213th Entry
Ancient Crescent, Lands March 3rd 3422
El settled onto the half-full sack with a weary wumpf, immediately regretting it as the uneven lumps of … root vegetables, she guessed? bit into her backside. Still, tubers and all, the moment's rest felt good. Everything hurt: her feet from standing, her legs from striding, her arms from lifting and her hands from sorting and parsing and weighing. Her fingers even bore the red splotches of not-quite blisters, flecked with dried sugar. Gods she ached.
Watching the smallfolk gather and talk amongst themselves in the narrow hall and lofted rafters of the abandoned home, El had to wonder at it - it was a kinder hurt, surely, than the sharp pains of combat, but to be able to walk the wilds and wage war with the forces of the Charnel One only to be laid low by a market stall. Smiling, El realized she'd missed it; ached for it just as keenly as the exhaustion ached in her limbs. When had she last honored Galinthe thus? She'd gone to market in the outer wilds; the far off dark of the spheres to be sure but that had been a strange dance of cold metals and colder blood, contracts writ in starlight on a borrowed ledger. It hadn't been of the same stuff as this; sweet and salt and sweat and the scents of clove, fennel and pepper laden heavy with smoke and spirits.
Had it been Ma'cab? Before the venture to the swamp? The smells then were more like this homecoming - worse, marketedly worse, Three Rings lacked the particular perfume of too many bodies and too little sanitation, and the ale she smelled was if not fresh at least not bitter-stale. Not that she'd been able to tell the difference at first. That thought dragged her back through the decades in flash of vivid memory; when she'd snuck her first ale from the dwarven traders it has all seemed like so much foulness; smelled bad and tasted worse - that day seemed a lifetime ago. Back then Ereth Cinlu's spires had seemed so tall: bone-white ivory spires riven and adorned with glass brushing against the clouds. The things she'd seen since made the truth of them small, but the memory- the memory still soared. The demotion in caste that followed her intemperance; hells, she could say it now, her being sold to the Seekers Across the Lands had opened those doors for her and tempered her knowing. Had They been nudging her all along, from where to want and back again, from what she was to what she ought be in the scheme of things?
Another thought simmered, not quite unasked but ever unanswered in the silent spaces of her sentiment. Did they - or would they, the tense of a far off possible "not yet" strangled something in her brain: the Wyrms had a word for it, conjugation, actually, but then they had words for everything - did her Father, her mother, her once-upon-a-future-time arranged for suitor and familial oracles of the Eborian Apiary who had named them … did they think her world smaller for the demotion, even now? Did they think her the wretched exile? If the could see what she had seen, stood where she had stood, loved who she had -
El kills that ribbon of thought with a firm shake of her head and a smirk on her lips. Some things weren't for family, even with - or despite - the prohibitions of her exile. And she HAD struck by that compact, in her own way. There were so so many ways to interpret a contract after all and the Wayward Conclave and their entanglements were pleasant scars upon her heart for it; both fresh and long healed. A bargain well struck; and it was no great thing to trade away a home and a family; such things were as tears and blood. One could always make more. In fact - El's eyes flitted across her companions, both present and remembered, and the shadow that cradled her throat and whose blade El wore - it was damn hard not to.
Stretching long and lean like a cat* she took in another spice-kissed breath and then stood, the weariness and aches of her task up to Galinthe with a silent prayer.
For a life measured and marked not by the span but by the breadth, for the 'wareness of worth I thank thee - at her rising another gaggle of townsfolk pressed forward and she greeting them with her best merchant's smile. - t'was bargained well and done.
"Hail and well met; what would you have Galinthe seek the great river for today?"
***
As the trading wound down and the sugar candy began to run out,a particularly giddy girl, maybe the age of 8, whom you noticed had a shoulder length glove on her right arm, got bold with the "old woman" giving her gifts.
Looking at El, mouth smeared with sugar and cheeks workings, she mumbled:
"Auntie. I want to show you something so special."
With that she started to peel off the glove, as it exposed her upper arm, you could see a healthy arm that truncated about two inches down the upper arm, where it was grafted to darkened, wizened flesh and an arm whose surface was vermiform with fine metal wires.
Sugar drunk she continued to roll it down,"See, see…I'm special like you." As she got it just above her elbow, a strong female hand reached out and stopped her.
"Greenbrier, what have we told you?" The woman in her late 20s, maybe early thirties, used calloused fingers to roll it back up. "The gift is for family eyes, not others."
She stares at you with bright green eyes surrounded by laugh lines and winter dryness. "Forgive her. Not the most pleasant thing to see, but nothing special. She simply fell into a fire and burnt her arm." She gives a deep, thoughtful, in-breath and drops her voice so the little girl can't hear her, "We tell her it's a gift, so she doesn't feel…disfigured…but nothing more than burns."
**"thank you for the candy with the children. Very rare.
"Now, Greenbrier come with me and stay close."**
And she leads the girl away to look at some of then bone jewelry and bronze arrow heads.
