lukeoutbelow | Do not be afraid of light

Do not be afraid of light

They smelled the battlefield long before they saw it. The apprentices and little Sisters who hadn't been on this kind of excursion before covered their noses and exclaimed. Vena didn't. As the child of a camp follower she would know to expect this, but her tread slowed and she looked repeatedly at Sister Lashan, especially as the sound of incredible numbers of crows cawing grew louder.

"Nasty, isn't it? Decay is part of death which is part of life," Lashan said firmly, if not totally without sympathy. How young had she been, the last time she was upset by the aftermath of battle? "There's armies that immediately turn around and sort the living from the dying from the dead and take care of that then and there. Not here, they're leaving it for the locals to handle or not and we're local enough. If you fight, you may well fight for people who'll leave you if you fall and move on. Make sure you at least have friends who'll look for you." They pressed on with their wagon. The donkey put its ears back but did not balk.

It wasn't as bad as it would get over the next few days. The bodies - it was now academic who had belonged to which side of whichever meaningless conflict this was - were not much bloated and decayed yet. Flies were not yet overwhelming. Right now the field of bodies was mostly attended by carrion birds, and various other birds that were willing to take advantage of the bounty before them. Finches among them, tiny beaks dipped red. A few other people could be seen picking their way across what had been a perfectly useable pasture. They kept clear. Lashan tasked girls to keep watch for them anyway, pretended not to see the ones who were being sick, and oversaw as dead men were loaded onto the donkeycart. They'd take them away a distance, say the rites, strip them of useful things, get them buried, and come back.

She paused. Something... like a sound. Not a sound. Lashan was hearing something with her mind, closer than the pickers. A threat? She stood like a sentinel and paid attention.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"That how it works?"

The question comes out milder than the last time. A genuine one without any malice to it. For various reasons, he got rather prickly around authority, but the weeks had worn down his thorns a bit. He didn't mind hearing Lashan's opinion on him as much, now that she seemed fairly trustworthy. In a way, it was nice entertaining the thought that there were some people out in the world who stuck to their word.

"Feels like a bit of both. Shins, mostly."

Hands occupied, he couldn't really point it out. Vena was heavy (managed with one arm and a bit of leverage) and he brought the wooden lantern with him, held steadily in the free hand. Between the two of them, they could at least get a decent amount of light. Guts lets the old lady set the pace, in no particular rush himself.

It wasn't immediately obvious due to his aversion to any contact, but he tended to run rather warm himself, so it was quite cozy between the two of them. A little shield from the elements. It was odd to see Vena so still, though. Endearing, even. Something he never thought he'd say about some energetic kid with her ancient blood curses. He doesn't think too much on how much he'd hate this under most circumstances. But like this, the weight of the kid didn't offend him.

Lashan adjusts her shawl against the slight chill. Well, if he’s going to be open to it this time, she’ll just go ahead.

“Do you remember losing your milk teeth before your adult ones came in? How it didn’t hurt as much as getting a tooth knocked out usually does but it didn’t feel good, either?” Guts can’t have had someone teaching him to bury them or throw them on the trail behind him or any of the other traditions about shed teeth. Lashan’s not going to wonder how it went for him instead.

She frowns, realizing that she has a better metaphor. Kai is more irritable lately, gumming on things and drooling, being harder on his parents. “Actually, my Aren’s boy is teething now, isn’t he? He’s all fussy because his teeth are cutting up his gums on their way out and it hurts him. It’s the same principle. When you grow there’s always something in the way that has to give way or be destroyed. Sometimes you don’t even notice but it can be hell, ‘specially if it’s fast.”

Recently the enclave has been busier, as the Sisters who’d gone together on pilgrimage returned with salt and goods and stories, and young women more combat-capable than most who had stayed behind. There’s no sign of that now. A few people flit past on their own errands. An owl calls, windchimes murmur. It’s very quiet.

Lashan makes her home quite near the forge. It’s modestly sized, barely larger than the guest cabin where Guts is staying, but taller. There’s a porch with, yes, a rocking chair and a cowhide vessel of fluid that she pauses to shake before going to the door.

All he could think was that the new teeth were better at biting. No recollection of fairy tales or rituals he might have done in the past, so it’s unlikely he was told of childish things like that. Instead, he gives a little snort in response. Politeness just wasn’t in his bones.

