MDII Fic!
Um, I sat down and some fic happened. I might still finish off the end of the PoR stuff, but this was fresher and a bit more straightforward :-). May contain some mild spoilers, although I think I have obfuscated anything really spoiler-y (other than Allegra's Terrible Opinions On Things) reasonably heavily. I have also conflated some related conversations and generally played faster and looser with chronology than usual. With apologies to After the Storm by Mumford and Sons.
Still open for impressions / prompts / requests of all varieties.
----
And after the storm,
I run and run as the rains come
And I look up, I look up,
on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.
----
"He's not dead."
That doesn't mean we aren't all acting like he is dead.
His short-term plans are dead. His political position, by the vultures that have been circling already, is probably dead.
My medium-term plans are, if not quite dead, at least significantly on hold.
I scarcely listen to the first few talks because the contingencies are flowing through my head, none of them in my sphere, none of them any of my business.
"There's no legislating for initiative."
I don't get to make the rest of my point, because too many other people want to speak.
When you're using an irregular force, and there's nothing more irregular than 'whoever feels like showing up to Anvil and sauntering through the Sentinel Gate', giving them more orders is counterproductive.
But it would be nice if the armchair generals would fetch the groundlings some information, instead. Irregular forces are excellent if and only if they know exactly what they are attempting to accomplish and why.
Irregular forces need to improvise - not more strategy or tactics - but they need a direction.
"Isn't Dragonbone mostly used in religious items?"
----
Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won't rot, I won't rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won't rot.
----
"I'm on my best behaviour."
She is telling people that she picked a fight with a tree. Iulian might even have believed her if I hadn't corrected him. Maybe she had done that too, but those damage patterns were consistent with headbutting and punching out that sad broken window at the Halls of Knowledge.
"I know Urizen don't do hugs."
"That's not quite true."
I considered explaining, but that seemed unlikely to...
Who am I kidding. I wanted a hug.
"Come with me."
We head around the side of the building, where no-one is having earnest conversations at picnic benches or gazing inquisitively out of windows.
And I give her a hug, and I try to explain.
"It's a matter of signalling," I tell her, "and the value of scarcity."
She is doubtful, and we head into an analogy about food, and then somehow we are talking about culinary poisons and Sarvos curries until we drift apart again.
----
And I took you by the hand
And we stood tall,
And remembered our own land,
What we lived for.
----
"You okay?"
The small pile in the corner of the room twitched noncommittally.
"Do you want to come outside?"
It unfolded into an Isca, and followed me quietly out the back of the ongoing talk.
"Can I have another hug?"
We are sitting on the wall by the lake; most people are inside, still paying attention to the talk, but I notice a couple of people over by an outside table - only after I have draped my arm around her comfortingly.
I try to draw her out of herself, and she tells me about her history, and I tell her about my culture, and for once she seems to understand.
Then, of course, I drop on her all of my undirected whining about how being comfortable and well-fed and wearing nice things is so terrible and confusing.
"No-one's trying to kill you, though?"
"No," I smiled. "But... almost, that's the problem. When someone's trying to kill you, it's so much simpler."
"Maybe that's why I pick fights with Mari all the time."
She asks me what I do, and I tell her about fleets and supplies and the difficulties of recruiting Urizeni sailors willing to actually do the work, and she tries to convince me that the little things are worthwhile.
"I feel like I need to pack in as many things into each moment as possible," I told her, "but... in a way that is because I did not expect to have so many more moments."
"Then surely that's a great reason to spend some of them sitting around and eating nice things?"
And we watched the trees; and the birds; and the lake; and I could almost convince myself again that I could be content.
----
And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
----
We're sitting on the front row vaguely looking at the map, and I am sure there are people behind me and they are probably in hearing distance, but I remind myself that other people care a lot less about what I am saying than I do.
(Or, even, than I care about what they're saying.)
Still, I am evasive.
"People find out eventually, and it's better if you told them earlier than later."
"But I can't even be sure of what I remember."
There are some things which are etched, but not all of them can be true at the same time. I can't have run to the treeline without looking back, and also looked back and seen the betrayal in her eyes.
"Then tell them that, too."
"I've got things that I need to do - an opportunity that I might never get again. I don't want to lose it."
