Behind the Serpent Throne (CK2)

Progress Update!

Things are about on track, I've done 10.2k today, but I'll need to keep it up tomorrow because I still need to do Split and I'm overdue for Covenant and then by Monday I need to make room for another KCS update, and by Thursday another EOAE update (it updates tomorrow), and the Lost Files have to go in there somewhere so when you look at it objectively, considering I had the whole day to type, I did terribly and am falling further and further behind.

TLDR: Situation normal, all fucked up. But I'm probably still mostly sorta close to on schedule. Maybe. Probably not.
 
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...Well, wow. That's a lot to keep up with. I shudder to think what you do during NaNoWriMo. :o

But yeah, I'm pretty excited to see where you'll take this. Original settings are always awesome when someone with your dedication is at the helm, I'm really interested to see where we'll be going with this Quest's storyline.
 
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So here're two questions. I think you mentioned the printing press and gunpowder before. Just how widespread are they in our part of the world? What are their uses? I'm basically wondering what the technology level is in the setting, and which era does it vaguely match up to in the real world.
 
So here're two questions. I think you mentioned the printing press and gunpowder before. Just how widespread are they in our part of the world? What are their uses? I'm basically wondering what the technology level is in the setting, and which era does it vaguely match up to in the real world.

It's relatively wide-spread, though not enough to ensure the start of any sort of mass literacy. But there are a lot of books floating around, though the printing presses are a little primitive. There hasn't been the discovery of mechanical presses, though discoveries in the last century have improved ink enough that there's no bleed over (some types of ink common used tend to bleed through when used with the traditional press method, meaning you could only have one side of a page filled), and so it's still more limited than you'd think, but it's getting there and if you want to have something printed, you can.

The gunpowder isn't put in guns, if you're wondering, but gunpowder bombs (though they're outclassed by the Sea Raiders spirit-infused bombs) exist, as do bronze and even iron cannons. They haven't exactly stolen the show, though, thanks to Magic. No, cannons don't exist outside of magic or anything, but the spirits that form or gather or whatnot around cannons are hard to deal with/use, and so there's some difficulty in super-charging (other than making the barrel stronger with basic iron spirits) or improving the cannon, reasons why it's maintained its presence almost entirely on ships.

One thing about the world is that if you can't super-charge it with spirits (and they haven't figured that out yet), it's going to be mediocre at best, considering even a poor and simple bowman can at least whisper to the wind to carry their arrow, or to the Csiritan God of War and hope he takes notice, or to...well, you get the picture.

Even the commonest of soldiers has a (very little) help from the spirits in matters of a fight, and more than a little (though still not a lot) outside of the fight, in gathering supplies and warding off pain and injuries and etc.

Edit: It also isn't helped by the fact that while Csirit came up with most of the gunpowder stuff, and *might* be the most advanced in the area, the Sea-Raiders have a lot of structural advantages in their magic-system which allow them to get the most use out of cannons.
 
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I would presume there are guilds, however? Which may encourage literary, among the lower crafters.
If you're going full Not!China guilds never arose, however, expansive family trades did.

One family, one line of business they excelled at, so expansion or acquisition was carried out by marriage and adoption(or just flat out taking their stuff). Not sure how it works here though.
 
Literacy is somewhat overvalued in modern day because we have the culture and industry to support it. If paper isn't being made on the cheap, and people are more interested in safeguarding their livelihoods than advancing scientific progress, literacy is just going to be less useful.

A lot of things that we would write down (grocery lists, measurements in crafting, etc) are just things that you are expected to simply remember. And without literacy as a crutch, people do.

That's not to say literacy has no value to such people- it does- but you have to understand that they don't have a ton of leisure time to spend learning their letters either. If you're trying to get by, spending hundreds of hours of time learning to read rather than spinning yarn or churning butter or doing other 'leisure hour work' you may end up in serious trouble.
 
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I fear that the banner-day achievement won't look all that impressive. I mean, look at all those times in LOTR or whatever when the heroes' armies beat 10-to-1 odds. So merely beating 5-to-3 odds seems a little...like, hrm.

Well, I'll try to make it as impressive as I can.
 
Higher odds just make the confidence of the favored party more obvious, IMO. So long as it's clear that the larger army thinks they'll win, it works.
 
Literacy is somewhat overvalued in modern day because we have the culture and industry to support it. If paper isn't being made on the cheap, and people are more interested in safeguarding their livelihoods than advancing scientific progress, literacy is just going to be less useful.

A lot of things that we would write down (grocery lists, measurements in crafting, etc) are just things that you are expected to simply remember. And without literacy as a crutch, people do.

That's not to say literacy has no value to such people- it does- but you have to understand that they don't have a ton of leisure time to spend learning their letters either. If you're trying to get by, spending hundreds of hours of time learning to read rather than spinning yarn or churning butter or doing other 'leisure hour work' you may end up in serious trouble.
Literacy varies, if it's an ancient china knockoff, it should actually have pretty good literacy for the era.

How useful it is depends on how much actually gets written down and shared. Thanks to extensive road/publicly available messenger networks and imperial peace, you got a lot more letter writing and reading in general getting done there, even the lower classes have access to SOMEBODY to read and write for them for money, while the artisan and merchant classes are literate, if not much more than the basics.

I fear that the banner-day achievement won't look all that impressive. I mean, look at all those times in LOTR or whatever when the heroes' armies beat 10-to-1 odds. So merely beating 5-to-3 odds seems a little...like, hrm.

Well, I'll try to make it as impressive as I can.
Well, depends a lot of relative quality as well. 5:3 odds are pretty good if fighting peers or disadvantaged terrains.
 
Progress Update

Close but no cigar! A mediocre day was turned around to be merely below what I needed by the second half (I was at 2k at noon), and so I'm at 8.8k. Didn't get to start on Split, let alone Covenant, etc, etc, boo hoo, cry myself a river.

Still, I did good, I think, overall.

God, though, it's probably going to be a little rough without a Beta. Anyways.

So, updates will be on schedule, next one on Tuesday.
 
Kiralo: An Education in Life
Kiralo: An Education In Life (0-15)

Smooth


He had never known Csirit, and so perhaps that should have made his life one smoothed like a stone in water, for there was no such thing as homesickness. And in a way it did. Early on he couldn't even imagine anything other than what he had.

From the very start he'd run around, even back when he was still in cloth diapers, exploring the house that his mommy owned. He hadn't seen anything all that odd about having a mommy and not a daddy, any more than he saw anything odd about how she acted. Normality was what it was, and so he'd run around and play with his cloth dolls and this little wooden horse that his mom had had that fit in his hand. And of course he'd eventually figure out that the two combined made for quite a bit of fun, when he wasn't running and climbing, happily ignorant of his father except in the way a letter came once in a while that left mom sad.

She smoothed his path as much as possible, teaching him how to speak. He soaked up the information, his mind as eager for motion as his body, and the world seemed the two of them, for all it wasn't true. They looked similar, as well, and while the stories she told clearly distinguished girls and boys, at that age there was little enough different in some ways between him and mommy, though she'd once whispered that he looked a little like daddy too.

He had smooth dark hair like she did, that he grew wild and long for a while, hair like she had, so long that when he dipped his fingers in it and ran down it, it was like traveling across a lake on a moonless night. She eventually taught him to pin it up like she had before she taught him how to pin it up and manage it. And she had those dark eyes with beautiful lashes, and the same soft, gentle features as him.

When men came over in dark colored layers of cloth, done up all nice and neat, layer by layer and with pretty rings on their fingers, they'd ruffle his hair, especially when he wore his 'formal clothes.' Jia had made a game of it, telling him he had to be as polite as he could be and wear this outfit that was really hot especially in the summer that made it hard for his legs to move, and was green and blue.

But it was so smooth, whatever it was made of (silk, he later learned), that he'd simply run his fingers across it sometimes while sitting at dinner where at first only smooth-faced men talked with her, and he made up affinities because their words were beyond him, and in fact sounded like gibberish to him.

Eventually there were men whose faces were less smooth-faced, and women who sat quietly as mother and their...husbands? Talked.

(Later he'd figure out that it was sort of a progression: from talking to fellow Csiritans (all young ones) and young and ambitious men, to being able to argue with and convince even those far too old to get into the silly fads of the youth.)

And he'd run and play, but when he first stepped outside he saw the world wasn't quite so smooth. In fact it was rough, complex, and he stared at the sky, and at the people who looked different from him. He was a rich yellow, and they looked as if they had been burnt just a little by the sun.

Yet still there was a gliding motion to his life, even when his mother began to teach him another language, until at last he received his first letter from his father.

Even that was smooth, but the way a cold stone was smooth.

"The third teaching of Monk Irano states that…"

"Always wise it is to know, as the ancient sage Joi says, 'that peace is better than war, but that peace can only be tended with discipline and care.'"

"'Those who act against the Gods are accursed, and those who act with them blessed. Read the precepts and learn."

The smoothest, coldest thing of all was when Kiralo was ten and one of his father's letters talked--he supposed because ten was old enough to think of it--about sexual morality in the most round-about way possible, using entirely quotes.

"She who out of wedlock has a child is twice accursed. Accursed for her child and accursed for her evil."

Kiralo, warm and smooth, who laughed when the other kids made jokes about his in-progress Southlands, who called him Ermin after a rather yellow fruit that the neighborhood boys dared themselves to steal from groves, had torn the letter up and for a year refused to see another one of them.

Smooth wasn't always good.

*****
A view of Herinzet

Herinzet was not the jewel of the Seventeen Cities. It wasn't nearly as large as Ahine, nor as rich as Sassis, but it was still a wondrous jewel, especially for a young boy, so young that the streets around their villa, located off the heart of the city, seemed the entire world. It would take years, decades, for him to slowly realize the shape and nature of the city.