“It’s gotta stop eventually, right? Or do growing pains just get traded for aging creaking ones?”

Guts supposes an old lady like Lashan would know all about that. He never gave it much thought himself, with death often peeking around the corner.

The village was quiet under night’s curtain, with the business of the day long finished for the most part. The stares had diminished quite a bit once he participated a little more in village life, setting his nerves at ease.

Lashan’s hut was less decorated than he expected for someone who seemed so important to the compound. He doesn’t seem to mind, rather despising the pageantry of the nobles that he only ever got glimpses of. How many afternoons did Lashan spend in that rocking chair? It was a silly thought. Much more domestic than he was used to.

Edited 2022-12-31 09:42 (UTC)

The outside of her domicile isn't plain really, the wood of it is carved with the four-pattern and square-knot emblems that are on so much of the architecture here, and that porch has more windchimes and some suncatchers on it. There is also bubbly, thick glass in small panes in the windows, which is rare outside of the public buildings but not unknown here. There are fancier little houses in the enclave but nothing approaching the flash of nobility.

"Oh, there's usually a grace period of at least a couple decades where the only odd pains are from illness and injury, but ultimately people never really stop... I'll say 'changing'. At my age that's more changing to be closer to being a corpse, you know," she says with a nasty snicker, and gets her door open. "It's a mess in here, be warned."

Inside - well, inside it's dark at first, and there's a sense of closeness. The floor yields and smells like sweet grass under foot, covered in rushes woven into loose mats and layered over each other. Lashan takes the lantern, grumbling a little, and hangs it up, remembering to use it to light a couple more. The walls are hung with horsehide patchwork and colorful geometric weavings, draped including overhead. A ladder leads up into darkness between gathered, tentlike hides. There's a bed as long as the one in the guest house. A few weapons hang on racks, including her familiar longsword and a few bows. There's a chest with a tatty, disintegrating boar hide over it, and finer racks hold strings of beads and yellowed tusks bound together in crescent-shapes. A bench is draped with quilts and more weavings.

There's also a shelf with various clutter - animal skulls, bits of glasswork, drawings and embroidery on rough paper or fabric or skins, things carved from wood, wool poppets, bundles of herbs, charms worked in metal or bone or various other things. A lot.

It's immediately warmer than outside. Vena sighs against Guts' neck.

"I used to live out of a tent whenever it wasn't too cold and just used this place for storage the rest of the year. It's like sleeping in the tomb of a khan or something! All stuff. I hate how much I've accumulated but I can't just get rid of it at this point, way too much of this was given to me and housefolk get so turned around when you give away their gifts. The problem with a sedentary lifestyle!" Lashan complains, and gestures at the bench. "Put her here, I'm not going to tell you to climb a ladder carrying a child."

Guts is distracted briefly by the faint tinkling of the wind chimes, coaxed into each other by a nightly breeze. The glinting and movement of the bronze had a way of grabbing his attention, like he were waiting for some ill-fated thing to leap out.

The door creaks and draws his eyes back to Lashan shuffling into the dark. The house had a cozier scent than the taverns he'd stay at, sometimes. Less alcohol and sweat and overcooked starling rising up through the wooden rafters. Little noise. It was more like a well-built tent in a camp. Despite the clutter and intricate decoration, the fields and the forests still touched the place. He hangs up his lantern by the door, contributing to the points of light bathing the main room. The warmth felt nice compared to the brisk outdoors. Suddenly he was rather aware that the chill had made the pain in his legs numb over a little, greeted with discomfort as his limbs warmed up again.

"A lotta weird 'stuff' you got packed in here," he remarks. Somehow, Lashan having amassed a horde of junk over the course of her life seemed about right for her.

Much of the decor felt quite pagan (not that he cared beyond the observation) but it reminded him of some of the unusual objects he'd see at festivals. All the subtler ways that older traditions still found some life, even if the rituals were mostly dead. These trinkets seemed to have more weight to them, somehow. And a fixation with boars.

At Lashan's request, he sets Vena down into the quilts easily. She must be a heavy sleeper to have dozed through all that, he thinks to himself. Not one to leave a job-half finished, he drapes some of the quilts over her like a soft cocoon. Had to give the girl some other warm thing to cling to, since he wouldn't be there for long.

