Solo Hung with Humid Nightblue Fruit

Aramenta accepts a wedding proposal

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Not found on any map, Endrykas is a large migrating tent city wherein the horseclans of Cyphrus gather to trade and exchange information. [Lore]

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Hung with Humid Nightblue Fruit

Postby Aramenta on June 2nd, 2013, 11:07 pm

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Summer 3, 513 AV

Summer was come, it was visible in the stars. A more knowledgeable woman, perhaps would have known this by their juxtaposition, by the direction of the Hook, or the way the Cave-rider hung just over the horizon. Ara was no oracle, though. It was a question, instead, of the way the sun-baked, cloudless sky turned clear as a settled stone pool, and the stars shown down in clear, steady, untwinkling stabs of light. Ara looked up at them, as her hands moved.

As above, so below.

Her hands were growing used to this work, to the long rows of knots on the filleting of the lace. When she thought about it - and she worked to avoid doing so - it was almost funny, she could see why the seamstress had given the work up. She knew, in her heart, how bored she should be by now. But her mind, thirsty for something to focus on, enclosed itself in this tiny world of repetition, of minuscule knots, knots that now, in the deepest night, she could hardly even see, so fine was the thread - she had to judge them with the sensitive tips of her fingers. long, knotted rows of star shine, when she knotted them correctly, a star falling into the belly of a second star, falling into the belly of a third, and on, and on, interrupted by the tiny supernova'd junctures of two strings.

She began now to feel, as she felt on the web, the subtle imbalances of a knot not just so. She had grown used to pulling them out, and learned the philosophical acceptance of her own insufficiencies. And the glory of being denied any need to concern herself with the grand schema, yet, in these early days of learning, freed her mind to focus, instead, on perfection, on making each individual knot just so, just precisely so. She ran her fingers up the slender threads of stars, and felt the subtle rhythm of an unshorn fingernail against even knotting - tiny tapping, muffled by the softness of the cotton thread - but no. Stop, that knot, it echoed differently through her hand. She pulled her hook out, unravelled back, fifteen knots back from where she was, and fingered the thread… no imperfections. Just her own sloppiness.

She retied it, delicately, felt, carefully… yes. Yes, that was cleaner, then her hands went on in the subtle rhythm, felt as clear and sure in the sharp stabbing knots in her back. She sat, and drew slow prisms of fiber out, like tying knots into a second sky, the pale fabric drawing in the faint new-moon starlight like a thirsty child. She wondered how Zintilla kept the stars. Where they, like her lace, in animate things, crystals formed by her fine fingers? Or did they live, like creatures in a sheepfold, to be driven out each night, and gently led back to their boom as the sun rose? PErhaps that was why they faded in the morning's light, slowly as the sun bled purple dawn across the horizon - they were not fading, but simply ambling slowly away,a way at the order of of Zintila's shepherd-crook, off into some secret haven to be tucked away until the sun-queen draws back underneath the earth. She pulled the story through her mind, like a child drawing strings through the mud puddles of spring, to pick up tiny glimmers of Seleme in the midst of the dull mud. Or maybe, they drew down, into the earth, their light infusing into invisible spirits of fixation, waiting to be tied into the knots of little lace skies. Ara tied knot after knot, and named them as she went in the last fainting echoes of a child's playfulness. Zina. Hela. Starhands. Idora. Palelip…

It was late. The city slept but for the echoing hooves of the watch and the night keepers, down beneath the hill. She thought of them, of the men and women, unburdened tonight. If her mother lived, she would be there, riding slow circuits around the Amethyst flank of the city, probing gently at the webstrands, and drinking in the starlight with her eyes, looking up when she passed, to see her daughter, sleepless on the hill. Sleepless, too much honesty in sleep, tonight. She was not tired enough. She had lay still in her cot for hours, until her body could not hold the weight of dream-flesh in, and she began to shiver in her nightdress.

When she rose, Livvy pretended to sleep - it was a bidirectional fantasy, for Ara knew it was a ruse, and Livvy knew it was unconvincing. But if Ara rose in the dark of night, she rose to be alone. If she wished comfort, she would roll to her side, and let her hands ask silent for it from her slave. Livvy, Ara supposed, lay in her bed, alone and worrying, and trying not to stir, trying to sleep, for if she was clumsy and tired in the morning, it would not fare well for her. She would get none of the concerned glances Ara might earn. She felt a pang for this, and wished, for everyone's sake, she could simply drop her consciousness, become a none.

