Post by Ankhiale on Apr 10, 2013 16:52:17 GMT 10
Title: Mayday
Rating: R to be safe
Warnings: mildly graphic descriptions of character death, discussions of possible murders
Summary: One is a beginning; two, opposition; three, instability; four, death. But five is justice, six is unexpected, and seven makes things complete again. Seven days in the life of Kalasin.
Notes: This went ... really weird. Even for me.
***
On the day the swallows returned to the mountains, Kalasin was born. It was the first day of True Spring, after the fertile rains had washed away winter, when the black-peaked mountains were cloaked in all the greens of the earth, creating the living shimmer known as the asein, the Green of Greens. The Old Mother who first held her up for the inspection of the Sun and Winds watched as Bitter Bian gusted forth and set the grasses to dancing and called the black-eyed girl Kalasin, the Green Girl, and she grew up in the fertile valleys sheltered by the black-peaked mountains, even from the southern wars.
Kalasin was born free, like all the Free People, and she was as beautiful as Bian the Blossom who blessed her birth. Long-legged and strong-limbed, she ran with the men up the slopes after the fleeing deer. Her sun-kissed skin was as bronze as the hollow statues of the lowlanders. Her face was broad, her nose was wide, her lips were full, her smile charming - all only serving as a backdrop for her laughing, knowing eyes. She kept her long hair coiled tight like any proper maiden, but hung tiny bells from her ears like a Shai-girl. She wore skirts of her own weaving, as airy and flowing and sumptuously dyed as any cosmopolitan lowlander, but went barefoot among the gnarled trees. Her passion was dancing, and what she longed for more than anything was a lover who made beautiful music, so that they could each complement the other's art.
When not dancing, or weaving, or running the hunt, when all the chores were done, Kalasin sat with the Old Mothers in the great tent and listened as they plucked secrets from the smoky air.
***
Kalasin watched the great bonfire in the square. The light stained the pearls that were her betrothal gift dawn pink. "In the mountains," she said, "we do not light great fires."
Adigun turned to gaze at her, honey-brown eyes warm on her face. "I imagine it might cause some problems, in the forests and fields."
Kalasin laughed, and Adigun marveled again at how very musical her low voice was. The bells in her ears tinkled in counterpoint. "It is not just that," she said, still watching the fire. "In the mountains, it is the onset of the warm rains that heralds real spring, and so we celebrate the return of the living waters."
"The rivers start flowing again, too."
"Well, they melt. They flow all year under the ice."
Adigun thought back over various winter campaigns. Yes, this was true. He conceded the point.
Kalasin's lips quirked into a smile. "Are you going to watch your sacred fire, or are you going to watch me all evening?"
Adigun flushed. "Watch you, I think," he said, amazed at how smooth his voice came out, and was amply rewarded when Kalasin's own cheeks darkened.
She reached out blindly, unerringly, and took his hand. Adigun turned his hand over, letting her hand rest in his larger palm, and contemplated the contrast. Her hand - perfectly proportioned, delicate yet strong, callused from the hunting bow. His - broad, blunt, pale, war-scarred and battle-hardened. She slanted a dark, impish glance his way and tickled his palm lightly; just as playfully, he closed his hand around hers, trapping her there.
"Let's go inside," Adigun said.
"And scandalize your servants again?" Kalasin asked, but she moved in time with him off his balcony, into his room.
"Why not?" Adigun asked.
"That sounded almost K'miri," Kalasin replied.
***
"They call me a traitor, you know."
"I know."
Kalasin turned, practiced hands never once slipping in their pinning of her braids, to survey her guard. "Jamarei Hau Ma, tell me plain. Do you think I am?"
Jamarei leaned casually against the door jamb, surveying her queen. "To us or to your husband?"
Kalasin was back to staring intently in her mirror. "Either."
"I hear rumors."
Now Kalasin sounded amused. "Rumors?"