All the hides and cloth and woven grass in here muffle sound, deaden echoes. Vena's eyelids flutter a moment, opening slightly without focusing, and then close again. She's probably about half awake, and without a reason to rouse is comfortably drowsing. A gray cat emerges from under Lashan's bed and hops up onto the bench with the girl, sniffing and sniffing and giving Guts a baleful cat look before hunkering down against Vena's side, tail twitching.

Lashan's opened the chest and started rummaging through its contents. She blocks Guts' view of it with her body, preferring he doesn't see what's in there. "Hunh, don't I know it! My clan, the La'tchán, we'd pick up and move regularly over most of the year, so it wasn't any good collecting more than your hoofstock could take."

Compared to La'tchán, La-shaan is softer, the Plainsfolk term rendered into more familiar syllables. She straightens up with a suppressed groan and closes the chest, having found what she was after. "It means, oh, 'standing boar' or 'defiant boar'. Here. Wait, are you going to go soak? Hot water's good for pain but I don't want you washing this off right away."

She's offering him a waxed paper wrapping around some yellow lanolin impregnated with something that smells both minty and nose-burning, though not unpleasant, exactly. Lashan has smelled of it herself from time to time, her and some of the other older or more injured Sisters.

After a brief staring contest between two equally quiet participants, Guts seems satisfied leaving Vena with the slinky little creature. Never quite understood cats. But he and them seemed to always have some unsung agreement to never interact with each other.

His attention is drawn over to the sounds of Lashan rummaging through a chest of more junk from her home clan. In truth, he would like a warm bath, but he wasn't sure if any hot water is available. He foregoes answering her question to take the lanolin and investigate (scent-first, of course). His nose wrinkles from the burning smell, though not enough to give up on holding it and looking up close near the ample candle light. The brief start subsides quickly enough.

"Wax?" he asks. "This some kind of medicine?"

It looked like the animal grease he used to coat his sword, but it smelled more like a soothing salve. The question about the bath implied he should be rubbing it on himself rather than on metal or on the inner layer of a scabbard. Soap, then? Well, if it would make his legs ease up...

He won't wonder too hard why this was hidden in the old lady's personal chest along with the rest of her dusty things.

The baths are fed by a hot spring - one of the reasons several Sisters are so into scented soaps is to try and compensate for the whiff of sulphur - and cleverly built so it's not hard to fill the great soaking-tub with hot water, but that does still mean operating some sluice gate stuff to fill and drain it. If Guts has watched it happen and figured out how to do it on his own, good for him, Lashan's not heading over there herself until she's gotten to doze off for a few hours.

"It's a balm recipe from the plains that feels hot and cold. Good for body aches, but don't get it near damaged skin or anything sensitive. Aumin's got her own version if you're too fussy for medicated wool fat, you can go knock her up if you want that or some kind of potion. A lot of old people like it." Lashan has decided not to care if he uses it or is too confused by the consistency as long as he doesn't just discard it. She stumps around him back to the porch, ignoring the cat as it watches her, and retrieves the skin of liquid she had sitting out there. Uncorking it, she sniffs the opening and decides it's been long enough.

"You want to try airag, boy? Fermented mare's milk." She pours some white liquid out into a little bowl-shaped cup and raises her eyebrows. "Not really any stronger than small beer. If it's cold I can let it freeze and take out the ice so it's arkhi and that's something to put hair on your chest."

"What gave you the idea that I'd be fussy?" he retorts, frowning. Whoever heard of a fussy mercenary? Only the terrible ones. And he fancies himself to be half-decent at suffering through blood and grime and worse.

Nevermind that there were times where he gave the Apothecary quite the hard time. He had a rather short fuse when it came to being handled, too.

The offense is forgotten easily as Lashan shuffles over to the front and pours herself a drink. He cranes his head to the side a bit, as if looking at the milk from another angle would reveal some untold secret about it. He'd already had taken a liking to the regular milk they had available, and he's had stronger things than beer. Mixing them both could turn out to be interesting.

"Sure." he agrees, not dissuaded. "How do you usually drink it?"

"That face you made," Lashan says instantly. "So skeptical! This is quicker to make than Aumin's. And messier. Sticks to things more and the suffering is worse if you get some in your eyes." Or on your dick, she almost says, but she moves on. She's not listening in on Guts as closely as when it was an open question whether he'd try to kill her but he's probably more comfortable with her not discussing his genitals and how handling them will make him feel. "So wash your hands after you use it, you will not grow any tougher for testing that."