The crowds yelling, especially on the Tenday markets that spread throughout the city, the perfumers and weavers who were the backbone of the city, though they didn't work with silk as some in Sassis had before the blockades.

The vastness of the city that could only truly be seen from the Prince's tower. He'd stood there once as a young man, and suddenly it was all revealed. The sprawl of buildings with slanted roofs for the seasons of hard rain, their colors muted but with bursts of festive red, the shacks and smell, the sights as the walls sprawled out.

The New Wall at the farthest reaches, well-maintained, with land even set aside for pastures so that they could have their own native cavalry, and then the Broken Wall, which sat clumped in the middle of the city like a bit of gruel that had congealed, and attracted the worst elements, as one might say, and then the Old Wall which surrounded the richest parts of the city and divided it all up.

Kiralo was born and lived out his youth in a neighborhood near the New Wall, where successful craftsmen lived, and so his journeys outside saw that and little else.

He grew, and before long his mom was teaching him Southlander, and if they mocked him for his clumsy tongue and accent, he was swift in making friends and swift in leading them on adventures across the cobbled streets, jumping and racing, laughing and playing. Eating fried dough balls covered in syrup that one boy's father specialized in making for a rich merchant with a sweet tooth.

Later he'd stand in the Prince's Tower and it would all look so small, but what he first learned of Herinzet was that it was made of people, like anywhere else.

He befriended those he could, and grew slowly towards manhood among over a hundred and sixty thousand other such people.

Yet, early on, his world seemed so small and intimate.

His view as clear as the skies above.

*****
Horse Tales

Jia taught him stories and games which were so amusing that at times he'd even forget he was learning anything at all. Stories of Csirit and stories of myths and legends, and he'd lay tucked in his cot, in his own room--which most of his friends lacked, sharing it with other siblings--as she told story after story.

But there were always certain stories he demanded. "Tell me horse stories, mommy."

She soon learned as many as she could, and Jia must have gone to great lengths to learn all of the stories of fabulous horses and great heroes riding them and even talking horses that were the spirit of all horses…

Yet he ate them up without so much as a thanks, despite all that he thanked her for. Just listened with wide eyes and imagined himself on horseback. Imagined himself a hero, someone who could protect mom and ride horses and...his imagination failed him, but he knew that horses sounded like the most amazing thing ever, and whenever he saw one, however distantly, he'd go to watch it.

And watching became deeper dreams, until at last he asked if he could have a horse. She had frowned and shaken her head and he'd tromped off outside to race someone, a traditional enough game, or throw around a leather ball with no aim in mind at all.

A few weeks later, she had bought partial ownership in a stables, and she took him down. He gaped at the wide open pitch, surrounded by iron gating, and the low, thatched stable, and the smell. It was the smell of horses, of everything that was them, and if it was pungent, that was all the better.

He gaped, tears in his eyes, and Jia said, "The stablemaster has agreed to give you lessons, there are some choices."

He went into the stable and he thought about it as he watched the horses, one by one, shown to him as the stablemaster, a dark faced man with henna'd red hair, named their virtues. This one was temperamental but fast, this one sedate and slow, and he stared at them and the more he stared the more nervous Jia was.

But then he picked an older pony, strong and steady. He was dark grey, and he snorted when Kiralo offered him food and ate, his tongue warm against Kiralo's skin. Across his face was a single patch of white, and so he was called Lightning.

"Boy," the stablemaster said, "You'll have to care for Lightning yourself if you're gonna learn anything about horses. It's hard work, not something for a soft Csiritan, yet here we are."

Kiralo had nodded and said, "I'm willing to work hard, learn hard."

"Then let's start with mucking out the stables and learning how much to feed this LIghtning of yours…"

It was like nothing else, to be on the back of a horse. To hear its heartbeat and feel its movements. It was as if he was born and lived for those moments, and as often as he could with all of the schooling he went through, all of the life he had to fit into his brief childhood, he came back here for Lightning.

*****
Lift Your Voice

This was a world of songs. So did some say, and he could believe it. Kiralo first learned to sing from his mother and the songs to the Gods that she sung in a low, quiet voice, as if she wanted to speak only to them. He'd copy her, and she'd correct him on his words, his grammar, and on how he sung it.

For a time, Kiralo even thought that song was somehow a part of his faith itself, but when he went out, there a workman sung, there a boy hummed a tune, there the lonely daughter of one of the cloth-weavers played a flute from a balcony and looked down every so often, hoping a boy might be drawn to her, dreaming of who-knows-what.

The laborers sung many songs, some beautiful and some ugly as they worked to move things in and out of a house, or load or unload a cart, "Haul it up and haul it over/ Work and work until you're through/ Time goes by like a lover's sigh…" and then one of the men had laughed and sung some alternate line, "For anyone but you!"

The men had burst out laughing at that, and he'd tried to memorize those and other words.

His mom realized quite wisely that he had far too much to do with himself to bother with an instrument, but she let him train his voice and he'd sometimes sing songs or try to make poems into songs as he mucked about in the streets and in the stables.

Yata, a friend of his, had grinned when he had first shown off a song he'd half-written himself with his mother's help and said, "Your voice is prettier than my sister's."

Kiralo had blushed and laughed and said, "Race you!"

****
The Flower Blooms

When he was young he'd shown a talent for poetry that his mother had tried to nurture. It began in songs and looped back around to songs in its own way. He would try and fiddle again and again with words, mixing Southlander and Csirit until even his mother's head sometimes spun with the way he managed to blend them together, picking and choosing meaning as his friends might steal a choice piece of fruit from a tree. This word here, and that word there, but when his father got to him and learned of it, then he sent manuals on poetry and examples of poems.

They flowed like the water and were as still and dead as well. Poems on long walks and poems on beautiful vases, poems that later he would be disgusted by, because even a vase moves, and a walk was fluid and beautiful. A ride still more beautiful. But then he had known only that the works said one thing, and his father the same thing, and so when he wrote he slipped free entirely of Southland constraints and even music to write these perfectly formed jewels that he had been so proud of.

"How fragile the greenrim flower is/ I hold it in my hand/ Like peace in a good ruler's" he'd written, and it was all but a copy of half a dozen other poems. The threefold structure, the flower imagery, the personal touch. As if a poet could not write about someone who wasn't themselves, something they wouldn't do.

Of course a poet could, but the more he studied those poems, and the more he heard the restrictions, the way this word and that word paired together was inauspicious, the way there were very specific forms and topics and the way, he slowly figured out, that his father was not actually a very good poet. He was a competent poet in the sense that the Civil Service Exams had required him to be, and he could fill in the blanks that Csiritan poetry fell into without a deft hand as easily as anyone else.

But he wasn't good at it. Competent, and that even barely.

At the time, though, Kiralo had been proud of his greenrim and had read the poem to Jia and smiled when she patted his head.

Much later, when he was seventeen, he would rewrite the poem in a way. In a way not at all. He wrote an entire poem, and like the Csiritan poems, it was all about himself. About the first two men he had killed.

There was a peasant village who had been plagued by bandits, and because the Wind-Dancers were having a sort of break, recovering from a few skirmishes, he hared off on his own after them, went to the village and talked to the elder, brought the traditional gifts and said the traditional things, and drank with the elder and the village to show that he meant well, and helped to train the villagers on the basics of self-defense, since clearly their city was not sending help just yet.

The bandits had come, but now the villagers had a Rassit, and the poorly armed bandits were routed. Five dead in a battle of ten minutes, the rest captured or run off, but what he remembered was the first as he'd ridden through the cloud of dust that he'd called up, the Spirits brown and twisting in the winds. He'd loosed his arrow and it had gone almost through the man, lodging in his chest as he rode past.

"How sturdy the bolt is/ as it leaves my hand/ To make a redrim flower/ To plant bitter and necessary harvest."

Not his greatest success, but the lines and the poem had reordered his life slightly, had made him see just what he was rejecting. A hand whose notion of peace was dominion, whose notion was that the world was fragile beneath his grip.

****
Faith

The gods began the world and they shall never end it. They were kind and they were clever, and the spirits were part of it. He would watch them sometimes. Every so often a guru would send a message through the wind, or a dangerous drunk might call on a spirit too dangerous, and even outside of that, the spirits danced and played at the edges of vision, or rose a little out of the sword that held them, or the water in its buckets.

Spirits were everywhere, and the Gods were everything and he learned their names and functions and learned to pray for them, and was even told about the Emperor.

That soon would tarnish, and yet he had thought about it from the start. The Emperor was a man, and more than that, imperfect.

He couldn't imagine the Southlands under the rule of the Emperor, he seemed so far away and the Southlanders seemed so fierce and proud and independent.

Faith buried itself deep into his heart, and like the blossom that survives underground even through the hardest winter, when all doubts had passed, there was a bountiful harvest.

*****
The Process of Living

It was harder just to live than he had expected, he'd think, as they stayed in the village for some time. She was on a sort of vacation, to find a pond and yet all they had found were streams and rivers, and rumors of watering holes that turned out to be nothing at all.

The Southlands were beautiful, they really were, rolling plains and hills, and good land that could be harvested with the help of spirits. Cattle were raised, and horses, and by the banks of the river there was fishing.

In fact, constant work was what Kiralo saw. The boys and girls, men and women, even the old worked constantly, and whereas girls were rarely let out for long in the streets, here they were out in the fields working like anyone else, when they couldn't help in the home in one fashion or another.

Every body was needed, the process of living wasn't an automatic one, but seemed to rely on sweat and labor and secretive Names whispered from father to son to son, on and on.

