there was early talk of bringing in a dedicated bee farm, since the village currently bought all its honey from outside trade and wanted to start producing its own for the growing mead operation.
Zone Four wouldn't carry any of the industrial capacity Zone Two had built up over the years. That wasn't the plan for it, and nobody seemed to mind the distinction.
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The Mountain Fort
Zone One Extension, the mountain fort itself, had also seen progress. The dwarves had fully settled in by now, the fort running on a regular maintenance schedule, food stocks rotated out and replaced monthly during quiet periods, fresh batches brought in to keep everything stocked properly. The dwarven engineers had taken to the fort's upkeep the way they took to most things, with a level of obsessive precision that occasionally exasperated the humans working alongside them but produced results nobody could argue with.
It wasn't dwarves alone living there anymore either. A small number of humans, fifty so far, had moved in to test themselves against mountain life and whatever the dwarves were willing to teach them. Not a large number, but a real one, and the kind of cultural crossover nobody had specifically planned for but that nobody also minded happening either. The dwarves seemed to take a certain pride in it, treating the humans willing to live by their mountain rules as something between students and honored guests, depending on the day and how well that particular human was holding up under dwarven standards.
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Master Ben's Secret
Master Ben had finished his latest project. It was already out walking the streets of Maya Village.
Mirabeth, fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you looked at it, was currently stuck far from Maya, caught in the Spiral City of Arabaya in the Sovereign State of Papila, unable to travel with the war disrupting movement across half the continent. Whether that counted as good timing or bad timing for Master Ben's secret wasn't entirely clear, but it gave him room to work without her looking over his shoulder constantly, which he seemed to appreciate more than he'd admit out loud.
Her name was Sylvier Solvorn, Benethar's sister.
Master Ben had kept her existence quiet, telling only Benethar and August at first. Aetherwing had noticed the new presence on his own, the way he noticed most things eventually, which meant Master Ben had no choice but to bring him into the small circle as well. Beyond those three, the secret held. For now.
Sylvier was learning the village the way a curious mind learns anything new, by watching closely and asking questions. Benethar had given her the basics of combat, the way an older brother might, patient and methodical the same way Master Ben had once been patient and methodical with him, though it became clear early on that fighting wasn't where her real interest sat. She was drawn instead to the administrative side of things, how humans actually ran a place this size day to day, the systems and decisions and small invisible choices that kept a settlement like Maya functioning. She watched the merchants haggle in the market. She watched the council deliberate. She watched the guards rotate their shifts and the farmers plan their fields around the seasons, and she asked questions about all of it, drawing her own conclusions as she went.
Eventually she asked Master Ben directly whether she might be allowed to join the village's administrative functions in some capacity.
He gave his approval. The real question now was whether the village itself was ready to absorb a new kind of intelligent being into its daily operations, one whose curiosity ran deep enough that the current crisis in Arwen had already caught her attention in ways nobody expected. She'd started asking about the political mechanics behind it, the economics, the use of military force, the deeper question of what was actually driving a kingdom to collapse this completely. She wanted to know if she was capable of that same kind of sophisticated thinking herself, or whether she'd simply absorbed the question without the capacity to actually answer it.
Master Ben hadn't given her a straight answer to that one yet. Partly because he genuinely wasn't sure, and partly because some questions felt better left for her to work out on her own, the same way he'd left Benethar to work out his own sense of humor and his own moral compass over the years rather than handing them to him fully formed.
Nobody could say for certain yet how far Sylvier's thinking would go. But there was something in the way she asked the question that suggested the answer, whatever it turned out to be, was going to matter a great deal to Maya Village's future.