She finds another little cup, peers at it - not too dusty, a girl's been in here to clean yesterday - and fills it. Airag is lightly carbonated, small bubbles rising to the surface, and it smells moderately pungent. A bit like something brewed in a still, and also a bit like any of the other forms of sour or cultured milk the enclave enjoys. Fresh, mellow, sweet milk doesn't last long and is mainly available at breakfast. Later in the day tart milk is offered, if not outright thin yogurt, buttermilk, or cheesy-tasting whey, depending on who's doing what. A great deal of effort is spent every day on milking goats and cows and treating the milk so it doesn't just spoil.

"Ideally cold, so, this is about as good as it gets in the summer," says a woman who'd find the concept of an ice house suspiciously decadent. She sniffs one of the cups and sips at it, then finishes in a few swallows. It doesn't quite taste like the airag of her youth, or really anywhere on the plains, but she's used to that. Even the milk of the same mare, in the same container, can ferment differently in different places. The alchemy of how it works is beyond Lashan.

The drink is a lot like thin yogurt with more of a sharp bite and a touch of the warm sensation of alcohol, though little enough that just as with small beer it would take a large amount to get really drunk. There's an aftertaste like almond.

Edited 2023-01-21 11:23 (UTC)

Somehow, Guts gets what she's implying without the need to get specific. So he nods without prying. No rubbing the stuff anywhere sensitive. Shins and legs only.

The airag honestly did not smell or look any worse than a bad beer or excessively watered down wine. A little more milk-like (obviously) but not quite butter or cheese. He leans forward to get a closer look and to take some of the scent in. Tart. He perks up with a bit of curiosity.

"How long has that been sittin' in here?" he's side-eyeing the skin as he takes the other cup.

Guts doesn't wait for the answer to take a few sips of the drink. It doesn't put a glint in his eye like the wonders of sweet and fresh morning milk, but it intrigues him regardless. Tart! Better than a lot of the drinks he's tried before. And the faint aftertaste of alcohol didn't hurt either. Sometimes that was the only solution to a miserable wound.

No immediate compliment comes but he doesn't balk or stop drinking from the cup. He wasn't sure how to describe it aside from 'interesting'. Not bad, though.

Lashan fills her cup again and if Guts doesn't object, she refills his too once he's finished. They aren't large cups but this also isn't a whole lot of airag. She doesn't tend to ferment much at a time, these days, unless she knows she'll have company. Enough to help her relax on nights when she's running old trails in her head, not enough to make an idiot out of herself. If she split the entire amount with Nerine the girl would be bright red and off balance. The boy, obviously, is larger.

The battered deerskin apron, she left behind in the forge. Now Lashan takes her headcloth off, the iron gray of her hair visibly paler and cleaner where it was covered. "It's been sitting since the afternoon. On the Plains we'd just tie a skin to our horses and let them shake it for us, otherwise it just needs agitating now and then. This is something even you could do, if you had milk."

By that she really means it's something she can do. For Lashan, 'making food' means cutting off the inedible bits and roasting what's left on a fire; she can, technically, soften dried meat and peas in a pot with water, but only if she makes herself pay attention the whole time.

She swirls airag in her mouth, swallows, and asks, "What do you do when it's winter? That's the lean season for sell-swords." Once upon a time she'd had a contract with a caravan that had included lodging for the winter... that had been quite a ways from here and probably before the boy's parents were born. Accommodations had been flea-ridden and miserable and she'd been half crazy with claustrophobia inside a month but she'd counted herself lucky, she and the other hired guards. The winter before that had been so much worse.

For all that Guts lacked obvious enthusiasm about the drink, his cup is empty by the time Lashan starts considering another round, and he passes it back without a second thought. He wouldn't mind having another. And maybe another?

He wonders how many of them might make his nerves numb over a little. Remembering the dull pain of his shins, he finally decides to take a seat on an empty bench.

"That's all? Faster than wine."

Vague memories of traveling through warmer climes, hearing villagers talk about their harvests and their heavy wooden barrels full of rotting grapes. Let them rot long enough and it becomes something desirable again. Or something.