"Then tell them afterwards. But soon."
"But actions have consequences."
"If anyone's mean to you because of it, tell me and I'll kick them."
I am not sure whether the impulse that I fight down is tears or laughter - or both.
"I think that would be exactly the opposite of helpful," I tell her, as kindly as I can muster.
"If they're too big, I'll get more people and we'll kick them. Or I can shout at them for you?"
"Still not better. I suppose the latter could give me a distraction so I can run away."
"I can help you run away!" she asserts triumphantly. "I'm good at running away. And getting lost. I can get quite lost sometimes."
I don't know how to respond. I don't want to hurt you; I don't want to lose the tenuous bond we have forged; I don't want to push you away.
"But I quite like sleeping in beds," I settle on, eventually.
----
And now I cling to what I knew
I saw exactly what was true
But oh no more.
----
I hover around the edges here and there, but I am unwanted and unneeded.
And the river is silent.
I pace restlessly - until Barak calls me over.
"I wouldn't usually show a guide priest these before the vision," he tells me.
I inspect his diagrams. At first, the tail of the phoenix seems caught in it, but from the generalised mapping I decide that is just me projecting.
"I don't see how it would hurt," I allow, reluctantly. "But no-one is more Vigilant, or more critical, of the effects than he is. If anything, he will be underestimating his capabilities."
"That's what I wanted to hear," he says. "Am I just being Highborn about it, then?"
"Probably, yes," I reply. "If I was going to entirely guess at an astromantic chart, taking no measurements of the actual stars, given his preoccupations I would have drawn something very much like this."
I am very good and I refrain from telling either of them about how Vigilance is a terrible virtue.
"I don't know the anointings of Vigilance," I say. "From my own, some would work and some would be utterly counterproductive."
(I have now gone away and looked up the anointings of Vigilance. All of them are a terrible idea. Maybe the first anointing - the Demands of Vigilance - won't actually kill us. I am less convinced about that for any of the others.)
He says something about it being a bad idea to use an anointing for a path he is not a pilgrim of. I am very good and I refrain from telling him that he isn't much of a pilgrim of Vigilance either, and he only thinks he is because everyone constantly mischaracterises Wisdom and Courage.
"Everyone constantly mistakes Wisdom and Courage," I complain to Corey, later. "If you think Wisdom is telling you not to do something, you are probably wrong. Wisdom is about gathering knowledge, and applying it - not avoiding action."
He looks agreeable, but still somewhat skeptical.
"There is rarely virtue in inaction. There is virtue in enduring - in patience..."
And this gets a knowing nod.
"...but that virtue is Courage, not Wisdom. It is courage to fight down the impulse to act, to do something when there is nothing to be done, to tolerate the situation and not to act in impatience."
And that is the point when he asks me if I'm a priest.
----
That's why I hold,
That's why I hold with all I have.
That's why I hold.
----
We are singing.
I am handing around the songbook which I am increasingly convinced I have stolen from somewhere, possibly somewhere highly embarrassing.
"He'll be sad if he misses the singing again."
And I am sitting next to her, and he has finally shown up and is sitting behind us, all three sharing the same song-book, and he is tapping out the rhythm on the back of my chair.
And all I want is for everything to be like this, forever.
I want to feel this belonging. I want to be the third voice carrying the song. I want him to compare reading speeds with me, for none of them to bat an eyelid when I say, "We will do it."
To hear him say, "You know that you can tell me to do things?" and, despite replying, "But it's usually counterproductive," to believe that he means it.
To have him say to me, "Do you want to run the Unfettered Mind?", and know that he would back me up all the way if I said, "Yes, actually," even though I flail around for excuses instead.
To have them believe in me.
But I have to keep spoiling it, don't I?
"And I can't cast it by myself," I say, unthinkingly, reflexively.
He looks at me as if I've grown a second head.
"...because it wouldn't matter if my head exploded, because I'm worth less than you?"
He looks at me as if I've grown a third head, stutters something about being sure he could find someone else to do it, any number of people.
But earlier I was determined not to be left out in the cold, and I was anyway.
How can I convince myself that I am worthwhile, without pulling so hard on the few strong threads I have - to reassure myself that they will hold - that I am being unreasonable?
