Solo [Silver Chest Event] The mother of them all.

[Ruari Darkwind]

77 SU 515 AV

The mother of them all was a gentle thing, a heat against the faces pressed against her for their sleep that was both loving and gloriously benevolent, as if she embraced every one of her children in their slumber and filled their hearts with her love. She did not have literal arms with which to shield her children, but she offered other things. The horses were hers, those great hearts infused with her soil in their blood. She was their mother before anyone else.

Ruari strove to not forget it. When she slept, curled in her tent by herself with her cheek resting to the dirt she left exposed, she never forgot that the earth was her mother.

Her own mother was not as accommodating nor warm as the earth mother. She was different, her love more for herself, for her husband's wealth, and for the spite of her sister-wives, that she didn't have the time to love her children. Ruari understood, though; she'd seen the family for what it was once, when she stood at the height of her mother's knee and grasped at her skirt in fear.

***

"Did you hear about the silver chest?" Ine's gentle voice was a comforting murmur, prying Ruari from her contemplation of the earth. Doe eyed Wynda, poised with tears in her eyes after a boy had pulled her hair, stared at her beloved sister, suddenly acutely aware that neither Gavenia nor Ruari were concerned with her tears.

"Silver chest? No." Ruari murmured, leaning over the book she wrote in. Although Ine had interrupted Ruari mid-word, Ruari quickly finished the sentence before closing the book. "Who made it?" She wondered if the chest were silver, if it were valuable, and which of the craftsmen would have put valuable silver into a simple chest. "Who commissioned it?"

Ine shrugged. When Ruari looked up at her, Wynda was well on her way to climbing onto the woman, her target clearly Ine's head where Ruari expected she'd promptly order Ine around, as if she were a mount. As Wynda climbed an Ine adjusted for comfort, she did manage a verbal response. "Nobody made it. Someone put it there, and nobody can move it. You should take a look at it; I went earlier, and it's quite the sight." Her hands signed urgency, interrupted by Wynda's wayward limbs.

Ruari smiled ruefully at her sister, as if to suggest she doubted she'd be much interested in a mysterious chest of silver, but she knew, deep down, she'd go, if only to gawk at the chest like she imagined everyone else to have done.

She rose to her feet and tucked her book into the waist of her pants. Ine, distracted with the now giggling Wynda, paid the girl no mind as she tried to evade Wynda's seeking arms playfully.

[Ruari Darkwind]

Endrykas was quiet, yet it was neither asleep nor empty. The tents flapped in the wind Zulrav threw at the horselords, animals brayed and catcalled one another, and there was the distant sound of children laughing and shrieking. Among the tents of the Darkwinds, though, it certainly seemed quiet; Ruari supposed they must have run off to find out about this chest, also, and she'd see them there if not somewhere in between.

Her path wound between tents decorated with green banners and intricate knotwork, the familiar sight of familiar tents leading her gradually to the centre of the city, where she expected a magic chest to be. Where else could it be? She should have asked Ine for directions before leaving, but with only now realising she didn't know exactly where she was going, she didn't have the heart to return home, disturb Ine, and perhaps have Wynda clamber her way all over her as well.

She continued on, stopping only once to kneel and scratch behind the ear of a tied dog that seemed in particular discomfort. Her reward was a bark and a lick, and she was ultimately grateful to have encountered a dog that liked attention and that didn't seem to be in a bad mood out in the sun.

Passing around the back of the Threaded Hide, Ruari knew she was closing in on the centre; the families here were more renowned, with lavish pavilions and smiling children quite unlike what she was familiar with among her own family, as the Darkwinds were quite unfortunate and they were, for the most part, well aware of it. Ruari, however, tried not to present that as much as her mother would. She was glad for her own life, and that was all that mattered to her.

In the end, Ruari was a woman, and she wouldn't long be tied down to a pavilion that hated itself as furiously as her birth pavilion did.

Eventually, she emerged from the sea of tents and people, and she saw just where the chest was when she took in the sight of a large group of people circled around a small point, murmuring and shifting, either in discomfort or excitement she couldn't readily tell.

Proper curiosity, and not just the passing interest she'd expressed with Ine, kicked in, and Ruari beelined for it.

[Ruari Darkwind]

The crowd wasn't as thick as Ruari initially perceived it to be, and upon meeting it she swept up into a queue to get a chance to use it herself. Although she wasn't exactly sure what the give and take was with the chest, she was a naturally curious girl with a little bit of adventure in her spirit and she was certain that, when the time came, she'd know what she had to do when it came to using the chest.

It progressed rather fast; Ruari's wait to hit the front of the queue wasn't even more than fifteen chimes, but it was a wait rife with anticipation and doubt, for she heard both excitement and regret in the exclamations of the Drykas that came before her, and she saw the frowns and the smiles of the Drykas around her. They spoke of losses, the voices of the Drykas, of how people to sacrifice a part of themselves and received only curses were people the gods didn't favour.