That Kalasin was a smoke-witch, sent to plague the Wilima lands. That she was the reason the crops failed, year after year, in Saren lands; that she brewed the plague that decimated the lowland army. That she slept with an envenomed dagger in her bed, and that the only reason she hadn't stuck the Warlord with it yet was that he repudiated her after the birth of Thayet. That she had aborted every male baby she'd carried.
"That you advised the Warlord to send the Churi an emissary of peace, and they wiped them out to the last man. That you persuaded the Warlord to allow your family to visit, and your brother and uncles tried to kill him. That you advised him to open the eastern trade routes, and when he followed your suggestion all the goods were plundered by K'miri riders. That your every suggestion is venom coated in honey." Jama's eyes were steady on Kalasin's reflection, and Kalasin's eyes darted up to meet hers in the mirror.
"Do you believe them?" the queen asked softly in her lilting voice.
"Does it matter if I do?"
"No." Kalasin stood. "What matters is that Adigun does." She paused. "Everything I have done, I have done for the free people."
The silence stretched.
"Except for when you married him," Jama replied at last. "That, you did for yourself."
***
Kalasin flung wide her balcony doors, and for the first time in years thanked the Lords that Adigun was a lowlander. He thought he knew K'miri ways, K'miri beliefs, but it would take him a moment to catch on, and that moment was the moment she needed.
Kalasin stopped just at the threshold and looked back, towards her bedroom door. Jama and Pathom stood there, on either side of the sturdy wood, short K'miri swords at the ready. Pathom - Kalasin felt a pang of regret; he would not see his twentieth spring - Pathom stood nervy with the wait. Jama - Kalasin's eyes met her old guard's and saw no regret there, and felt her own evaporate. Jama stood braced with her hand tight on the bolt, preparing to hold against entry. Kalasin nodded at them both, then turned back to the sunlit balcony.
Fortress Wilima was a massive building, made with great slabs of basalt torn from the heart of the black mountains. Stolen, like so many things, from the free people by these lowland savages.
Kalasin stepped forward, out into the light. In the great courtyard, people gathered: the usual merchants from the Wilima quay, household guards, lowland priests, servants, townfolk. A few K'mir. Directly across from her, on the other side of the fortress, was Adigun's war room. He always retired there after midday.
She had been swept away by her beautiful lowland flutist, who had come north to try and understand the people he had been forced to fight. She had thought him genuine. She had thought him sincere.
She had thought him her soul's mate.
She had been a silly girl.
Kalasin had no gift for music, not like Adigun. But she stepped forward, up onto the ledge, and began to sing.
It was her fortieth birthday.
***
He had ordered the windows of the war room boarded up, then ordered the war room doors nailed shut. The courtyard had been closed immediately, and he had never seen fit to reopen it, even after repeated scourings. No matter what his advisors said, he could not open such a tainted place again.
What galled Adigun more than anything was that he could not find Thayet. She had fled - sent away by her witch of a mother, and it had been a mistake to let Kalasin have K'miri guards, even if he had forbidden her to use members of her own clan. But Thayet was his, his little girl, beautiful in an entirely lowland way, not a trace of her mother in her features. He had been disappointed by that, at first; he had hoped for a daughter who captured her mother's radiance.
The crops still would not grow. The land was still unsettled. Adigun glanced towards the courtyard, then away. Some taint of the witch must still linger; he just hoped another scouring of Wilima would do. He hoped desperately that nothing of Kalasin lingered in his daughter's blood.
It was a year to the very day. A year and a day was how long the priests said it took to lay a ghost permanently to rest. Tomorrow, even a smoke-witch like Kalasin couldn't come back.
Adigun stepped out into the courtyard and stopped. Blood the servants swore wasn't there splattered his boots. Kalasin plummeted from the balcony to the earth at his feet, loosing a low moan as her head shattered against the garden wall. Her frothy green skirts fluttered in a wind that didn't sway the flowers.
