SUMMER

Angkar: Wet season. Precipitation is common during the late afternoon and evening hours. Vegetation grows significantly during the summer, but flooding is a danger due to the monsoons that ravage the country. The rainforest sees evenly distributed rainfall throughout the season.

Ashoka: Desert: Extremely hot and dry. Violent, heavy downpours following long dryspells. Jungle: Hot and humid with frequent, violent rainstorms.

Morrim: Relatively hot and dry, but with a chance of thunderstorms from time to time. The heat may cause forest fires.

Soto: Hot and humid, tree cover is dense while ground growth is restricted. Thunderstorms see the most amount of rainfall during the season, and it can be very windy. On occasion, there are flash floods that can destroy homes and farms built on flood plains.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

March 30th, 2018 As you might have noticed, Elenlond has changed hands and is now under new management! If you have any questions, please direct them to DaringRaven! As for the rest of the announcements, including a season change, you can find them over here at the following link!

January 16, 2018 As you might have noticed, Elenlond has a new skin, all thanks to Mel! Don't forget to check out the new OTMs as well!

December 2, 2017 Winter has settled on Elenlond, bringing sleep for some and new life for others.

September 26, 2017 With the belated arrival of autumn come some interesting developments: new OTMs, a Town Crier and the release of the Elly Awards winners!

July 14, 2017 After a bit of forum clean-up, Elly Awards season has arrived! Head on over to make your nominations!

May 31, 2017 Summer has arrived and so has activity check! That's not all though – we also have some new OTMs for you and some staff changes!


WHAT IS ELENLOND?

Elenlond is an original free-form medieval fantasy RPG set on the continent of Soare and the Scattered Isles, which are located to the south in the Sea of Diverging Waters. The four chief nations of the western side of the world—Ashoka in northern Soare, Soto in western Soare, Morrim in eastern Soare, and Angkar, the largest of the Scattered Isles—continue to experience growth and prosperity since the fall of the Mianorite gods, although power struggles within the countries—or outside of them—continue to ensue.


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  • CURRENT EVENTS

    Angkar: To honour the reinvigoration of the ancient city of Mondrágon, the majestic Queen Eulalia has permitted the opening of a Coliseum where people from around the world and all walks of life can test their combat skills against one another. Many have already done battle in search of honour, glory, prizes and money.

    Ashoka: In an otherwise peaceful times, Ashokans are beset with the relatively minor inconveniences of wandering undead and occasionally-aggressive giant rock worms. There has also been some controversy over the recent re-legalisation of human sacrifice.

    Morrim: Rumour has it that Emperor Leofric de Hollemark is mustering forces for a war. Though the threat from Soto’s forests has passed, the forces previously employed in watching the forest now linger at the border. Rumours also circulate of a small group that has been dispatched to make contact with the tribes of the Do’suul Mountains.

    Soto: The Sotoans have defeated the fey and liberated themselves from Méadaigh’s oppression! Preliminary efforts have been made at rebuilding the city of Madrid, which had been captured at the beginning of the war. However, the Sotoans are hindered from recovery famine. Méadaigh’s magic caused summer to persist in the Erth’netora Forest through the winter. Her power has been withdrawn and the plants die as if preparing for winter – even though it is now summer. The Sotoans must sustain off what food they can get, what creatures they can kill and what can be imported into the city from Morrim and Angkar.

    For a fuller description of our most recent events, check out our most recent edition of The Town Crier!

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    Welcome to our home, a world in which anything can happen. From sprawling deserts and vast forests to massive volcanoes and luscious hot springs, Soare and the Scattered Isles are beautiful places just waiting to be explored. For the brave and the bold or the cautious and the wary, creatures of all kinds roam the earth, looking for adventure or for a place to call their own. Species of all kinds - the well-known and the unknown - thrive here, though not always in harmony.

    Elenlond is an original medieval fantasy RPG with a world that's as broad as it is unique. Calling on characters of all kinds, the sky's the limit in a world where boundaries are blurred and the imagination runs rampant. Restrictions are limited and members are encouraged to embrace their creativity, to see where they can go and what they can do. It's no longer just text on a page - it becomes real.

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    The Deluge; Juul!
    Topic Started: Jul 14 2014, 06:35 PM (1,133 Views)
    Nevneni
    Member Avatar
    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    The memory came up like a candle taking light: suddenly and brightly. The memory came up with a candle taking light, then the flame lit Gweson’s face: long, soft and smiling; a pond of orange in the night. How did these things happen? Nevneni, on her to nowhere, had crested the top of a small, rocky hill, and the sight before her had come up suddenly and brightly, like a memory of a candle, and she remembered. The sight before her was of a place that had once been a farm and was now out of order, with weeds filling the land before a derelict, broken-backed home. It meant nothing, but then there was Gweson using his little magic trick to light a candle in the kitchen of her home and smiling.

    The rest of the memory fell into place after that, though it did not play out in order: first it was the candlelight, then it was the walk in the woods, then it was their shadows on the wall and Gweson with wet blue eyes. When she tried to run through it in her mind, it was as tedious and constructed as going over any normal memory in order, even though this one had been hidden away for two years. She put it together though, as she walked down the steep slope of the hill, her feet sliding and scuffing in the dry dirt.

    They had been walking in the forest into the night, talking of Nevneni’s wonderful travels and the goings-on in the town that her mother had been too polite to mention. They had begun their walk shortly before sunset, though Nevneni could not remember how it started or what led up to it. More than anything else, Nevneni remembered the feeling in her chest, like curtains snapping in a gale: the feeling of low, long rage contained neatly in her body. She remembered the feeling she had when her mind strayed during the conversation and then her face grew dark and terrified and Gweson never knew because she was hidden by the night. She had seen Aravin by that point, had already been picked apart by his eyes like she was a flesh-filled crab, and so she lived with a storm blowing silently in her chest. Still, she laughed with Gweson, and smiled because Gweson had never failed to make her laugh. Good and wellness built up a wall around the flapping, dread wind inside her and she felt both at once; she was both static and twisting in the wind.

    Night drifted upon the forest and they knew the town was going to bed, and they began to walk back to Nevneni’s old home, and then they were there and Gweson did the magic trick where he pinched the candle wick and it jumped up into flame. “I will have to learn to do that,” Nevneni had said, and as she slipped her way down the hillside in Ashoka, she wanted to laugh a little because she had learned since then and she would never get to tell Gweson about. She checked the Ashokan sky, which was blue but edged with storm clouds, and in her mind she saw how their shadows dithered on the walls of the kitchen, how her leaping shadow reached up to tuck a sheet of hair behind her ear.

    They sat on the same side of the kitchen table, the table on which Ysmail had died, and their knees faced each other, nearly touching. They talked quietly of something, careful not to wake anyone, and Gweson reached the end of some joke and then his stifled laughter shivered into serious silence. She remembered how his eyes, rimed with candlelight, flicked up to her face, and he focused on her and said something like “I’m glad you came back.”

    She had known Gweson for seven or so years before she left. He had once been a tow-haired boy with a persistent cough, sitting in this kitchen and chattering, then hawking up sputum into a bucket, then chattering again. He had some angel blood in him, he told her, so he aged just as slowly she did. Nevneni had spent years forgetting him after she left, then when she remembered him, his face was disintegrated, so he was nothing but blonde hair and a distant strain of laughter. Gweson seemed like a vivid dream even now, one who sat there all golden in the light and listened to her say “I’m so glad I got to see you again.” She wasn’t glad then she’d come back home, and she still wasn’t now, even after nearly two years. But she had missed him before her return, once she remembered who he was and how they’d whirled around and around at her sister’s wedding, laughing.

    Nevneni came to the bottom of the hill and broached the field of weeds, the little house in her sights. The clouds came swarming from the east, a veil of rain suspended under them. She was lucky she had found shelter just in time for the deluge, and all this right when her mind had decided to dig up Gweson and his little flame. Her flesh felt numb, as if her mind had withdrawn to focus on the dull pain swelling in her bones and the feeling of the gale tearing its way into her chest. She stumbled over the crumbling earth, her face blank, her lips biting inwards and her eyes holding a glazed but determined focus on the old house. Firmly, she set her mind back to the recollection of this memory, slapping her thoughts to keep them from leaping ahead or wandering away.

    Where she put her mind was in the silence after her words, the moment when she remembered Aravin and his new wife and then the window in her chest slammed open and the curtains clapped like sails. Sickness lanced through her stomach and she wanted to curl up and away, but Gweson scraped his stool across the dirt floor and their knees knocked together. He was closer and she was closer, for she was sinking, she was bending like grass in the breeze.

    Their kiss was gentle but when she thought of it two years later, it felt like a collision. The memory bowled its way through her, knocking off her hollow walls and her rotting bones. Lips can be soft, was what Nevneni thought when they kissed. She was surprised. She did not know how to kiss because Aravin had been the first one and he had bitten her lips until they bled. But of course they can be soft, Nevneni thought as she wound her way through the weeds, because Vorkael’s had been, and he was her first proper kiss, or so she had thought until now. That kiss hadn’t come until the end of the summer, after all those lost memories, and so this one, with Gweson, had to be the first.

    Of course that one thing would be upset, of course it would. She had clung to memories of Vorkael despite his disappearance, running over them to feel some ghost of comfort. They were good memories, so of course they would be unsettled by some stark realisation. Somehow she had managed to kiss Gweson and forget it, and then what else had happened? She winced to remember some memories that came after this kiss, and only distantly: Gweson’s heart thrumming under her ear and his back bare in the moonlight as he showed her his withered part-angel wings.

    But she must not think so far ahead. Everything had to progress chronologically, like a story. She slapped her mind away from thoughts of Vorkael and his forgotten face. Her staff thumped on the dry earth. Her hand was clenched over the stabbing pain in her gut. The farmer who had lived on this scrap of desert land had once grown fennel and now it was everywhere, prospering. Fennel for clouded eyes, fennel for the gut, fennel for a milky breast. These specimens had not gone to seed yet, and so were useless to her. They grew densely, some as high as her waist. They folded out feathery new leaves, which were bunched up into dark, lascivious tongues. She plunged through the plants and the slippery fennel licked her ankles and arms.

    Gweson, Gweson, Gweson.

    They had both been practically folded to their knees to kiss, and they were just a hair too far apart to do it well and Nevneni knew less of kissing than someone who had never been kissed at all. They parted and Nevneni’s face crumpled with shame and concern and the gale whipping about inside her. “But what about your wife?” she whispered.

    Gweson sat back, his gaze downcast. “Yes…Falanel,” he had said, and then he went on, “I love her but she’s not like you.”

    “She isn’t me,” said Nevneni, her hand shifting in her lap to hold the pain in her gut. Her lips felt hot, red and swollen and they ached with a phantom memory of Aravin’s teeth.

    “No, I mean…” He didn’t seem to know what he meant. Nevneni remembered that moment well, for she had studied his face and memorised it: his gaze was turned to the floor and from this stance his nose appeared beak-like. His eyes were shaded under glowing lashes and his lips were open, like a pair of petals on a daisy. A wing of hair laid across his thin forehead and the shadow underneath it danced in the candlelight. “I mean…the reason I asked her to marry me was not the reason I was going to ask you to marry me.”

    Nevneni ran over that moment in her head at least five times. She tried to imagine it fully, to make it as real as it had once been; she imagined his voice, the way he turned his eyes up to her as if in question. She conjured up the same feeling in her insides over and over again: her heart had clenched up, the pain in her gut had slipped in deeper, but the gale had stopped, as if she hung in a moment outside of time. The lack of fury had felt like pleasure, despite the agonies of her innards; it was nice to be stunned. So she stunned herself again and again, playing out the emotions in her internal theatre until they stopped having any impact whatsoever. Then she moved on.

    Had she said anything to this? She didn’t remember. She didn’t remember anything after that, just Gweson’s story, which was almost still fresh in her memory but still sort of paraphrased. She re-wrote the empty parts herself as she wandered through the thick clumps of fennel. And so he said: “I had been thinking about it for years, Nevneni, but I wanted to wait for the right time. It seemed that it would soon be the right time too, that summer, what with Liosi’s wedding, and your birthday. I even went to see you the day after your birthday, to draw your parents aside and ask permission, but you weren’t there. Alleis said the bed was empty, but she said she had heard you come back from Aravin’s in the middle of the night and she’d thought you’d gone to bed after that. She thought that maybe you had gone off to gather herbs in the early morning and that would be why some of your things were gone. You weren’t back by mid-day, so they all thought that maybe you had thought of something to do in another town. We all wanted to think you’d be back soon…but you weren’t. I had their permission, though: I asked before I knew you were gone. Seemed like Alleis was expecting it.”

    Where had Nevneni been by then? It was hard to remember. She had first left home ten years ago and she only remembered the moment of departure and a liquified version of the sunny, tortured days that followed. She imagined herself on the road somewhere, still holding herself and crying, while Alleis waited and fidgeted in the house, her eyes cast out the windows.

