Kellen has always been a big boy. Now at the age of 20 turns, his muscular frame is well-used to lifting stones, making bricks, and laying both down on new construction sites. He has a great eye for stones and their strengths and weaknesses. His expertise is at around a Journeyman's level, though again, he has never walked the tables at the stone craft.
All that mass you see there? It's MUSCLE. He's got not a shred of fat on him, yet he is very shy about showing off to the hold girls. He thinks because he is a mere mason that they'll snub him.
All but one did. Heather is a sleek young holder's daughter, long in a line of children so she won't be inheriting anything of worth. Her sweet eyes and style match her attitude. Less than a turn ago, they were handfasted and Kellen's daughter Summer has just been born.
While the dragons fly in the skies, Kellen has usually had his nose buried in work below. The ground is what interests him... Isn't it?
It took months of prodding to get a little shine out of him. When the search riders from Cincanta weyr came to the Hold, they found that this burly young man was exactly right for a clutch on their sands.
K'allin laughed at the man when he turned a bright pink shade with embarrassment.
"No need for that," the blue rider said, "You're Searched, and you're standing... now come along and introduce me to your friends!"
"Loosen up," said the search rider, "we're all friendly here. You're here to impress, and if you don't do that, maybe if you like the place you two could stay on. We can always use someone with your talents!"
Kellen looked around, and decided that Cincanta was a well-built area, but had weaknesses that perhaps the locals didn't notice. But he wasn't going to start pointing those out fresh off the dragon's back!
The family was settled in a small but private weyr, one which adjoined a weyrling's ledge and dragon cot. Just big enough for a dragon to grow into.
Kellen looked at the walls without thinking. Then, he furrowed his bushy blond eyebrows.
"There's a fault running through the ceiling, I would put marks that it goes all the way through to the weyr above us. I want to see if that's true..."
The drudge who had led them into the weyr blinked and then nodded, taking the stone worker up a ramp into the next higher level of weyrs. There, the slightly older and larger weyrlings were housed. And though they interrupted one of the weyrlings in his studies, Kellen walked directly to the site where the long groove of a fault was creeping through the stone.
"You see this here?" He asked, and the drudge as well as the now-intrigued weyrling looked on. "There's a long fault here, and if there is an seismic activity --" he looked at the drudge's blank expression, and added, "an earthquake or eruption, this might fall completely away. Look, it goes down through the room, but ends here... That's all the way through our weyr below. And here," he pointed to the wall, "there's its source. There is something pressing down on this ledge, and..."
He muttered to himself, and finally crossed his huge arms over his chest. "I must speak with the weyrleaders about this, if that is all right? This is dangerous, but it can be fixed before it's too late."
The wide-eyed drudge ran off to find someone of import.
Kellen stood with a knowledgable smirk on his face, and then hoped that nothing DID disturb the grounds, while they remained. If that were to happen... Half of this weyr would be atop everything in his own!
***
Two sevendays later, while the eggs were hatching and the other weyrling classes were filling the rest of his time, Kellen watched as the apprentices spackled up the deep fissure, and then began laying in a pillar in both his weyr, and the one atop it, to prevent any further stress.
"Staggering the weyrs is the best way," he pointed out to one of the crafters, and the man agreed.
"I wish we could have been here before they started excavating," he added, while they walked back to the weyrling class. Kellen picked up on many little things in the walls while he was waiting for the clutch to hatch, though he did notice that everyone would kind of walk on shells around him when he was looking at the walls.
As if they had done something to the stone, to attract his ire! He chuckled to himself at that. Let them think that he's a knotted journeyman.
That thought rested in the back of his mind, and just before the hatching of Cincanta's eggs, Kellen got a clap at the door flap of their weyr. To his surprise, it was one of the craft masters at Dawnlight, come to visit him.
The elder man commanded Kellen to show him around the weyrs that he'd supervised repairs upon, and watched silently, chewing his lip, as Kellen explained first that pillar, then this wedge, and that spackle.
Nodding, finally, the man turned to the bulk of Kellen's chest, looked up, and smiled. "Then without all that formality that we usually go through, I'll award you this Journeyman's knot. You've done a fine job here. But if you do impress, you'll not have time to complete enough work for a mastery. That's... That is our craft's loss, Kellen. Congratulations."
With a shaking hand he fingered the knot that the man had pinned to his shoulder, and then Kellen erupted in a hooting hollar the likes of which had never been heard out of him before!