Kalasin stood, jerkily. Belatedly, Adigun tried to run, but the dagger in her hand had already kissed his throat.
***
Thayet jumped the bonfire with Jon every Beltane, just as she had jumped the bonfires with the other maidens in her youth. Her mother had disapproved, but that had been one of the few things Thayet had gone against her mother on, and Kalasin, with a sigh, had conceded.
In fact, throughout her entire reign, Thayet only missed one Beltane - in her second year as queen, when her first daughter was born.
It is rather hard to jump a bonfire when one is in labor.
Jonathan had apparently gotten the new-father panic out of his system with Roald, and spent the afternoon in the nursery with his son, earnestly explaining to an avid one-year-old what sisters were good for. Buri doubted Roald really cared - or understood - but if western men wanted to be strange, well, they were western.
Buri trudged down to Thayet's rooms, to witness the birth as a proper K'mir. The midwives, who had argued endlessly the last time, just sighed and let her in.
Time passed, and the older midwife handed Buri the newborn with a sigh, then stood back as Buri held the infant up to greet the world.
The girl was thoroughly lowlander, just like her brother. Pale skin, narrow nose, thin lips. Bright blue eyes from her western father, fuzzy black hair that could've come from either of them. Plenty of Thayet in her, but nothing of her foremothers. Buri felt a thrill of foreboding.
"Kalasin," Thayet said, wearily cheerful. Buri jerked back to awareness. "I'm naming her Kalasin."
Buri looked at her sharply, unnerved, and her jaw muscle worked for a moment. She looked down at the infant she cradled, and Kalasin stared back with too-knowing eyes.
She stayed silent. It wasn't Thayet's fault she was raised a lowlander.
***
Kaddar, Emperor of Carthak, paused on his walk through the temple district. He could've sworn that shrine hadn't been there yesterday.
He turned off onto the small path. As he got nearer, he realized that yes, the shrine had been there before - only it had been empty, devoid of even the trace of an icon, weathering away in the elements. It was right by the district's meadow, a plot of land carefully cultivated to be always green, the project of some devout university student.
The small shrine was little more than a stone box a few feet high, open on the front; it rested on stone legs that raised it so the whole shrine only came to Kaddar's chest. Someone had cleaned it thoroughly, but no repairs had been made; instead, the whole thing was covered in gauzy green cloth that danced and shimmered in the breeze.
Kaddar tentatively moved closer, wary. No one who honored the Hag ever took gods lightly. The cloth seemed thicker at the front - Kaddar gingerly touched it, and when nothing happened, gently lifted the cloth to find more layers of filmy fabric, in all the colors of the rainbow, hanging from a small rod like a curtain. Ever-so-gently, Kaddar raised the curtain to peer inside.
A little glass bird rested inside, on a velvet pillow. Kaddar ran a finger gently down the colorful figurine; it was a swallow, but he didn't recognize the kind.
"It's a black-mountain swallow. From Sarain," came a voice from right behind him.
Kaddar jerked and spun, and the gauzy curtain rippled back into place.
Kalasin stepped up next to her husband, eyes on the shrine. "They say my grandmother was born on the day the swallows returned." She smiled a strange, thin little smile. "And died the same day. Three years later, I was born." Kalasin parted the curtains and surveyed the sparrow for a moment, before gently placing a few spring blossoms before it, like an offering. Kaddar recognized the blooms - they were cut from the tree outside Kally's bedroom.
He eyed his wife questioningly. "Should we repair the shrine?" he asked finally, quietly, uncertain as always around his self-possessed wife.
Kally shook her head, the strange smile still on her face. "No. Let the stone crumble, the bird always flies free."
Kaddar ran one finger lightly over the cloth again. "Where did you get this? I don't recognize the style."
"I wove it," Kally said.
Kaddar paused. "I didn't know you knew how."
"It was a lifetime ago," Kally responded, and for just a moment her eyes seem far darker than Conté blue.