Great unbroken chains of labor and rest and life, and yet at night they sung and danced if any strength was left in them.

He tagged along, and occasionally Jia went back to that village, or to another, and he'd offered to help. Not the fields, but he carried things and got underfoot and learned. He made fast friends who slipped away when Jia was ready to return to the city, and he began to grow stronger and leaner in response.

His smile and strange ways clashed with his perfect Southlander accent, and they teached him the lower dialects and accents, the ways that court Southlander didn't make sense to them, and he taught them what he could, even mentioned the pieces and bits of Names he'd picked up.

The first girls he'd ever befriended had been peasant girls, who as much as anything wanted someone to talk to while they worked, wanted something to do with themselves. He tried to be polite to everyone, even the village idiots and drunks.

The people were rough, and often broken, and he knew that he was a curiosity, that's all. A strange foreigner who talked like them and was willing to play at being just another kid, and his mother was yet another, even more interesting aberration.

They stared at her as a foreigner, and as a woman who was rich, and as a woman who didn't have a husband, and as a woman who was beautiful, like something out of a dream. He'd seen enough of her to know she wasn't a dream, that she was real and that was better than any dream, but if he'd been told as a child that they wanted his mother, he would have been confused and yet...of course they did.

Beneath the exterior, she was just as concerned with the process of living as them, though, and though she indulged him they never stayed too long, never overstayed their welcome, and they brought gifts wherever they can, learned the rituals of the peasants' strange faiths enough to at least avoid offense.

Kiralo remembered it all, when the time came. And he always came with gifts. Perhaps it was like pouring water into the desert, the way the needs of the worlds were, but he remembered the stretched, drawn faces even in times of prosperity, and so he tried at least to be generous.

Everyone was trying to live, everyone wanted to continue on their lives, and after his mother's death this fact had seemed even more significant.



****
Hazel

Abdai was the son of the stablemaster, thirteen to Kiralo's eight when the crush first started, the first crush he'd ever had, and the reason he knew he was Mirena, that he preferred the company of men.

It was in the way his hair was so brown it looked like a nut, short and cut so that only a few stray tufts went beyond his head, how it looked so soft and smelled faintly always of horses. It was the hazel eyes that seemed to alight with mirth as he talked of horses and running, jumping and throwing.

It was his thick lips and wide smile, the way he had a little bit of stubble on his cheek, just the first blush of early growth, and how Kiralo would stare at it for a long time wondering what it was like to touch.

Rough, he knew, and yet.

It was the pointed way of his chin and the way his name sounded and how he laughed when Kiralo's idiot friends had started calling him 'Hazenut' when Abdai was a lovely name. It was that they worked together, that they rode together and that the first time he fired an arrow, it was because Abdai had encouraged him to do it, saying that if he was on the back of the horse, "You might as well learn a little more."

It was the way when he told his mom all of this she had looked at him and began to start reading heroic stories to him. There were romances in them, and some of them were between men, as the bold Han and the shy Kiralo (his name, but not at all like him) had fought together against the chaos to save the life of the tenth Emperor.

"Han seems like he's a jerk," he'd said one night.

"I've heard that said," Jia said fondly, "You don't need to date a Han. Or be a fool like Kiralo."

She was wrong, in a way, everyone was a fool for love, but at the time he'd nodded eagerly and realized at last what he was feeling.

Story after story taught him, wrongly in some cases, it was to be true, what to expected and taught him that it was okay, and that it happened.

He remembered once, when he was eighteen, he'd gone to a bar and when he informed a woman flirting with him that he was Mirena, she had laughed and said, "At last a man who knows how to appreciate beauty!" And then she'd leered at one of the other Rassit who had gone out drinking with him.
He'd laughed, and that was a large part of the attitude. Clans mattered, and so if a Mirena was unable to marry and go through the fumblings to make heirs, that was a matter quite different, but the act itself, the desire and even the love, was if anything celebrated in its own way.

His crush on Abdai eventually died for many reasons, but the feelings didn't.

*****
Racing Through Youth

He began to race against other boys on horseback at nine, and sometimes even challenge the people from other stables to races. Lightning was starting to get a little bit old, and he'd have to get a real horse as he grew up fast and taller than the average Csiritan. But for the moment his life was in the exercise and the feel of wind against his hair, and the bits and pieces of Names that he could learn.

He learned the word for leather and whispered and called out the Spirits so that they would soften the saddle against the horse's body. He whispered the Name of the breeze that flowed through the pasture and he watched the spirits play about him, drawn to his actions as a fly towards a carcass. Or as onlookers towards a show.

It wasn't all that surprising, really. Spirits were strange and hard to define, and he learned their names at first slowly, but he was a magpie, and bit by bit he learned the names, mostly of the petty spirits, and learned even sometimes to understand what they meant. The petty spirits didn't talk like people did, and many didn't even manifest.

It was so strange, watching their forms, which seemed tied to what they were and yet also strange. An insect with hundreds of legs or the feel of a breeze were both forms that spirits came in, including ones that touched only a single sense. A sound that told where it was or a smell that was unlike any other.

Spirits were strange, and yet everyone knew of some, everyone kept with them. Some men it was said even befriended Spirits, rather than merely working with them and trusting them. They kept close to spirits and became Gurus, or practiced any number of means to control and direct Spirits on a grand scale.

But even those that didn't grow up that way knew the joy of hearing a spirit shiver at its name, coming as it was called, knew how frustrating it could be to beg for help when the lesser spirits barely understood anything, and yet when you called them often enough, they started responding, started sometimes even lending their strength and power in their own way if you pleaded often enough.

And he learned how to command them, how to force them. Sometimes one had to blow out one's breath to call the winds, and offer string to placate spirits of cloth, but sometimes one could take.

As he grew he began to play more serious games as well. Abdai had begun to teach him the art of the bow, and now he raced around doing trick shots at targets, daring his friends to try to hit a target on the wing halfway across the pasture, or firing backwards in the old style, still used but hardly the special trick it had been before.

He learned to shoot so fast his fingers were numb at the force, and how the flight of an arrow could be whispered and begged along by a wind spirit, or made stronger by a spirit of hearth and metal. Everything that could be learned he set himself to learning it, and by the time he was eleven, his path was diverging quite widely from the scholar his father wanted him to be.

He never found out if his father knew earlier on, but Kiralo doubted it.

*****
A War of Art

Even without the increasingly warlike nature of the games he played, there was poetry as well.

His style changed and shifted and now the words flowed together and banged against each other. He'd end a line halfway through and deny the rhyme in the next, he'd put together food and flowers and have them rub lines against each other, he'd borrow Southlander words for Csiritan poetry and Csiritan words for Southlander poetry, sometimes even just for the sound of them.

It was a strange sort of mastery, like what he felt on the back of a horse, as if the entire world was something he could, if not control, at least encode.

Understand in a way. He wrote about other people as much as about himself, and about things he'd read, or things he'd understood. He wrote about far-off lands and the way that they must imagine the Southlands.

Because surely, just as people told stories about Csirit and he asked his mom and she said 'no it is not true' and just as he knew that the epics made up all sorts of things about the Southlands, surely someone in far off places made up things about both of them.

He imagined it, and imagined a different world, and blended and fused it together. He even thought to write something one day, about an outsider to the Southlands. But not a Csiritan, that was too obvious, something stranger still.

Ideas now, and poems. It was a poor weapon to repudiate his father's vision, but like a Rassit out of arrows and down his sword with only a Hektu knife left, he used what he had.

So focused was he on the war, that when it all came crashing down, he wasn't prepared at all.

*****
Rot and Purification

Then sickness came. The Arfu, as some called it, almost comically named. It struck one and left them in the bed, half-rotting away, bones softening and muscle growing weak and diseased. It didn't eat one up so much as spoil one. Jia was terrified, and cried when she heard, and told him about her father, how he'd been so strong and then gone.

People died in a day or lingered for months.

Abdai died a week into the disease, and the gang all broke up, terrified and hiding or dying. By the end of the summer season, eight thousand lie dead.

And he nursed his mother even though she tried to send him away. Changed her soiled bed clothes and fed her sweet fruit and porridge and called on every spirit he knew to help her however he can. He labored day and night, and the doctors she hired did as well, despite the costs that were wracking up.

They healed her skin and it sickened again, her heart and it struggled to beat. Everything fell apart, and yet he kept on trying. He went without a horse that whole time, and by the end he was drained.

He'd stare at her drained and dead and hate himself, because after a certain point the tears didn't come any longer and he was more weary than anything else. It made him a bad son, it made him a horrible son and he wanted to confess how horrible it was by the second month, how…

His hands shook when he was away from her, and he imagined her death and couldn't picture it or mourn it because there wasn't anything after her.

It was the grim whiteness of a corpse, and the blackness of the dead.

In the stories and the descriptions, one of two things happened. Either the pious and caring son by their treatment cures the father or mother, showing their filial piety and respect, rewarding them for it, or the parent dies. Yet dies happy, and giving a blessing or some sign that everything was worth it, that there is at least an end. Instead she lived, but broken. She lingered a year, a broken year at the edge of life, the illness past but the rot there.

She prayed a lot in the last year, for purification and not of her body.

He didn't know what to pray for, what to hope or dream for, what to act for. The Summer ended and it felt as if he were the one rotting away inside.

*****

The Other

Kiralo, Jia, and the death. The twosome, the relationship which had seemed so perfect, between mother and son, now had a third member, who wished to court the mother and leave the son behind. He'd run away from home to train with Lightning, or run the derby or write poems and now death tinged it at the edges.

He felt as cold as if his insides had been plunged into ice, and he'd run the trick shots, pushing his horse as far and fast as sense would go, and then leaping off to run some more, to hone himself until he was worn away.

