Discovery Three, a continuation of a story of Steam!Calenta

Dec25

after Discovery and Discovery Part II

The Emperor’s secretary was having a hard time understanding. “Sir. Sir, if you go out onto the ship, you’re at risk.”

The Emperor shrugged into a heavily-embroidered vest. “Exactly. Otondyoo, if I don’t go out there, what kind of ruler am I?”

“An aging one, sir?” Otondyoo had not gotten to the position of Emperor’s secretary without learning how to be very very blunt with the monarch.

“But one that can still sit in a saddle with the best of them. We’ve forgotten a lot lately, in this long era of peace, but I believe we’ll never forget that.”

“…But it’s a boat, sir, not a goat.” Otondyoo tried to sound reasonable, even if the Emperor was being anything but.

“The theory still holds. I will be on the boat that greets these visitors. And if they attack us and I am killed, my heir will have sufficient diplomatic reason to kill them all and begin war on whence they came. But Otondyoo? If it comes to that, tell her to save the boat. You’re going to need it.”

The Emperor was smiling. Otondyoo had not seen that in quite a while. The Emperor’s secretary bowed deeply. Let him have his boat ride. He had been cooped up in the palace for far too long. “Of course, sir. Give me a moment to leave those notes with my assistant. I’m coming with you.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1031838.html. You can comment here or there.

Christmas Prompt Call!

Dec24

Hello and Merry Christmas!

Today I’m doing a “for me and for you” prompt call.

Here’s how it goes (Thanks for the idea, Cal)

You can either prompt something you want to read or something that would be fun for me to write. The former gets 100 words and the latter gets 500.

For every $15 in total donations I receive, I’ll add 50 words to non-tippers’ prompts and 100 words to tippers’ prompts, or write to a second prompt for each tipper.

In addition, for every $5 you tip, I’ll write 300 words of whatever you want.


Leave a prompt!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1031669.html. You can comment here or there.

Day and Night, #Lexember day 24

Dec24

Day and Night!

[personal profile] rix_scaedu asked for Day and Night, which is coincidental, because tomorrow’s Edally holiday post is IetTienaabaa, which means “The Day of Tienaabaa.”

Iettie, actually, is day in the sense of a a whole day, from sunrise to sunrise, while Ietta is most often day in the sense of “day of;” birthday, gods’ day, coronation day.

The time from sunrise to sunset is anez /’a nez/, meaning, from sun to stars, and the word for night comes from the old phrase Odyidai ahkaarununu, “demons come.” While the word for “demons” in this sense is lost to history, it is still seen in words like dyid, darkness, and odyaikaar, night.

(If you are guessing that the Calenyena historically had an unpleasant relationship with nighttime…)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1031215.html. You can comment here or there.

Light a Candle for me, a story of Edally Academy, is up for Patrons

Dec24

Light a Candle for Me

In Calenta, there was an old tradition – born out of a much older story, and that itself born out of an ancient event – that you did not count the dead as gone until the cold season had passed without them returning to life…

(read on…)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1030862.html. You can comment here or there.

First, Catch the Rabbit… Making things from your own yard

Dec23

I’m making my mother Kale & Apple soup for Christmas.

I try to make her a soup most years. This isn’t just feeding her – she can cook plenty well by herself – it’s also test-driving a recipe that almost always has some meat product in it and making it tasty and vegetarian for her.

This year’s recipe, for instance, has bacon in it. I think we’re going to start with mushrooms and perhaps a little bit of gelatin (I know, horse hooves, but she’s only mostly vegetarian…) to get the proper umami and texture going on.

It’s also going to be made – aside from the mushrooms, which I’ve not gotten around to trying growing at home yet, and the gelatin, which, uh, no – entirely from homegrown stuff.

Apples, of course. My house is still full of apples. You can’t turn around without running into a box of apples.

Apple cider for some of the liquid. When we make it, it has stock in it; I’ll probably make some leek stock as a start. The leeks are still sitting in the garden, wondering when I’ll do something with them. And the cider we pressed ourselves, from the apples our trees produced.