    “No one ever thought you had left for some awful reason. Alleis trusted you not to run away with some man and I trusted in that too…I still do. There seemed no good reason for your departure, and Alleis thought that you’d loved your home and family so much that, when you weren’t back for a month, that something terrible must have happened to you. After some point I think it was easier for all of us to believe that you were dead. About a year later, we had a ceremony. We took ashes from the fire and buried them and we said good-bye to your spirit. It was just easier that way, I hope you understand.”

    Maybe she had said that she did understand, or maybe she just sat there with a hand at her stomach, still as stone, imagining her mother growing frantic in her waiting, imagining Gweson dressed in black, imagining her own funeral occurring while she was off in some distant land, rocking back and forth and biting her knuckles, too distraught to sleep.

    “So I met Falanel, and she’s half-elf but from pretty far away. I just had to think of you as dead, so we were married and now she bears my second child. But I…She was never my first choice. I still dreamt of you sometimes, I suppose I always will. But there’s nothing to be done now, is there? I can’t imagine you staying anyways. I don’t know why you left and I don’t think it was the reason you said, but I trust that it was a good one.”

    Had she ever had a response to what he said? Had she maybe even explained what happened on the night of her birthday eight years prior? She doubted it, but how could she know when the rest was blank space? In a rare fit of frustration, she tore off a stalk of fennel that was in her way and threw it to the ground. The storm was almost upon her and the house: it shot down bolts of lightning and slammed the air to bits. Why did life have to work this way? There was so much unnecessary drama to the loss of her memories, which had no doubt been caused by her attempt to poison herself with belladonna after she’d killed Aravin, which was yet more torturous and unwanted rama. These moments, with looming storms and unearthed memories, seemed to eat up her life, overshadowing her everyday existence until even eating and sleeping was a part of her pointless, melodramatic torment. If only she could have come to this abandoned farmhouse thinking of nothing, or of the food she’d make for herself once she got inside. Anything but this obsessive repetition, this self-modulated maelstrom of emotion, this cursed summer now nearly two years old and so long gone. If only there was a way for a whole period of her life to disappear, if only there was some way for her to exist without it tearing her up every day.

    The flat little house, with its mouldering thatched roof, was right before her. She stepped onto the worn stone that had been its doorstep and went through the hole where the door had once been. Just in time the rain spattered down, then worked itself up into a roaring torrent. She inhaled the scent of rain billowing through the door, and the scent of age lingering in the corners. She stood just past the door and peered around at the dense shadows until her eyes adjusted.

    There was someone else there. She jumped back with a shriek, her other troubles almost, and immediately set about apologising for her carelessness in not realising that the abandoned hut might somehow be inhabited. But then…she recognised that angled, beaten face, that thatch of bright hair. She stepped closer, trying to see through the shadow to make out the woman who sat there. “Juul?” she asked, her voice rising with disbelief, “Is that really you?”
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    Juul Shaepah
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    The soldier had seen the clouds early in the day, as she made her southerly progress through the shrubland in her usual mile devouring stride. The sky to the south and west had been utterly clear, the sun unopposed, with a stiff breeze from the east whipping her dry skin. As she had crested a particular rise after crossing the Origa at a shallow ford, she had spied them - thick and black, and pregnant with rain. They sat on the edge of the horizon, billowing with expectant violence, with the sharp wind bringing them in like an awful tide.

    She knew she had a few hours before the downpour began, and began scouting for a suitable shelter - though the terrain offered precious few opportunities. She was looking for a cave, or a rock with a steep lee - something solid to hunker down under, a shield against the wind and rain. Though, from what she could see of the ominous blackness on the horizon, she would be there all night. Still she marched southward, her thoughts on her homeland and her eyes on the landscape. There was a peace that emanated from its stark emptiness, which seemed at odds with the looming storm - she enjoyed the distinction.

    As she crested another shallow rise, she saw it - a lone, tumbledown house that unassumingly dominated a shallow bowl in the land. She could see the outlines of its surrounding fields, the once stark lines long blurred by time - like faint scars on the land. There remained some rough trellises, and a dilapated well sat some feet away from the house. As she approached, she observed the mouldering thatch, and the central beam bowed like the back of an old man. The crops had gone wild, and mingled with the encroaching natives - and sweet smell filled her nostrils. She grinned - her sanctuary was found.

    The single room was nearly bare - the victim of a generation or more of wandering rummagers like herself - though she found a couple of ancient fleeces and a rough cooking pot of unglazed clay on the hard packed dirt. She relieved herself of her arms and armour, and set to work beating the dust and lice from the sheepskins on the outside walls, leaving them to hang in the wind - a rough bed, but better than the harsh scrubs she had slept under in the past few days. There were a couple of old millstones in the house - too heavy to be easily looted - and she arranged them next to the firepit and cleared the room of debris. Satisfied, she took to the fields - there was sure to be food.

    She foraged the rough trellises first - the winding beans that crawled across them were ripe, and there were plenty that the birds and wandering goats had left. As her rough hands picked the fat pods, she was struck with remembrance of her peasantry. She could only snatch scant images, sounds, smells - she remembered rough work, when the steel in her hand had been a sickle not a sword, but also laughter and comfort. She remembered her mother, Irini, laughing by the fire, the flickering light making her eyes glimmer. Her throat tightened a little, a bitter taste in her mouth.

    She squeezed shut her eyes, and took to the fields. Fennel had proliferated amongst the scrubs and weeds, and she tore three from the dusty ground, cutting the leaves away from their sweet hearts. She also found a few wild onions, hidden among the wispy canopy of fennel, and she dug into the dusty ground with her knife to prise them out. The soil was thin, and rocky - to till it must have been back breaking, unlike the soft blackness of her native land. She set her jaw, as her guts were gripped by nostalgia.

    She returned to the house with her rudimentary harvest, placing her forage on one of the millstones, before she left again to gather water and firewood. The scrubs were hardy, but they burned well. Her tasks completed, she sat for a while on the smooth step in the door-less entry, and watched the sun set, the light hardly touching the rapidly approaching clouds. At the demise of the light, she set about lighting a fire and preparing her dinner.

    She became absorbed in her task, and barely noticed the fulminating cloud that now commanded the skies overhead. She had filled the pot, and placed it over the crackling fire, and proceeded with her dinner. She peeled the vegetables, using long, sure stroked of her knife, until she was shocked by a sudden whip of sound - high pitched and wavering, and closer than the booming thuinder.

    She half stood, her eyes blazing, brandishing her knife in one hand and an onion in the other. It took her a moment to take in the sight - the burbling apologies emanating from the bowed figure, thickly swaddled in robes - then a mention of her name. She blinked, still standing, before she sighed with relief and gave a small laugh.

    "Come in, Nevvy! Ye gave me a fright." she invited, a smile creeping across her lacerated features. She sat once more, gesturing lazily with her onion at the opposite millstone "By Vespasian, what ye doin' way out here?"
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Jul 15 2014, 12:39 PM.
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    Nevneni
    Member Avatar
    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    If she had sudden memories and if she suffered a desert storm, then surely she should have expected something more to happen. Nevneni had a way of stumbling across people she almost knew at the most crucial moments: Sinadryn, who she had known from the Ashokan refugee camp, came along just in time to pull her from the sea and Alexandros, who had drunk tea with her in Kinaldi, happened upon her as she first tried to march away from Fairin. So it was now with Juul, the tall soldier who had needed a hangover cure on a cold morning and now turned up at the moment she was least remembered or expected.

    Except she was somehow more than just some stranger, wasn't she? Nevneni had developed such a delicious way of mistreating herself that past winter, and then Juul had given her one look in the eye and somehow made her stop. As she dithered on the doorstep, she remembered how the woman had perched on the fountain-lip next to her, her warm scent of life and sweat and booze radiating into the frozen air. She had coaxed Nevneni to look her in the eye, spoken a few words, and with that she had somehow convinced her to eat again.

    After that, Nevneni had a reduced desire to deprive herself of food. In fact, at times, her appetite got the better of her and she just ate anything she could get her hands on, then slept, oh gods, she slept. She suffered bad dreams of course, but still, she slept. She slept and ate, which she had somehow managed to avoid so well through that bitter winter, and then by the end of it she had stopped indulging herself in such mistreatment. All because she'd been helped once by Phaedrus and Juul and this made her realise that she should probably stop putting herself in such dire situations if she could help it.

    Still, sometimes dire situations came to her, for they had hidden dens in her mind and waited for the right moment to burst out. This is what had just happened outside, and Nevneni was strangely glad to have Juul flare up at just the right moment, like a candle set alight. Perhaps that was what Juul had a talent for: turning up when someone needed it. Nevneni didn't know. She hardly knew the woman. Her face slipped into a strange smile even though she felt like a sack full of tears, ready to split. She inhaled, laughed a little at the nickname and managed to contain herself. Without question or further hesitation, she sat on the millstone offered to her as a seat and peered across the small fire.

    The soldier had done well for herself; better than Nevneni would have done. She had gathered food, especially fennel bulbs, rather than regarding them as worthless. In her haste and her tide of emotions, Nevneni had forgotten that surely there was food to be found on an old farm. Juul had an onion in hand, a knife in the other, and was in the process of making herself dinner. This, too, reeked of familiarity: Nevneni had spent her first meeting with Phaedrus trying to make soup, only to be interrupted by a lewd bowman. Hopefully no one could come dashing out of the storm to ruin their meal, perhaps sent by a god who sensed that there was a moment of peace to be ruined.

    Nevneni's eyes flicked up to Juul as she set her staff down on the stone beside her and shook her pack off her shoulders. "What am I doing all the way out here?" Everything seemed suddenly hilarious to her, even Gweson and her lost memories and the general state of aporia that hung over her life these days. "I don't know. I think I thought that I hadn't been to Ashoka in a while, so I might as well go. Or maybe I just wanted to go to Etruria for something. My feet turned this way, I think, and so this way I came."

    She smiled across the fire, her eyes still moist and her cheeks still hot with the threat of tears. She jumped a little with every whipcrack of thunder, but she was otherwise holding herself together admirably. Juul's face was like a candle taking light: it was sudden and bright no matter how often Nevneni looked away and then looked back again. Those high cheek bones tapered to her nose, which tapered to her chin, which tapered to the fire, and above this arrangement were her eyes which were turned into gleaming amber by the fire. After a moment, Nevneni realised how directly she'd been looking at Juul. This task as normally impossible, but now it was so easy, either by virtue of the cosmic hilarity of the situation or because of that one, meaningful glance they'd shared in Madrid.

    Habit forced Nevneni's eyes away from Juul. She turned to pull her pack onto her lap and began to rummage through, asking, "But what are you doing out here?" Out came little bags and bundles of herbs: the traditional threesome of rosemary, oregano and thyme, and then a few nicer things, like coriander seeds and cumin. With these lined up neatly on the millstone, Nevneni leaned forward to add her herbs to the pot, starting with the rosemary. She was sure Juul would not object, as she had nothing else to add to the meal and she would surely be made to eat of it whether she liked it or not.
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    Juul Shaepah
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    As the healer stood vacillating in the entrance, the soldier became still, paused in her labours. As her keen eyes watched and her ears listened to her reply, her jaw was agape at the strange, almost unreal, happenstance of the situation. She hadn't expected to see anyone here - she hadn't seen a soul in days - for Nevneni to appear flustered at the door, when she hadn't seen her in months, was remarkable. She seemed more animated than she had in Madrid, where it had seemed she was being inexorably crushed by something. Her speech and motion had a slight air of something amiss.

    The soldier smiled at her muddled reply - she had become something of an aimless wanderer herself in the past few years. At the healers words, she resumed her labours, neatly quartering the peeled onion, before shaving the vegetable against its grain with deft movement from her knife, tiny white triangles disturbing the still water. Thunder cracked violently outside, and then rumbled like the protestations of an old man, while the wind whipped the tumbledown house. The door was missing, as was the frame and shutters of the single window - long torn from their hinges for firewood, she guessed.

    "Oh, Etruria? Aye, s'a nice town. I've a few friends there, spent a year or so guarding the caravans goin' t'the City of Oracles. Til the Moghul shut that down, o'course. He don't much like foreigners knowin' how to ride an' fight." she spoke, her eyes meeting those of the healer who seemed more willing to look at her. She let them linger, before picking up another onion and repeating the process. She took a breath, eyes cast down, before she answered the question of the other, her voice a little thick with melancholy.

    "I'm goin' t'Morrim. I'm goin' home."

    Home. The word rattled around her mind, loaded with an ineffable conflagration of feeling. It had been four years since she had left, the country falling to ruin, the companies disbanding. Some had gotten fat from the Conquest, and could ply other trades but most were left with no future - once proud fighters scratching around for work, begging for the most rudimentary of positions. It had broken her spirit, and she had searched for fresher pastures with a heavy heart.

    She glanced around at the bare room, the small fire imbuing the rough stones of the walls with a dull warmth, punctuated by the white-blue flash of lightning. She looked back at Nevneni as she added herbs to the pot, noting the flush on her rounded cheeks, the wetness in her eyes. She idly wondered if those cheeks were as soft as they looked, if the girl was as sweet as she seemed. She kept locked to the gaze, enjoying the silence broken only by the odd rumble and the constant rush of rain. She let the thought linger, and felt a fire rise a little in her guts.