----
And I won't die alone and be left there.
Well I guess I'll just go home,
Oh God knows where.
----
"Beware the empty one - bleached bones beneath the sun - the hero who undone dies alone, dies alone; the hero who, undone, dies alone."
And there is a crack in my memory, through which is spilling unwelcome light.
"The strength that comes from strife - the endless thirst for life - the mercy of the knife in bloody hand, bloody hand..."
And I can see her, bleeding into the forest floor; turning her head to the side and coughing out blood that is almost black.
Black to match her scales and her hair.
And there is a wound across her throat and a knife in my hand and she has asked me for this, and she chokes out, weakly: "Live for me."
"The blood upon the frost - and famine's ugly cost..."
I didn't come across a party of already-dead explorers.
The others died, one by one, because there was something in me that wanted to live.
But how can I trust this memory, more than any other explanation my mind has offered?
Somehow - I am sitting here - I am alive.
Somehow I walked out of the wilds of Redoubt in respectable enough condition that they accepted me.
But I can no longer believe my initial explanation for how.
----
Because death is just so full and man so small.
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before.
----
"Is this a private staring-at-the-stars-morosely party, or can anyone join in?"
The Three Sisters.
Things are connected by blood. The weight of the world.
Not all blood is that inherited in birth.
It hangs there clearly in the sky before them, over the dark and placid lake.
Barak points out a few more correspondences; the Door is bright too this evening, and the Wyrm is dim-to-invisible.
Things move and change, but do not transform.
We are all moving, but we have no clear idea of where we are going, and we will all discover sadly that we are still the same people, with the same problems, when we get there.
As more people spill out into the night, I can lose myself in odological debate which rambles comfortably through a morass of heresies - "Please don't call the Labyrinth a realm," he says; "Dragonbone," I can't help but reply - and it is comfortable enough to remain here in the clash of philosophy with insufficient evidence while Barak and Livia head off further into the darkness.
I glance in their direction when there is a lull in conversational attention. His hood is up.
And I turn back to the conversation and fight down a wave of the universe's callous unfairness. I want so badly to have someone that I could confide in; while Isca is a useful sounding-board, I can't bring myself to lay everything on her shoulders.
"But why did they burn someone so virtuous?" she asks.
"Sometimes Virtue is in facing up to what you have done," I tell her, because I am such a hypocrite.
It would not, I think, burden her as it does me - but I fear to lean too much on the one link that gives me any semblance of what I want in that moment, lest it break under the load.
"Some of them have been wearing the warpaint for so long that they find it difficult to know how to take it off," Eleri had explained, earlier.
How does the world work when there are no orders, and the demands of survival are no longer difficult enough to be fighting for?
----
And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
----
"The Wanderer!"
She watches their faces when she thinks she can get away with it.
"Bugger all this superstitious rot," declaims one of those she wants to be confident enough to call her friend, with surprisingly excellent acting talent.
Barak is actively hiding behind his copy of the play, attempting to shelter his display of rueful humour at the synchronicity from the possibility of distracting the audience.
Bugger all this superstitious rot, indeed.
As they were setting up the play, she claimed the roles of all three Interchangeable Arbiters.
She sees the momentary shock on Livia's face as she falls straight over on cue, and despite the perfidious chairs shifting underneath her quick change from one to the other, she pulls off the scene with all three of them and the audience laughs at all the right lines.
She hopes that the play is desensitizing both of them to any worry about the star.
Anvil will have enough worries of its own.
Today, in this moment, she is glorious.
----
And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
----
It is late, and she is frustrated with her performance at the card game; she had enjoyed it, but it had brought out an obnoxious tendency to boast about, and hint at, things she should have kept inside herself.
"I got you something."
Isca produces a beautiful green-embroidered cuff, secured with wooden leaf buttons.
"Picked it up in Sarvos. Made it for you."
She doesn't quite hug Isca right there in the main room with the last few stragglers making their way off to bed, but she does admire the gift with shining eyes, don it immediately, and thank her with more sincerity than she thought that she was capable of.
"Do you know where you're going tomorrow?"