Ruari, young and untested as she was, swallowed an uncomfortable feeling of doubt in herself when she heard those words. She wanted to be accepted by the gods, by her gods, of the wind and the earth, and to be one of those unaccepted would crush her. She knew it. Deep down, she expected it to become of her, a deep point of wounded pride pierced by an unkind mother that throbbed when she doubted herself, as if it wished to eat her happiness and make it all the doubt.

But her feet were grounded on Semele. Semele, of all the mothers that Ruari had known, was the mother to love unconditionally, as she'd never grown cold under Ruari as she slept, as she warmed under her hand. It was easy to smother the doubt under a wall of rock and gemstones.

The woman to go before Ruari was taller than her, but hardly older. She was sure to have seen the girl some time before, possibly sometime at the Pride. Intently, Ruari watched her and what she did with the chest. She watched as the woman placed in a piece of her own clothing, a scarf of the most brilliant purple, and closed the lid upon it. A sacrifice.

Ruari herself hadn't brought anything with her but for the notebook, with the crudest bit of drawings she herself had done, and the clothes on her back. In a meagre coinpurse she tucked away, though, there were things she could give the chest, and she spent a moment fishing out the mostly purse to then empty it in her hand. The stone that came out of it was unremarkable and rough, taken with great pride when she'd traded some of her mizas for it and one other like it. They were tokens of the earth, jade from Riverfall that her father had brought back from it once and then sold to her, and they were both perhaps the most precious possessions that Ruari owned.

The woman moved on, and though Ruari heard murmurs of what she had received from the chest in return for her scarf, she was deaf to the words. It was her turn, and where that doubt pricked at her nerves, she started forward with a hurry.

[Ruari Darkwind]

Ruari didn't know how one should approach a gods-given chest. Did she come to it, head bowed and in prayer, or did she approach it like a zealot, proud and arrogant? In the end, she stumbled and hit the ground, a chuckle rising from the watching Drykas and fire rising to her face in embarrassment.

The dirt dug into her palms when Ruari pushed herself from her kneel and sat back, dusting them off before picking up the jade and the coinpurse. Her hand clenched upon them both, but where the coinpurse was a soft comfort, the jade pricked her already tender skin and drew blood on a sharp edge. The discomfort grounded her and helped her ignore the brief burst of laughter, and she crawled the rest of the way to the chest, more out of ease than a lack of pride, as she was sure to feel the sting when she was done.

There was reverence when Ruari lifted the lid of the chest and looked into it, finding the hollow container to be completely empty. The stone, bloodied and sweaty in her hand, was hard to relinquish to the depths of that chest. It was one of the two things she had that were Semele's, one of the few things she had that weren't once someone else's, and she was loathe to release it to the chest so easily.

Her hand raised, hovering over the open chest, and it shook. Ruari, nervous, could feel eyes on her, could feel the anticipation as it swaddled her and took her breath.

She dropped the stone in and hastily closed the lid, but rather than immediately opening it as she assumed she must, she dropped her hand from the lid to the earth below and prayed. Although it was for Semele, for the Mother, it was a quiet and sombre prayer, something fuelled by those plaguing doubts and what she thought she might feel when she opened the lid of the chest.

"Mother, please." Ruari whispered, laying her hand upon the chest once her prayer to the goddess had finished.

She was tentative and shy while lifting the lid of the chest once again, swallowing a stone in her throat that tasted like the doubt it was meant to crush. Ruari had to be grateful of any reward that emerged from that chest, because she knew that the reward was going to be something she deserved, given by the gods, and whether it was deemed a curse or blessing would be nothing to the sheer fact that the gods had given her something.

She exhaled, a deep and shaky breath, and lifted the lid.

[Tribal]

Set down in the middle of the silver chest was a simple jade bottle, small enough to hide in a pocket. Opening the polished lid attached to the bottle with a thin, silver chain, would reveal nothing, but if the girl were to turn the vessel upside down, an endless stream of rich, red soil would spill from the mouth like sand through an hourglass.

It is impossible to fill the bottle with anything else though when peeking inside, it appears empty. This tiny vessel harvests the power to form mountains, albeit at a very slow rate. Semele’s arms had protected Ruari her whole life, now it was the girl’s turn to hold her mother near.

The jade bottle of earth will only work for Ruari; turned up by anyone else it does nothing. The soil is very rich and fertile.

G R A D E S

Ruari Darkwind

Experience

• Writing: 1
• Rhetoric: 1
• Observation: 4
• Logic: 1
• Investigation: 1

Lore

• Semele: The Mother
• Event: The Silver Chest
• The Silver Chest: A gift for a gift
• Zulrav: Father of Storms
• Location: The Threaded Hide
• Ruari: Daughter of Wind and Earth
• Gems: Jade from Riverfall

Rewards

- Jade (please edit on CS)
+ Jade Bottle (Semele’s gift)

Notes

Hey Ru, great thread, beautifully written and pleasure to grade. Enjoy the rewards.