    She suddenly felt a little exposed at the healer's eyes - her arms and armour were set in a corner, and she had even relieved herself of the strappings at her bust, dressed only in her boots, trews and a rough-cut sleeveless tunic of green. She was rarely disarmed in such a manner in the presence of another - she had lived on the battlefield for twenty years, and she felt the need to always been on guard. Company was not something she had prepared for, though it was welcome. She cleared her throat, and hastily grabbed a bulb of fennel, slightly flushed. She inhaled sharply through her nose as Nevneni brought out her herbs, noting how her nimble fingers arranged them on the millstone.

    "Is that cumin? I've not tasted that in many a year." she spoke, breaking the quiet. She felt the need to chatter, awkward as it was, as she set about dicing the fennel "Ye been t'Angkar recently then? That's th'last place I tasted it."
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Jul 17 2014, 02:05 PM.
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    Nevneni
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    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    Nevneni nodded, wishing she had some tale to tell of a personal connection to Etruria. It didn't seem worth it to say that she'd been through there a few times and she still hardly had anything interesting to remember about the place. So often she just wandered somewhere and never truly took it in. Perhaps she had managed to see Juul without ever noticing her when she had visited Etruria one time. Perhaps they secretly had a habit of passing by each other their entire lives at least and Nevneni had never even known.

    "I'm goin' t'Morrim," said Juul, her voice heavy and swaying with emotion, "I'm goin' home."

    Nevneni glanced up to see the downwards expression on the soldier's face. She felt like her heart was stretching, trying to get out of her chest and across the space between her and Juul. She knew what it was like to speak of heading home in that tone of voice, or at least something similar. She couldn't tell exactly what kind of sad Juul was, but perhaps it was something like how she'd felt when she had gone home two years ago: half homesick and half terrified and barely at all happy about it. It would have meant something for her to have Juul know that she knew, but she could think of no way to express it, especially when they truly didn't know very much about each other.

    "So, in the opposite direction," Nevneni said dully. It seemed a great pity that they would depart like this after such a fortuitous meeting. Nevneni did not often think of gods and alignments of the planets, but the fact that she'd come across Juul at such a time, in such a place, now seemed to her to be the result of some divine circumstance. Then there are reasons for you to go to Ashoka, she told herself, You have been led that way and that way you will go...

    Though the storm sent rain spitting through the shutter-less windows and the hole-ridden roof, it seemed that none got within their little circle of firelight. The winds shifted and sometimes a gust came howling in through the nearby window, but this would only last for a moment before it pulled away to leave them in the little room of warmth they'd made for themselves.

    You'll have to do something about that window, thought Nevneni vaguely as she dusted rosemary off her hands. She stole another glance at Juul, catching her just as she opened her mouth to speak. A small, hidden smile crept onto her face at her words. She had been saving cumin for some special event, though her mind was never too specific in imagining what sort of special event that would involve. Sometimes she thought about finding Vorkael again and using the cumin then, but that didn't matter unless she was going to scatter it in someone's blood because he didn't even really eat soup. This was a better excuse, especially since Juul seemed pretty pleased with it.

    "I got this cumin at a market in Soto somewhere," she told her, "Set the spice-seller's son's broken arm and he gave me this as payment." Then after a moment, more softly: "I've never been to Angkar." She untied her little bag of oregano leaves and sifted some into the pot. "I was planning to go once. With...someone. But the plans fell through. Maybe some day. I have a long enough life to live." She and Vorkael had talked about such a journey, trying to fit the cost of fare into Nevneni's small budget and speculating the difficulties of getting a vampire overseas such that he never had to see the sun. Too many boats had cracks between the deck planks, so they imagined covering him in a blanket or keeping him in a box, and then Vorkael had disappeared and Nevneni had been unmoored and left to drift wherever she was taken. Such as Ashoka. Such as Etruria. Such as here.

    A particularly harsh gust of wind made her decide that the rest of the herbs could wait. She slipped her pack onto her lap again and dug through it, finally producing an old blanket she'd found in some other abandoned house. She'd been cutting off bits of it for rags, but there was still sizeable amount of the wool cloth left, even if it was thin and full of holes. She also found some bent old hairpins she'd scavenged, thinking they could be useful for holding together bandages if she was in a pinch.

    Before she stood, Nevneni picked up the bag of cumin and said, "Juul." She waited for the soldier to respond, then, "Catch." She leaned around the fire and tossed the bag to the soldier, saying as she stood, "Keep it. My gift to you." A smile flashed across her face and then she turned away.

    She went over to the window and weathered a gust of rain-filled wind as she placed the blanket up to the corner of the hole. She shoved her pin through the corner of the blanket and into the soft plaster of the wall. As she passed the blanket over the window, she caught a glimpse of the field frozen in a flash of lightning. The fennel stalks were bent over in the wind and the rain was, for that moment, halted in the air. A crash of thunder came a second later, making her tense for a moment, then rumbled away into nothing. She pinned up the other side of the blanket, then came to the lower corner and pinned it too. The last corner was one she had cut away at, but she put a pin there too. There was still a shred of the window open to the elements, but at least with the blanket pinned in four places there was significantly less wind getting to them, even if the arrangement bulged like a sail when the wind tried to force its way in.

    Nevneni sat and set about adding the rest of the herbs. After a moment, she asked politely, "Where in Morrim is home to you, Juul?"
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    Juul Shaepah
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    Her eyes remained fixed on the bulb of fennel in her hand, narrowing as she made quick work of it with her knife, the glinting blade turning the plant into thin shreds. Her ears remained focused on the words of the healer, noticing the oscillation of her tone between dull sadness to bright engagement, then to wistfulness. Judging form her words, she was lonely - but found a value in helping others, bringing some meaning to her life. The soldier picked up the second bulb, and repeated her quick whittle, raising her eyes back to the healer's face.

    "'Tis a strange place, Angkar. Like nowhere on Soare, though you'll see Ashokans and Sotoans and Morrimians aplenty - some of 'em in chains." she replied softly, thinking some on her response. "Lots o' pretty feathers, and ships, an' animals which ye'd ne'er dream o' seein' here. Surely, wi' yer skills, ye can go anywhere. People always in need o' healin'."

    As the second bulb disintegrated under her ministrations, she paused as the woman before her threw a bag lightly at her. She caught it somewhat clumsily in her off hand, lurching at it as if she were swatting away a rat. She looked at the small pouch, before raising it to her nose and giving it a quick whiff. Her eyes returned to the now-standing healer, as she produced a coarse blanket from her pack and began to tend to the billowing wind whipping through the window. She glanced at the sheepskins she had piled in the corner, and cursed herself a fool for not thinking of it herself. Instead, she sat dumbly, as if struck by her brief smile, as she watched the labours of the other.

    "Are ye sure, Nev? This is rare stuff..." she stated, knowing that she had little to give in return, save for her soup and doubtful company. To give coin would be distasteful, and she immediately dismissed the thought.

    She moved to her own pack, laying next to her shield and mail, and produced a thin leather thong, which she tied round the small pouch before looping it over her head. It had been a long time since she had worn a talisman of any meaning - she remembered vividly a trade she had made when she was thirteen, on the eve of her first battle in the front lines. She had traded a quiver of arrows and a hunting knife for a piece of polished tortoiseshell, a ward against swords. She should have kept the knife at least - two of her facial scars had been earned in that battle. Since then, she had only kept things of personal value around her neck.

    "I'll be sparin' wi'it." she declared, gesturing to its new home with a pointed finger "Should ye want it back, ye know where it is. Ye have my thanks."

    She moved back to the stone and sat astride it, picking up the final fennel bulb, leaning forward and resuming the task. The water was burbling slightly, on its way to the simmer, with the shredded onions and fennel moving lethargically in the lazy currents. Her eyes were raised to healer at her politess, after a brief pause she gave a short laugh. She let the moment hang there as she thought on the question - she had had a fixed home, long ago, but she knew far better the itinerant camps of mercenaries.

    "I guess I don' have one, lass. When I was a bairn, I lived on the southeast border o' Soto, a place like this." she gestured around at the house with her knife. "But that were twenty year ago."

    She took a breath, sighing as she finished the final bulb. Her answer seemed wrong, it seemed inexpressive of what her home was, of her feeling for it. Her eyes stared past the healer at nothing, except the wide fields of her memory.

    "If there's black soil beneath me feet, and wide golden fields to my eye. If I've a full belly an' plenty of forage beside, with an enemy on the wide plain where we can decide things as warriors. Good steel in m'hand an' doughty friends at m'back. I think tha's my home, but I can't know that it's waitin' fir me."

    She fell quiet, her eyes looking to the healer momentarily before she grabbed at a handful of beans in their pods. She began to shell them, as she broke the silence once more.

    "Yer a wanderer, I'd wager, so I guess ye ain't got a home either. Nowhere fixed, anyway."
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Jul 20 2014, 10:16 AM.
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    Nevneni
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    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    "Of course I'm sure," said Nevneni, another one of those rare smiles passing over her face. She wanted to add that it was all for a good reason, that it was small repayment for what Juul had done, but she knew she could not phrase it without it sounding melodramatic. Juul had not caused such a change in her intentionally; surely she had wished it somehow, but the reaction that had happened in Nevneni was almost random. If Juul had not given her a look in the eyes, she would have learned to start taking care of herself again somehow, maybe by looking at a squirrel or seeing a street at dusk or remembering Gweson suddenly and brightly before a storm.

    Nevneni sprinkled some coriander into the pot, watching Juul make a necklace of the cumin bag from under her lashes. She dusted her hands off and sat back to listen to the soldier's account of Morrim as a home, wistfully conjuring an imitation of those feelings in herself. For a moment, it was almost real, in the same way that she could sometimes feel a character's joy and despair when bards told their tales. For the barest moment, she longed for Morrim, especially Fairin, and she carelessly thought Just turn around and go back.

    Then it passed and she was afraid of the place again, especially of what it would be like to face up to Euphorbia, saying "I'm sorry I left." She twitched her head in the tiniest of shakes, convincing herself to forget it. Juul made the correct prediction about her: she wandered and didn't have a home. Well, sort of. There was home but that shouldn't even count any more. You should have forgotten about it by now, and then she wanted to laugh because she had, just not in the way she wanted to.

    She wondered how to answer, her eyes travelling up to the dripping roof. Her ears were filled with the constant fuzz of the rain on the hard earth. Another shot of lightning split the sky, then the thunder split her. She reflected that she felt more rent apart than usual, but in a calmer, more resigned way. She had felt a lot like this when she had untangled her confused memories to Vorkael once, and perhaps sometime before in her life, probably at least ten years ago in some distant conversation with Gweson. How did these things happen? Was it the storm, or the soup, or the memories, or the clashes of thunder or Juul herself?

    "There was a place once," she said carefully. Each word was like a stepping stone across a stream. "Sometimes it still feels like home, but it's not any more. It's in Soto, where I was born. It's where my family still lives. But I can't go back there any more. So what use does it have? If I could make anywhere else feel the way Morrim does for you, I would. But that's not how it works." She stared down at the hands sitting loosely in her lap, her vision pulsating with sudden nerves. Hurriedly, she started to stow away her herbs in her back, trying to pretend that Juul had not heard her and would not say anything about it.
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    A quiet fell between the two women, allowing the constant drone of rain to dominate their ears, with the rumbles and cracks of thunder strewn across the aural landscape like the boulders in the sands. The soldier concentrated on the task at hand, splitting the ripe pods and threshing the beans from them straight into the pot. Occasionally she tossed the odd bean into the pile of refuse at her feet, a brown stem or a black eye having offended her nascent peasant sensibilities. The pot was simmering now, the garnered fare dancing prettily in the shifting waters. As the healer added more herbs, they turned in the eddies - darkening, twisting from shapes recognisable.

    Juul took another lug of air through her nose, deeply, and exhaled slowly as she continued her shelling. She smiled, appreciating the nasal stimulation, but did not comment. The healer had lapsed into what seemed to be a contemplative silence, though the soldier perceived an edge to it - not outright sadness, nor hostility. She gave her space to express, her rough hands working the crop like an automaton, its ripeness affording it a perfect malleability. The last mighty crack of thunder had produced a fresh surge in the downpour - and so spoke the other.

    But I can't go back there any more. So what use does it have?

    She felt her hackles raise and her stomach tighten at this utter resignation from the healer. She couldn't quite place why, but there was a sense of sudden apprehension, and potential action - akin to when opposing scouting parties happen across one another, a moment of shock followed by anxious heartbeats, half breaths in moments pregnant with awful silence. Sometimes, a mutual retreat. Others, frenzied bloodletting. She watched as the healer nervously put away her herbs, a certain skittishness to her movements. She finished her pod, and slowly half stood, reaching out a rough hand. Her manner was slow, like she was approaching a horse, as she gently clasped Nevneni's upper arm.

    "Come wi' me."

    She led her towards the gaping hole where the door had once stood, her arm slowly circling the healer's shoulder. She was surprised to see that the woman was only slightly shorter than her - were it not for their juxtaposed postures, there would only be an inch in it. She gazed out at the outside scene, the wind howling and whipping the vegetation like an angry tide. She waited, until a streak of white blue illuminated the scene, followed close by a dense fulmination. She began to speak, her thoughts and words slightly twisted as she struggled to explain.