"I think I'm staying here and teaching you to swim?" She spotted Livia still clearing up, and raised her voice slightly, "If Cascade are happy to put up with us for a few more days."
Livia looked over at her questioning, so she filled the silence. "I was thinking we could use the secluded pools, a little way further up..."
Still open for impressions / prompts / requests of all varieties.
----
And after the storm,
I run and run as the rains come
And I look up, I look up,
on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.
----
"He's not dead."
That doesn't mean we aren't all acting like he is dead.
His short-term plans are dead. His political position, by the vultures that have been circling already, is probably dead.
My medium-term plans are, if not quite dead, at least significantly on hold.
I scarcely listen to the first few talks because the contingencies are flowing through my head, none of them in my sphere, none of them any of my business.
"There's no legislating for initiative."
I don't get to make the rest of my point, because too many other people want to speak.
When you're using an irregular force, and there's nothing more irregular than 'whoever feels like showing up to Anvil and sauntering through the Sentinel Gate', giving them more orders is counterproductive.
But it would be nice if the armchair generals would fetch the groundlings some information, instead. Irregular forces are excellent if and only if they know exactly what they are attempting to accomplish and why.
Irregular forces need to improvise - not more strategy or tactics - but they need a direction.
"Isn't Dragonbone mostly used in religious items?"
----
Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won't rot, I won't rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won't rot.
----
"I'm on my best behaviour."
She is telling people that she picked a fight with a tree. Iulian might even have believed her if I hadn't corrected him. Maybe she had done that too, but those damage patterns were consistent with headbutting and punching out that sad broken window at the Halls of Knowledge.
"I know Urizen don't do hugs."
"That's not quite true."
I considered explaining, but that seemed unlikely to...
Who am I kidding. I wanted a hug.
"Come with me."
We head around the side of the building, where no-one is having earnest conversations at picnic benches or gazing inquisitively out of windows.
And I give her a hug, and I try to explain.
"It's a matter of signalling," I tell her, "and the value of scarcity."
She is doubtful, and we head into an analogy about food, and then somehow we are talking about culinary poisons and Sarvos curries until we drift apart again.
----
And I took you by the hand
And we stood tall,
And remembered our own land,
What we lived for.
----
"You okay?"
The small pile in the corner of the room twitched noncommittally.
"Do you want to come outside?"
It unfolded into an Isca, and followed me quietly out the back of the ongoing talk.
"Can I have another hug?"
We are sitting on the wall by the lake; most people are inside, still paying attention to the talk, but I notice a couple of people over by an outside table - only after I have draped my arm around her comfortingly.
I try to draw her out of herself, and she tells me about her history, and I tell her about my culture, and for once she seems to understand.
Then, of course, I drop on her all of my undirected whining about how being comfortable and well-fed and wearing nice things is so terrible and confusing.
"No-one's trying to kill you, though?"
"No," I smiled. "But... almost, that's the problem. When someone's trying to kill you, it's so much simpler."
"Maybe that's why I pick fights with Mari all the time."
She asks me what I do, and I tell her about fleets and supplies and the difficulties of recruiting Urizeni sailors willing to actually do the work, and she tries to convince me that the little things are worthwhile.
"I feel like I need to pack in as many things into each moment as possible," I told her, "but... in a way that is because I did not expect to have so many more moments."
"Then surely that's a great reason to spend some of them sitting around and eating nice things?"
And we watched the trees; and the birds; and the lake; and I could almost convince myself again that I could be content.
----
And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
----
We're sitting on the front row vaguely looking at the map, and I am sure there are people behind me and they are probably in hearing distance, but I remind myself that other people care a lot less about what I am saying than I do.
(Or, even, than I care about what they're saying.)
Still, I am evasive.
"People find out eventually, and it's better if you told them earlier than later."
"But I can't even be sure of what I remember."
There are some things which are etched, but not all of them can be true at the same time. I can't have run to the treeline without looking back, and also looked back and seen the betrayal in her eyes.
"Then tell them that, too."
"I've got things that I need to do - an opportunity that I might never get again. I don't want to lose it."
"Then tell them afterwards. But soon."
"But actions have consequences."
"If anyone's mean to you because of it, tell me and I'll kick them."
I am not sure whether the impulse that I fight down is tears or laughter - or both.