He'd trudge back home and collapse into the bed as if he were one of the dead, as if he wanted this Other as much as she feared it. And then he'd wake up again, and again, and again.

The days passed slowly but they passed. He cared for her and tried to learn and listened and learned to hate, and sometimes the only warmth there was was that fire. That her mother was dying and Father was alive seemed to him such a great injustice that to think on it would send him storming off.

He was too polite to make a beast of himself with his circle of friends, but he didn't laugh, he didn't smile. He curled himself into a deeper and deeper ball until there was nothing left. He acted, he did, and felt as if it all could end only one way.

Then towards the end, it faded. It was remarkable and horrible, but when his mother finally approached death, when their long fight was at last over, when the battle was lost and the troops fleeing for their lives, then he felt at peace with it.

She had stopped crying long ago, and they'd both run out of tears and reached whatever was left on the other side of tears.

Wills, legacies, memories. Dreams.

She was leaving everything to him, she was banking on him, trusting him to go forward. She had enough wealth to give him a start, to take him to sixteen or seventeen with tutors and the stables and anything he wanted.

The best she could now give him.

A chance.

*****
A Legacy of Gold

There were many legacies, and after her funeral he dug through them. He'd known what she did, but now it became even more clear that she was an amazing woman. Widows or unmarried mothers in the Southlands went to their families, or to their families families' if they had any, and if they did not and could not remarry, they usually starved and did any scrapling work they could, unless their husband had taught them something.

The wife of a Blacksmith might become one as well to feed her children if he died, if she knew the Names of the forge and hearth and steel and fire and leather, if he'd taught her in fear of what might yet come.

Not forever, for every woman was expected to gratefully shuck the burden once their eldest son became sixteen, but it was accepted.

It was through this small hole that Jia slipped, as cunningly as ever. The money Kuojah had sent her, and the false implication that because she recieved letters from him she might have connection, was enough to begin it.

She would donate money to merchants that needed it, and if their venture was a success she would get back a portion. Gambling on good luck and good weather, meeting with people and judging them carefully. She'd grown richer and richer over the years, until even men with long beards and old rheumy eyes whose every child and grandchild had a dowry to marry anyone nodded at her when they entered, and she saved it rather than moving to the wealthy districts.

Or perhaps she'd saved it because Kiralo had friends and interests here, and everything was for him. Maybe she wasn't that different from any other widow in that way, but it was something that he couldn't have managed, something few expected of a woman, and yet she'd done it.

She had shouldered burdens he couldn't understand, including more marriage proposals than he had expected, letter after letter tossed away, and now some of the meetings, some of them men who came again and again in handsome robes backed by dozens of servants, made sense.

He wondered who he'd be if she'd accepted. Not here, sorting through all that remained of the most beautiful woman who had ever lived, the wisest and smartest the…

Every emotion he had thought was dead came to life, like the injured and half-frozen limb which suddenly received a little warmth. It burned, burned and he read through his tears, his heart torn in two and buried at crossroads.

He had friends who were there, including Yata, and he had her legacy.

So he tried to live.

*****
A House in Black and White

The tutors came in serious robes, and he dismissed and hired them as carefully as if it were his last silver piece. He was now the master of his own household, and he managed it as frugally as he could, feeling an obligation that he'd never felt before.

He had a few years, this twelve year old, and he had to make something of himself. For a time he was somber, and for another stretch he was exuberant, but it all came back to the fact that he was changed, and each time he turned to look at it, it was in a different way.

Three years of study, three years of growth.

Even of first awkward kisses that led to very little. New friends and old friends, and all the time the house was the last place he wanted to be.

It was this black and white tomb where she had died, and so he spent as much time as he could outside of it. Lightning was replaced by Cloudsong, grey and white and a beautiful girl indeed, a horse he believed could take him places.

Perhaps he was sick of blacks and whites alone.

Three years was enough.

*****
An Art to War

His vision was war, and his goal was the Rassit. He spent almost a year preparing, and he prepared by reading military manuals and learning what he could from crippled old veterans. Once he knew what he wanted, he could hire such men for the cost of a drink to spill their every story, and he listened and nodded and honed himself.

He didn't read the Csiritan books of war, not until far later. In fact, though he did want them, the letter to his father was a sign more than anything. For the past three years his father had been sending more letters, more stern and yet more formal than any of them before. As if trying to run his life from afar.

To request books on the nature of war was a sign, and it was a sign that Kuojah understood all too well.

*****
Proof of Meaning

His legs gripped tighter to Cloudsong's body as he raced along the pitch, the wind howling at his back. Faster, faster than he'd ever been. His hands gripped the short bow, so carefully chosen and so carefully made, and he pulled it back, horse racing so fast that he thought he would fly off.

Yells filled the air as he fired a bolt at the target the size of a fist on the tree. Under his breath he whispered to Anin, God of Warriors, and to the spirits of the bow and the wood, the horse and metal, to everything he could, imploring that they aid his shot. But he was already passing, and there was another target, but he shifted his right leg and Cloudsong dodged the obstacle, and now he wove while trying to line up another shot, this one through a ring hanging opposite the other one, and then turn, turn as fast as he could.

Now he did almost fall off, but he was racing ahead. Another arrow entered the air and he was knocking a fourth as he moved forward. This target was far lower, infantry probably.

The roar filled his head as he moved. Sweat almost blinding him as moved, body tense.

"Left!" a voice called, and Cloudsong turned almost literally upon a coin, and he raced down at the targets. Dozens and dozens, and he was expected to mow by them. Arrow after arrow entered the targets, and moving this fast, with this much at stake, he didn't try to get fancy. He aimed for their body and nothing more and then whipped around for the charge that was expected, groping clumsily for the sword.

Mounted Archery at targets was the same as the real thing, at least in the sense that once the targets could move and were far enough away, it was difficult. But he'd never truly practiced using the sword in these conditions, and yet he rode through the 'ranks' and slashed as he could, before being ordered to turn again, and again. To flank the foe here and charge them there, until Cloudsong was groaning under his command and until the roar of the crowd had died away. They stood in clumps and masses, and he rode by them when at last there was a call, "Halt!"

He adjusted the helmet, the horsehair itching against his back, rubbing Cloudsong and whispering. "Thank you, Cloudsong."

Maybe it wasn't enough. He felt good at what he was doing, he thought he'd done well, but they were the Wind-Dancer Rassit. He was hardly trying out for a third-rate operation, and they mostly replaced their members from experienced Rassit.

He rode up to where the three members were. One almost thirty, hair already growing grey, one a year or two younger and slightly plump, but with scars all across his face, and a third, handsome and perhaps twenty, two scars across his chin, with perhaps the most impressing moustache he had ever seen.

"I do say...that was...well," the plump one began.

"Were you born in the saddle, boy?" the greying man asked, his voice fast and rapid, bordering on Far Southerner for how different it was from the way people around here talked.

"If'n it makes you more likely to say yes," he said, and was it strange that he felt pride that he sounded like he belonged in the city more than the greying man, not a trace of anything except a proper North Southlander in his voice, "Then I'd be born on anything you want."

The man with the moustache broke out laughing. "By the Spirits, I like you already boy? How old are you?"

"Fifteen, but--"

"Spirits," the plump man said, quietly.

"And your name? I am Kueli," the man with the moustache said.

Kiralo hesitated and said, "Kiralo."

He pulled off his helmet, and they stared.

"You look a full-blooded Csiritan," the greying man said, "We haven't...well."

"You can call me Etya," the plump man said, "And watching you...I saw a mediocre Rassit."

Kiralo flushed, and perhaps not all of them could be so easily charmed.

"But you're fifteen, and trained in none of it, hm? Someone who is a mediocre Rassit at fifteen is likely to become a great one, if they've trained all of that on their own," Etya said. "I am impressed. And your father not a Rassit at all?"

"I never knew him," Kiralo said, which was closer to the truth than he wanted.

Kueli said, "Enough with the questioning. We've bastards enough here, what's one more? And first full-blooded Csiritan since ol' Hano a decade ago." He shrugged, his words blunt.

"By that we mean, we would be happy to have you," Etya said. "Now, we need to see who else we might bring."

He turned back to the crowds, and the other applicants on their mounts, ready to do the run he'd just done.

He'd done it.

Mom. Mom.

He was going to become a Rassit.

*****
A/N: Okay, so I'm really uncertain about this because there's so much ground to cover that it's hard to do good character and worldbuilding and move things along without it being too long. So it kinda sucks.

But...

Eh. Anyways, also, I decided. Reaction Posts and Omakes will be rewarded with bonuses to dice rolls so long as it doesn't suck all the tension out of the game.
 
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I am going to try my hand for short not-canon omake.

*****

He stood before a silver mirror, which was a little higher then him. It was an expensive investment, he would see if it would pay off.

He spoke a Name before the mirror. It was name of strange spirit, not material but of concepts, and even for them is strange one. As he understood it represented unwalked paths. Which was strance since it represented concept and not merely path on which no man walked.

His reflection shifted, his tattoos fading, his muscles growing and his garment lost its magic properties and changed into something else.

But even if it was different, it was still him.

'Now I understand. It shows neither past nor future, but unrealized possibilities. So in another life I might have become Wind-Dancer Rassit', Kiralo thought.

Still there is wisdom in this. And also there were practical uses. Many man, especially older richer ones, were plagued with regret. Showing how their life might gone should give them some comfort. But first he should add more impressive frame to the mirror.

****

I still miss love-guru (especially now when I can see what could be done with spirits)
 
I don't have any time, but I just want to say that I'm loving this.
 
Kiarlo: An Education In Life (0-15)

Smooth

You misspelled our name here but not in the threadmark.

