"Is this how you learned runes?" Violet asks, looking up from one of her runework assignments. A stack of wooden circles sit in front of her, each imbued a little more neatly than the last.
This is a question I can answer without worrying overmuch about what secrets I've told her and what I've held so long I've forgotten it's tucked away, so I hurry to answer it. "Not at all. We learn long before we would be bonding with dragons, so it's never really a matter of controlling too much power."
"You learn it before you can do magic...? Like in the book you gave me." Her eyes dart toward where she'd left it open on the bed. She doesn't try to imbue in bed any longer. I enjoy it when she's leaning against me as she studies, but it's just not practical when burning the sheets is a concern. So she sits at my desk with her little stack of sliced-up tree, and I sit in the window seat with my correspondence and the reports I have to review.
It's fascinating to watch her work through the runes. Even with the practice she had before coming to Aretia, the fine control required of her for runework has been a challenge. My Violence is both accustomed to challenge and expects success of herself quickly when she learns new things she considers academic. I suspect this seems academic to her because it resembles learning a dead language, and she speaks those as easily as she spoke my dead heart into life.
"We learn it without regard to signets or channeled magic," I clarify. "The simplest ones work for anyone, even children. It's much easier to learn when you don't have to worry about pouring too much in." It's strange to think about it now, the philosophy I only picked up tangentially as a child and understood much later. Adulthood is a foreign language I learned after the apostasy, and I've had to spend so much time translating things into it.
She considers that. "I think I can see why. Weaving the knots with fabric was difficult enough, but trying to do it without putting in too much or too little energy, keeping it stable…"
"Exactly. We learn to trace the knot and push our own anaile into it... breath is probably the closest word in Navarran." There are no perfect words in Navarran.
"Anaile." She repeats it with the slightest hint of an accent, the lilt musical but misplaced. I cannot wait until I have time to teach her Tyrrish properly. There are so many things that will never sound correct to me in Navarran, and I'm confident she'll be able to speak it with me in no time. Kissing the words out of her mouth will be even sweeter in my native tongue.
"Would you like to try it?" I ask her. "I have an idea. It's not exactly the way I learned but I think you'll enjoy it." I stand up and walk across the room, leaning over her in the chair. She looks up at me, her chin a perfectly kissable line down to the collar of her tunic and I take advantage, trailing a little line of kisses up to her jaw.
She laughs. "Xaden, I told you we can argue about sex after I finish my assignments."
"Mm. I can't help that I find you endlessly distracting, Violence."
"You certainly can when you want to."
I let that go. "Pay attention to how this feels. See if you can sense my anaile the way you would lightning gathering before a strike." Leaning in, I let my lips find their home against hers, taking the first moment just to luxuriate in how soft they are before I bring a hint of energy into my mouth like I'm about to speak a ward and then I breathe into the kiss, feeling as my energy ceases to be mine and settles into her.
When I pull away, she's staring at me, pupils wide and dark as the mountains at night. "What was that?"
"My breath, given freely."
"Xaden…"
"My Aunt Aoibhe taught us to do it by imagining the knot and then blowing into it like it was a little paper boat in the lake and we wanted it to sail away, so we had to blow as hard as we could. It's easier now, but I bet you could take the shape of it and make it work for you." She's fucking brilliant, of course she will. Probably with a better metaphor than I could ever come up with, and in half the time it took me to realize it would help.
"Us?"
"She was Bodhi's mom. During the summers when I was young it would be me and Bodhi and Garrick running around here, and when my dad and Garrick's father were busy, it would be Aunt Aoibhe teaching us how not to be completely feral little shits, or Garrick's Aunt Morag teaching us how to not die in the weapons courtyard. They were good times."
"Thank you," she says with the curl of a smile. "For showing me. And for telling me something."
"I want to tell you things." I hate how desperate I sound when I say it, but it's true. "It's hard for me, and I know it's hard on you too."
"I can tell you're trying," she says, her words careful and diplomatic. She wants to believe me but she's still cautious. I can't fucking blame her, can I? But she's listening. I may not be as good as she is at learning languages, but if I want her to speak Tyrrish for me some day, I need to keep learning honesty for her now.
Vanora, the first true Queen of Tyrrendor, who founded Aretia
Fic: Early Tyrrish Romantic Poetry
Areoir, Vanora's husband and King, born Réaltaíóirsanoíche of the black dragon den
Ulliam, first knight and lover of Vanora and Areoir, who came with other refugee survivors from what is now the Barrens
Siobhan, Ulliam's sister and a great sorceress
Princes Xaden and Miraz, Vanora and Areoir's sons, great warrior-poets in their own right
Fic: Be Proud of that Skin Full of Scars
Malek's Rest, the day Zihnal tricked Malek into stepping away from his work and the dead were given leave to visit the living if they were remembered strongly enough to find their way out of the sea of the dead and back to the surface. An autumn festival of the dead.
Fic: Malek's Rest
In no way do I think it makes sense for them to bury bodies based on what we see. They burn them. 100% they cremate 'em. Can you IMAGINE how many stones there would be marking a hundred years of riders who didn't make it out of the quadrant alone? Nope. We're commending their bodies to Malek along with their souls and their Pokemon cards.
I love the idea that what you choose to burn is like. A public statement on your feelings about the person who died. Because in a shared household there's a lot of ways to interpret ownership, imagine that the greater your grief, the more you burn. If you hated your husband, when he died you make a paltry show of burning the things you hated of his, that one fucking armchair and all his clothes and his bowling trophies or whatever. But your household is still a functional household. You're saying that very little reminds you of him now that he's gone. But if you loved your spouse with every fiber of your being you might burn the whole house down as a way of saying that nothing you shared with him could ever be free of his memory.