"I think that would be exactly the opposite of helpful," I tell her, as kindly as I can muster.
"If they're too big, I'll get more people and we'll kick them. Or I can shout at them for you?"
"Still not better. I suppose the latter could give me a distraction so I can run away."
"I can help you run away!" she asserts triumphantly. "I'm good at running away. And getting lost. I can get quite lost sometimes."
I don't know how to respond. I don't want to hurt you; I don't want to lose the tenuous bond we have forged; I don't want to push you away.
"But I quite like sleeping in beds," I settle on, eventually.
----
And now I cling to what I knew
I saw exactly what was true
But oh no more.
----
I hover around the edges here and there, but I am unwanted and unneeded.
And the river is silent.
I pace restlessly - until Barak calls me over.
"I wouldn't usually show a guide priest these before the vision," he tells me.
I inspect his diagrams. At first, the tail of the phoenix seems caught in it, but from the generalised mapping I decide that is just me projecting.
"I don't see how it would hurt," I allow, reluctantly. "But no-one is more Vigilant, or more critical, of the effects than he is. If anything, he will be underestimating his capabilities."
"That's what I wanted to hear," he says. "Am I just being Highborn about it, then?"
"Probably, yes," I reply. "If I was going to entirely guess at an astromantic chart, taking no measurements of the actual stars, given his preoccupations I would have drawn something very much like this."
I am very good and I refrain from telling either of them about how Vigilance is a terrible virtue.
"I don't know the anointings of Vigilance," I say. "From my own, some would work and some would be utterly counterproductive."
(I have now gone away and looked up the anointings of Vigilance. All of them are a terrible idea. Maybe the first anointing - the Demands of Vigilance - won't actually kill us. I am less convinced about that for any of the others.)
He says something about it being a bad idea to use an anointing for a path he is not a pilgrim of. I am very good and I refrain from telling him that he isn't much of a pilgrim of Vigilance either, and he only thinks he is because everyone constantly mischaracterises Wisdom and Courage.
"Everyone constantly mistakes Wisdom and Courage," I complain to Corey, later. "If you think Wisdom is telling you not to do something, you are probably wrong. Wisdom is about gathering knowledge, and applying it - not avoiding action."
He looks agreeable, but still somewhat skeptical.
"There is rarely virtue in inaction. There is virtue in enduring - in patience..."
And this gets a knowing nod.
"...but that virtue is Courage, not Wisdom. It is courage to fight down the impulse to act, to do something when there is nothing to be done, to tolerate the situation and not to act in impatience."
And that is the point when he asks me if I'm a priest.
----
That's why I hold,
That's why I hold with all I have.
That's why I hold.
----
We are singing.
I am handing around the songbook which I am increasingly convinced I have stolen from somewhere, possibly somewhere highly embarrassing.
"He'll be sad if he misses the singing again."
And I am sitting next to her, and he has finally shown up and is sitting behind us, all three sharing the same song-book, and he is tapping out the rhythm on the back of my chair.
And all I want is for everything to be like this, forever.
I want to feel this belonging. I want to be the third voice carrying the song. I want him to compare reading speeds with me, for none of them to bat an eyelid when I say, "We will do it."
To hear him say, "You know that you can tell me to do things?" and, despite replying, "But it's usually counterproductive," to believe that he means it.
To have him say to me, "Do you want to run the Unfettered Mind?", and know that he would back me up all the way if I said, "Yes, actually," even though I flail around for excuses instead.
To have them believe in me.
But I have to keep spoiling it, don't I?
"And I can't cast it by myself," I say, unthinkingly, reflexively.
He looks at me as if I've grown a second head.
"...because it wouldn't matter if my head exploded, because I'm worth less than you?"
He looks at me as if I've grown a third head, stutters something about being sure he could find someone else to do it, any number of people.
But earlier I was determined not to be left out in the cold, and I was anyway.
How can I convince myself that I am worthwhile, without pulling so hard on the few strong threads I have - to reassure myself that they will hold - that I am being unreasonable?
----
And I won't die alone and be left there.
Well I guess I'll just go home,
Oh God knows where.