A view of Herinzet

Harinzet was not the jewel of the Seventeen Cities. It wasn't nearly as large as Ahine, nor as rich as Sassis, but it was still a wondrous jewel, especially for a young boy, so young that the streets around their villa, located off the heart of the city, seemed the entire world. It would take years, decades, for him to slowly realize the shape and nature of the city.

Herinzet or harinzet? one is wrong, I'm sure.


Of course a poet could, but the more he studied those poems, and the more he heard the restrictions, the way this word and that word paired together was inauspicious, the way there were very specific forms and topics and the way, he slowly figured out, that his father was not actually a very good poet. He was a competent poet in the sense that the Civil Service Exams had required him to be, and he could fill in the blanks that Csiritan poetry fell into without a deft hand as easily as anyone else.

But he wasn't good at it. Competent, and that even barely.

I like this bit, the way we notice possessing a skill our father lacks.

Faith buried itself deep into his heart, and like the blossom that survives underground even through the hardest winter, when all doubts had passed, there was a bountiful harvest.

Daaaaw.


This target was fall lower, infantry probably.

Far lower, I think?
 
You misspelled our name here but not in the threadmark.



Herinzet or harinzet? one is wrong, I'm sure.




I like this bit, the way we notice possessing a skill our father lacks.



Daaaaw.




Far lower, I think?

Fixed. And it's Herinzet. Hari is far too Csiritan of a word. As much as in a vague way I'm trying to make different languages without any competence, Hari is a Csiritan word/combination.
 
A Soldier's Story (15-24)
A Soldier's Story (15-24)

Care


Kiralo hadn't expected war and death, as some of the other recruits had, and so he wasn't surprised when what he did was clean his horse and learn how to care for injured horses. When he was made to run back and forth carrying loads of water or chopping wood for fires. Others complained, but he knew that this was part of living, and he'd had three years desperately trying to live on his own as best he could.

He'd seen what the peasants would do to survive, and knew that plenty of them were dead now. Friends he would never meet again, whose names perhaps he would one day forget as horrible as it was. Scars faded, he knew it as a fact.

So he endured and survived and learned. And as he worked they'd whisper the Names to him. The spirit of the Horses of the Southlands, powerful and easy to rile. They warned him to invoke It only when one is willing to hear a response.

And then spirits of the Wind, and the Storms, spirits of the West and of the North, of the rays of the sun as they hit the ground, spirits whose names and natures were confused. Piece by piece, day by day he served, and that's what it was, service.

He poured drinks and smiled and talked. He learned their names and if he might eventually forget them, he remembered them the whole time, and teased out their past while keeping his secret. "Hey, how is Blossom...now, now, don't yell at me, you're the one who drank the rice wine, not me...of course, this way. You should put on your leggings, it's nothing I want to see," he joked with one, and then another, working as best he could.

He rode every day, but not against bandits or armies, but on patrol. Scouting ahead was one of the first things they taught you of tactics. If you were exhausted from a day of racing across the plains, you still sent out scouts and kept an eye out. The terrain was everything. "You can tell a good Rassit from a bad one less by how they fight: I'd take a good one that was average at best over a killer who doesn't know what he is," Kuilo said, "Instead, look at whether they're willing to scout. After a battle, before a battle, during a march, in the driving rains. A blind Rassit is a useless man, and the army he is part of if he is one is a fools' army, headed into the deep desert. No offense meant to your ancestors."

They still talked about the Oasis campaign two-hundred years later. Nearly a hundred thousand men in two armies had gone south to finish off the Kingdoms of the Oasis and with it the last major Southland resistance to their century of expansion.

About ten thousand people had emerged, most of them broken or captives or worse.

"None taken," Kiralo said, well aware that to have Kueli as a teacher was an honor. The man, besides having the finest mustache known to man, was an excellent rider and often regarded as a possible next Captain, when Captain Yahin stepped down. He was said to be oddly cunning with coming up with ambushes, and he handled much of the logistics of the Wind-Dancers.

Father a merchant, he'd said once, and a sneaky fellow. Mother the daughter of a famous Rassit. He'd been taught from birth, almost, to shoot an arrow and ride a horse. It was something to behold, indeed.

So he listened and learned as they scouted out and examined terrain and he listened and nodded to everything and at everything.

It was easy enough, to ride out into the night and be there with nothing more than yourself and your eyes, to try to spot in the darkness the shape of threats and the turn of the trail. Kueli told him that a single upturned root could decide the fate of a skirmish if one Rassit knew of it and another didn't. That the way the land dipped and dived gave room to ambush and avenues to run.

The world, through Kueli's eyes, was as wide as could be, and Kiralo couldn't help but like the man, for all that he was far from the most polished.

Polish wasn't something required for the Rassit.

And the world was wide when he was a Wind-Dancer, traveling across three cities in a matter of weeks, and that taking it slow, the world racing by. They were even going slow to allow the new blood to begin to learn the secrets to speed, to daring the winds itself.

Those were secrets it would yet take time, and yet the feeling with the wind in his blood and even the slightest second-hand trace of what sorts of spirits of speed there were left him laughing and heady.

There were other things to learn as well, ones he wouldn't have thought of. He already knew how to cook for himself, well enough, but he learned more, and sewing as well. "If your pants are falling apart or your formal robes for meeting the muckity-mucks have tears in them, then you'll want to know how to manage it, and when you're out in the field and your clothes are ripped up, you'll regret not learning it," he said to all of them, but it was Kiralo who had taken easiest to it. It was relaxing in a way, and being raised by his mother as he was meant that he didn't think a little work was beneath his manly pride.

His mother had done all of that and more for him, and done it while becoming rich off careful investment. So he sewed his own clothes and cooked meals and did everything for himself, as he'd been doing to a lesser extent for years.

When they finally stopped in the fourth city, having passed several towns, Kueli said, "Hey, let's go out on the town. I know where some night-ladies are, and good ones. Clardin is famous for them, in fact. The silken dancers and the others…"

"I'm Mirena," he had admitted.

"This...this is terrible!" Kueli had said, and Kiralo, used to bland nods and at worst mutters about making families weaker, was stunned.

"It is?"

"Because surely you have fallen for me," Kueli said, "And yet I harbor no lust for man, only women and drink!"

"I...what?" Kiralo asked, knowing he was being thrown for a turn by Kueli's humor and yet relishing the end of it.

"Many women have told me that this is irresistable," Kueli said, and he fingered his brownish-black mustache. "So, surely you've fallen madly for me!"

Kiralo considered it, since it was possible. He'd certainly fallen for older men before, and Kueli was an impressive specimen of a man, but no, something...well, Kiralo had no idea if he had a type except for what he didn't want, but he shrugged, "What can I say? The mustache is amazing, but envy is not desire."

"You'd be surprised, young man," Kueli said, as if the difference weren't only five years, "Well if Silken Dancers are not your speed, what about the Silver Steeds?"

"What are...they?" Kiralo asked.

"Young men, all of them. Some as slender and lithe as a willow branch, some as strong as any warrior, but they dance for you, naked, only not. Rings in their ears as if they are a sailor, silver rings, rings on their tongues and rings on their fingers and on their…" he touched his chest and laughed as Kiralo's face grew red, "And bangles on their arms and legs, and then, filled with spirits for virility and everything else, a ring on their…"

And the leer he gave and the gestures he made told the whole story.

Kiralo was as red as a Far Southlander after a week in the sun now, and he shook his head.

He looked--and it was something any man should see at least once, and perhaps more than that--but he didn't touch. It would be...awfully intimidating, for one of them to be one's first time.

Kiralo didn't have a bad opinion of himself, and he knew he was attractive, but there was a little difference between himself and a boy of eighteen, and yet shorter than him, dark of hair and eyes, whose every movement had the grace of an innocence that couldn't exist, or his partner, a strong looking farmboy whose eyes sparked desire.

It was all...well, a little too much.

But what mattered is that Kueli cared and didn't care. Didn't care about what shouldn't matter and cared about what should.

By the second time Kiralo had escorted a drunk Kueli back to camp, they were fast friends.

*****

That Bloody Dance

"Alright, mind me. War doesn't happen often," Kueli explained one day over the campfire to him and others, "But when it does, cavalry most often fights cavalry. Skirmishes, most often, but there is a logic to it, if one cannot ambush another, there are choices. It is like being asked to dance. If you dance, that is where you engage but do not meet. The Rassit keeps out of range of the enemy, and the enemy if they are Rassit does what they can to do the same or close the distance, and each exchange arrows and try to bring each other down. So, they can dance, or they can disengage, leave the area or refuse to fight. A Rassit never has to fight, they choose as no one else does. But there is more, sometimes it calls for dancing of a different sort. The rough, brutal sort of dances that moralists say only the married should do, skin on skin and flesh on flesh. That is the clash of swords, the chaotic swirl in which suddenly that skill which we care for least, the sword compared to the bow, suddenly becomes most."

"How do you know what to decide?" one boy asked, as if the question wasn't obvious.

"Experience, luck. Think through what you're doing and obey orders and fight as hard as you can. A Tarnarin is strong enough that if they get a close dance, they'll win nine times out of ten, and maybe more. But running from the engagement like a woman whose father has seen her leaves the Tarnarin to deal his wrath. A Dance takes time, and time can be valuable. A good unit of Rassit can force an enemy to waste valuable resources doing pitiful damage when they could be hitting your own line with the force of thunder itself."

Kiralo nodded, and listened.

"Of course, I've only been in one battle, and it wasn't much of one. We're living in a peaceful time, lads. For now, at least."