She felt the thought with a shock, and analyzed it more closely, as she reached a fillet's end, threading the remnant into her steel needle's eye: the realization that, to be honest, she wished she had no more identity. That she was a horse, instead of a strider, a beast instead of a herdsman. Something to be pushed along, to feel only in a muted away, until the end came, until she grew too old and was of use no more. She rolled the thought around inside her mind, weighed it, wove it through her brain and tied in the staccato-legato of crochet-pull-knot, crochet-pull-knot, crochet-pull-knot. And then, clarified, and accepted the core of it: it was better to be useful than to be happy.

"These are lovely stars this evening Aramenta."

Ara started, turned. Her grandmother stood, leaning heavily on a stick. She had not too long left for the world. Ara, and everyone else, knew this. The last year, she had grown frailer, so frail it made her ache to ride a horse too long, and she had long hours when her mind grew rattled and tired. Ara starting tying off, temporarily, so she could stand, respectfully, and let her grandmother sit. Her grandmother laughed, and waved her off.

"Sit, child. If I settled onto a stool at my age, I might never stand up again."

Ara signed, her resistance, her insistence, humbly, Granmother smirked, and made a "Stop" signal with her own old fingers.

"Aramenta… I want to speak to you." Ara started to move again to stand so she could whisper, and her grandmother stopped her again, "No, no, child. None of that. Come, close your eyes. We'll speak web-wise."

Ara frowned, at this. This was unlike her Grandmother who. Ara had seen her Grandmother's handiwork in the web of their pavilion, but had never seen her there. She never spoke of it. Ara frowned, but nodded quietly. Grandmother came to her, stiffly, and put a hand on her shoulder, and closed her eyes. Ara closed her own, obediently, and drifted, down, down, down...x
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Hung with Humid Nightblue Fruit

Postby Aramenta on June 4th, 2013, 1:54 am

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Ara closed the ghost of her eyes, and fell deep, deep into the eyes. The cording traced into her fingers smelled of sunbaked fibers, and the last of the springtime dews on top, just starting to distill across the land below them. The song at night of the web was different, lower, softer, mournful. Or perhaps, Ara thought, it was not the singer that had changed but the listener. For now, that was all Ara did, no spirit to sing, even here, even in the weblines. She lay, empty and dry, across the dewy strands of the Stonewhistling, and listened, low, low, low. The web murmured, moaned and rolled, and underneath… underneath… soft voices, soft soft voices enticing her.

"Let go… let go, Aramenta Stonewhistling. Let go of your name, let go of your body, come down, down, down below, where there is nothing left to be frightened of."

But then, the ghost of herself called her back, for a gentle hand rested on the shoulder, and soft lips on the cheek.

"Aramenta."

She opened her eyes. The voice was strong, soft, sweet, young, and the face the same, the body the same, a child, much smaller than Ara was. The slender colt-legs and flat bosom of a girl not yet entered into womanhood. But the eyes… the eyes were the same, right down to the fading light in them.

"Grandmama?" Ara's voice was hoarse and whispery.

Young-grandmother smiled sadly, and spoke in the high-pitched lilt of a child, almost a lisp, "I miss your singing, Aramenta."

"I haven't sung since the fire."

"Yes. I miss that singing, too. But you have sung since the fire. You have sung here. I have heard you. I have come of a purpose to listen."

Ara blushed, and looked at her grandmother, coming up to kneel before her so they were the same height. She opened her mouth, but no -- no. It is frightening to sing when the world is strange.

"You must be brave, now. You never had to be brave to sing before, did you? But something has happened now, Aramenta. You have grown up."

Ara looked down. She did not feel grown up. She felt smaller than she'd ever felt before. More frightened and vulnerable.

"You think, maybe grownup should feel confident, hmm? Grownup should feel like you know where you're going." The strange child-voice laughed, "On the contrary, it is childhood that makes us confident. Its only a knowledge of how things are that makes us doubt. I will tell you a secret. Those who you see who seem sure of themselves? I think either they are not grown up, or they are lying. To themselves, too, perhaps. Being a grown-up woman, that is a hard, sharp change."

