Without a doubt one of the pivotal threads, and one of the two root threads from which all others spring (the other being her devotion to Qalaya), Alanza, or Lanie, is one of the dominant figures in Minnie's life, and her son, Egyptus (now known as Wrenmae to much of the rest of the world) is another.
Lanie and Minnie
met incidentally, at the orphanage in Zeltiva in its darkest days, when they were both inmates of it. Minnie was a shy, guarded, bookish creature. Lanie, for her part was a lonely, impulsive child who channeled her loneliness into an intense search for a patron god.
The two
developed a friendship after Minnie, in pity of the younger girl whose infection of worms made her continuously even hungrier than was normal for a girl of the orphanage, took a beating given to her in punishment for stealing a jar of jam from another girl.
The
friendship blossomed throughout their entire childhood, and the two became very close - Minnie is asexual, but Lanie is unquestionably the closest she's ever been to being in love with someone (though if one focuses on the physical aspects of love, one could make a good argument for Evalin). They eventually began to call each other sisters. It was during this time, that the two - Minnie being spiritually devoted to the call of being a a recorder of tales, and Lanie being a natural story teller - collaborated to begin to write the "Tales of Wrenmae Wanderer", a collection of fairy tales about a fictional character they made up, named after a mashup of their nicknames for each other: Minnie-Wren and Lanie-Mae (even now, in fact, Minnie think of the name 'Wren' as referring to her, not to Wrenmae, and it startles her to hear people say it). These stories have never been finished, which we'll bring up later.
The two had two really dangerous adventures together. The first was when they were
nearly kidnapped by Ignotus Everto, as a gift to Evalin, and then later saw him murder another orphan before being
made a Nuit by her. The second time (referred to in the same thread as
above) was when the orphanage was being stalked by a mad child murderer know as 'The Bird Lady', who eventually marked Minnie as her next victim. At this point, Lanie ran into the streets and prayed wildly to the Gods, asking any of them to come help. Sadly, the one who came was Vayt. Vayt marked Lanie with his mark, and told her that all he wanted in return was for her to kill three people, and that one would be the bird lady, and the bird lady would not murder Minnie. The first was a random man, Lanie never even knew who he was - she simply brushed against him on the way back to the orphanage, and he died quickly of a sudden, terrible disease. The second was indeed the Bird Lady. Lanie slept with Minnie in her bed, to protect her, and awoke when the Bird Lady came. She planted a hand on the murderer's face, then, and Vayt filled the creature with a terrible illness, that immediately felled her to the ground screaming. She died before she coudl go to trial. It was a few weeks later, as Minnie began to waste away and die, that Lanie realized the truth - the third person was Minnie herself. Lanie left the city, promising Vayt she would serve him until she took Minnie's life as the third promised one.
Minnie did not see her beloved friend for many years.
When she finally returned, she was pregnant. Minnie kept her in her own flat, and they simply worked hard to touch each other as little as possible. Minnie ended up midwifing the baby, who was born without complication: Egyptus, or Gypa, the child who would later become Wrenmae Sek. Minnie, and Egyptus, began to grow sicker and sicker, though, and finally Minnie told Lanie she had to leave, that Minnie herself was ready to die with her, but that the child deserved to live. She promised two things, and both of these are very pivotal:
1) She promised she would care for the child, and raise him as best she could.
2) They promised each other that when Gypa was grown, and Minnie grown old, that Lanie would return to her, and they would take the Tales of Wrenmae Wanderer, and write the last stories in it, then go together into the wild-lands, so that a beast woudl come and eat them, and they could lie together in the same belly.
These two promises, Minnie takes extremely, extremely seriously. They frequently define her actions, and have saved her life more than once - it is the second that, for the dark years of her life, kept her from suicide.
With Lanie gone, Minnie settled into being a mother for many years. She raised Gypa in the Spring of every year - during the other three seasons, he went with his biological father, a merchant, who returned him each year to Minnie, who taught Gypa to call her his 'Harbor Mother', a title of emotional significance to them both.
Most of the years were good, though in the seasons Gypa was gone, Minnie found herself fit to bouts of loneliness and depression. She raised him to love Qalaya, and to tell stories, like his mother - or more than this, to worship stories. She infused with a strong sense of the need for stories to follow a strong narrative, and most of all, to have an ending. She told him the tales of Wrenmae Wanderer, and gave him a copy of all the stories, with blank space at the end where she promised to write the final story for him, one day.
Then, when Gypa was nine, he left on a trip with his father. And never came back. The next Spring, when the tulips bloomed, and went to seed and died, and her son never came home, was one of the most painful of Minnie's life, and the Springtime has been a dark and terrible period for her ever since, and she hates the season on principle.
Only years later, did she learn that her son had not died. Minnie, for the third time in her life, now,
became infected by a Vayt-marked's plague, in Zeltiva in 512, when she cut herself with a fish knife, and then brushed against the plague bearer in a meeting at the town square. She
recognized the plague almost immediately, its quick progression, the way in which it crawled through you almost palpably, and became convinced: this meant Lanie had returned. She only needed to find her.
Sadly, she was mistaken. Despite many
late night, madness-clouded searches, Minnie could not pin her down. The truth came as she sat, collapsed into sleep
in her office. She woke suddenly, feeling as if Lanie had come in. She had not. Instead it was her son, Gypa, who, in the years in which they had been parted, had been cursed with the same dark gnosis as her mother. He was now the plague bearer of the city. He returned the Tales to her - in the back, in his childhood, he had tried to write his own ending. Minnie pleaded with him, but finally, too shocked and horrified to think, allowed him to leave. She spent the rest of Winter growing more and more ill and more and more hopeless of herself.
The tale as yet has no end. There is things that could happen in 513, in Spring and Summer, that would be very meaningful. But its difficult to say if they will occur.