*****

Boy

A little into the first year with the Wind-Dancers, with his experience still being little more than patrolling, and running across a bandit who was so surprised he surrendered then and there, Kueli said, "We need to find you a Rassit Romance."

Kiralo frowned, knowing what it was. They often stayed in the same town or city for only weeks at a time, and so a Rassit Romance was where you found a man or woman and for a few weeks swept them off their feet. Acted as if this was the great love affair of their life. The nice ones, of course, told their partner, so that they knew the game. It was a full romance, with presents and love and everything else, and then they left when they had to.

It was an old tradition, and he knew he'd never lie to someone and say it was something it wasn't, but it sounded nice, and oddly sweet for all that it sounded deeply cynical. So he'd nodded and Kueli had left the regular bars and seedy back alleys in search of someplace that catered to Mirena.

Once there, he found that there were many men there that did not please him. Fat old men with huge beards, as large as a barrel, who patted their lap and said, "C'mere, beautiful boy, I'd like to talk to you."

Who looked at him as if he were meat. He knew he was attractive. In the tight green and black cloth robes, wrapped around him in a single layer, pinned gently up, his arms were visible. Hard-worn arms, and a body that even at fifteen was showing the lean and powerful muscle of the Rassit, with neck-length hair that was still silken and dark. Mysterious features, dark eyes, fine...like, he knew all of that.

But the way they stared at him still made him flush.

Yet he laughed it off where other men might have demanded satisfaction.

"I'd have decked the creepy fucker," Kueli said.

"I see it this way, or try to," Kiralo pointed out, "Did you deck Ohsti?"

"Well, no, she's as ugly as them, I'll admit. Spirits…"

"I take it as a compliment," Kiralo said, "Though...those aren't my type at all."

"Which is?"

"I know it when I see it."

He didn't have a Rassit Romance in that city, but in the next town, where they stayed for a month clearing out supposed bandits and mostly spinning their wheels, he had one with the son of a local merchant, six months older yet with a certain interesting innocence.

Kiralo eventually figured out that his type had less to do with body or even personality than it did any number of dozens of strange combinations of the two that worked for him.

He did try to spare Kueli the details, though, for all that Kueli didn't always return the favor when talking about some of the women he'd met and fucked over the years.

*****
Campfire Songs

When they learned he had a good singing voice, they immediately started teaching him their songs and even their poems, though there were few enough who were true poets. Yet those who were gave advice, and he honed his craft and practiced singing or saying it while he was in front of the campfire.

Sometimes they dared each other to leap over the fire on their horse, or to order the spirits of the fire to go out or flame up, and the spirits would sometimes obey and sometimes would rear up, mottled red and strange and thin, weak spirits that gathered to bask in the flames, or were made by the flames to some extent.

Sometimes they'd give him an instrument and he'd bang on it and shake it, but mostly it was his voice and dozens of other voices, joined in song.

His poems took on a more military nature, but he tried to be more than that, and he tried to describe what people would miss. The quiet of a patrol, the warmth of a horse, or running across a hunter suddenly in the woods shocked to see another living being, let alone a Rassit.

It wasn't a lonely life at all, and poetry was about everything but loneliness. Even a poem about being lonely, about those years alone or about those who were without anyone else was ultimately, he thought, also about other people. Absence could only exist in reference to presence, and so a poem about untouched nature was also a poem about the fact that nature existed to be seen and touched--or left untouched.

A poem about spirits was about spirits, about groups and dynamics, about walking through the woods and seeing them fly up and stumbling back laughing. A poem in those days might end with telling it around the campfire, but it started from a dozen experiences and a hundred stories he heard or imagined, all churned up and ground up in the silence of his thoughtful mind until at last he got what he wanted.

Not every verse worked, not every line was perfect, but it was enough.

And he was proud enough of them that Kiralo did not hesitate to disclaim them around a campfire, or sing or dance, or do anything at all.

"You could have been a trained animal instead of a Rassit," Kueli had said after one drunken demonstration of prowess that had ended with him leaping over the firepit.

"Maybe I'll do that too," Kiralo had declared, though his head ached and he knew it was not sense.

Sometimes a little drink loosened his tongue until it rolled out of his head, but even drunk there was still poetry on it.

Poetry and song.


*****
Prize

The first time he truly gained a prize, that he was paid more than the share of the contracts they pursued, was after they'd rousted a whole nest of bandits. There hadn't even been much of a fight, and Kiralo had badly injured several of them, but as yet remained relatively unblooded.

But the bandits had been taken care of, and their gear and what they'd stolen from several towns was now divided up almost seven-hundred ways. It was hardly, then, the vast bounty one might expect, but it was something, and a considerable something.

Which was why Captain Yahin approached him. The man was as tall as any man Kiralo had seen in his life, his face a puckered mass of scars, his eyes shining out from them, face a sort of burnt yellow. He was built like an Aedaemon, and he could ride and fight to put a Tarnarin to shame and disgrace.

His grasp of the logistics of war was a little shaky, but the man was a great leader, and he was still nervous in his presence. "So, what are you thinking of getting with your prize? Hopefully not more of those books on Arimism or whatnot, Kiralo."

He'd taken to...okay, it was more people insulted Csiritan religion in front of him and so he argued back sometimes. As politely as he could. And he'd started reading about the other religions to try to counter their points. It wasn't as if he was obsessed with it, really, but he did buy books on occasion. "They started it," Kiralo said, flushing at how childish that sounded. He was sixteen, a man now, but that was all he could come up with?

"I'm sure they did, though I too find the idea of worshipping a man faintly ridiculous."

"It isn't…" Kiralo trailed off and said, "Never mind. No, probably not, I'm not sure what I'll do."

"Well, you're a Rassit, so remember, you travel fast and you travel light. I'd invest it if I were you, at one of the banks of the Seventeen cities, or find a good man who can handle the money side of things. When you retire, you'll be glad of it."

Kiralo frowned and thought about it, but eventually he decided on something a little different.

At one of the shrines he'd been arguing at--having passed it when someone was saying just the right thing--they gave away alms to the poor. He couldn't exactly afford much, but he bought food and gave what he could.

It was slightly satisfying, but also intensely frustrating, this feeling that there was far too much for any one man to do.

He didn't throw away all of his coins, then or later, on it. And he took the Captain's advice, at least as far as saving up money went, but he still sometimes gave out coins.

It was his prize money, after all.

*****

Geru

The first person that Kiralo entered into a long term relationship with was Geru. He was a year older when they first took those awkward steps towards something more, almost eighteen to his almost-seventeen, a quarter Csirit which showed in a certain fineness of features that was belied by his bull's strength. He had strong, heavy muscles, and his eyes seemed to flash with amusement and wry jokes. There was a power and an authority to him that he wore well.

He'd lived his life with none of the doubts or uncertainties that had sometimes crept up on Kiralo, and he was smart despite not being very well educated. What did he need of education when he had his prowess and his mind, and everything else he so ably and deftly used?

So Kiralo fell for him, and Geru fell back, and for a year they were happy, for a year and a half they were together.

In a way it wasn't much more than what it was. Or, rather. It wasn't a Rassit Romance. Flowers weren't involved (often) and hiring a chef to prepare a meal didn't happen (except once), and so most of what they did involved being together. Friends, as it were, but something over the edge into more, even before it came to the sex.

Or the poetry he sometimes wrote and then didn't tell anyone because of all of the insipid things he'd done in his life...he wasn't going to admit love poetry was one of them. If these oddly personal and yet oddly abstract poems were the bane of Csiritan poetry, then the overly self-involved love poems (like the ones he wrote or composed in his head) were the bane of Southlands poetry.

Geru was sweet, and kind, and strong, and more than that, for all that they did not share quite as many interests--Kiralo was aware that he was the reasonably well-educated (even if it had been cut brief) son of a Csiritan lady who wrote poetry and debated theology--as he might like, they still worked together.

Then, in a routine enough skirmish that managed not to evolve into a battle, something happened. It was between a small mercenary band of Rassit that had hired on with a rebelling township that wanted its city (and by this point Kiralo had been to each of the Seventeen Cities at least once) to exert less control over it, and the Wind Dancers. They were outnumbered seven-to-one, and so the fight ended quickly and with only a few deaths, and the enemy Rassit should have run.

But during the skirmish Geru was unhorsed, and his leg badly broken. It healed, though not as well as it should have.

Kiralo could only watch, as Geru drifted away for those last six months. He drank more and more to deal with the pain, and pushed himself as hard as he could to get better and yelled and slung insults at him even as Kiralo tended to him.

It was a little like with his mother, this process of slowly dying inside as you tended to someone else and started to realize that maybe they would not get better. Geru drank yet more, and now half the words out of his mouth were drunken insults, but he was fine. It was fine. It wasn't as if half the Rassit didn't have mouths that were sewer privies, even if it felt a little personal.

He was a man, though, and while he knew the power of words, it wasn't as if they actually hurt him. He was fine. It was fine. They were probably even fine, and when he was sober an apology could usually be shaken out of Geru.

So they slept near each other or in the same tent, and Kiralo helped him how he could and listened, or at least let the sounds wash over his ears, when Geru complained about something. Everything, it felt like, and Kiralo most of all. He could be sweet sometimes, and that was what mattered, and they still had sex so what was it that he cared about happiness?

After all, he'd seen enough of the world to know that happiness was rare enough in a relationship, so he just endured.

Until he didn't.

Geru was complaining about something that night. Probably the rain, which had been heavy and unseasonable, washing the plains clean and no doubt destroying plenty of crops. People would starve and die, and Geru was complaining about his wet boots.

But Kiralo nodded along as he worked on replacing the leather in Geru's boots, adding another layer. Easy, simple work that he did for himself as well.