Ara looked at her eyes, and she tried to sing. She drew her heart in close, and pushed her voice.

"The stars are shining,
And the moon is full.
I meet a little…"

Her voice faltered, and rang false. It did not bind with the strands of the web properly. And she began to understand what her grandmother was saying: for she sounded like a woman trying to sing a children's song. Too self-conscious. Too aware. Too knowledgeable of the ramifications of pleasure.

Her grandmother smiled, and a tear ran down the dusk-tan slender cheek, "You start to see. Try it again, differently."

She sighed, softly, and tried to understand what a grown song sounded like. She threaded her fingers into the web, and listened, listened very softly to the web. She listened to her grandmother - her grandmother who sounded, now that Ara really listened, like a child - all the complexities and assurance of a child, but with the richness of the chords of memory beneath. She listened to the far off seductive voices. She listened to the line that drew her back to the Pavilion, to her father, to Livvy, to Canterfoot.

And she sang a low, thrumming song without words, a sort of muted, exhausted wail, oscillating up and down a scale like a call of a pre-storm wind in the grass, like the keen of the slave-women over a dead chlid - only the child was her. And it was like taking her fear-plumped heart, and pouring it over a dry, cracked stone, the intensity of relief pulling the moan farther from her. And then, she could sing. It felt weak and unsteady, but honest again.

"I grew up, grandmama…"

"You don't have to tell me how it happened."

"You came to tell me,
To tell me things.
I'll listen when
You come to tell me things."

"I came to tell you, you will be married soon."

She was silent.

"You can say no, of course. Perhaps, even, you should, Aramenta. But you won't. You are a giver, Aramenta, you always have been, since you were a little girl. And now, you are grown, I think you'll give yourself."

"Who?"

"Pedrion Facetshine."

"The webber from the team,
The man who looked at me hungry,
Who touched my legs."

"He has done it honorably. He has spoken to your father."

"Papa gave his blessing then?"

"He did."

"My papa gave his blessing,
And then sent his mother out
To break the news to her granddaughter."

"No. Your father would be upset if he knew I came to tell you. I tell you for my own reasons."

Ara looked at her grandmother, thirsty-eyed, in need, perhaps, of someone to have reasons. Someone to have a purpose for her.

"Aramenta… listen to me, now. Do you know? I have 37 grandchildren. I love all of them, of course, it is my duty. IT is who I am. But… not everything, my child, is duty. Duty is what gives us life, but life means nothing without individuality. And do you know what makes me and individual? I have favorites."

Ara frowned and looked down.

"Don't play humble, child. I'm not telling you something you don't know. I've kept my eye on you since you were little, and you know it. A girl who knows her duty. A girl who knows how to find the good and follow it. When you…"

The little-girl-grandmother turned a face away. The web pulsed slowly underneath Ara's knees, subtle vibrations. The echoes of stars groaning through the heavens, slowly, waiting for their shepherd. The particles inside the particles of the summer dust. the light itself, singing softly through the atmosphere. All these things, in the silence, were alive, were present. And water. Salt tears, groaning slowly down a slender, child's face. Her grandmother was crying.

"When you are married, Aramenta, it is… easy to forget. You are a giver, my child, child of my heart. That is right, that is good. All things in us are for giving, all things. But for one small thing. Your one small thing. You must keep that. Do you understand? Just as I kept my favorites, though duty told me to give them up. Do you understand?"

Ara was still a long moment, her grandmother did not turn. Grandmama looked so small, so frail. So young and lonely. And Ara stepped forward, very softly, and bent over the slender, frail child-shoulder, and put her lips to her Grandmother's cheek. Then whispered very, very soft in her Grandmother's ear, not the forced harsh struggle of her living voice, but for one, only one moment, the liquid whisper of secrets between those who love each other.

"Yes, Grandmama. I understand."

The cheek leaned and nuzzled Ara's hand, tiny, frightened, vulnerable. Her grandmother said softly, "What you have seen... of me... please. Can it be our shared secret, Aramenta?"