Rating: R to be safe
Warnings: mildly graphic descriptions of character death, discussions of possible murders
Summary: One is a beginning; two, opposition; three, instability; four, death. But five is justice, six is unexpected, and seven makes things complete again. Seven days in the life of Kalasin.
Notes: This went ... really weird. Even for me.
***
On the day the swallows returned to the mountains, Kalasin was born. It was the first day of True Spring, after the fertile rains had washed away winter, when the black-peaked mountains were cloaked in all the greens of the earth, creating the living shimmer known as the asein, the Green of Greens. The Old Mother who first held her up for the inspection of the Sun and Winds watched as Bitter Bian gusted forth and set the grasses to dancing and called the black-eyed girl Kalasin, the Green Girl, and she grew up in the fertile valleys sheltered by the black-peaked mountains, even from the southern wars.
Kalasin was born free, like all the Free People, and she was as beautiful as Bian the Blossom who blessed her birth. Long-legged and strong-limbed, she ran with the men up the slopes after the fleeing deer. Her sun-kissed skin was as bronze as the hollow statues of the lowlanders. Her face was broad, her nose was wide, her lips were full, her smile charming - all only serving as a backdrop for her laughing, knowing eyes. She kept her long hair coiled tight like any proper maiden, but hung tiny bells from her ears like a Shai-girl. She wore skirts of her own weaving, as airy and flowing and sumptuously dyed as any cosmopolitan lowlander, but went barefoot among the gnarled trees. Her passion was dancing, and what she longed for more than anything was a lover who made beautiful music, so that they could each complement the other's art.
When not dancing, or weaving, or running the hunt, when all the chores were done, Kalasin sat with the Old Mothers in the great tent and listened as they plucked secrets from the smoky air.
***
Kalasin watched the great bonfire in the square. The light stained the pearls that were her betrothal gift dawn pink. "In the mountains," she said, "we do not light great fires."
Adigun turned to gaze at her, honey-brown eyes warm on her face. "I imagine it might cause some problems, in the forests and fields."
Kalasin laughed, and Adigun marveled again at how very musical her low voice was. The bells in her ears tinkled in counterpoint. "It is not just that," she said, still watching the fire. "In the mountains, it is the onset of the warm rains that heralds real spring, and so we celebrate the return of the living waters."
"The rivers start flowing again, too."
"Well, they melt. They flow all year under the ice."
Adigun thought back over various winter campaigns. Yes, this was true. He conceded the point.
Kalasin's lips quirked into a smile. "Are you going to watch your sacred fire, or are you going to watch me all evening?"
Adigun flushed. "Watch you, I think," he said, amazed at how smooth his voice came out, and was amply rewarded when Kalasin's own cheeks darkened.
She reached out blindly, unerringly, and took his hand. Adigun turned his hand over, letting her hand rest in his larger palm, and contemplated the contrast. Her hand - perfectly proportioned, delicate yet strong, callused from the hunting bow. His - broad, blunt, pale, war-scarred and battle-hardened. She slanted a dark, impish glance his way and tickled his palm lightly; just as playfully, he closed his hand around hers, trapping her there.
"Let's go inside," Adigun said.
"And scandalize your servants again?" Kalasin asked, but she moved in time with him off his balcony, into his room.
"Why not?" Adigun asked.
"That sounded almost K'miri," Kalasin replied.
***
"They call me a traitor, you know."
"I know."
Kalasin turned, practiced hands never once slipping in their pinning of her braids, to survey her guard. "Jamarei Hau Ma, tell me plain. Do you think I am?"
Jamarei leaned casually against the door jamb, surveying her queen. "To us or to your husband?"
Kalasin was back to staring intently in her mirror. "Either."
"I hear rumors."
Now Kalasin sounded amused. "Rumors?"
