11-13-2016, 09:02 PM
She spends enough time in the cold to let her coat grow.
Her mother taught her – (taught Viera and Trystane; was taught herself by the venerable once-lady, Elladora, whom had taken her rightful place in the soil many years ago) – to love every season equally. The bitterness and the headiness; sweet winds carrying honeysuckle and clover, and the desolation of winter.
Desolation, her mother would chide, is a poor way to describe winter.
Restful. Quiet. Waiting and expectant. They would leave the understory, humming with bug songs and howler monkeys, and head down to the temperate places between home and abroad, to study the changing colours and the animals gathering their stockpiles. Watch as the ground hardened beneath their feet, as that earthen womb closed herself off.
For a time.
Waiting.
So though she had been reared in the jungle, and now called the large, wild continent – thoroughly heated by a volcano at it’s heart – home, she is unreasonably fuzzy beside Tiphon. That, mother would say, is nature. That is winter. She examines him with the same calm, inquisitive eye, always dancing on the edge of overly-probing, and witnesses the passing of his thoughts like a cloud in front of a star.
What was left behind?
But she does not ask.
It is still so raw.
“Uconn,” she echoes, nodding to him and then Tiphon, “you are not the first to stare.
Tiphon. It is a pleasure to meet you both. I, too, have the advantage of warmth year round,” advantage it is. She hadn’t needed to drag her daughters through ice and snow, and that was a blessing by the Mother, though when they were strong enough she had brought them swimming across the divide between home and the mainland and let them draw spirals in the new snow and showed them the places where animals were holed up for the season.
“It can make the extra coat I still manage to grow a tad uncomfortable.”
She glances back to Uconn with an almost condoling eye, “I’m afraid neither are much like your Tundra. I suppose I’m lucky, Tephra has hints of the jungle I am used to…” Remade and refashioned. Sometimes she thinks she can smell the faint blushes of orchid and python skin in the soil that nurtures Tephra’s sub tropical trees. “It is hot… humid, thanks to our lovely volcano. Tephra was a sort of organized effort by remnants of the Chamber, Gates Valley and Tundra. But, really, she is her own thing, now.”
In her short life, the waterlocked country has seen many peaks and valleys; many changes.
Change is nature’s way, mother would say. Change and adaptation.
Her mother taught her – (taught Viera and Trystane; was taught herself by the venerable once-lady, Elladora, whom had taken her rightful place in the soil many years ago) – to love every season equally. The bitterness and the headiness; sweet winds carrying honeysuckle and clover, and the desolation of winter.
Desolation, her mother would chide, is a poor way to describe winter.
Restful. Quiet. Waiting and expectant. They would leave the understory, humming with bug songs and howler monkeys, and head down to the temperate places between home and abroad, to study the changing colours and the animals gathering their stockpiles. Watch as the ground hardened beneath their feet, as that earthen womb closed herself off.
For a time.
Waiting.
So though she had been reared in the jungle, and now called the large, wild continent – thoroughly heated by a volcano at it’s heart – home, she is unreasonably fuzzy beside Tiphon. That, mother would say, is nature. That is winter. She examines him with the same calm, inquisitive eye, always dancing on the edge of overly-probing, and witnesses the passing of his thoughts like a cloud in front of a star.
What was left behind?
But she does not ask.
It is still so raw.
“Uconn,” she echoes, nodding to him and then Tiphon, “you are not the first to stare.
Tiphon. It is a pleasure to meet you both. I, too, have the advantage of warmth year round,” advantage it is. She hadn’t needed to drag her daughters through ice and snow, and that was a blessing by the Mother, though when they were strong enough she had brought them swimming across the divide between home and the mainland and let them draw spirals in the new snow and showed them the places where animals were holed up for the season.
“It can make the extra coat I still manage to grow a tad uncomfortable.”
She glances back to Uconn with an almost condoling eye, “I’m afraid neither are much like your Tundra. I suppose I’m lucky, Tephra has hints of the jungle I am used to…” Remade and refashioned. Sometimes she thinks she can smell the faint blushes of orchid and python skin in the soil that nurtures Tephra’s sub tropical trees. “It is hot… humid, thanks to our lovely volcano. Tephra was a sort of organized effort by remnants of the Chamber, Gates Valley and Tundra. But, really, she is her own thing, now.”
In her short life, the waterlocked country has seen many peaks and valleys; many changes.
Change is nature’s way, mother would say. Change and adaptation.
“My heart has joined the Thousand,
for my friend stopped running today.”