----
"Beware the empty one - bleached bones beneath the sun - the hero who undone dies alone, dies alone; the hero who, undone, dies alone."
And there is a crack in my memory, through which is spilling unwelcome light.
"The strength that comes from strife - the endless thirst for life - the mercy of the knife in bloody hand, bloody hand..."
And I can see her, bleeding into the forest floor; turning her head to the side and coughing out blood that is almost black.
Black to match her scales and her hair.
And there is a wound across her throat and a knife in my hand and she has asked me for this, and she chokes out, weakly: "Live for me."
"The blood upon the frost - and famine's ugly cost..."
I didn't come across a party of already-dead explorers.
The others died, one by one, because there was something in me that wanted to live.
But how can I trust this memory, more than any other explanation my mind has offered?
Somehow - I am sitting here - I am alive.
Somehow I walked out of the wilds of Redoubt in respectable enough condition that they accepted me.
But I can no longer believe my initial explanation for how.
----
Because death is just so full and man so small.
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before.
----
"Is this a private staring-at-the-stars-morosely party, or can anyone join in?"
The Three Sisters.
Things are connected by blood. The weight of the world.
Not all blood is that inherited in birth.
It hangs there clearly in the sky before them, over the dark and placid lake.
Barak points out a few more correspondences; the Door is bright too this evening, and the Wyrm is dim-to-invisible.
Things move and change, but do not transform.
We are all moving, but we have no clear idea of where we are going, and we will all discover sadly that we are still the same people, with the same problems, when we get there.
As more people spill out into the night, I can lose myself in odological debate which rambles comfortably through a morass of heresies - "Please don't call the Labyrinth a realm," he says; "Dragonbone," I can't help but reply - and it is comfortable enough to remain here in the clash of philosophy with insufficient evidence while Barak and Livia head off further into the darkness.
I glance in their direction when there is a lull in conversational attention. His hood is up.
And I turn back to the conversation and fight down a wave of the universe's callous unfairness. I want so badly to have someone that I could confide in; while Isca is a useful sounding-board, I can't bring myself to lay everything on her shoulders.
"But why did they burn someone so virtuous?" she asks.
"Sometimes Virtue is in facing up to what you have done," I tell her, because I am such a hypocrite.
It would not, I think, burden her as it does me - but I fear to lean too much on the one link that gives me any semblance of what I want in that moment, lest it break under the load.
"Some of them have been wearing the warpaint for so long that they find it difficult to know how to take it off," Eleri had explained, earlier.
How does the world work when there are no orders, and the demands of survival are no longer difficult enough to be fighting for?
----
And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
----
"The Wanderer!"
She watches their faces when she thinks she can get away with it.
"Bugger all this superstitious rot," declaims one of those she wants to be confident enough to call her friend, with surprisingly excellent acting talent.
Barak is actively hiding behind his copy of the play, attempting to shelter his display of rueful humour at the synchronicity from the possibility of distracting the audience.
Bugger all this superstitious rot, indeed.
As they were setting up the play, she claimed the roles of all three Interchangeable Arbiters.
She sees the momentary shock on Livia's face as she falls straight over on cue, and despite the perfidious chairs shifting underneath her quick change from one to the other, she pulls off the scene with all three of them and the audience laughs at all the right lines.
She hopes that the play is desensitizing both of them to any worry about the star.
Anvil will have enough worries of its own.
Today, in this moment, she is glorious.
----
And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
----
It is late, and she is frustrated with her performance at the card game; she had enjoyed it, but it had brought out an obnoxious tendency to boast about, and hint at, things she should have kept inside herself.
"I got you something."
Isca produces a beautiful green-embroidered cuff, secured with wooden leaf buttons.
"Picked it up in Sarvos. Made it for you."
She doesn't quite hug Isca right there in the main room with the last few stragglers making their way off to bed, but she does admire the gift with shining eyes, don it immediately, and thank her with more sincerity than she thought that she was capable of.
"Do you know where you're going tomorrow?"
"I think I'm staying here and teaching you to swim?" She spotted Livia still clearing up, and raised her voice slightly, "If Cascade are happy to put up with us for a few more days."
Livia looked over at her questioning, so she filled the silence. "I was thinking we could use the secluded pools, a little way further up..."