    "Y'see that? That light, shows some things, sometimes." she paused, trying to put words to her feelings, her thoughts "They're there, though, with or wi'out it. Y'just can't see 'em, sometime y'can't feel 'em. But the wheel turns, an' yer given a fresh look - things become diff'rent. I don' know that Morrim is at it was, but I can hope. F'sure, I can hope."
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Jul 22 2014, 12:53 PM.
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    Nevneni put such focused intention into her task that she didn't quite notice Juul edging towards her until she was part way around the fire. Nevneni looked to her questioningly, her hands lifting up limply from her pack. A careful hand clasped her arm and, at Juul's behest, Nevneni stood and followed her to the door-hole. She stared out at the misty darkness, a little shiver running through her at the cold air sighing through the door.

    What was she supposed to be seeing? Juul's arm slipped comfortably around her and Nevneni leaned into the woman, her head lolling onto her shoulder. This she did not question: there was something distinctly comforting to how Juul held her, so much so that she did not feel the deep wavering in her spirit that usually accompanied contact. Even with Vorkael she had sometimes found herself thinking that she trusted him, but the trust was so intellectual, so decided, that her insides and instincts did not respond to it. So she would shy away, her nerves flaring, before she even knew what she was doing. Not tonight, apparently, and not with this one person. But why?

    Just then, a thick vein of lightning branched through the sky. Nevneni's eyes were drawn to this sight, which appeared through a haze of rain. She jumped at the harsh crack of thunder that followed, her hands flurrying over to Juul to grab her at the waist and back. She realised what she was doing a moment later and she drew her fingers away to place them firmly on her own thighs.

    Juul's words came through Nevneni's mind slowly, for she was muddled with her random, irrational fear. She had to think around those words for a little while, for she believed for just a moment that Juul was somehow talking about those sudden and bright memories that sometimes struck Nevneni's mind. But that couldn't be it, because she had no way to know about these things. She reconsidered, watching another jolt of lightning strike farther away. As the thunder rolled over the land, she said, "So the truth of things is out there, just rarely seen?"

    She turned her mind back on her own issues, thinking that if she could barely find crops in the field of her own mind, then she'd have even more trouble finding them in Juul's. The question she found herself asking, that most philosophers apparently asked and that most heroes had answered was a vast sort of "Why?" Heroes in favourite tales got stories from the gods about why their trials and sufferings were for the better, but Nevneni was not a hero and there were no gods descending upon clouds and trumpetsong to tell her. The closest she'd ever gotten to a satisfactory answer was when she was twined up in self-loathing and she told herself that it was all because she was scum; otherwise, she had no reasons and no narrative.

    Unless it wasn't about answering a "Why?" but a "What?" or some other question, or no question at all. She tried to think of a moment of such clarity in her life and found that there weren't many. Maybe one time when she'd sat on a hilltop two years ago and promised herself that she would go home again. And that had turned out so well! Or when she had dropped her dress in her room in Fairin, baring the clay-like whiteness of her flesh to Vorkael's placid gaze. She'd had a good reason for it at the time, some sort of sight of herself as if she was staring at her being as it lay at the bottom of a once-dark pool. Something like that, though she hadn't been all too sure what Juul had meant. So, she had lacked the flash of lightning to reveal the meaning to her, and until then she was groping around in the dark.

    Nevneni's mind wandered back to Juul and she became conscious of the woman's radiating warmth beside her. Their closeness was better this time, since Juul didn't smell like drink and sleeplessness. She was more scented with dust and sweat and livingness, and also cumin. Why am I going to Ashoka again? she asked herself, and then a rare moment of clarity, a little flash of light, told her, For no good reason.

    A small knot unravelled in her head. She went there, and anywhere, because she had to go somewhere, or else she'd find herself without much purpose at all. Home had been a purpose, healing was a pretension of a purpose, and her sisters and parents were especially a purpose, and there hadn't been much else in her youth, especially not romance and travel. Even if Aravin had not happened to her, would she have been able to stay? Maybe not, given that her sisters grew away from home faster than her and her father had no memory to remember all the things Nevneni had done. Doubtless she would have wound up walking somewhere, just for something to do, as she'd done something like that even before she left home: even the practice of foraging for herbs was mostly for walking. She needed her metronome and she got nervous without it, but a metronome did not give her directions.

    Nevneni combed her mind for more revelations, but the moment was done. She knew this thing about herself but not what it meant, or how it related to any time in her life she had not walked, or how to do anything about it. Her mind was all thick and blank, at least for a moment, but then she thought again of Juul and her road-worn warmth so close by. "Do you want me to come to Morrim with you?" she said, catching even herself by surprise, "I'm not going to Ashoka for any real reason." She lifted her head up and turned a sideways gaze onto Juul, trying to read something in her scar-lined face. A quavering urge forced her to offer a sheepish explanation: "It just seems...if we came across each other in this way, then maybe it's a sign that we shouldn't wander off again."
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    As the limb of the soldier settled in place over the healer's shoulders, she relaxed slightly, enjoying the closeness and warmth of the smaller woman. Her arm tightened a little as the healer's hands scrabbled at her torso, not drawing her closer as such but instead trying to offer some comfort. It had been so long since she had felt a physical intimacy with another - her armour was her mask; she was a soldier, not a woman. She felt a little monstrous without it, in her thin and well-worn garb - half female, half male.

    She sighed after she had said her piece, flustered and embarrassed by her expression - she had a vague idea of what she meant, but she lacked the lexical flair to communicate it. Regardless, she tried to let it go, focusing on her immediate physical reality as the healer's body pressed into hers. Though her constitution felt soft and comforting, there was a quivering tension underlying it. She was painfully aware of her own physicality in contrast; though she felt at peace, her limbs and torso were hard and conditioned - made up of dense muscle, rigid tendon and thick bone. A little envy crept into the soldier's guts.

    "Maybe there's truth, Nev. But maybe ye only see, or feel - an' let yer faith or yer hope fill in what's left." she was a little quieter, her eyes cast down and her posture slumping slightly as she felt a barrier, a mental block, that stymied her reason "Listen t'me go on. Sure, I don' know what I'm sayin'. I'm no scholar."

    She fell quiet, feeling the rhythms of her body and those of the healer. They were breathing almost in unison, though the soldier's heart was beating a little faster and she felt a burning in the pit of her gut. It was an unsure amalgam - lust, envy, longing - and it was a slow and constant flame, unlike a surge of rage, or a disembowelling punch of shame and regret. She tried to quash it within herself, focusing on the air filling Nevneni's lungs - the slow inflation, the gentle exhale. But then the healer twisted next to her, those soft, sad eyes threatening to swallow her whole and her words singing to her, their flustered cadence turned to a divine melody. The fire in her guts lurched, and roaring blood filled her ears - without thinking, the soldier turned, and their lips met in a soft press.

    The physical dichotomy was plain in the gentle undulation - the scarred and chapped margins of the soldier's mouth meeting with the soft moistness of the healer. Her broad limbs circled around Nevneni's waist and she became lost - her eyes closed, she was blissfully unaware of the change in wind and the rain that now spattered them both. The feeling surged in her guts once more and she broke the contact, her breathing shallow and restrained. Almost ashamed, she broke the gaze of the healer, sighing before she spoke.

    "Come. Let's eat."

    She retreated to her pack, and produced a long handled iron spoon. She returned to the burbling pot and sat astride the millstone, the words of the healer bubbling in her mind. The soldier considered the other woman in great detail as she stirred and smelled the concoction. It was not much better than a gruel, though the smells that wafted around the single room enticed her gut.

    Do you want me to come to Morrim with you?

    She struggled to picture the healer living among roving bands of rough men-at-arms. An image flooded her vision - the healer clothed in white, bringing relief to stricken, dirty soldiers, moving among them like a saint treading water. She immediately dismissed it as romantic - the reality would be grim. Could she deal with the blood, the violence? The coarse words and brawls or worse, the groping hands and constant solicitations? She was such a sweet girl. But Juul was no knight - she had no house to keep, no land to tend. She was a destroyer, she was conditioned to kill, or at least threaten it with her very presence. Nevneni was a producer, a maintainer. The battlefield would weigh on her fragility.

    Her brow furrowed, and she spooned some broth roughly to her mouth. The combination of flavour exploded in her mouth, and she grunted a little at the pleasure of it. It was thin, but the taste was good. If she had had some potatoes, or some meat, it would have been divine. Greedily she shovelled another three spoonfuls into her mouth, chewing determinedly before offering the spoon to the other.

    "S'good." she said, her mouth half full "Try it."
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Jul 23 2014, 09:04 AM.
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    Nevneni nodded slowly as understanding bloomed in her chest. Just because she did not know facts and reasons – everything from whether her father was still alive to why she'd had to struggle through the thicket of ordeals in her life – did not mean that they weren't out there. Not only that, but if she didn't know these things, then that meant they could turn out being the answers she wanted. Until she was proven wrong, she could assure herself that things could be as good as she wished them to be, and she could be sure that suffering did have a good end, even if she didn't know it yet.

    Nevneni's proposition was followed by a hair of silence, and then Juul slipped around, tilted her face down and kissed her. Nevneni stood rigid and wide-eyed at first first, her vision filled with Juul's closed eyes and crinkled brow. Then she felt Juul's arms wrapped around her lower back, bringing Nevneni close, and she melted forward, her hands slipping up to Juul's shoulders. The storm swirled up around them, spattering them with rain, but it made Nevneni feel like they were being swept away on a giddy wind.

    Somewhere in the back of her mind, there was a voice that said, Oh, that explains it. It was a little bit sarcastic, as if it expected her to have figured this out before, but not displeased. No wonder she had felt so strange around Juul, so willing to accept gazes and food and affection from her. They hardly even knew each other but somehow they had fit together, like the tiny teeth of clock gears. This fitting-together was as cosmically mysterious as their chance meeting, if not more so. And yet, this moment somehow made so much more sense than anything else, especially the nonsense of kissing on old friends and cold vampires; it was another bolt from the heavens.

    Juul pulled her hard mouth away from Nevneni's and the healer peeled off her regretfully, trying to get one last look into Juul's eyes before she looked nervously away. The soldier plodded off to the fire, suddenly as guilty as a dog. Nevneni stood there at the door, dizzy and dithering. There was suddenly a lot for her to think through. She'd somehow managed to moon after Juul without ever even considering her as a romantic possibility, and now the full force of attraction hit her, mingled with confusion, for she remembered that there were plenty of people who insisted that love between women was wrong, even though there were precedents for it among the Sotoan gods. Both sides of the argument reeled through her head, tempering the sudden, blooming heat in her blood. Somehow, her blood shoved those concerns away and she went floating over to Juul to sit beside her on the millstone, feeling like her mind was floating roughly thirty feet above her head.

    Buzzingly, she watched Juul eat, somehow unaware that the woman was doing anything because she was so busy admiring the sharp wedge of her nose, the firelight on the transparent bulbs of her eyes and the cutting-board scars hewn into her skin. She took the spoon and ate, and perhaps she said something in agreement to Juul's approval, but she wasn't all too sure if her lips – still feeling warm from that kiss – had actually done anything. Unable to come up with any words, she ate in silence, and then at some point she became conscious of the braid running down her back. It felt heavy, so, when Juul had the spoon, she swung it over her shoulder and removed the tie holding it in place. She shook out her wavy hair, sending up a scent of cloves, nutmeg and green leaves, all traced with rose oil.

    She was not sure whether she was supposed to travel to Morrim with Juul and for the moment she was too afraid to ask for clarification, as if thinking ahead would break some spell of timelessness cast on the house. By the time dinner was done, the thunder was distant and the rain had subsided to a gentle patter on the desert earth. Nevneni rested her head on Juul's shoulder again, her hands loose in her lap and her eyes on the fire, a slight smile warming her lips. "Thank you," she murmured, and she could have been thanking Juul for the food or for the kiss or something more ineffable; to her it was all of them at once.
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    The pair settled into a comfortable silence as they filled their bellies, the only sounds being the billowing wind against the covered window and their crunching, gulping mastication. The soldier was quietly enjoying her presence; there was a camaraderie, and a sense of affection that she had not felt for a long time. The rage of the storm seemed to have passed over their heads, the whipping winds taking it further north - the wash of rain was subdued, imbuing their little shelter with a sense of peace. When the pot was finished, Juul laid it next to the crackling fire, before she shifted herself on the millstone, her body facing the healer - it was a force of habit. All of her wounds, and her happiness, came from head on.

    The healer had dislodged her braid, and a cavalcade of sweet smells flooded the soldier's nose. As Nevneni nestled into her shoulder, Juul's arms wrapped around her bowed body as she gave her soft thanks. She half-buried her face into the healer's mane and inhaled slowly, the medley of herbs filling her nostrils and causing her stomach to ache with emotion. She couldn't come with her to Morrim. It was a rough existence at the best of times. But neither did Juul want to break the spell of the moment. It was as if she had enticed a dove to her - a beautiful and fulfilling sight, but one that could disappear in a flutter of feathers instantly. All she would be left with would be the whisper of the moment, a memory. She kissed the top of Nevneni's head, loth to break the silence, before she pulled her mouth away to speak.

