The next morning, Damien Cross awoke to the sound of panicked shouting.
"Lord Damien! The canal! The canal is—!"
The rest of the sentence drowned beneath the deafening roar of rushing water. Not a pleasant, trickling brook sort of rush. More like "Poseidon just dumped his morning bathwater into our fields."
I sat up in bed, already dreading the explanation.
Three days earlier…
I had proudly announced that my "ingenious" canal would transform this wasteland into a breadbasket. My retainers—bless their tiny, skeptical hearts—had gathered around the blueprints like medieval squirrels inspecting a strange new nut.
"This here… this is supposed to be the water, right?" asked Old Man Garrick, pointing at the squiggly lines with a gnarled finger.
"Yes, Garrick. Those are waves," I said patiently.
"It looks more like a snake," muttered Jorah, my so-called steward.
"That's because I drew it fast," I lied. In truth, I had no idea how to draw waves in medieval blueprints, so yes—it looked exactly like a tipsy python.
Still, enthusiasm had swept the estate. Or rather, my enthusiasm. Everyone else looked at me like I was trying to irrigate the land with dragon spit.
Now…
I threw on my boots and marched outside. The smell hit me first—wet soil, crushed grass, and the faint odor of cow panic.
Half the fields were underwater. Tree stumps jutted out like drowning giants waving for help. The "canal" I'd painstakingly directed was flowing… sideways.
"Why," I said slowly, "is the water going into the village?"
"That's the problem, my lord," said Jorah. "The slope… er… it's the wrong way."
"The slope?" I repeated. "You mean to tell me the entire thing is uphill?"
Jorah cleared his throat. "Only for the first few hundred feet. After that, it goes down very fast… toward your house."
The laborers were frantically trying to redirect the water with shovels, which was about as effective as bailing out a sinking ship with a soup spoon. One of them slipped in the mud and was promptly swept away toward the chicken coops. The chickens, offended, scattered in every direction.
"I meant to do that," I declared.
"You meant… to flood your own village?" Jorah said, dripping sarcasm.
"Of course. This is called… controlled saturation. Builds resilience in the soil."
From the looks on their faces, no one bought that. But it was better than admitting I'd just spent two weeks building a medieval waterslide.
And then there was the swamp. Oh, the swamp.
Remember that part of the land "not on any map"? Turns out there's a reason it wasn't mapped—it was an ankle-deep bog masquerading as farmland. My new canal had graciously donated enough water to turn it into a knee-deep bog. Congratulations, Damien. You invented a recreational hazard.
To make matters worse, Garrick came running up holding a dead fish. "The fish are coming in from the river!" he said, as if announcing a miracle.
"That's… actually not terrible," I admitted. "Free protein."
"Yes, but they're flopping into the road."
Okay. Less great.
By evening, the worst of the chaos had settled. The village wasn't entirely washed away, the chickens had more or less forgiven us, and a few of the newly flooded plots did look… well… richer. Darker soil. Fresher smell.
Jorah stood beside me, surveying the damage. "If you squint, my lord… you might have actually improved some of the land."
"Obviously," I said, arms crossed. "This was all part of the plan."
Jorah gave me a look that suggested he was calculating how much trouble he'd be in if he pushed me into the canal.
The sun set behind the hills, casting long shadows over my half-drowned estate. In the distance, I could hear villagers gossiping about "Lord Damien's great water folly."
Let them talk. One day, when these fields were lush and overflowing, they'd remember me as the visionary who brought water to the wasteland.
…Not the idiot who accidentally turned his estate into the world's first medieval water park.