He ponders the question while staring at the refilled cup, watching as the airag leaves a light film on the inside. After fleeing from Gambino's camp, no stranger cared enough to ask him such things.

"Move South." he says, after a long bout of silence. "There's always someplace where the snow don't reach. Somebody'll need a sword for something."

As he emerged from his early childhood, he started to find finances to be less of a problem the more he threw himself into his career as a killer. His upkeep included food and his sword, leaving plenty to be made otherwise. The cobbled together armor had held together well enough given the beatings he'd gone through.

"Easier than making beer and there's no fooling around with stills," Lashan says by way of agreement. She's pretty sure mare's milk ferments more quickly and easily as a gift from the Crafter-twin but it may instead be attributed to her favorite of the three animals held in most esteem. Perhaps horsekind wants the humans who care for them the most to feel loved and happy and it's a secret hidden by the extra work, compared to cows and goats, required to milk them.

She dwells on that a minute as she sinks onto her bed across from the boy so she can try and avoid thinking about yet another edge of the gaping chasm in Guts' life that has him taken aback by the most conversational kindness. Acknowledging it will do neither of them any good, he's grown up around it by now.

It's really bleak to fight to live and live to fight. Lashan grunts, "Smarter than I was. I spent my first winter off the Plains thinking 'it can't possibly get colder or snow more than this' and alienating housefolk. Bet there's still places where I'm technically wanted for stealing grain and horses."

After draining her cup again, she says, "I was gonna say, come by for a few weeks if you're in the area in the winter, but remote as this is that's not likely. The snowfall here gets absurd."

Despite the town being well out of the way, despite the bitter winter making travel a far more lethal affair than usual, he doesn't consider it absurd at all.

"Maybe I will."

Another long drink from the cup. Was it wrong to get the old lady's hopes up? Two months or so is how long it took to get from here to Vritannis, the evergreen port city, if one picked up a few rides along the way. It's unlikely he'll drop by again, unless they pay was good enough. Who knows what'll happen.

The empty glass is held out to her for more. He was feeling a little warm, but not to the point of stopping yet. He could still think straight enough to mull over the future too much - can't have those thoughts staying his head.

"Did your clan really name you after themselves? Or is that somethin' you decided to pick up?" La'tchán and Lashan seemed like too much of a coincidence.

She smiles faintly and shrugs, like it doesn't matter. Really it's not uncommon for people who come to the enclave to leave it again, once their wounds have healed, once they've picked up a trade, once the quiet and the quality of the food, half-foreign half-peasant, has gotten to them. They're not usually going quite so plainly towards their own destruction as this boy who's so quiet now.

A horse can be led to water only if it accepts the human's guidance, for the horse is stronger. Trust can't be gained by main force. Sometimes there's no earning it at all. ...Or however the saying goes. Lashan fills his cup again and pours a third for herself. It's a bit thicker at this point and doesn't pour as smoothly.

"It's much like how a family of housefolk barrel-makers are all Cooper. Among my nation, a clan is a family. Children born to one clan are forbidden to, ahem, marry anyone else in it because that's incest, even if their parents aren't related. That's half of why the girls here are expected to be chaste." The other half is See-related practices and expectations, like those of the nunnery. All in all the running of the enclave is quite affected by both religions and a few others besides, even if at a glance or even a very long look the whole thing seems extremely pagan.

"La'tchán is too hard for these people to say. I got tired of correcting them," she concludes. "'Lashan' is fine. Better than some of the other ways. It's got mangled from time to time."

"Family name, then. Sounds complicated."

It sounded definitively foreign, too.

Guts never realized how straightforward his answer was with regards to names until he developed a better understanding on how surnames and titles made a difference in one's quality of life. One arbitrarily important detail decided at birth. In this case, though, it seemed more personal preference than social standing. A memory of a lost thing, from the way Lashan talked about it.

He has more questions about everything, but that deeply-learned aversion to prying keeps them locked up in his head. Pondering. Sipping the more yogurt-like end of the Airag as the comfy warmth settled in his limbs.

It was nice. The mood in the air was peaceful.

"How much more is left?"

He hasn't finished this latest round yet, but he eyes the bottle.