    "Y'can't come wi' me to Morrim, Nev. I don't e'en know what's there these days - it could be no better'n when I left. We might end up penniless an' starvin', but e'en if there's good craic it's a rough life. I don' want to drag ye to somewhere that might break ye." she spoke softly, her voice coloured with regret, her enunciation a little halting. She paused for a heartbeat or two, before continuing "I might be lucky. I could get posted as a sergeant in a garrison somewhere, tuggin' the forelock to a liege o' some repute. Or a scout, on a march somewhere, bein' paid t'be wild an' wanderin'. I'm no legend, but I've a good pedigree. I'm known t'certain people."

    She rested her head back into the thick hair of her companion. It was fairly wild now it was emanipated from the braid, and there was an earthy scent underlying the herby perfume. It reminded her of the autumn, of fallen leaves, and of the rain. The mixture was heady, or perhaps it was the closeness she felt - the indulgence of the moment, the impotent longing against its end. Her arms tightened slightly around the other's body, and she sighed heavily. It all seemed a little unfair to her. She would always be wed to her homeland, but there was an inexplicable pull to this woman, too. Her eyes widened a little, as the soldier realised that she had failed to express that.

    "I'd like t'see ye again."

    The indecision gnawed at her gizzards, as she tried to find the middle road - some harmonius compromise - but she could not. She unclasped one heavy limb from around her companion, moved it slowly up to Nevneni's jaw, and gave it a light stroke. She swallowed, with a little difficulty, her own disappointment sticking in her throat. They had this night, at least - Juul tried to repress forward-looking thoughts, and focus on what was in the now. Gently, she tried to tip the healer's head towards her own, and the soldier's lips sought to kiss her nectarous mouth once more.
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Jul 24 2014, 01:12 PM.
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    Nevneni
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    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    Nevneni had not quite turned to Juul when she was gathered up in a hug. Again, she was limp and unresponsive for a moment, then she slid around into the embrace, her hands resting on the woman's shoulder blades. Her chin had gotten hooked over Juul's shoulder, and that felt wrong, so she turned her face inwards, her forehead pressing into Juul's warm neck.

    She heard Juul's breath by her ear and was gripped by the super-reality of the situation. She felt uncomfortably aware of the awkwardness of this position, for she had to twist away from her legs to hold Juul. She was also terribly aware of her existence and how little she knew about anything, especially about what she was doing and what she had suddenly gotten herself into. Maybe about half an hour ago, maybe more, or less, she'd been storming her way to this ruin with an unwanted fire in her brain. Then somehow, only a bare scape of time of time later, she'd found herself swept up into a kiss and she felt more well and more alive than she had in a year.

    Juul planted a kiss in the wildlands of her hair and spoke. The first words hurt her: "Y'can't come wi' me to Morrim, Nev." Of course she couldn't. Why had she even asked?

    Nevneni pulled away, her hands sliding along the underside of Juul's arms. They slipped into place beneath Juul's palms and her thumbs folded over her hands. Those hands were so much bigger than her own and padded with calluses and scars. Nevneni's doe-eyed expression fell into one of defiance at the words that followed: she lifted her chin and stared Juul in the eyes, jaw jutting out and brow furrowed. She wanted to tell her that she'd been through a lot of dark places and dangerous situations, and conveniently shoved aside the thought that she'd run away from the only incident of true combat she'd ever had to face. She wanted to protest that she was no piece of fine china to be kept away from real use, so she could come, right?

    But by the end of Juul's little speech, she found herself agreeing. Tagging along with a band of soldiers would not be the life for her: not because she was a bit of porcelain but because she was an ill-made cup, too likely to crack. Then there was that keen, discomforting awareness that now sharpened her mind: she stared at Juul's hard-bitten face, suddenly aware of how strange faces and all human-ish things were, and she realised that she'd not understood the meaning of following Juul when she'd proposed it. At that point, it had seemed a simple companionship, but now it was so much more and Nevneni felt that the situation had escalated to something wildly out of her control. Her feelings were greatly in the present and abstained from the future; she could not fathom travelling with a woman she had kissed but did not quite know.

    She felt her giddiness folding up like wet cardboard. She didn't want to have to think about the future at all, or about anything that was not this strange event that had made her so suddenly happy. They sank back together, Juul's face in Nevneni's hair and Nevneni's face in Juul's neck. Nevneni's thoughts had been without words during their dinner, and now that familiar mental voice shifted out of silence, and proceeded to needl her with guilt. She owed it to Juul to tell her about herself, that voice told her. Juul did not know the full extent of the cracks in Nevneni's substance, nor that she'd managed to kill a few people.

    But she's a soldier, Nevneni protested to herself, She probably has too. What does it matter?

    Yes, but that's different. She didn't do what you did.

    "I'd like t'see ye again," Juul said.

    Nevneni nodded wordlessly. Somehow, that hadn't been in question for her. Juul hardly needed to saw it when Nevneni could see it in every line of her body. Still, the admission tossed a small sprig of brightness back into Nevneni's heart. Thinking that Juul would want to hear this too, she said, "I want to see you again too."

    Juul's finger brushed her jaw delicately. Now that Nevneni knew what was coming, she was distinctly nervous, and it felt like she was facing a cart careening down a road, though mostly in a good way. She didn't quite know what she had to be nervous about; maybe it was the thought that she might be a bad kisser, but Vorkael had said–

    Their lips touched and Nevneni forgot. They had this moment, didn't they? Anything that followed later or occurred outside was suddenly irrelevant because Juul was so wonderfully alive, with her scarred lips and a pulse swirling through her veins. Nevneni felt that pulse when her hands found a way up her neck and to her face. She held Juul's cheeks in her hands, one thumb stroking the runnel of a scar along her cheek. Somehow her grasp on the woman slipped to the back of her head and her fingers twined through her hair. She brought herself closer to Juul, her lips pushing forwards, and then she felt all the pressure in her leak out.

    Nevneni sank, her forehead once again pressed into Juul's neck, her arms draped across her sturdy shoulders. She was dizzy again, more than before due to the length of this kiss. "Perhaps I should lie down," she murmured, "This is so..." She thought of a lot of words to say. Wonderful was one of them, but that meant she had missed out on saying how terrifying this was. Finally, she found one that seemed to cover it all: "...overwhelming."

    She pulled away from Juul, looking at her with eyes that had somehow become thick with tears. "And sitting that way...uncomfortable." She let out a laugh-sob and hid her face. It seemed like every strong emotion she had somehow came with tears, and she was feeling at least three or four of those emotions right now. "I'm sorry," Nevneni said, swiping her tears away. Her chin wobbled even as she smiled. "I'm not sad, I just..." She dove back into her hands to hide the flood of tears that had suddenly welled up. She tried to keep herself quiet, but her breaths came out in stuttered gasps. "I just...don't know!" she managed to say, half laughing. "I think...I think I'm happy?" Then for the sake of honesty, "But I'm scared. Why? And I don't want to leave you. When will I even see you again after tonight?"
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    Juul Shaepah
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    As the soldier spoke, she felt the woman before her pull away, those small hands sliding away from her back, and under her bare arms, before finally coming to a firm hold on the soldier's hands. She felt the aura of the healer change and bunch - like a cat raising its hackles. Her head was up, and the eyes stared strongly, her brow furrowed, her jaw set. Those sweet eyes, so round and soft and sad, now glinted with open resistance. It was a surprise to Juul - she had not expected there to be steel hidden within the downy folds of the healer's spirit.

    Aha! There's a wolf in there yet! There's always teeth an' jaws an' feral eyes, no matter how thick th' fleece.

    It pleased her, fired her even, so that when their lips collided again it was more passionate than before - an anticipation, almost a clash of wills, blended with their physical movements. She felt hands stroke at her face, their soft touch animated by the moment, smooth digits tracing old wounds as their lips and tongues danced. Her own hands moved in their own clumsy caresses, to the shoulders of the healer, to her hips, as her heart thudded heavily in her chest. She became lost in the moment once more as those fingers swept up into her hair, and her heart burned with lust, each beat coursing fresh embers through her veins like the bellows of a blacksmith. She thought to unravel those swaddling robes and feel skin on skin - she groaned as she thought of the heaving softness they would make in the rough fleeces, the world forgotten, as ethereal as ash before their shared heat.

    And then suddenly, it was broken, the smaller woman pulled downwards into the crook of the soldier's neck once more. Juul let in a sharp inhale, her nose once more filled with those myriad scents, as the healer spoke. Nevneni's confusion was palpable, even without her stumbling explanation. It dawned on Juul that the poor girl had probably only been fawned over by soft farm boys before - she was in all probability a bit wilder, and a woman to boot. It was always the way, she had a habit of falling for the sweet ones who saw her more as a queer abberation, a departure from the norm, than as an object of attraction.

    As Nevneni pulled away from her, the soldier felt disappointment ache from her guts to her limbs - though she couldn't show it. She could not be seen to be weak. So, eyes glinting, her lips pulled back into a grin, and smiled at her words. Uncomfortable was about right. The girl's eyes had welled with tears, and the soldier's heart ached a little at the girls physical retreat into herself, folding up and closing off as a clam would. The roaring of passion in her ears had subsided a little, and she could now perceive the dull crackle of the fire, and the wet slaps of the leaking thatch, the droning pitter-patter of the rain. The healer's words rang across to her, like a bell over the hills.

    "I think...I think I'm happy?

    The soldier exhaled - she hadn't realised she'd been holding her breath - and the smile became genuine. She placed a broad hand on the healer's back, and gave a small, relieved laugh. There was something pushing itself through the healer, a conflict, and the veil of Nevneni's sadness was pierced by something - passion, exultation - she didn't know. She let the smaller woman say her piece through the stutters and gasps, her hand willing the other to calm the flowing sorrow. After a couple of choice, calmed heartbeats, Juul spoke, her tone warm.

    "S'alright t'be scared, Nevvy. I'd wager ye ain't been with a woman b'fore?" she stated, her smiling eyes locked to the healer's obscured face. She waited a little, before continuing "There's not much in it, s'just a diff'rent kind o' dance. But, let's set a meet - say, the main square o' Kinaldi, when the first rains o' the autumn are fallin'? Gives me two seasons t'find m'feet, an' I guess ye got to go see the pretty streets o' Etruria. Find th'shop o' the baker Gorgo - I used t'march wi' him. He makes a cheese loaf that'll melt in ye mouth."

    She withdrew her hand, seeking the rudimentary buckles of her worn boots. She unclasped them gently, for they were on the wrong side of battered, before she eased them off her feet - luckily, the scented hair of the healer, and the cumin about her own neck masked their hot rankness. Then she stood, her face glowing in the low fire, enjoying the moment of quiet - though her belly still seethed with passion. The coals of it were burning low, though still white-hot, and she felt compelled to breathe them back to high flame. She placed a hand on Nevneni's shoulder, before she spoke softly, bent slightly to not appear intimidating.

    "D'ye want to go t'bed wi 'me?"
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Jul 25 2014, 05:59 PM.
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    Nevneni
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    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    Juul's heavy hand bridged Nevneni's shoulder-blades. She was comforted by this touch, by the softness of understanding in the words that followed: "S'alright t'be scared, Nevvy. I'd wager ye ain't been with a woman b'fore?"

    Nevneni pulled her hands from her face and drew the loose red sleeves of her dress over her thumbs. She used the cloth to mop up her tears and running nose, still sniffling and leaking and shaking with the occasional gasping sob or bittersweet laugh. "You'd wager right," she said, "I've only been with...with a vampire. And I think...maybe with an old friend. But I'm not sure. I forgot and I only remembered that it might have happened just before I found you. And I..." She trailed off, unable to force his name and his act out of her throat. She couldn't even get her mind to acknowledge that as real; it occurred to her only as a set of distant images, like a set of paintings she'd seen a million times before.

    She put the thought aside, a quavering smile on her face as she said, "Well, I don't know the original dance very well, so the different one should be fine. Maybe...better." With another few tears trickling down her face, she thought that she had good enough reason to hope for that. Even now, a year later, thinking about the things that passed between her and Vorkael was something that left her feeling both warm and haunted. The vampire had been so tender and careful, but she could never forget a moment that occurred when they laid in bed afterwards, when Nevneni felt more like a corpse than even her cold-skinned lover. But now, even though she had felt her energies drain suddenly away, as they usually did, she still felt a great deal of something coursing through her, like the passage of a river moving continually through her body.

    The storm of tears was apparently not quite done. She drizzled a little as Juul set up a second meeting; she agreed eagerly, still dabbing at the tears before they even fell onto her swollen cheeks. "I'll...I'll get you something from Etruria," she added with a tearful glimmering of hope, "Or even the City of Oracles, if I can; I haven't been there in a while." She sniffled, let out one last hiccuping laugh, and dried the last of the tears from her face. Juul removed her shoes, so Nevneni did the same, folding her knee so she could brush off the sand that had stuck to her feet. She flexed her toes until they cracked, and sighed out one last dewy, happy-sad-tense-glowing breath.