Then Geru hit him in the face. Hard. Geru was a bull of a man, and he hadn't seen it coming at all. Just pain and stumbling back and red rage that he barely held in check.

Kuojah's father. Kuojah's mother. Jia's stories.

"Fuck you," Kiralo spat.

"You stupid bitch, pay attention to me when I'm trying to tell you something," Geru said.

"I'm gone," Kiralo said, and turned.

"Wait, fuck, I didn't mean it like--" Geru said, sounding apologetic, or like he was trying to sound apologetic.

"Fuck you," Kiralo said, and he was hardly acting the poet right now, hardly any eloquence to him at all, words spat out.

Which is when Geru charged him with a knife. He had his back turned, but he turned just in time to dodge a thrust that seemed designed to go for his face.

Kiralo had killed by this point, but he instead forced the dagger away and tackled the man.

It was almost familiar. They rolled together, struggling and sweating and grappling, their words reduced to curses, their names repeated and yelled or whispered or everything else, rolling and rolling. Only screams replaced moans and sighs, pain replaced playful grappling. Hate replaced love as they rolled out into the dirt and mud, and fought as furiously as they had ever fought.

Kiralo stared down at him when he was at last pinned, halfway in the mud, mouth barely above the water. People were running, and Kiralo kicked him once, as hard as he could, and then got up and stumbled off into the night.

He didn't sleep that night, not even for a minute.

He didn't return to Geru.

Two weeks later, he was relieved when Geru quit for different pastures, and he didn't ask whether his friends might have had something to do with that.

It was mostly Rassit Romances after that. Even those, as infrequently as he did them, made him wonder.

*****

Holding Court

It was early in his relationship with Geru that he figured out something he hadn't expected. He liked going to Court. In each city the Captain and others would be dragged up to show themselves up and talk to this noble or that merchant, or the Prince or full Council if there was a contract to negotiate.

He liked talking to people there, and he knew enough about Csiritan manners (and most courtiers knew enough about them to know he was being polite) to imitate court formalities, and once he'd learned the Southlands version it was easy. They talked of books and poems, they walked in gardens, and if he was more active than them, it didn't mean they didn't have value.

So he made friends and allies as he went court by court.

He also made enemies, of course. Two in particular vexed his poetic career, though by the time he'd gained the second the first was a friend. A friend who still sent angry, decrepit-old-man letters which mixed insults to Csiritans and their poetry with a fondness that was his true achievement.

Certainly, nobody could call Narasim's poetry anything to consider. Well, they could, but Kiralo was startled by how formal it was, even if it was still better than Kuojah's. That wasn't much of a compliment, and neither was that he was a better poet than the idiotic young man who had challenged him to a duel when he was twenty-three.

The courts always had something interesting for him, though when he'd invited Kueli or Geru, they always demurred.

So it remained a strange affection of his, the way he went out of his way to find his entree into the highest levels of society and the lowest...one which was often commented upon. But there were people there that loved his poetry, and men who liked more than that, and musicians and dancers and ritual and ceremony, and he lost himself in all of that.

Only later, when he was past twenty-one, would a hint of darkness and uncertainty wander into his relations with the court.
*****

Bodies

Kiralo hated the stench of dead bodies, and yet he buried them. This wasn't the first time and it wasn't the last he'd do it. But the stink of the corpses, the way the flies rose up as a mass when he approached, fleeing before him, it was its own kind of horrible. He liked the fighting for itself, and it was as necessary then as it would be three years later when he fought his first real battle, several thousand on each side.

At seventeen, though, he was new to the dead. He'd killed two of them, and if they were bandits who had killed peasants and stolen valuable lifestock and would have done it again and again until someone ran them off, that didn't change the fact that they were dead. He could tell which arrows were his, and the men didn't look like anything in death.

Not bad, not good. Smelly, dirty, ragged.

Fools, now down to the Judges. But it was one thing to think that and it was another to face it like this. He'd never killed a man outside of combat, never killed at all. And in his twenty five years he'd never kill a man who wasn't a soldier, though he had killed fleeing enemies before, those who would not stand and fight.

Then, and now, the same thought had always occured to him, the lack of difference between it all. An enemy turned to run or one picked out by an arrow when all he could see was the dust from the horses, it was all the same in a way.

It ended the same, and Kiralo was skilled enough in the saddle by that point, let alone later, that he couldn't pretend that it wasn't vexing.

He liked it, in a way. He liked the fight, the task, the challenge, but the dead who had to be buried, those were more difficult.

He said the prayers he knew, the incantations, for he had grown as strong in the way of the Spirits as the body. To war, to peace, to anything, and to the Judges themselves. He did what he could. Down, down into the cold earth. Far up north they burned the bodies and he could not imagine what that smelled like.

The air felt crisp and yet befouled when he was done, and the peasants wanted to kill the bandits, those captured.

"No," Kiralo whispered.

That's all there were, small mercies.

After his first real battle he'd gone across the field, to try to understand what there was. If he saw someone who could be saved, a wounded man, he'd approach them and perhaps save them. A few, but it hurt nothing. Mercenaries after a battle were not going to continue the war.

And those that were going to die? What he should have done was kill them, save them the mercy of their deaths, but perhaps there was a softness in him that was truly weakness.

Kindness and Justice were not always the same. Instead he poured out water onto the dying.

Water, water endless like upon a desert. Nobody was ever made happier, nobody was ever saved for a little water before their deaths. But then again, there were the Judges, and perhaps…

He didn't know.

Useless, useless, the crow cried in the folk story at each man's efforts as they marched towards the grave.

And still they marched. Laughed even, as he did. Lived.

*****

Court by Court

When it was finally revealed by some foolish courtier digging too far that he was not merely Kiralo but Kiralo of lineage Ainin, son of Kuojah, who ruled Csirit all of those years. It changed everything. People looked at him differently and they laughed at his jokes with a different edge. the Captain called him up and asked if he'd like a position as one of the sub-leaders, though to be fair he'd also called Kueli with the same offer.

Kiralo knew it had to be that, because he was only twenty-one, far too young to even begin to have a leadership position.

He was untried and if he was blooded, that was not the same as being a born Southlander. He was confident of course that one day he'd be a sub-commander, maybe in three or four years once he'd proven himself.

Kiralo was not one for false humility, but he was sure that this was politics as much as everything, and advertising as well. But he was no slacker and no fool, and so he tried as hard as he could to live up to the expectations.

Over three years he led, and he tried to learn the names and the weaknesses and strengths of each of the men under him, read about tactics and strategies and interrogated everyone he could on the matter. He went to Kueli for advice on logistics and others for yet other advice, worked as hard as he could and so when Captain Yahin retired with a 'I'm forty-and-four, and Kiralo, you're a damn fine Rassit' he was not as surprised as he should have been.

Startled, and worried about what Kueli, clearly older and clearly a very good choice, would say about it.

Yet Kueli only laughed when he heard and clasped his shoulder, "Onward and upwards. I knew you had it in you."

He wasn't so sure, but he was going to do his best.

*****
A/N: Rather unsatisfied with this, it felt like I skipped over too much, but...hopefully it's alright. Reaction-posts at this point will go to the trait rolls for Banner Day.
 
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*****
A/N: Rather unsatisfied with this, it felt like I skipped over too much, but...hopefully it's alright. Reaction-posts at this point will go to the trait rolls for Banner Day.

It skips some things (it would be fun to see more of poet feud) but it is alredy very long. You keep well with style. I like also like very much how are you treating romance here. It is very well written. I also like his ineraction with future lt. You have made very organic.
 
Just fyi, your work is deeply impressive, and I've been hesitant to post out of intimidation as much as anything.
It's fun to try and understand how a child thinks, and very easy to forget. I like the simplicity of his world, and the endless surprise of new things. Not much to say about the character here, since this bit reaffirms long-established points about his father and his position.
I feel like you put him in a home town that might be easy to forget. Average in many aspects. It's suitable, for the prospective cavalry-commander to have an easier time with homesickness. Kids being kids is nice, Kiralo is tentatively established as the friendly, popular sort. It lays groundwork for his rapidly-expanding worldview.
This is just absurdly classic. Kid meets fascination, roll montage, great person does great things.
You know, in another world Kiralo could be a hit pop star. Beautiful singer/poet and all that. The art and music help bring your world to life, and make Kiralo much more vibrant.
This right here, is why I'm scared to post. You're spitting out poetry and heavily-laden text I feel unqualified to analyze. It's fantastic, yes, but I think I miss a lot. I don't think this is criticism, unless you count being too good for forum quests as a flaw. Anyway, the surprise at his distant, educated father's inability is pretty damn formative for Kiralo.
Short and simple. His faith grounds him, and gives him something to turn to in hard times. It's ironic that in a world with magic, faith is much the same. I guess the difference between gods and spirits is the necessity of belief.
The Process of Living
Man, when you put forth a C2K quest, I kind of assume utilitarian cruelty will be the order of the day. We're not yet in the game proper, but Kiralo is looking like quite the upstanding dude. I do like the window into the lower-classes' lives. It's helpful for us and for Kiralo to understand them a bit better.
This is adorable, like first crushes always are. Needing an heir may complicate our husbando-wars in the future.
Racing Through Youth
This one is a bit less focused, just the general growth and change of childhood. More on spirits, the inklings of ambition, and defiance.
Kiralo's world grows again while he comes into his own as a poet. It's almost... poetic.
Rot and Purification
Here's the actual end of childhood. It's tragic, and it's life.
The Arfu, as some called it, almost comically named.
How so?
Coping is vital, and peace is better.
This is a pretty astounding achievement, and Kiralo is right to be impressed. I suspect this lowers his father in Kiralo's eyes more than anything else. That she did everything for him, and more, while Kuojah wrote letters.
A House in Black and White
He's forced to grow up fast, and manages it. It's not at all surprising that he'd want to leave.
Dissapointing Kuojah is just a bonus, here. Though I imagine this has been fairly heartbreaking, even for a man like him.
The triumphant beginning. Get Hype.
Kueli is hilarious. The Rassit are unsurprisingly tight-knit.
Just straight wisdom being doled out.
Man, the Rassit Romance is fantastic. Classics are gonna be written about this.
The Laurent is a cruel man, who enjoys dissapointing fictional young girls with stories of a beautiful successful Rassit who sings like a bird, leaps tall fires, and turns out to be totally gay.
[Noblesse Oblige Intensifies]
Romance and tragedy go hand in hand. I can think of half a dozen trite sayings about love that apply here, and it's very real.
Gee, I wonder if this will turn out to be useful? The contrast with the other Rassit is fun, though.
Kiralo has had to learn to accept death from two sides now, those he's had to kill and one he wished to save.
The legend begins! I, for one, am thrilled to see this continue.
I've really enjoyed these short stories, and I think they'll help us shape the game in the future. Most of the quests I've followed struggled with the characterization of the PC, but here we'll have a strong background to look to.
 
