Who

Cascabel

What

Waiting out Zsaviranth's flight. With fuzzy baby geese.

Really late posting shh

When

It is evening of the twenty-second day of the twelfth month of the sixteenth turn of the 12th pass.

Where

Subterranean Gardens, Kurkar Hold

OOC Date 11 May 2019 04:00

 

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… and here it was watching waterfowl, young and recently hatched, splash in the water.


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Subterranean Gardens

Pillars of desert light entering through small gaps in the spanse above encourage the growth of quick-growing algaes and freshwater plants within the shallow lake. Fish descended from a population stocked here a century ago, are kept in place with a series of stone terraces and weirs so that they might be easily moved or caught. Waterfowl also float and bob, safe against predation. Vegetation above the water’s turquoise surface feeds off the by-products of the fish and fowl, providing the populace a much needed diet of greens and small vegetables. There are several of these setups engineered wherever light from the surface leaks underground.


Other than the place she still calls home in her heart, Kurkar's subterranean gardens are one of the nicest ones she can imagine being in.

She is sure after enough time passes that the senior queen's flight must be done, but Cascabel does not hurry to return. Instead she watches the water ripple, and listens to the familiar sounds of waterfowl being themselves, sees waterlillies and wishes she could draw to remember them better.

That is her first resolve: that she needs to bring Khulan to see them, whether or not she has before, to ask that she could draw one for Cascabel's wall, to make the space in the room she sleeps in — with several others — more her own.

It's odd how now that she is in a place in the world she has carved out for herself, she realizes she doesn't know who she is anymore. It hadn't been quite so obvious until she found herself facing introduction to a Parhelion rider who directly gave her a title and she wasn't sure how to follow up with her own.

She isn't Enyem's wife, Cascabel, any more than she is Gharan's youngest, Ghislaine, anymore. She is late of Lemos, and she might be widow of Enyem if it's all that important. She is a widow, no matter if it was of her own making. She is also a widow of circumstance. It is not a choice she would have made in any other one.

At twenty-three she is of an age where the dragonmen — dragonriders — call her young, but back at the cothold of her home she would be considered very mature, and in the bazaar she is at least old enough to have a family. She knows she has a son who is just now two and a half; she knows she has celebrated his turnday both times, and that he knows who she is, but that they are not a family in the way that she would have been had she given birth to him married.

Cascabel is in many ways entirely on her own, even if she has things now that she never thought she would have again — friends, gardens, work, connections. Things that are hers and if not hers alone, at least hers in a way where she is the connection to them. As herself, not as someone's child, not as someone's wife.

She loves these gardens, and she's grateful to that same Parhelion rider who brought her here; there are many places to wait out a gold's rising, but this one is preferable. She knows that Divale doesn't feel the same way about the place, but that is in a realm where their stories diverge — this was another form of captivity for her, but it is a place that Cascabel has only been to now that she's free.

It's a place she thinks she could stay someday, maybe. If ever the Weyr stops feeling like where she belongs - but as of now, she worries that might feel like a betrayal, and she does want to stay where Divale is. But if ever the time came that for some reason she couldn't —

— not that she could ever begin to imagine why she might not be wanted, but these things do happen —

— Kurkar wasn't at all bad. Not as Kurkar, as a place finding itself over the turns the same way Cascabel was finding herself. She could see parts of herself in the concept, even if she didn't understand how a Hold with no Blood, no Lords, might run itself. She didn't understand how things worked here, but it was beautiful regardless.
She didn't understand how things worked in her own mind either, a lot of the time.

Hidden but alive, very alive — that could describe this garden, and it could describe Cascabel herself. She couldn't help but feel happy here the same way she did in the small courtyards of Igen, watching flowers grow, watching the caprines and the canines, taking Trumpet for a walk and watering those plants she snuck into abandoned pots … and here it was watching waterfowl, young and recently hatched, splash in the water.

Pity she couldn't have goslings to raise at the Weyr.

They were uplifting and relieving, as was the entire living landscape, and Cascabel didn't return to the Weyr until mid-day the next day.

Her bosses didn't even scold her when she did.

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