Aramenta felt the urge to protect, to hold tight, and wrapped her arms around the little girl, in a way that felt eminently comfortable, "Of course, grandmama. I promise."
x
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Hung with Humid Nightblue Fruit

Postby Aramenta on June 4th, 2013, 3:58 pm

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The next morning, Grandmother did not rise in the morning. Ara's Uncle, a healer enough for the simple things of the house looked her over and quietly spread the word that she was not speaking, and was clearly ill. Ara listened in silence, then slipped out of the family circle, and went outside, her mind shivering. She sat in the sun outside, and tried to set at her lacework, but her hands shook too much, the knots came out rough and coarse. She tried to set a skein of wool to spin, but her arms and back were tense nervous energy, and she gave it up, and simply rocked gently back and forth on her chair for a little while.

It was Livvy who came to stop her, coming up from scrubbing clothes, her arms full of linens. When she saw Ara, she set the linens down and rushed over, her face filled with terror. She looked around her quickly, to see who might be watching, and then wrapped her arms around her quivering mistress.

"Come on Missy Ara… its alright, Missy… come on… shhh… shh… "

Ara looked up at Livvy. She could feel the familiar, lean and muscular warmth of her friend, could feel how it should comfort her. In a sense, she could even feel the comfort. But she felt it as something outside of her, something inaccessible to her. Feeling simple sorrow would have been manageable. But now? She felt… nothing. blank, immeasurably, hauntingly blank, like a dead thing.

"Grandmother is dying, Livvy. And I'm to be married."

Livvy was still a moment.

Ara cleared her throat, "I'm to be married to a--"

"--you don't have to tell me who. It don't matter."

Livvy's voice was tense, filled with an overflowing emotion. Ara felt a twinge almost of jealousy for that, thirsty for emotion. She looked back at her own bluntness, in telling Livvy, and saw in it her selfishness - in some lonely corner of her heart, this is what she'd wanted. She'd wanted to make her cry. She'd wanted someone to cry over her. Livvy didn't cry, though. Instead, she quietly went round her mistress, and set her rough, kind hands against the mass of braidwork, in silence. Then, slowly, she began to unravel it. Ara said nothing, but closed her eyes, and sat very, very still. Livvy, for once, did not even sing. The world was a chorus of tiny sounds, almost like the web itself - the whistling of grass, the snap of taut canvas in the wind, the dull murmur of voices inside the city. A flight of grackles raising up from the grass at an unseen startle.

Livvy's hands were quick, and clever and sure, and Ara's hair soon hung in a loose heavy mass down her back. Then she felt the girls fingers thread through her hair, to reach the tender, secret skin of her scalp, massaging gently. The grackles wheeled over the pavilion in a series of croakings and the swoop of wings. She felt Livvy's hands start gather up ropes of hair, and bind them into long, slender chains, wound tight around each other, tied int locks of interlacing cables of tightness, pulling gently on her skull.

"Aramenta Stonewhistling, Sister of my People."

Her eyes flew back open. And there, in front of her stood Pedrion Facetshine. He had the sharp bones of long hours peering at the sun-drenched grass, the think, dusty lines of a face used to squinting at the horse-tossed dust. But he was washed clean, his grey-brown hair tied tight behind, and oiled with something strong-smelling and intended to be pleasant. And he wore a rich colored suit of blue. Aramenta, in contrast, wore a pair of jodhpurs, mucking boots, and a worn linen blouse. She was startled to realize how suddenly aware of this she was - startled, but neither upset nor excited. Livvy's hands stopped, rested in her hair, the joints of them stiff and tense. Fighter's stance.

Ara turned and whispered softly to Aramenta, "Offer my welcome, to Pedrion Facetshine?" she was startled, again, by how hollow her voice sounded.

Livvy frowned, almost a snarl entering the muscles of her face, her eyes trained with a lust for blood on the man. Her hands unlaced from Ara's hair only regretfully, and her Drykas sign came with a jerking angularity that did not come across as welcoming in the least.

"Missy Ara wish you welcome, Pedrion Facetshine."

Pedrion looked nervous, and shuffled his feet uncomfortably, "You look… lovely today, Aramenta. I hope you're rested from your travels."

Ara smiled, blandly, and nodded respectfully, and whispered softly to Ara, "I'm very well, and you are kind to inquire."

"Missy Ara jez fine, thank you."

