The castle

Marcus sat on a rock ledge on the hill, looking out over the empty expanse of land before him. He sighed and scratched his bearded chin, trying to think about how he was going to go about building the castle that he had been commissioned for. He had been given more than enough funds to build the castle to the requested specifics, but the land...

Marcus fell backwards to lie down, staring up at the sky. He didn't know how he was going to manage in this land. Where there weren't hills, there was weak soil and rock that would easily shift and change with the weather. Rain would make it slick and hard to walk in. Heat would solidify it, making it impossible to farm. Winds would raise the dust and blow it wildly, preventing people's sights. It was a terrible place to live. There was clearly more than one reason that no one had settled down there.

But the king himself had insisted upon it. "We shall build a kingdom regardless of the doubts against us," he had proudly proclaimed, "and it shall be symbolized by our very castle itself." Nothing Marcus said could convince him otherwise. And oh... He had tried to convince him otherwise.

Even if he could succeed in building the castle, which was somewhat unlikely given he needed a solid and consistent base to build it upon, it was questionable if anyone could reasonably survive in these lands for an extended period of time. Traveling through the land, certainly, it could be crossed to more stable climates in a couple of days... But living there. That was another question entirely.

"Why the hell did I agree to this anyway?" Marcus muttered bitterly to himself. "I knew this land was going to be impossible to build on. I tried to tell the king that. But he wouldn't listen to me. I should've just refused him. Saved us both some time."

"You know perfectly well that to refuse the king would be treason, and as difficult as this may be, you'd much rather be alive than dead." Marcus looked up to see his apprentice, Olivia, approaching with the blueprinting supplies that he had sent her off to get.

"You should know better than to talk back to me, Olivia," Marcus replied, sitting up and turning to her as she dropped off the supplies in front of her.

"And you should know better than to complain about things that you can not change," she responded matter of factly. "You are the one who told me that it is best to take a job and run with it, damn the consequences, than to sit and moan about the difficulty of it."

Marcus only grunted in response. He was already at work drawing out plans for how he was going to build the castle. He didn't know if the plans would even work. He was sure that he would have to redraw them at least a dozen times before he even came close to having a workable solution. And even that would only be a beginning.

"That's more like the master I know," Olivia dotted happily. "Straight to work."

"Why don't you stop talking," Marcus replied absent mindedly, "and start testing these designs." He threw the first sheet of diagrams her direction and immediately set to work on the next sheet, anticipating the failure of the first. "We have work to do."

"Yes sir!"