Alright, that's definitely worth a +5 to a roll in the Banner Day. I'll even be nice and try to look for something that might need it. Also, Kueli is the second-in-command, though I think that's obvious enough.

I'll be posting his character sheet after I'm done with Banner Day, but before the Turn 0.


In the mid-Southlands, the phonetic representation of a dog's bark is actually similar to one of the representations of it in American. Arf, or something close to that. So Arfu sounds like it's some weird dog sound. Only it's a horrible deadly disease.

In Far Southlander, it doesn't sound at all like how they'd describe a dog to bark because people render dog barks phonetically a lot of different ways.
 
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He was said to be oddly cunning with coming up with ambushes, and he handled all much of the logistics of the Wind-Dancers.

'all much' looks to me like you changed your word choice and failed to delete the old

"I see it this way, or try to," Kiralo pointed out, "Did you duck Ohsti?"

Pretty sure this should be deck, not 'duck'

The first time he truly gained a prize, that he was paid more than the share of the contracts they pursued, was after they'd rousted a while nest of bandits.

probably whole nest, not 'while nest'

He liked the fighting for itself, and it was necessary then as it would be three years later when he fought his first real battle, several thousand on each side.

I'm not actually convinced this is an error but it crossed my mind you may have intended 'was as necessary' or similar.

Kiralo knew it had to be because he was only twenty-one, far too young to even begin to have a leadership position.

This seems like it's missing a bit, as is it reads as 'he knew he was being selected for a leadership position on the basic of his young age that renders him inappropriate for a leadership position', to me, at least.
 
Bloody hell Laurent, as usual you make me completely and utterly ashamed of the miserable dreck I scrawl while you're dropping gold. :D
 
Is another reaction post welcome? Sorry, I could only have written it recently. Time zones and all that. I'll try to talk about subjects Fumbles hasn't or has but where I have something else to say to avoid redundancy.

Before I begin, my preamble. I'm fond of how you formatted your telling of Kiralo's past. Reminds me of my past English class and how this was one of the favored styles, and for good reason. They become like windows, looking back, of a past. There's something ephemereal about them, like they're flitting about. We get a glimpse there and then of things that define Kiralo but never in one continuous stream. Perhaps others may want different but the Narrator goes where he pleases. And though the narrative timeline is mostly held intact it's not a hard set rule as you go back and forth between years.

Kiralo: An Education In Life (0-15)
Your childhood defines you. Here the start of what he will become, though he may discover new things well down his life, for the sake of the narrative, we begin forming his character's defining traits here.

There's really not much to say here story-wise. It sets up Kiralo's childhood and is the beginning narrative of his life. What I'd like to focus on is your use of the metaphor; smooth, important and prevalent enough to be the title of this blurb.

Smooth to describe Mother and Father, and they're influence in our protagonist's childhood. Smoothness, used to describe them both. In ways the two parents are similar, both incredibly Csiritan. Yet where Jia's smoothness is warm and familiar, Kuojah's is a cold stone polished by rivers.

I don't think it's coincidence when this is the second time you used the word 'polish' in regards to Father. The realm is polished like an collector's sword under his rule. His letters polish us as he desires, smoothing the the irregularities and undesired until we are perfect. The world is his to care and remake until it mirrors only his image.

A description of where this story post is set. I think of Florence or of Constantinople (though Herinzet must not be so grand) in the Assassin's Creed games, all domes and sun-bleached bricks, buildings the color of sand. Where we read the beginnings of his love of...

horses,...

singing,...

poetry,...

and religion.

The Process of Living
Sympathy is much more different from empathy. Make no mistake, both are very welcome, but I wonder if Kiralo mistakes one for the other. For all his mother's death and his father's absence and his time as a mercenary (in a very well-regarded company), he is still a rich boy. Perhaps he will never know as the poor knows how it is to live like them, and that is fine. One does not need to be poor to be good or thoughtful of others.

Hmm. Worldbuilding in the form of narrative and characterization. Love it.

Racing Through Youth
A slice of life. As is what makes much of this post before the death of his mother. His childhood and what comes before it all falls down.

More of poetry. And he merges his ancestry with his home and what comes of it, no one knows. Know one knows what to make of it. Csiritan and Southlander blended together, his father would be... displeased.

Rot and Purification
And the plague comes and with it his childhood.

Death. Sometimes there's nothing left but, when it comes to these things.

Ah. What is this? It is nothing. Just cutting onions by my eyes.

A House in Black and White
The house is black and white, as of the dead and of the corpses. He sees in his horse and the life of a mercenary an escape from the city and a new life.

And so the last straw on the camel's back is placed and all their relationship, or what little they did have, is broken. Perhaps here is when he begins to keep the secret of who just his father is in earnest. To succeed because of your father's shadow, when he is the person he hates the most, would be a bitter medicine to swallow.

And so the adventure begins... or not. That call to adventure comes in the form of a letter ten years from now.

I can imagine many recruits would harbor - if not ill will, then- some indignity in what they're doing. If what is said before about the Wind-Dancer recruits is true (that they recruit mostly from experienced Rassit) then I can see how turning from a bloodied soldier to squire duties would be seen as demeaning by all but the humblest.

Though they are described as an unpolished sort. Again, with the choice of word. Now I'm not sure if this was deliberate, but whether or not it was, you differentiate clearly what kind of people Kiralo has come to lay with. The kinds his father is fundamentally opposite to. Where he is polished, they are not.

But I doubt Kiralo would give much weight for his father's preferences because he has found the beginnings of a bromance, as well as a little world-building. Kueli's strengths come in the form of logistics and scouting, and maneuver warfare, but is invaluable emotionally to Kiralo. And so the meaning of the title 'Care' is twofold. Kiralo as a recruit cares for the basic needs of the Wind-Dancers. There is no room for hanger-ons, supply trains, or a support staff for Rassit. In the same vein, Kueli takes care of Kiralo, first as a mentor then later as a Lieutenant, but always as a friend.

The foreshadowing continues, for the characters, most obviously, but maybe a bit for the readers as well. We know a real war is coming. The Banner Day will be one. But what reason does Father have to call on the famous Captain of Rassit, even though Kiralo be his son?

A boy is not a man until he's had his first lay. Machoism at its finest, even if it is inclusive of any sexuality. Well, they are living up to their image very well, I'd give them that. Han Solo speaks for all dashing rouges when he says he is proud.

Kiralo, the singer and dancer. He might very well be so atypical of soldiering culture. I don't know how Southlander culture marries War and Poetry but I'm sure it's not in the way Kiralo does. For all his prowess in the saddle, one wouldn't see the soldier in him, at least when compared to his companions. Most must come from well-to-do families indeed, to be able to afford a horse and train to their extent, and have all varied interests, but Kiralo must be the geekiest among them. For what kind of mercenary takes his obsession of poetry, theology, and the fineries of the court to that extent? Really, a 'trained animal' is suitable a lifestyle for him; to debate theology, lend in his verses a philosophical and spiritual bent, and enjoy the soft life of a courtier.

It can't hurt to have a protagonist who is sympathetic to those in need. Helps with the relating. Even then, it is a good image to be seen as charitable. I've no doubt Kuojah is a very big philanthropist.

Hmm. You write the romance well. If the SV population is adverse to male homosexual romance due to the awkwardness of it, I for one am happy to help Kiralo's futue love life.

Is it wrong to say he reminds me of a Disney prince (or at least of the trope characteristic among the "good" nobility)? One can easily imagine him sneaking out of the royal palace in commoner clothes to experience the common life, at least for a while. Look, he can sing too!

Magnanimous of him. To trudge through death when many others would prefer to fall from exhaustion. But we see it here, all that tiredness in his mind. He knows futility and mercy come hand in hand, at least during these times. And because of the nature of the scene there is much to philosophize. Perhaps, now, we may know if he writes of war it would not be exulting the battle. No war ballads for the victors here, but maybe something Hemmingway.

In a more fair world Kueli would have been Captain before us with us as Lietenant or just as a close friend. I'd like to think he'd do well as a Captain, probably get the fame as we would on Banner Day, but names have power, and not just of Spirits and Gods. And the world is far from fair.

It's been said before, and it bears repeating now. This quest has so much potential. The thought put into the setting, its uniqueness, and the character all put together. You have something amazing in your hand.
 
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There's no limit to the number of reaction posts that can be made, though I'll value them differently depending on how I feel about it, the color of the sky, and whether I woke up on the right side of the bed.

Now to read.
 
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