Obviously it's more complicated than that because of practical concerns like who else lives with you and your finances. Burning everything down is what people do in fairytales and epic love stories... but the idea is there, and gets interpreted in various ways.
I only knew about Mimr and her brother Liew at all because of my father. Among the books we read when I was young there seemed to be endless fables and myths, and among those were the stories about much more complicated death and grieving had been before Unification. Now we have straightfoward burnings like Brennan's, commending the dead to Malek and moving on, at least in the military. Based on things I've heard Rhiannon say, or what Bodhi told me about Liam's burning, I'm realizing a lot of things are still carried forward, even if people don't know why they're doing it.
In the stories my father read me, the soul was judged by Malek but the grief belonged to Mimr and Liew. Choosing what to burn was more complex; it was about letting go of what would hold you in the past. I held my father's sweaters, his cream scribe robes, the cushion he put under his back when he sat on the couch, his favorite mug and the wooden tea-spoon he always used, the little notebook by the couch where he'd write things down. Each item was a memory, and while I prepared I draped myself in the memories of my father. Literally, in the case of wearing his sweater for the two days it took to go through everything.
A huge burning was a show of love and grief, a statement that everything reminded you of the one who had walked with Malek. There was an ancient Tyrrish chivalric romance where a queen in mourning cut her hair and threw it into her king's pyre, and for a long time widows had done that.
But one thing hadn't changed: once you were done burning, that was it. The soul belonged to Malek, and their name was either given to Mimr to be recorded as history, or to Liew to be forgotten. Of course everyone still thought of their dead, but we weren't meant to dwell in the past.
"I was taught that when you keep vigil with Malek, you talk about the good and the bad so you can balance the scales of a life, and decide what memories to keep what which ones to forget. I thought I might offer you a memory."
Fic: The Cure is Worse Than the Poison
The details will vary from place to place, but (unsurprisingly) the one I've thought through the most is Tyrrendor. I think the basic idea would carry across the continent, that the family would keep vigil during the burning of the dead, and people would visit them during the vigil to keep them company, and to share memories of the deceased.
He looked up in time to see Violet wrench her arm away from Ridoc and pull one of the daggers from her jacket. Before he even understood what she was doing, she was reaching for her braid with one hand and pulling it against the edge of the dagger until her hair fell loose, framing her face as she threw the braid in the fire. Bodhi stared. He knew Violet could be dramatic, but did she know? That was the kind of thing people did in ancient poems, and by people he meant widows. She'd just announced that she and Xaden were married, as far as almost everyone standing here was concerned.
Fic Scenes From a Dukedom
Amari's beads are green, which feels like an of course. It has seven sections of seven beads, which mirrors the seven points on the Tyrrish flag I designed, and six divider beads. Four are blood-red because life is not just growth but blood shed. The focal charms on the end are sea glass, because there is life in the sea as well as the land, an acorn for potential, and an aquamarine star and a lotus charm because if you're doing prayer reps you can probably use calm, clarity and intuition. I see these being used specifically as a way to focus and open oneself to insight or messages, a kind of meditation.
Loial's is purple and has twenty beads. I am imagining a saying that we focus on each of our loves for twenty years: twenty years with our parents/family of origin (which is why 20 is the conscription age), twenty years with our partners/family of choice, (ie raising our own children), and twenty years in our community/wider family (ie as elders).
It has an unusually long chain to the focal beads, a compass charm and a feather, because it's also used as a pendulum for divination. It's not an uncommon headcanon that the broken compass will lead Violet to Xaden somehow, and I think it may actually be a symbol of Loial, a compass that leads you not to north but to your heart. Without an actual mythical compass gifted by the gods, you can use the pendulum to point you in the right direction, or in general to read as you would with a normal pendulum. It's expected you'd do a round of prayers, one for each bead, to calm your mind and focus on the question you want to ask/the thing you need to find before doing the pendulum reading.
"It wasn't feathertails," Violet said quietly. I set down the book I was reading.
"What is it?"
"I think he was looking for a treatment? For my mom, and then for me, after I was born. I need to see if I can find some of his earlier research, this is almost all written for himself so there's nothing that doesn't assume his own familiarity with his research." She pulled out another one of the hidden books the scribe had found and started to read, indexing and taking notes on a fresh page.
An hour later, I had a headache and I was thinking about going to find food for both of us when Violet looked up at me.
"Xaden..." Her voice died in her throat. I waited for her to continue, but whatever she'd found was too much for her to put into words.
I walked over and looked at the translation notes she'd been making, turning her father's shorthand into words we could understand.
"That's the ingredient list Sgaeyl gave you, isn't it?"
Fic: The Cure is Worse Than the Poison
Long ago and before, there were two knights who served King Miraz in the south of Tyrrendor, Ser Hannah and Ser Keit. Both were known far and wide for their great deeds in service of their king, for their valiant acts in battle and their cleverness outside of it. These knights loved each other fiercely and refused to be parted in any battle or any peacetime.
When Ser Keit finally fell to one of their opponents, Ser Hannah wept and mourned. Unable to face a world without her love in it, she kept herself in seclusion for a full year's worth of seasons. Finally, gentle King Miraz came to her to ask if she would return to his side of if she would rather be released from her service to the crown, perhaps to find peace in the service of Malek or Loial.
The knight, however, could not speak. When Ser Hannah opened her mouth, it was full of flower petals. When she tried to cough, flowers fell from her lips. They were a deep red color, almost black, and when they touched the ground they took root there and spread.
Ser Hannah, unable to bear returning to the service of her king, instead lived out her days as a silent wanderer until the day she was finally overcome by her grief and walked with Malek, breathless to see her love. Anywhere flowers fell from her lips, the took root, and people called them Hannah-Keit flowers, not allowing the lovers to be parted even in memory.
Code from UtilityHotbar.