    Juul stood, then leaned over to place a hand on Nevneni's shoulder. Leg still folded, she looked up, meeting Juul's eyes wholly and without aversion. "D'ye want to go t'bed wi 'me?" asked Juul, so gently that Nevneni hardly managed to be scared of her. Thoughtfully, Nevneni ran her fingers along the underside of Juul's arm and lifted the weight of her hand into her own. She twined her fingers through Juul's and felt how small and safe her hand seemed in the soldier's.

    For once, she let herself think about the fact that she might actually want something. It was hard to tell what she actually wanted, and she wasn't practiced in thinking about her own desires, so it took a long moment of silence for her to come up with what she felt. The chain of her thought started with this: for once she didn't feel stuck with an obligation, like she should do this, and more for Juul's sake than her own. The fact that it had ever seemed that way for her suddenly seemed wrong, which was a perplexing thought: she had spent so long thinking that to get into bed with him was utterly romantic and the right thing to do. But how could that be if she struggled her way through it, trying to think more about his face than what happened below it?

    The river coursed through her heart and filled up her fingers until she thought they'd burst. She wanted to say all sorts of strange things, sudden things: she wanted to disgorge her entire life just so Juul could see; she wanted to hold Juul's face and tell her that she had never see someone more beautiful; she even wanted to nestle into Juul's neck and speak of love. How could she know if these things were real? Maybe they were some sort of mirage made by the river in her, or maybe such thoughts would be as brief as mayflies and maybe the river was just the run-off from a storm.

    But who cares? she thought to herself, her eyes lifting up to Juul's again, You feel it now. Who cares if it is forever or not? It could be or it might not be, but at this moment... Her thoughts descended once again into a space without words. She let go of Juul's hand and lifted her fingers up to her face, tracing the line of her brow and following the curve of bone around her eye to her cheek. A smile, more steady now, came to Nevneni's face as the river redoubled its flow. "Yes, I do," she said.

    Their foreheads touched, and then Nevneni graced herself back a little, saying with a sort of subdued mischief, "But we need a bed first."
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    Juul Shaepah
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    Another period of quiet had descended upon them, their shared sanctuary seemed rife with peace against the violence of the storm outside - though it had calmed now, the wind still billowed at the blanket Nevneni had pinned across the shutterless window, and the persistence of the rain could be heard through the stone that surrounded them. The fire has burned down slightly, imbuing the scene with a deep orange-red, a ward of warmth against the darkness outside, the haze of smoke giving a dreamlike edge to the proceedings. Though it was a tumbledown shelter, dilapidated and reeking of abandonment, Juul hadn't felt quite as warm and rested as she did now for many years. Perhaps the night after the fall of Eldahar, fat with loot and praise and feeling a deep closeness with her comrades that had survived. But that was far removed from the quietness of this remote ruin.

    As she bent forward, face close to the healer, she considered the words that had been said. A vampire? She knew very little of those creatures of the night, though she had been party to various hues and cries over the years, as a part of scared militias set on burning out various dens - they were always empty, though dried gore was always a feature, along with a few scattered belongings. They had all gone up in smoke. She had a peasant's sensibilities when it came to creatures born of darkness. How could this delightful girl, so unassuming, have formed a relationship with one? She tried to form a story for it in her mind, but stopped herself. She didn't want to know.

    There's more t'this one, I'm sure...

    Her mind was jerked back to the present by Nevneni's fingers running gently down her arm, coming to rest in her hand, their digits entwined. She gave her quiet assent, and the soldier's heart burned more fiercely, seeming to melt the slickness on the healer's cheeks. Their foreheads touched, their eyes locked, and Juul saw a playful edge enter Nevneni's features. The cheeks of the other raised in a slight smile, as did her eyebrows, as she teased the soldier's ardour. The soldier's face erupted into a ferocious grin, her forehead creased as she bared her teeth. She stepped back, her tongue brushing her incisors, before speaking.

    "Ah, I forget yer Sotoan, needin' a bit o' comfort an' ritual 'fore ye do the deed. Well, there's a well fer ye ablutions outside, an' I'm sure I've a fan somewhere to cool yeself. We're in sore need o' some attendants, mind, t'bring us plates o' soft fruit in the intervals, an' I can't see any bards t'softly strum a harp." she grinned as she moved to her pack, her mail jingling and rustling from within as her hands groped about, before she produced her oiled leather cloak "O' course, us Morrimians must make do wi' bales o' hay and piles o' dung, wi' panting dogs in yer ear an' yer mates sitting five feet away."

    She moved to the two fleeces, bundled in the corner, and flattened them out next to one another, before laying her thin cloak over it. It was rough, but was surely better than the cold stone of the floor. She moved back to her companion, before crossing her right arm over her chest, hand to her left shoulder, and dipped her torso and straightened her left leg. Her back leg crouched slightly as she bent forward in an elaborate bow, one that wouldn't be out of place for a courtier.

    "Yer chamber, m'lady." she spoke as she rose, the words and mannerisms utterly affected, and somewhat mauled by her accent. She gave a small laugh, unable to keep character, and outstretched her hand.

    "What say ye?"
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Jul 27 2014, 05:26 PM.
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    Nevneni
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    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    To go on should have been easy after she agreed to it – that would have been fair and logical – but it was not. Nevneni caught a glimpse of the tooth-baring grin on Juul's face and she recognised it as the expression on the faces of so many who wanted only one thing from her. Fear twitched through her, just briefly, but then she realised that she was grinning in the same way, with her teeth showing and her eyes glittering. The river in her flowed not only to her aching fingertips but to her open lips, to her breasts and to the once-hated space between her legs. She was swollen with an incipient joy, or else an incipient terror, that she had kept subdued and denied for so long.

    But she was still Nevneni, still agonising over the future and all the things she did not yet know, still terrified of the choice that she had made. She laughed at Juul's jokes, her giggles tinkling nervously over the muffling grey song of the rain. "Don't forget the rose petals sprinkled on the cotton sheets and silken pillows," she added helpfully, "and the hot, perfumed bath for afterwards."

    Juul set about creating a bed for them and Nevneni slipped into silence and distraction. She sat for her moment, her eyes on Juul, then she stood suddenly and went to retrieve a horn comb from her pack. She sat back down on the millstone she'd shared with Juul and ran the comb methodically through her hair, her eyes glazed, her mind running away through the rain.

    She could have submitted to fear and left Juul there with her cumin, sheepskins and cloak. But the power of the river surged through her tremulous body, impelled by something in her that demanded that she do this. Nevneni feared for a moment that this compulsion came straight from the engine of her morality, which in the past had driven her to endless penance and starvation, to the supposed favours she owed Vorkael.

    But no, it was more like the voice she used when demanding that a patient take their medicine: it told her that the bitterness of her fear had to be swallowed. This is good for you, the compulsion told her, holding her hand through the quaverings of her apprehension, After this, everything changes, and you feel the bliss of wellness.

    Nevneni realised that the compulsion was not wholly new to her. It had driven her before and she had forgotten: for, at some point before killing Aravin, she had felt the same way, but the medicine was not only for her but for her mother, for his new wife and for Ysmail's weeping shade. In that moment of confidence, she'd felt absolutely right, free of doubt and full of holy anger. So it was now, though with silken tenderness in place of anger.

    The remembrance horrified her, then emboldened her, filling her shivering soul with strength. Juul straightened up and came to her to sweep her tree-trunk body into a bow. Nevneni grinned a gain, put down her comb and allowed Juul to spirit her up to standing, saying "What say ye?"

    To spit out a commendation would have sounded false, so Nevneni slung her arms over Juul's rocky shoulders and swayed their, her gaze in Juul's eyes, breathing, breathing. She considered Juul and all her well-earned scars and her unearthed kindness and her careful restraint. The river in her roared and suffused her absolutely; she kissed Juul and did not stop.

    Nevneni allowed herself to be tumbled down to bed, and there she was guided by callused hands, and there she was held, caressed and undressed, and through this she was adored, not as Nevneni the Wife or Nevneni the Redeemer or Nevneni the Bleeding Deer, but Nevneni-being-Neveneni, with all her tears and nerves and broken edges, as well as her rare smiles and her small humours and her unconditional, upwards-looking love for the world. The intimate actions of love-making, she realised, could happen not as one doing to another, but as two together, two with each other, two for each other, two because of each other. This epiphany heralded a moment of great breath-filled breathlessness and she felt as if she'd spent her life deep under the water, amongst the swirling fish and ancient crabs, only to learn after forty years to breach the surface and see the glory of the sun.

    Except that wasn't the whole truth, because she was not rising along, but with another, and they were two: Juul and Nevneni, Nevneni and Juul, or they were one thing at the same time: Beauty, Beauty, Beauty.
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    The smoke from her expectant lust was billowing up inside of her - she could feel it in her breast, her shoulders, to the tips of her fingers and the wetness in her eyes. Up it came, to hang there unresolved, akin to the plumes coming from the glowing brushfire. Her tongue returned to the bottom of her teeth, aching for contact, the flame in her womb burning bright, urging her to act, to rip her dusty garb from her body and sweep the woman up from her feet. The iron rod of her discipline descended, rapping the beast within her, but only succeeded fending it off momentarily. Still she remained, the fire glinting from her grinning teeth, waiting only from a word from the sweet woman before her to let slip the ravening hound.

    Like a surge in the tide, the healer rose, her hands aflutter, roaming around her tense shoulders. Caught off guard, it took a heartbeat for the soldier to react, but then her chains were loosed by the searching lips of the healer. Unfettered, her response was fierce, the fire in her guts given air from a bellows, climbing from the depths within to her body, to her limbs, to her hands and feet. The iron rod was cast to the flame, and her rational, concious self was consumed. Now, she existed only as movement, as hands fumbling at clothes, as kissing lips that could never be sated.

    The bed, suddenly beneath her in a moment of clarity, became her world now. The light of the fire, the hiss of the rain, the heavy drops of the leaking roof were not even in her periphery. The ragged fleeces and oiled leather served only to frame the other woman, but the depicted scene shifted and danced - sometimes above, sometimes below, sometimes side by side in a tangle of limbs and lips. Their shared pleasures were like the meeting of opposed elements, like water on fire - a flash and a hiss as both extinguished, to become something else, something ephemeral. The soldier's mind was thoughtless, acting and responding on instinct, as was the other, their shared mindlessness becoming only breath and movement.

    She opened her eyes, blinking languidly at the bright sun that now radiated through the window. Nevneni's temporary shutter had fallen from the window, unnoticed, at some point during the night. She gently turned her head, at the sleeping form of the healer. She couldn't resist a smile at her tender sleeping features, wondering idly what caused those brows to furrow for the merest moments before the tension eased, peace reigning once more. The soldier couldn't remember at what point they had fallen into the abyss of sleep, but she felt utterly rested. Slowly, she rose, taking care as as she disentangled herself. She thought to dress and armour herself, from a lifetime of readiness, but then there was a raising of rebellion in her gizzards. If she cloaked herself, the moment would be ended.

    Her naked form padded around the room, past the ash of the fire last night and the empty pot. She stood at the doorway, eyes raking the landscape. The storm had blown itself out, its rage clearing the sky, leaving it utterly clear, utterly blue. She took a deep breath; her limbs and mind felt as if they were unfurled sails, animated invisibly. A satisfaction flowed through her, a kind of sated joy. She looked back at the healer - she felt compelled to - and ached at their remembered warmth. Then came the wind.

    It came sharply, from the south east, a keen gale that died just as suddenly as it appeared. It woke her, brushed the sleep from her eyes, and stabbed at her with thoughts of her other love. Her jaw set, as her pale form moved to the well. She pulled on the coarse rope to bring up the leaking bucket, before she plunged her hands into the water. It was bracing, and she scrubbed at her body methodically before pouring the remainder over herself. Awake now, she cast the bucket back down, and moved back to the house. She stood at the doorway, her eyes on the sleeping, blanketed form, ignoring the wind as it whipped at her again.

    She opened her mouth to speak, but the only forthcoming sound was the steady drip of water from her body onto the ancient stone. She thought to curl up with Nevneni once more, but the sergeant inside her barked at her to embrace the cold. To sleep meant death. So she stood, for once indecisive, as the wind rose and fell.
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Aug 1 2014, 12:38 PM.
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    Nevneni
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    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    They might have been at it for hours, or days for all Nevneni knew. Eventually they rolled apart, panting, sweat evaporating off their warmed skin. For a long while, Nevneni's heart thrummed in her chest and her limbs felt tingly and far away, as if stars had gathered in her flesh. For once, her muscles were loose and did not feel compelled to the convulsive rocking motions that usually swayed her to sleep. When she lolled her head over and stared at Juul, she realised that some hidden chamber of her life had been opened up; she felt like an initiate in the mysteries of a cult, like her mind had been cracked open with a crowbar.

    Eventually, cold pricked goosebumps into their skin and they knotted together as a mess of heavy arms and legs. Eventually, sleep fluttered down like a great moth and rested on their chests. Nevneni fumbled through the darkening house, barely able to walk, for her legs now felt full of treacle, and she retrieved some blankets. Nevneni huddled with Juul under the blankets, too tired and too pleasant for thought, and she slept.

