Teja and Pyrrha -- for the light-boat festival

[gotland_npc]

The door Teja opens comes out on a hillside, and in the valley below it, there's a large, prosperous farm with a longhouse and many out-buildings -- baking oven, forge, and so on. It's near dusk, and everything is covered in snow. To the right, there is the sea.

There are children playing in the yard, and light streaming from the open door of the longhouse, and smoke from the snow-covered thatched roof.

Comments

[scarred_grin]

"Green's a good color too," she says, glancing where Valeria is pointing. "If I were gonna have two boats, they'd be green and blue--they'd sorta match. Like you two."

[ostro_goth]

"They're twins!" their mother, Gotho, says, and both little girls nod proudly.

Teja reaches over the table.

"Give her to me, so you may eat as well," he says, and takes the other twin.

He has no problem with small children, here. They're the small children of his dearest friends (or those of his dearest friends that survived him), and so they're somehow his business.

[scarred_grin]

"They're adorable, is what they are," Pyrrha grins.

With that bright-eyed wonder that happy children are supposed to have.

But this whole community feels so different from her childhood family's dynamic.

[ostro_goth]

Teja shares the honey cake with the twin on his lap while Valeria continues happily eating her own.

"Apple?" she then asks. "Please?"

Teja takes a fruit from the platter, and starts peeling and slicing it with his sahs knife.

[scarred_grin]

It's nice.

It's quiet, it's peaceful.

But Pyrrha's got a lot to think about, none of which she is willing to think about right here and right now.

So she doesn't, she just stays quiet and relatively still.

[ostro_goth]

After a while, little Hilde gets up from where she's been sitting beside Teja.

"I hear horses!" she announces. "That's our neighbours with the kids! We can start then!"

The others laugh, and Gotho goes to the the door to greet the newcomers.

"The people who breed the cats," Teja says to Pyrrha. "My Myrrh, and William Evans' Horus, are both from their litters."

[scarred_grin]

She nods, looking to the door.

"Are there a lot of people who live around here?" she asks. "Like a whole town, or just a few farms?"

[ostro_goth]

"Just a few farms," Teja says. "And these neighbours are special. None else would be invited, if I am there, as I am, of course, a great secret."

Two men, a woman, and two well-wrapped kids come inside with Gotho.

"Agilulf, Martialis the Roman, Agilulf's widowed sister, and her two children," Teja introduces them.

[scarred_grin]

"I'm Pyrrha," she says, giving the new arrivals a bit of a wave. "It's nice to meet you."

A nice little farming community. Enough space that you're not surrounded by people on all sides, not having to deal with crowds all the time, but people around if you need them.

[ostro_goth]

The newcomers settle around the table, coming to greet Teja before the settle on the other side of Adalgoth; and then Teja tells them about how the cats are doing.

They know all his cats, it seems, from when he evacuated them here during the Allpocalypse.

[scarred_grin]

Pyrrha stays quiet, just watching the conversation.

It's strange to think about time-traveling cats, but it works.

Transdimensional cats. Whatever you'd call it.

[ostro_goth]

"Martialis was the last who ever joined the Ostrogoths, before our last battle," Teja explains to Pyrrha. "He came with us all the way."

[scarred_grin]

Pyrrha nods, looking to the man.

She's reached a level of discomfort, unease and worry that she'll somehow do something wrong, that all she can really do is revert to her childhood training--be placid, amiable, and quiet. But most people can't tell the difference.

She has things to think about that she can't think about right now. She'll get through this, she won't do anything to upset or offend anybody, and then she'll go home.

[ostro_goth]

"When will we go out and let the boats swim?" one of the visitor kids asks, and then suddenly, people get up from the table and put on cloaks.

Liuta brings a large basket with little boats that have tiny lights in them, and coloured sails.

[scarred_grin]

"Aw, little boats."

She remembers going to the park with Damian, and seeing kids floating origami boats; and she'd been to a rubber duck race (at which she'd won a free visit to some local day spa). But those didn't have lights, and the mood was very different.

[ostro_goth]

Little Valeria runs to find hers in the basket; she comes back to Pyrrha to show it to her , proudly.

Then, her mother wraps her in a warm shawl, and people start drifting outside.

[scarred_grin]

"Oh, you made a nice boat."

She is suitably impressed--she likes the colors, and the lines, and thinks they'll be quite a sight when they're all in the water. Artistically, it appeals to her.

[ostro_goth]

Soon, everybody traipses down through the snow to the sea shore. Teja puts his arm around Pyrrha, and little Valeria takes her hand.

"The sea is pulling out," Liuta tells her as they walk. "That's why we picked tonight. We needed a night when the boats wouldn't come back to the shore."

There is no proper ebb and flow in the Baltic sea, just a few inches that don't really count, but the little boats react to what direction the water is going.

[scarred_grin]

"They just keep going forever?"

She's not exactly comfortable with the sea either; partly because of the fact that she can't swim, even though she knows it's not likely she'll end up in the water, and partly because it's such a wide-open space. In her imagination the sea does go on forever, and if somebody ends up in it, they'll never be found.

She really is a city girl.

[ostro_goth]

"They will be drowned at last, by the bigger waves," Liuta says, "but they won't be swept back upon the beach, looking bedraggled and pointless."

[scarred_grin]

"Eaten by the sea," she says. "Taken as tribute for... for something."

A much nicer thought that the idea that the boats might simply, prosaically, wash ashore on some other stretch of beach.

But maybe there are other children somewhere who collect those boats. Maybe they have an annual boat-collecting festival.

[ostro_goth]

"For hope going out that the light will return," Teja says.

He's carrying a little boat as well, for the tiny baby Liuta carries.

[scarred_grin]

"That, yeah," she says.

And those other children on that other shore might celebrate... well. Do all gifts from gods need to be useful? Maybe those other children have stories about children-of-gods who make these boats for them as gifts. Just little boats, and nothing more.

Maybe that's all people need.

[ostro_goth]

If Teja knew her thoughts, he would imagine those the children of the netherworld, and how the original Athalwin would fish the boat this cowboy-hatted Athalwin made from the waves, and show it to his parents, Witichis and Rauthgundis (after whom this Athalwin's older siblings are named). And how so may other children that starved or were slain in the wars would find these boats, and think of the living children that carry on the Ostrogoths in their stead.

But he does not, so he can't lose himself in melancholy if poetic fancies.

Instead, he helps the children light the tiny lamps or tallow-candles in the boats, from the fire-pot that Adalgoth has brought.

[scarred_grin]

He'll get to see her thoughts--later, when she's had time to process through and develop them. There will be an entire series of drawings from this; when inspiration strikes, she goes with it.

For now, she stays out of the way of the lighting and just watches. She knows full well how bad an idea it would be to have someone as clumsy as she can be handling fire around children.