Pedrion was not a young man. This was actually the third wedding proposal he'd made in his years, in fact, but he hated it every time. He was a quiet man, generally, more a dreamer than a speaker, and as close and affectionate as he'd felt to his late wives, the intimacy was born in the silent moments, rather than the spoken ones. He had chosen Aramenta, in fact, perhaps, impart, because he believed her silence would make easier. He began to regret this.

"I spoke… to your father, I… we have not… we have known each other, perhaps not very long, Aramenta… "

Aramenta looked at the man, and listened, and tried hard to feel some sort of affection for him. It wasn't that she disliked him, though she admitted to herself she could have done without his little advances on the trail. He seems more or less good man. Perhaps, a few months ago, at this time, she might even haven fallen in love a bit. Perhaps. She wondered softly what that would be like. She met the man's eyes again, and felt nothing like romance - rather an almost motherly tenderness. He was suffering so much in this, clearly. The man was trained to knot web lines and herd kine.

Very softly, before her breast, and with no expression at all in her mouth or brows, she lifted her hands and signed, quietly, but without ambiguity: acceptance. I will do as you ask. Her eyes softened, slightly. Pityingly.

He started, and stared at her as if she'd just taken her shirt off.

"You… are… you know what I come to ask you?"

She smiled, gently, the smile of a mother for a frightened child, and nodded gently, made the same sign again. She reached behind her hair. He would want a token of her, to seal the engagement. She untwined one of the braids Livvy had just set, and pulled it over her shoulder. It had a deep, violet ribbon twined into it, a gift for her birthday from her father. She began, slowly methodically to untwine the ribbon the movements of her fingers, she realized, suddenly, very beautiful, slow and twining, sensual and smooth. Pedrion watched her, rapt and hopeful. She felt the force of his desire, of a sudden, like a wave, and it shook her, made her hands falter, weakly - but then that just made his gaze heavier. Desire and weakness intermixed and intensified both. She swallowed quietly, and felt a paleness enter her face. The ribbon came unwound. Her mind had forgotten what the slender strip was for, watched stupidly as she rolled it up and stood, walked to the man and twined it with her pale fingers around his wrist. Her hands continued to fascinate, small, and pale, fragile and nimble. She felt almost a desire for them herself, felt the faint echo of the lust of the man in front of her. Imagination unbidden described to her the sensation of unlatching the wooden buttons of her blouse, and pulling back the linen, the feeling of those little white finger-birds fluttering across her belly, her shoulders, her breasts. She swallowed hard, feeling green and nauseous, and watched, as the little fingers wrapped the ribbon round the man's wrist in a slow, teasing latticework.

He stayed silent until she stepped back softly, then swallowed. Ara could see the dryness of his lips, thirsty to be wetted. When he spoke again, his voice had grown husky and confused.

"We… our people have asked that we all work quickly… to…"

She nodded, and quietly signed across her breast, with a slight quiver in her hands, her face still dead and blank: I concur. Sooner, no fanfare.

He nodded, with a relief in his little smile, that made her feel that same motherly tenderness again. She wanted, almost to wrap the old man like a child in her arms and rock him in her lap, pet him into quiet and calm again, as she did with her half-sisters when they had nightmares.

"Yes… I… we can wed in three days time. Your father and I have arranged, already the bride price, and if you… need help with a dress or anything, on short notice, I…"

She smiled, though it did not extend to her eyes, and shook her head, quietly.

"Yes… yes. Thank you… Aramenta. Thank you… I… I will see you. In a few days. I will… I will do my best to make you happy, child."

Aramenta smiled, and bowed quietly. She turned to whisper in Livvy's ear. But Livvy was gone.x
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Hung with Humid Nightblue Fruit

Postby Jackalope on June 18th, 2013, 7:35 pm

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Ara

Award
Skill XP Earned Lore Earned
Weaving +1 Wondering as you Weave
Philosophy +3 Talking Life with Grandma
Singing +1 An Arranged Marriage
Observation +2 Engaged to Pedrion Facetshine


Witty Remark Here
Very emotional, on many levels. The final advice of a loved one, and a life to begin anew, even if it's not the one desired. Wonderful writing, as always. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your grade, please send me a PM and we can figure it out. :)

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