    She managed a good hunk of sleep too, for when she woke the fire down to its last ash-covered embers and the storm had quieted. Nevneni was facing the door at first, then she rolled over to see Juul, who was sprawled out on her back in sleep. Nevneni smiled and wriggled closer to place her head on Juul's bare chest, her arm laid across Juul's stomach. The woman was so warm, as if she had just been pulled out from the pile of embers and laid in Nevneni's arms.

    Nevneni twisted her head up to kiss her lover's neck, which she had explored so well hours before. She watched the breath fumbling in and out of Juul's lips, observed rolling her eyes in sleep. The warmth of her lover's body seemed to have gotten into her heart and was swelling it against its many stitchings. "I think..." whispered Nevneni, "I think this is love? Should I not think that? Is it too soon? It probably is too soon, but I hope not." Under Nevneni's ear, Juul's heart ticked away the silence. Nevneni kept watching her, her own heart pounding for fear that Juul might wake.

    "I hope it is love. Though I suppose it can be, if I call it that. I learned to feel this way for others, but not so quickly as this. It was like it took practice. But tonight...just like that. Like how crocuses bloom out of nowhere sometimes." She stretched up and kissed the line of Juul's jaw. "I hope I can say it when you're awake, Juul. I love you, or at least I'm pretty sure I do."

    She stretched up further to kiss one of the scars on Juul's cheek. "I hope it will be fine with you." She sank back down onto Juul's chest and waited for sleep to come. It took a while, and for a time her mind wandered inexplicably, inventing strange presents to bring Juul from Ashoka and reminding her of the previous hours they'd spent with each other and the way that made her whole body feel so full it might split. Then the rain started up again, soft as Juul's breath, and this slipped the wings of sleep over Nevneni once again.

    Even in sleep she could not forget that they were supposed to part. Her dreams played through extractions and extrapolations of months spent apart, of journeys to Ashoka with stories that happened on the side and then were forgotten. There was an underground city of skeletal creatures that glowed blue and never talked, and this meant something dark and pitiable, and Nevneni thought of Juul all along. Then she wound her way back to Morrim through a forest turned red in the autumn. The bare trees stuck up like black pikes thrust through the ground and the blue creatures sometimes came near her through the fog. Juul wound up being somewhere, but Nevneni somehow missed this ultimate fulfilment by going down the wrong road and heading off towards a thin white thread of a tower far in the distance.

    Sometime after this, Nevneni stirred under a block of light from outside. Hearing footsteps, Nevneni came slowly to the surface of wakefulness. Her eyes opened after the footsteps had stopped and she rolled over to see Juul's silhouette in the doorway. She was dripping onto the stone of the front steps and a cold wind was blowing around her. Somehow, Nevneni knew what this was about: Juul was being the hard soldier and submitting more readily to discipline to indulgence. Sleepily, Nevneni stuck a bare arm out of the blankets and held it out to Juul. "You have to come back to bed. Healer's orders. I promise it's for your own good."
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    Juul Shaepah
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    The drip continued. A steady, but arhythmic, wet slapping on the stone of the floor was the only sound that pricked the soldier's ears. She took a breath, her corded gut inflating, before sighing, her eyes still on the sleeping healer. All was still in their tumbledown refuge, the homeward breeze shut out, other than a bracing of her back, a resistance against a shiver. She looked to her armoury, so neatly organised, the wild steel muzzled by leather, with her shield propped against the wall like a silent colossus. She felt them call, the allure of their deadly regimentation pulling on her like a chain, their potential violence a thick veil - with it, her brutal mask would be set in place. She could be nothing but blades and hard eyes with it, she could lose her self in the anonymity of the image.

    She tore her gaze from her assembled harness, sweeping sharply back to the still form of the healer, the mess of limbs and lips and the pleasures of the inexact. The chain pulled, tugging at her naval and the entrails within. The compulsion was almost painful. Judging from the sun, she had lost four hours of marching, she reckoned, which was nearly fifteen miles. That blazing body wouldn't stop in its arc, so why should she? She'd had her pleasures - surely the healer had too - and they had set a meet. Perhaps leaving now would be best, she could steal a march into the night to compensate for the lost time. A day or two on a hard march would see her to Loniar, where she'd-

    Stop it.

    It had come unbidden from within some long-sealed recess of herself, like a mother reprimanding a boisterous son. As if on cue, the shape under the blankets shifted, accompanied by the contented grunts and breaths of awakening. An alabaster limb emerged, its paleness seeming to shine like a light against its dingy backcloth. Its bareness was a tease - a reminder, a promise - of that fragrant undulation, and those eyes that seemed to promise a chasm - almost as if facing a cliff, or a seething tide of charging steel. It was an oblivion of sorts, an unshackling of the chains of seeing and being, a delightful slavery to that which burned within. No social cues or marching drills, nothing where a reaction had been beaten into the psyche. Only the fire, and that which fuelled it.

    The somnolent words of her lover drifted over her ears, and the lacerations on her face were joined by the furrows of a genuine smile. The soldier slunk over to the drowsily flailing arm and squatted, taking the gentle hand in between her own. Their digits interlaced, the contrast supreme, and Juul felt the warmth inside her begin again. The sergeant was dismissed - the old country could wait another day. Another week. Another month. The heady smell of those myriad herbs bloomed in her nose - she could not begin to identify even half of them - and her head began to spin.

    "Yes'm. As ye order, so it shall be. I'm wet as a dog, mind."

    Swiftly she slipped back beneath the blanket, seeking Nevneni's soft skin, the warmth covering her pleasantly. An arm slipped under the healer's head, the other circling around her stomach, Juul's body folding into that of her lover with a press of skin, and of two hardened points. Gently, the soldier's head grazed Nevneni's hair, savouring the bouquet, before burying itself into the crook of her neck with a slow, but fierce, kiss. The hand at the healer's stomach drifted upwards to cup a handful of yielding flesh, the thumb and the index circling its apex. An unexpected moan rattled from her throat as she almost got lost in the feeling of skin on skin, of rushing blood. Her head perked up, to peck another kiss on the healer's cheek.

    "How's it ye smell so sweet?" she whispered huskily, her finger and thumb tightening slightly as they continued the circuitous exploration "My head spinnin' such tha' s'like I'm dreamin this ruin's m'home."
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Aug 7 2014, 12:46 AM.
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    Nevneni
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    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    Sometimes Nevneni surprised herself and said things that someone else would have said, or else things that she would have said if she had not been formed by those courses her life had taken. Things like: "And cold too, I bet. I'll warm you up, beauty." She didn't know how her mind came up with that, but what was more perplexing was that she felt alright saying it now, whereas such innuendos had slipped from her mouth when she shared a bed with Vorkael and she hated her own lips for speaking them. If there was some unaltered Nevneni that called these witticisms from across the distance, she was growing closer.

    Nevneni latched onto Juul as soon as she was under the blanket, shivering and growing gooseflesh at the cold film of water on Juul's skin. Still she pulled herself closer, meshing her legs with Juul's, wrapping her arms around her and pressing her face into the woman's broad shoulders, her eyes fluttering closed. She thought of the myth of Iseina, the mortal woman who held her god-lover in his arms as he became a winter wind that froze her, a fire that burned her, and a pack of wolves that tore at her flesh. Just as Cermos had, with time, become full of her love and shook off his curse to be himself again, so did Juul's skin take up Nevneni's warmth.

    Juul's lips came to her neck and Nevneni tucked back her hair and stretched up into Juul's grasp, her own hands wandering feverishly up and down Juul's back, then over her ribs and along the jutting ridge of her hip. Nevneni's breath became short and her head spun vertiginously; her lips opened with a shuddering smile, then latched onto Juul's neck, which was already marked by so many of her kisses.

    Her eyes fluttered open at the kiss on her cheek and she pulled away a little to look at Juul's face, her gaze soaked with adoration, her mouth open and wet and smiling. "How's it ye smell so sweet?" Juul asked her, her hand continuing in motions that sent new goosebumps up Nevneni's back, "My head spinnin' such tha' s'like I'm dreamin this ruin's m'home."

    Nevneni told her the simple answer first, the clinical one that she would give as a healer: "Dried roses, nutmeg, cloves, watercress and galangal, when I can get them all. Powdered and combed into the hair with diluted rose oil. I could give you some." Her breathing slowed and poured through her nose when she closed her lips. Her brown irises swayed in a gentle dance as she searched Juul's face. "If not to use, then to remember me by."

    She noticed the implication of this, for it had come out so naturally and unintentionally: Nevneni was sure that she was forgettable. After all, Vorkael had forgotten her for a while, and evidently he had again, and in fact most of her town had. Nevneni had forgotten herself as well, and sometimes she wanted to do that completely and never wake up to her own existence again.

    Her ability to hold onto Juul's gaze suddenly snapped and she buried her head in her lover's shoulder again, speaking in a rush: "Maybe I'd like something too, something for remembering you, but I don't need it. My memory is so good, too good, except for the time that it wasn't, and that was because–" She stopped, her words running into a wall. She screwed up her face and punched her way through the blockage, her voice coming out loudly at first and then slipping down to a sigh: "Because of the belladonna I ate. But other than that, I remember so much, and I couldn't ever forget you, because you are–" She struggled again, now because she wasn't even sure what she was trying to say. "You are– Or I haven't– I haven't ever felt like this."

    Her breath huffed out onto Juul's naked flesh in another sigh. "Oh, that sounds so hackneyed." She unburied herself and brought her hand up to hold Juul's face. Now she actually wanted to surprise herself, to say exactly what needed to be said without thinking it first, because thinking couldn't tell her the right words. She came as close to this as she could, blurting out the first thing on her mind: "Maybe it is home, sort of. When we walked into Phaedrus' house – remember? – I wondered what it would be like to be in a house instead of wandering. I've barely stopped for– oh, so long. Ten years? I wondered, could I live like that, could I do it if someone is there? And now I don't want to go wandering away, though of course I have to. But I thought maybe, some day, if there was someone there and I loved them, if I finally found out..."

    The stream of her words finally trickled into dryness and she swallowed, her heart slapping itself against Juul's palm, for she was terrified she'd gone and said too much. There was a way that such talk could chase people away, she was sure of it, even if she couldn't remember some specific story or experience to use as evidence. Then there was the fact that the total amount of time they'd spent was probably less than a day, and that was so minuscule compared to all the years Nevneni had spent alive, and the ones she'd spent wandering and swaying and rocking herself back and forth, alone.
    Edited by Nevneni, Aug 10 2014, 09:30 AM.
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    Juul Shaepah
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    Heat bloomed in her skin, her hands, as she became ensconced in the malleable folds of the blanket and the other. Their shared physicality - a tangle of limbs, the rise and fall in breaths - began to usurp her sense of self, a spot of blood mingling into the course of running sweat. She was it finding hard to speak and listen, to express and receive, and struggled to shake herself of the feeling that it was all so ancillary. She felt the breaths form in Nevneni's ribcage more than she heard the words, and read an usurped meaning from the rushed staccato respirations and long, slow sighs. The words washed over her in an almost extra-sensory fashion, and on occasion her mind ventured forth from its physical tangent to grasp an utterance like a wriggling fish, writhing in its divorced singularity.

    Nutmeg, cloves, watercress and galangal...She couldn't match words to smells as the healer itemised them - the heady cacophony in her nose conflicted with the pricking in her ears and the descriptions seemed incongruous, unreal. She was submerged in the rhythm of breaths once more, then she was dragged back above the surface. If not to use, then to remember me by... Her hands reacted instinctively, her fingers extended in delicate traces over the downy softness of the healer's skin. That! The sensation is what she would truly remember - the gifted herbs would serve only as a talisman, an emblem of a physicality that was not its own. She felt roused to speak, but her breath caught at its apex. What could she say, that wouldn't feel as if her clumsy speech and vague graspings of meaning were mauling it somehow?

    The other woman continued, and all the soldier could do in response was slowly deflate. Their head ebbed and flowed, alternately burying themselves in the crooks of necks or coming apart to observe. She felt compelled to the depths in Nevneni's eyes, but steeled herself, her lips pursing and eyes widening as she tried to open her ears to the now flustered tumble of words that came from her lover. Her gentle caresses became halting, and her brow knitted into a questioning furrow as she began to conceive of the images the healer was calling forth. To not be a mote of dust on the breeze, rising and falling with the gasp and sigh of the wind - settling only to be swept away once more. To have regularity, to know the exact horizon over which the sun would break. It seemed both a wide plain and a closed cell to her. She bit her lower lip as the healer came to a stammering halt, leaning in and prefixing her words with a ponderous touch of lips on a sweetly expressive brow.

    "A scrap o' land to till, a herd t'milk an' eat. A rock to live on, wi' a love to fire ye. 'Tis a bonny picture." she drawled as her head pulled away, her eyes glinting with a pensiveness, at once glazed and focused. She steeled herself slightly, her breath halting, before she went on. "E'en if my boots were on th'same door each night, my 'ead would be roamin'. Ye'd have to tug th' forelock an' pay th'tithe, with steel under ye bed should that promise prove false. Ye'd have t'know the lay o' th' land, the backtrails. The way to run from the fire and th'sword."

