Timber Goodpaw's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Timber knocked on the door of the stone cottage, counting this as ask number forty-seven — or was it forty-eight? He'd lost track weeks ago. The dream still burned clear: a place where wanderers could stop and trade and tell their stories instead of just moving on. He needed land, and every patch worth having already belonged to someone else. An old man answered, leaning on a cane, his face lined like cracked leather. He listened to Timber's pitch without interrupting. Then he said something strange: "Follow me." He led Timber down a worn path to a clearing where an old trading post sat abandoned, its canvas roof still intact, its wooden platform solid underfoot. Behind it, a pond stretched out with a broken fountain at its center, stone archway half-covered in moss. The spot was perfect — room for travelers, water nearby, the old post already built. "It's yours," the old man said. "But the price isn't coin." He pulled a folded ledger page from his coat, numbers crossed out and rewritten, soil stains on every corner. "There's a name in this book — someone who cheated me forty years back. Find them. Get my money. Then the land is yours." Timber's stomach dropped. Tracking down old debts meant digging into someone else's past, maybe ruining them. It meant starting his trade hub on revenge instead of welcome. Timber stared at the ledger, then at the perfect clearing. He folded the paper carefully and handed it back. "I can't," he said. "Not like that." The old man's face hardened, but Timber turned and walked back down the path. He'd knocked on forty-seven doors — he could knock on a hundred more. The right land would come, or it wouldn't. But it had to be clean.