That Kalasin was a smoke-witch, sent to plague the Wilima lands. That she was the reason the crops failed, year after year, in Saren lands; that she brewed the plague that decimated the lowland army. That she slept with an envenomed dagger in her bed, and that the only reason she hadn't stuck the Warlord with it yet was that he repudiated her after the birth of Thayet. That she had aborted every male baby she'd carried.
"That you advised the Warlord to send the Churi an emissary of peace, and they wiped them out to the last man. That you persuaded the Warlord to allow your family to visit, and your brother and uncles tried to kill him. That you advised him to open the eastern trade routes, and when he followed your suggestion all the goods were plundered by K'miri riders. That your every suggestion is venom coated in honey." Jama's eyes were steady on Kalasin's reflection, and Kalasin's eyes darted up to meet hers in the mirror.
"Do you believe them?" the queen asked softly in her lilting voice.
"Does it matter if I do?"
"No." Kalasin stood. "What matters is that Adigun does." She paused. "Everything I have done, I have done for the free people."
The silence stretched.
"Except for when you married him," Jama replied at last. "That, you did for yourself."
***
Kalasin flung wide her balcony doors, and for the first time in years thanked the Lords that Adigun was a lowlander. He thought he knew K'miri ways, K'miri beliefs, but it would take him a moment to catch on, and that moment was the moment she needed.
Kalasin stopped just at the threshold and looked back, towards her bedroom door. Jama and Pathom stood there, on either side of the sturdy wood, short K'miri swords at the ready. Pathom - Kalasin felt a pang of regret; he would not see his twentieth spring - Pathom stood nervy with the wait. Jama - Kalasin's eyes met her old guard's and saw no regret there, and felt her own evaporate. Jama stood braced with her hand tight on the bolt, preparing to hold against entry. Kalasin nodded at them both, then turned back to the sunlit balcony.
Fortress Wilima was a massive building, made with great slabs of basalt torn from the heart of the black mountains. Stolen, like so many things, from the free people by these lowland savages.
Kalasin stepped forward, out into the light. In the great courtyard, people gathered: the usual merchants from the Wilima quay, household guards, lowland priests, servants, townfolk. A few K'mir. Directly across from her, on the other side of the fortress, was Adigun's war room. He always retired there after midday.
She had been swept away by her beautiful lowland flutist, who had come north to try and understand the people he had been forced to fight. She had thought him genuine. She had thought him sincere.
She had thought him her soul's mate.
She had been a silly girl.
Kalasin had no gift for music, not like Adigun. But she stepped forward, up onto the ledge, and began to sing.
It was her fortieth birthday.
***
He had ordered the windows of the war room boarded up, then ordered the war room doors nailed shut. The courtyard had been closed immediately, and he had never seen fit to reopen it, even after repeated scourings. No matter what his advisors said, he could not open such a tainted place again.
What galled Adigun more than anything was that he could not find Thayet. She had fled - sent away by her witch of a mother, and it had been a mistake to let Kalasin have K'miri guards, even if he had forbidden her to use members of her own clan. But Thayet was his, his little girl, beautiful in an entirely lowland way, not a trace of her mother in her features. He had been disappointed by that, at first; he had hoped for a daughter who captured her mother's radiance.
The crops still would not grow. The land was still unsettled. Adigun glanced towards the courtyard, then away. Some taint of the witch must still linger; he just hoped another scouring of Wilima would do. He hoped desperately that nothing of Kalasin lingered in his daughter's blood.
It was a year to the very day. A year and a day was how long the priests said it took to lay a ghost permanently to rest. Tomorrow, even a smoke-witch like Kalasin couldn't come back.
Adigun stepped out into the courtyard and stopped. Blood the servants swore wasn't there splattered his boots. Kalasin plummeted from the balcony to the earth at his feet, loosing a low moan as her head shattered against the garden wall. Her frothy green skirts fluttered in a wind that didn't sway the flowers.