    Her jaw clenched slightly, as she felt she had clipped the fluttering wings of conversation. She lapsed into silence, feeling the beat of the other heart under her stilled hands. She blinked rapidly, as if coming out of a torpor, her tongue hesitantly wetting her lips. She exhaled through her nose, as she gently touched it with Nevneni's, as if they were both being cradled against one another. When next she spoke, it was as a murmur.

    "I'd have company on that march, mind. And I'd hope it'd be you."
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Aug 13 2014, 07:10 AM.
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    Nevneni
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    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    Juul's lips brushed Nevneni's brow and this, with the words that followed, had her heart and body splitting open like a pomegranate. "'Tis a bonny picture," she said, and Nevneni breathed, almost tearfully, "It is."

    But she talked on still, and Nevneni's heart closed up, as if cinched shut with wire. She felt as if she was retreating from the front of her face, and Juul spoke from a great distance, her face blurred by mist. Nevneni's tense body became languid, her eyes shaded. Her hands laid atop one another between them, as if in limp prayer. Juul had as good as said that Nevneni was as forgettable as she feared, which, though she said and believed it herself, she did not want to hear from another.

    A touch on the nose brought her eyes back into focus, however. Juul seemed suddenly over-real, and Nevneni travelled over her scarred and pored face before falling into her pupils, which seemed to contain cliffs of brown stone. The beloved voice came: "I'd have company on that march, mind. And I'd hope it'd be you."

    The wires holding Nevneni's heart loosened, leaving it to splay open, red treasures open to the light. A smile hoisted itself back onto her face, and she thought, Yes, not a place exactly, but a person, or somewhere in the mind itself. Of course, she had the undercurrent of doubt folding its way under the returned flow of emotion; it fed her with thoughts of how she may have once thought something similar about Vorkael, about how if she was not sedentary she might be too willing to wander away, about how Juul herself could wander away. In her sudden resurgence of hope, she forgot circumspection and remembered that plans could be of no use when fate was likely to change its mind anyways.

    So she showed Juul her approval of those words, rather than speaking it. Her hand came back to Juul's waist; the other clenched over her lover's hand, pressing her grip closer, digging those fingernails into her own tender, pale, flesh. She curved her body in closer, her lips aching for Juul's until she found them with almost painful impact. The hand on Juul's hip wandered, and again Nevneni submitted to the strange alchemy of this relationship, lost to doubt and despair until they had extinguished themselves.

    Then she rolled away, her lips and skin filmed with moisture, her mind sparking somewhere at the front of her head. She had managed to hold away guilt for so long, and now it loomed amongst the shadows on the ceiling, creeping between the spots where the blue sky shone through. She had, somewhere in the dream that was the night before, run over her various offences to the world and deemed them medicinal, or somehow justified, and so this did not bother her so much now. The fact that Juul did not know this, however, crushed dread into Nevneni's chest. How could Juul imagine such kind futures when she did not know this of Nevneni?

    And, Nevneni thought darkly, how could you think the same of someone you hardly know?

    She propped herself up slowly, her limbs still filled with the sap of exhaustion. With her cheek in her hand, Nevneni turned a serious, almost sorrowful gaze onto Juul. She breathed haltingly, inhaling greatly again and again in the attempt to speak but, as always, failing to find the words. She felt that she should not interrupt the sun that still filled them, for it seemed that she was always bustling in like a dark cloud. But she forced herself to say them anyways, hoping that what she said would bring Juul to ask a question because she knew that was the only way she would be able to respond: "You don't know me, or much of me."
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    And so, here they were again, locked into one another. The warmth of the healer and the blankets began to seep into her bones, and through their breathy words, like a call and response, she began to forget the siren call of home. Her eyes blinked languidly, and opened, taking in the sun-dappled radiance of the woman beneath her anew. She felt Nevneni steel herself, as she had done, but then she felt a dextrous hand about her hips, and a hard grip on her callused limb. She yielded to them, enjoying the slight ache from the healer's clutch, and found hungry lips seeking her own. Once more she was at the precipice, facing down into the abyss of craving lust, of validation, of desiring and being desired. Once more she dove into it, her form dissolving, her senses aflame.

    Sated and smiling, they rolled apart, the chill water on her skin being replaced by a filmy sweat. Their sex had started fiercely, but had grown into a slow tenderness, more like a study, or an exploration of one another. She felt it in a stark contrast to their fervent actions the night before, where it had seemed as if they were two cauldrons, bubbling over and merging into a ferocious torrent. Her heart felt as if it was billowing smoke with every beat - in her other dalliances there had always been a sense of conquest, or shame as she palmed them silver. But here, in this ruin, there was nothing but contentedness, edged only by a creeping longing for the wide plains of the old country.

    She sat up, after a few heartbeats, bringing her knees to her chest, hugging them as she laid down her head. She turned it to her lover, eyes running over her form as she propped herself up. She smiled at the sharp distinction between the darkness of her hair and her alabaster skin. Again, she saw the skittishness enter her spirit - another darkness, one that was not scented with galangal and rose oil. She always seemed as if she was filled by something, filled so far that it seemed she would burst, the sharp breaths failing to buttress her against it. Finally, the words spewed forth.

    You don't know me, or much of me.

    Juul thought on this, her lips pursed a little, her brow furrowed. She spoke the truth. But then, how much did anyone really know of anyone else? Moreover, did they really want to know? Immediately her thoughts turned to the more bestial moments in her past. Should she tell this sweet woman of how she had waited at the southern gate of Eldahar, bracing behind her shield, her heart leaping with joy with every crack of the iron-tipped ram against the door? Of how she had leaped through the shattered wood, cackling like a witch as her sword plunged into seasoned soldiers and callow youths without distinction? Or how she had run amuck, the populace shrieking in terror at her and her comrades, hands grabbing at the glint of silver and gold? Could she?

    "Aye, ye speak true Nevvy." she spoke, to break the pall of violence swirling in her mind. She chewed a little at her bottom lip, before she continued "I don' even know yer last name - but ye look as if ye got weightier matters on that sweet soul o' yours. Speak up, an' I'll share what I can wi' ye."
    Edited by Juul Shaepah, Aug 27 2014, 06:33 PM.
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    Nevneni
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    Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

    (TW: Rape.)

    "Lesten. It's Lesten. Nevneni Lesten. What about you?" She managed but a faint smile, for her heart had begun to flutter frantically in her chest and a knife of pain stabbed through her guts. Shakingly, achingly, she sat up, and folded her legs before her. The blanket slipped from herbody and she sat, naked, her skin prickling with the comparative cold of the world outside their bed.

    She was still and silent for a time, hunched over her legs, her hands gripping her ankles. You've done it now, she thought, You've worked yourself into a corner. Just say "nevermind" and then at least she'll never have to know exactly what it is that's wrong with you, even if she'll always wonder. Just let it be. Nevneni's eyelids drooped and she stared down at the spots where her feet pressed together, almost forgetting that Juul was there in her fretful silence.

    The urge to speak, to say anything, repeatedly surged up in her. At first she thought that she'd truly say it was nothing, but after she'd nearly said it a few times, she found that she ached to tell it all. Again she found herself commanded forth by the strong healer's voice in her mind, telling her to take the brew and purge. But how was she to say it? Even to her mother she had not found the correct words, had only danced around the subject and then let her fill in the blanks. Could she find those words now?

    Nevneni agonised over each infinitesimally small moment, dragging herself back and forth until she was too tired of it to continue this war any longer. Then, finally, she spoke, and found herself at the beginning: "I grew up in Soto, just in a village. My mother is an elf and a healer, her name's Alleis. She taught me most of what I know. My father was...is a human, and he was a carpenter. His name's Derthos. I was born first, then came my sister Liosi, then Temia. Eventually, I had a friend named Gweson, who had an angelic grandmother, so he aged just about as slow as I did. He loved me also, but I didn't realise until just last night. I don't know if I felt the same. Sometimes I did, but I was always so scared, but why? I don't really know.

    "But that stuff doesn't matter. My father...he had a friend. His name was Aravin. His wife, Ysmail, killed herself with belladonna and I saw her die. So he had no one, I suppose. No one to be his wife. He drank a lot because of this. Because of her? I don't think she wanted to do that to him, she was just..."

    Nevneni swallowed, her eyes darting up to Juul's face and then back down to her feet, though really to nowhere in particular, because, in her mind, memoriess opened up like bright little flowers: the stink and filth that surrounded Ysmail as she died and Liosi's wedding dress under her hands and the sunlight falling on the town and the dance with Gweson and so on and so on. She felt these things too, especially the happiness. That pierced her sharpest of all, as if it had become pain through her recollection. That needle of former joy dug straight into her palpitating heart and it made her whole body hurt.

    "So, it was nine years ago, in the summertime. Liosi got married that summer, soon before my birthday, and it was so beautiful." A smile haunted her face. "I danced with Gweson and it seemed that everything that had ever been wrong before was right on the brink of falling into place. That was the happiest feeling in the world. I just expected, without knowing how, that everything was about to be good, even though it wasn't yet. Turns out Gweson was going to propose to me but he didn't get the chance. I didn't know it at the time, not exactly. Perhaps that was why I sure everything was going to be good. Or maybe it was the summer air, or the sunlight, or maybe I imagined it all."

    Her lips slowly fell into her straight line and her gaze was more far away than ever. The sensation of the sunlight on her birthday itched under her skin and her family loomed up before her like a set of nightmares, all smiling and unaware. When she spoke, her voice was like the monotonous clang of a bell and it did nothing describe what multiplied so vividly in her mind:

    "My birthday. I got my staff from father and Temia and rose oil from my mother. Roses 'all the way from the Southwestern Isle.' Gweson and I ate raspberries. There was mead with dinner. Then Aravin came at night, as he sometimes did. He was drunk and angry. I ran away. When I came back, he was asleep on the table and my father was the only one up. He couldn't take Aravin home because his joints ached so. He asked me to do it."

    Her breath came short now and her body rippled with tremors. Tears started in her eyes but on she went, her words measured out carefully so they wouldn't bleed together. "So I did it," she said, "And there was no one awake in the entire town, just us. I took him home, and got him in the door and he– and he–" Trembling fingers peeled back the veil of hair over her face, revealing the thin scar that ran from her eyebrow up into her hairline. Her composure melted and a sob worked its way out of her. She felt the pain of his blows again, she once more suffered his his grabbings and haulings and pinnings.

    All of this was as clear as it had been the night it had happened, as if she had just found the memory folded up in a box, hidden away from moths, sunlight and time. She had known it was there the entire time, but she had hoped it had mouldered away into nothing. But it had not, and unfairly so, for she hauled that memory out to find it more untouched than the ones she had loved, which were so worn through from use. She had taken too much care of this dreadful recollection, and so it assailed her once again. So she gasped her way through it, her eyes seeing something else, her body rent with a timeless agony:

    "He hit me and– and– still! Hit me! Dragged me like– like nothing. Right to his bed. If I'd been stronger, if I'd been anything at all!" Her hands wove themselves into her hair and pulled, just to feel the present pain tugging at her scalp. She saw nothing of Juul, of the house, she saw only the moonlight stretching itself across the rafters like the white tower and she saw his hulking back rocking and rocking. She choked the cries in her throat and curled her legs up to her chest, dropping her hands to the place where he had hurt her. Her nails dug into her thighs and she drooped with the same sort of resignation that had carried her through Aravin's furious pumpings.

    "But I wasn't anything. Nothing at all. Nothing to be done. He clamped me to him until he fell asleep, then I ran away. Left home. Family never knew why. No one did. Just abandoned them. Nothing to be done."

    Nevneni blinked then and it was like she woke for a moment to see Juul's face. Her gaze was full of terror for that moment, and then she passed away into her trance again, her thoughts dragged homewards again. She had no tears: she was like a jug emptied of water with its last dregs drying in the sun.

    "But I killed him. Years later. Just two years ago. I promised Vorkael I'd go home. He was the vampire I loved, before he disappeared. But I went home, like I said I would, and for a long time I didn't remember what happened there. I just woke up in the No'bu Jungle knowing nothing, feeling terrible. Some bits came back, but I remembered that I killed him because of a dream that came a year later. Mother told me to do it, she set it up so he would come into the forest, and I got him with a knife. Pinned him down and stabbed him again and again. He died so easily. I hated it. So I ate belladonna and it didn't kill me, just made me run away and imagine things and then forget it all."

    Nevneni's stared at Juul again, seeing her truly now and aching for how much she admired the woman and how much she despised herself. How could she have told this whole story so rudely? It was like dropping a brick onto Juul, it wasn't fair. Guilt threatened to choke her, but after a moment she stumbled on, for her worries pricked her on: "There was a woman in my dream who told me that I did the right thing. Aravin had a new wife and she looked so scared. But it can't have been the right thing, surely? There was another person I killed; he was a highwaymen who attacked Vorkael and me. Vorkael killed two, or three...But it can't have been right. Why would I get to do that? Why did I want to? It was wrong. I should not have. I hate it." She sighed and laid down, her eyes drifting in blankness to the ceiling. She folded her arms over her chest and clutched herself. "I don't know. I shouldn't have said anything. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
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