ꙮ Irric’s Grove, some distance from the marketplace, but still well within the city center. To a watchful eye - or to someone who knows why the town is called Irric’s Rest, by those who live there and love it dearly, or looking at a map with one eye closed and the truth in your heart - it would not be unreasonable to call it Kesset’s heart. It is calm and peaceful here; Centrelight filters through the trees, as it is wont to do.
No song playing
Up next: 0 songs
2 listening
- Aurelius
- The Awoken
Scene Archives
← Active ScenesIn Irric's Grove
#saint
wears her mask as she walks to Irric’s Grove, not because she thinks anyone in Kesset might now know who she is by now, but because there is something to be gained for people to see the Sword-Saint as the Sword-Saint. She thinks of the story of Irric, the one a Sword-Saint long ago witnessed, as she walks towards the heart of the town. She is not Wolf; she doesn’t feel the song of Almachadta as easy as breathing, but if she holds her mind very still and calm she sometimes feels like she can brush her fingers over the past like it’s the fur of some great, rumbling cat, or the surface of a deep, deep lake. ⁂
enters the heart thinking of Irric, thinking of safety, of care, of endings and, hopefully, beginnings. The Centrelight, dappled by the heavy canopy of leaves here, filters through, and though Kesset-Irric’s-Rest is not home, she knows what it is like for it to be home. How lucky, to have been chosen to bear the mask, to have roots everywhere she goes. “I seek Raskhendas,” she announces to the trees, to the light, to the grove.
🙧
ꙮ One of the trees answers. Immensely slowly, from where they were knelt upon the ground directly in the path of a sunbeam, they rise with the soft wood-creaks and leaf-rustles and the slow up-pick of air curling around the branches and the leaves and the bark and - the moment when your hair goes up on the back of your neck, just a little, when gnosis shapes the air, gently and with loving hands, flute-forming the air with invisible fingers. No mouth and no lungs and yet they speak: the oak rises to greet the Sword-Saint, with a voice that’s resonant and rough and like wind through leaves at once. “O my Saint. Raskhendas thee answers.”
: “Raskhendas,” she says, admiring, always admiring, because she remembers being Spoken Wood and she cannot imagine being Spoken Wood and the ancient trees of Almachadta were always some of the most beautiful things about her world, even before she was the Sword-Saint. “Thank you for answering. I come with a story of new life for you, and a request for that new life, if you see it fit to grant it.”
ꙮ Raskhendas turns, slowly, curiously. It is always hard to tell where pareidolia leaves off and the Spoken Wood’s actual faces start. Are they smiling? Or is it the tendency to see a smiling face in the tree’s bark? Surely they are smiling. “Tell me the tale that you carry.”
- You hear — and your Star hears — a song, echoing from the stillness: To Be Aware of Deep Time
: “There is a man, or maybe a boy, who remembers nothing–only a way forward. There is a man, or maybe a boy, who bottled pure possibility and brought it with him through wild and strange places, and then he planted some seeds and uncorked the vial. There is a man, or maybe a boy, who tugged the magic through the air to those seeds and they sprouted, faster than they should, or could. New life, from a new man, able to go forward. I thought, perhaps, you might–I wanted it to have the chance to become a full person, if you’re willing.”
Replying for your leisure Teak; no need to worry about this atm
ꙮ Raskhendas thinks, for a long time. Salme is used to this. Spoken Wood are all like this, especially those who do not spend a -great- deal of time with the quick-moving peoples, and eventually, there’s a languid stretch. “Memory comes to the roots in its season, like rain to the seedling; he who remembers no yesterdays walks with the seed that has none yet. Strange to receive a request from a man who has carried no stories; ask me no more. I shall tend it. Who knows what the seedling might carry?”
: “Thank you,” she breathes, and then adds–“though, to be clear, the request is mine. It had a certain symmetry, I thought.”
ꙮ Wind rustling through the branches: a Spoken Wood’s laughter. “Rivers flow from their headwaters,” like that’s an answer. The oak nods, though. Or, well, the branches wave, in a certain characteristic way.
it’s enough of an answer for her, and it makes a kind of sense. “Thank you, Raskhendas. May the Light keep you.” She bows, and then takes her leave.
ꙮ ”O Saint. Light keep you as well.” And Raskhendas will have some work to do! But that is another story, and will be told another time.