"There's a joke like, Plainsfolk don't use personal names because they keep changing. Not to get into it, but I'll say I had a child-name that means 'runt goat' that was wildly inappropriate by the time I shed it." She smiles sardonically at the memory. Really, the idea of keeping one name for all of a person's life seems so limiting to her. Hierarchical, but that's housefolk for you. They're as set in some kind of great chain of being as Plainsfolk are in clans.

There's a lot she could say about her names and her history and Lashan thinks about it as she nurses her little bowl. A lot of things that were very painful once have been worn small and smooth enough that they don't choke her to say, particularly with the mild, pleasing warmth of the airag in her. It still takes a level of sincerity that she has to be very careful about. For the moment she settles on, "I hunted a big old boar by myself to... 'become a man' isn't right but it's got a better ring to it. We had four paths out of childhood and the Hunter's looked the most impressive and achievable to me when I was growing out of all my clothes and had rocks for brains. Also, if you go for a boar in a Boar Clan, that just looks good."

A nod over Vena, towards the ancient pelt and yellowed tusk ornaments. The faded eyes of the tattoo across her chest show above the low collar of her shirt, as well.

She shakes the skin. With less liquid inside it sloshes more noisily and at a higher pitch than before she'd taken it inside. There are small curds in the remainder. "Two bowls if I don't fill them to the top, but it's thick. If I know I'm drinking with company I bring a bit of cow's milk to cut the last of it with." Cow's milk at this hour is quite sour, any that hasn't already been drank or used to make something else.

Boar for the boar clan. Seems like a simple enough reasoning. Explains the tattoo accross her chest and all the memorabilia.

"Is that how it worked?" he asks with a certain cavalier lightness than isn't there usually. Sometimes small talk was fine after enough airag and warmth in the belly.

"Dont know what I'd pick for a name if things were like that here. Feels weird not to just stick with what you've been goin' with this whole time."

That went for his name and his early-chosen profession, it seemed. Even if he lived life as a wanderer, he was far away from the customs of the Plainsfolk.

"Guess it'd be however 'bear' is pronounced in your country."

Following her example.

"My kinsfolk would've given me a name from that and a few other things," Lashan says with a shrug. It's an academic question these days. "It probably would've ended up something like Akalykes, since I got to participate in a lykeblade ceremony."

She waves her hand, vaguely indicating something complicated that Guts wouldn't find interesting. It would be a terrible chore and ruin the mood, to have to actually explain lykeblades to an outclan boy. "The death and veneration of an elder. It happens about once every fifty years so it looks good, to have someone in your clan with that name. But if I hadn't liked it I could've tried my own anyway."

Lashan refills her little bowl, the liquid pouring less smoothly from the spout now, without draining it all the way first. Guts can have the last of the airag if he wants it.

"Heh. Might be. I've seen a lot of weird, impressive shit, but never anything like that. You might have named yourself 'Mishe' for the bear but we would've at least joked about calling you 'bloody burial'." Or something more flattering, honestly. She can't imagine the clan that wouldn't be proud to point to this boy as one of their own. "Do you know where 'Guts' is from? I've wondered. My firebug thinks she knows, but that doesn't mean she's right."

Mulling over it, the boy scratches his head, fingers idly running through the pitch black tufts superficially similar to bear's fur. In texture, anyway.

"Dunno. The mercenary who raised me didn't really talk about that."

Speaking so openly and freely as they were didn't happen often either. It was the first time he'd mentioned Gambino to someone else, even indirectly. He didn't seem to mind cracking open that door a little, as long as the old witch didn't push any more than he wanted to.

He takes the last drops of airag in his bowl, simply because it doesn't make sense to leave the bottle unfinished.

"Whatever she guessed, it's probably right." he concedes easily. Names never held special significance to him like it did to the Plains clans, apparently. Some part of him always wonders about the curse of his birth that seemed to haunt him in childhood -
simple hearsay, he'd later decided. Soldiers' superstitions. It was an uncanny coincidence, all the same.

Edited 2023-02-09 08:21 (UTC)

"If you'd said that when I wasn't long off the Plains I would have been shocked," Lashan says with a self-deprecating chuckle. She doesn't want to scare the boy off doing new things. She also doesn't really want to talk about Gambino, a man she has already had a stupid fantasy or two about stabbing several years ago, when it would have done some good. "I think we talk about names more than we use them. But, it's sunk in by now, different people find different things important. Hesri thinks it's some version of 'Gustav'. I like the idea that it comes from 'August' but I think that kind of name went out of fashion when the old empire fell." It's still the name of a month, but she hasn't met anyone named August.