And then there’s the kale. Kale is a marvelous thing. It just keeps growing. Last year, it lasted until February. This year, I imagine I might have to pull it out to plant new come June – since there’s no snow to speak of yet.

There’s something satisfying about giving homemade gifts; there’s something even more pleasing about doing it from ingredients your yard grew.

I wonder if she’d want duck egg something next year…

But first we have to get the ducks.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1030436.html. You can comment here or there.

Discovery, Part Fnarg

Dec23

Tangential to but concurrent with Discovery and Discovery Part II.

The miners had found the bones, and at first, nobody had thought anything of it.

They had been following a newly discovered vein of prime silver, accessible only due to new machines and techniques and so heavily loaded with aether that it seemed to vibrate. They’d cracked open a cave and found further veins of silver running down below the cave, and then their first crack at the ground had revealed bones.

It didn’t take a doctor or an anthropologist to determine that the bones were human; when they called in two of each, what they could say was that the bones were very old indeed, female, and they did not know how she’d died. They could also guess that the bones were from a full-grown adult, although she would have only reached the shoulder of most women.

A lone woman dead in a cave nobody had known about was a mystery, but not so strange as to halt digging of aether-rich silver. The miners had let the doctors and scientists take away the bones, and then they’d begun digging again.

That was when they found the second skeleton. And the third. And the fourth. And the fifth, sixth… at ten, the miners threw up their hands in frustration.

By that point, the scientists had begun the serious examination of the first set of bones.

next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080795.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1030274.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day 22: Paaaar-taaaay

Dec22

[personal profile] rix_scaedu asked for parties!

To begin with, we’ll want the word for party, which comes from lok, meal, and rook, tribe or family group: lok-ryu-rook (meal for the whole tribe), Lokurook. From this word you get Lokook, /lō ‘ko͝ok/ party, as well as lokozh, a grand festival or large meal at a gathering.

(See the post on trade).

Recently, the term lokurdin – from derdin, friends, from diednerdin (obsolete), who who trusts another, from ner, trust – has risen to prominence. A meal-for-friends is a completely social gathering, often with alcoholic drinks featuring heavily.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1029847.html. You can comment here or there.

An attempt at First Person

Dec22

I am trying writing in first person by re-writing bits of extant stuff. I couldn’t think of anything to do, so I did part of Monday’s Edally

The dining hall wasn’t silent, but it might as well have been. There was the House Monitor to one side of me, my friends to the other, and a small gang of Bitrani boys in front of me; nothing else in the room mattered at the moment.

“There’s no fight.” Darnio talked around the lie slowly. “We were talking to Saydrie. Things got heated.”

The House Monitor looked doubtful. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why?” No, of course they didn’t.

“He’s a ra-” Maybe they did. But the Bitrani that spoke up was silenced by his friends. Maybe they just liked to touch each other. I didn’t shudder, but I wanted to.

“We were having a political disagreement?” Darnio’s lies were getting less and less believable. “It just got a little out of hand.”

Was the House Monitor really going to believe that? I hadn’t gotten this whole thing right up to the edge of a fight to have her believe his manufactured stories.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1029461.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day (20) (Yesterday) – Fancy Pants

Dec21

The Calenyena have two words they use to mean “over done, gaudy, frivolous.”

The first comes from the Tabersi {Bitrani} words for “wide-brim”, fanada lerjo.

Although the Tabersi use broad-brimmed hats for a number of sensible reasons, not the least of them being that they are a cold-weather-adapted race that migrated south and tend to sunburn, they also wear some pretty ridiculous hats, at least by Calenyena lights, and thus “wide brimmed” became a term of disparagement. In Calenyen, this became baanaadaaler /’bän nä ‘dä ler/.

The second term comes from the West-Coasters {Arran}, from the city of Sheburri, which was known for being a fashion hub. To be immensely overdressed for a situation (“silk in the goat pen” is another phrase for it) is to be like someone from Sheburri, zhebburnon.

If you are thinking you have to be pretty overdone for the Calenyen to find you ridiculous… well, that’s not entirely inaccurate.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1029201.html. You can comment here or there.