Kalasin stood, jerkily. Belatedly, Adigun tried to run, but the dagger in her hand had already kissed his throat.
***
Thayet jumped the bonfire with Jon every Beltane, just as she had jumped the bonfires with the other maidens in her youth. Her mother had disapproved, but that had been one of the few things Thayet had gone against her mother on, and Kalasin, with a sigh, had conceded.
In fact, throughout her entire reign, Thayet only missed one Beltane - in her second year as queen, when her first daughter was born.
It is rather hard to jump a bonfire when one is in labor.
Jonathan had apparently gotten the new-father panic out of his system with Roald, and spent the afternoon in the nursery with his son, earnestly explaining to an avid one-year-old what sisters were good for. Buri doubted Roald really cared - or understood - but if western men wanted to be strange, well, they were western.
Buri trudged down to Thayet's rooms, to witness the birth as a proper K'mir. The midwives, who had argued endlessly the last time, just sighed and let her in.
Time passed, and the older midwife handed Buri the newborn with a sigh, then stood back as Buri held the infant up to greet the world.
The girl was thoroughly lowlander, just like her brother. Pale skin, narrow nose, thin lips. Bright blue eyes from her western father, fuzzy black hair that could've come from either of them. Plenty of Thayet in her, but nothing of her foremothers. Buri felt a thrill of foreboding.
"Kalasin," Thayet said, wearily cheerful. Buri jerked back to awareness. "I'm naming her Kalasin."
Buri looked at her sharply, unnerved, and her jaw muscle worked for a moment. She looked down at the infant she cradled, and Kalasin stared back with too-knowing eyes.
She stayed silent. It wasn't Thayet's fault she was raised a lowlander.
***
Kaddar, Emperor of Carthak, paused on his walk through the temple district. He could've sworn that shrine hadn't been there yesterday.
He turned off onto the small path. As he got nearer, he realized that yes, the shrine had been there before - only it had been empty, devoid of even the trace of an icon, weathering away in the elements. It was right by the district's meadow, a plot of land carefully cultivated to be always green, the project of some devout university student.
The small shrine was little more than a stone box a few feet high, open on the front; it rested on stone legs that raised it so the whole shrine only came to Kaddar's chest. Someone had cleaned it thoroughly, but no repairs had been made; instead, the whole thing was covered in gauzy green cloth that danced and shimmered in the breeze.
Kaddar tentatively moved closer, wary. No one who honored the Hag ever took gods lightly. The cloth seemed thicker at the front - Kaddar gingerly touched it, and when nothing happened, gently lifted the cloth to find more layers of filmy fabric, in all the colors of the rainbow, hanging from a small rod like a curtain. Ever-so-gently, Kaddar raised the curtain to peer inside.
A little glass bird rested inside, on a velvet pillow. Kaddar ran a finger gently down the colorful figurine; it was a swallow, but he didn't recognize the kind.
"It's a black-mountain swallow. From Sarain," came a voice from right behind him.
Kaddar jerked and spun, and the gauzy curtain rippled back into place.
Kalasin stepped up next to her husband, eyes on the shrine. "They say my grandmother was born on the day the swallows returned." She smiled a strange, thin little smile. "And died the same day. Three years later, I was born." Kalasin parted the curtains and surveyed the sparrow for a moment, before gently placing a few spring blossoms before it, like an offering. Kaddar recognized the blooms - they were cut from the tree outside Kally's bedroom.
He eyed his wife questioningly. "Should we repair the shrine?" he asked finally, quietly, uncertain as always around his self-possessed wife.
Kally shook her head, the strange smile still on her face. "No. Let the stone crumble, the bird always flies free."
Kaddar ran one finger lightly over the cloth again. "Where did you get this? I don't recognize the style."
"I wove it," Kally said.
Kaddar paused. "I didn't know you knew how."
"It was a lifetime ago," Kally responded, and for just a moment her eyes seem far darker than Conté blue.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!