There had been a presence - Lashan had rooted around pretty shamelessly before deciding she could take a boy who'd attacked her back to a place she'd dedicated herself to protecting - in Guts' life who had been warm and caring in a way that man hadn't been. Long gone and hazy though she was, she must be the reason he'd survived infancy and learned to walk and talk and is actually capable of acting like a human being at all.

That does not mean, if she was the one to name him, she necessarily had much in mind but that's fine. Some names are just syllables or combinations of syllables that pleased the ear, even if it doesn't please Lashan's. Guts being named 'guts' even if it is literally just 'entrails' is the most neutral thing about his upbringing.

This is a nice moment. She has a sense of this half-feral boy extending a fragile degree of trust towards her. Some of that's alcohol, some is... Lashan ruthlessly controls her feelings so they don't ruin it, and glances back towards her girl, who's more deeply asleep now. That cat's eyes are slitted, too wary to fully close. "Vena's mother, if she had anything really in mind, didn't tell her. At best, it's from an old empire word that means 'hunter'." Which would be a good name and probably what Vena would say if asked. "At worst, I've heard a dialect where her name sounds a lot like their word for 'vein', plus 'a' to make it feminine."

Her laughing manages to get a smile out of him, surely the fault of the airag. He doesn't seem offended by either proposal.

"August is pretty nice. That's when all the leaves start changing color."

It kindles warmer memories in him, the loose association with the word and the fair breeze and fiery orange leaves. Sometimes, they were red like arterial blood spilled from an enemy throat. It was when war campaigns began to consider their winter plans, pausing once the bite of cold became too harsh.

In the end, he never knew why it was picked. Perhaps it was appropriate in his own way, to want to cling to the last remnant of that warm embrace that kept him alive back then. If nothing else, then a name.

He looks back at Vena when Lashan does, listening to the apparent backstory to her name. The last sips of the airag leaves him with a small warmth to his cheeks, sinking comfortably in his spot. He seems to think this was nice, too.

"Vein, huh? Guess we'd be matching, then. Who could've guessed."

"It's not bad at all," Lashan allows, and lets her face settle into a less cynical expression than is typical. The forest around the enclave is mostly towering evergreen, but the Irminsul, the sacred tree that's lent it its name, changes, as do the orchard trees and a few others in the cleared agricultural space around it. It's quite a sight, even if the change from summer to fall also means girding up for harvest time and the sometimes intense work that requires. "She won't thank me for telling you that. Ah, well."

The smile that doesn't seem like it really belongs on his face... he's not someone who's happy alone even if he prefers it to most company. She needs to not think about Guts too much, Lashan thinks, and then she has a sense that's come on more often as she's grown older. The bittersweet sense that this moment is unlikely and fleeting and will soon pass, never to be repeated. Flowing past as ceaselessly as wind.

She finishes the dregs of her airag, cheese-scented and salty, and sternly tells herself she's not going to wake up Vena just to take her in her arms or press their foreheads together or even just take her hand. If she indicated any desire to do any of that to Guts she'd spook this boy as badly as putting a halter on a feral horse. She has gotten so sentimental, it's awful.

"If you head in that direction, I know Midland will have work for you. Assuming things haven't changed radically in the past few months there's a particularly huge merc company there my contact-" she does something sarcastic with her eyebrows, indicating that 'contacts' is probably too strong a word -"likes. But I'm sure you can find something anywhere. You ever get brought on to guard a caravan?"

"Sure. Easier job than fightin' on a battlefield. Enough men with swords'll keep your usual bandits away, unless you get hit with real bad luck."

Yet, for whatever reason, he finds himself lured over by the jobs with more pain and misery and insufferable rich men. Greater rewards, maybe. Or perhaps he gets easily bored of the idea of babysitting a wagon instead of fighting.

"Is your friend looking for guards?"

His smile is gone, but he seems content to talk shop if she wanted. Midland's old civil war was staring to flare up again, that's what he'd heard. There'd be plenty of work for him by the time he gets there, for one side or the other. It wouldn't hurt to take an quieter job in between them.

Edited 2023-02-16 07:55 (UTC)

(no subject)

hasapoint - 2023-02-17 18:14 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only