#Kastav

[one-time-i-dreamt]

The world is oftentimes such an ugly place, but sometimes it can be so beautiful.

Like, when two choirs, one from Croatia and the other from Zimbabwe, met on the opposite sides of a Lisbon subway station and both sang to each other.

I unfortunately do not know what the Zimbabwe children choir sang to them (although it was so beautiful), but the Croatian klapa Kastav sang 'Kuća puna naroda' (a house full of people).

And let my reward be a house full of people, my life, give me a voice, so I can embrace you with songs.

Video source: Irena Grdinić

[fide-et-amore]

[mazurga]

Fort Kastav

[bitchwhoreofastorm]

the first blighter, following kastav

-

For three weeks now it's been the same nightmare. The dungeon, after Kastav, with all its dark wetness and pain, the ache of the gag in his jaw. He's waiting to die, in the nightmare, feeling the jagged edge of his own broken rib wearing a slow hole in his lung; he's abandoned, down there, Barfok must be somewhere nearby but he cannot feel her presence. In the nightmare he lies there for interminable time, until something-- the fear of dying alone, perhaps-- compels him to open his eyes. He opens his eyes and he's lying face-to-face with his mother, her blue irises dull as marbles, his father roaring through his heart, and he always thinks (just as he did when it happened) that someone has dyed his mother's fair hair the same colour as his, until he understands that, in fact, her head is red with her spilled blood.

Then the wetness of Kastav is the wetness of blood and the solitude is--

For three weeks now, Chemua has awoken suffocating. He spasms, he gropes around in his silk sheets until he recalls that he took nobody to bed last night, and by then he's sitting upright. He flattens his hand against the badly-mended ribs below his heart, still misshapen to the touch, and he thinks that the injury has rent his lung open before he understands that he's simply in a panic. Then it's gasping, swallowing, forcing himself through his meditations, muttering su'um, su'um as if he can use the thu'um to will himself to normalcy. Wondering, all the while, what sort of a Tongue so frequently finds himself unable to breathe.

Kastav. Kastav. One year out and the word is a shackles: Kastav. One of the most powerful men alive and he knows what it's like to be caged like a dog. Even his racing heart beats it-- Kastav, Kastav, Kastav-- louder than any meditation, until he can't bear to think it, any more than he can bear the memory of the imprisonment. Itching, restless to the bone, he rises and gets dressed.

It's cold comfort: that Mournhold is his, rightful inheritance that hardly wants him. There's a hidden passage just beyond his chambers and he knows the slaveways better in the darkness than the palace hallways in light. Still, he holds his fingertips against the wall when he traverses them, counting paces-- twenty, to a niche here, then a turn left, and a narrow staircase-- then he emerges from a tapestry, much as an assassin would, stepping into a long moonlit hallway with a broad door at the very end of it.

At that door stands a Shout on duty. He locks eyes with Chemua, long enough that Chemua can read his suspicion even in the dim; then Chemua turns and goes the other way, making the rest of his journey in the open. Wondering, all the while, whether the fear on his face shows.

Movement helps. So does being around people, though there are dwindling numbers whose company he can seem to abide. In the daytime there's always Amun-Shae, though Chemua finds her company embarrassing, he likes her patience and the wisdom of statecraft she shares. Then there's Nords: Fenja, Einhelf, Amornen, Eloja, men who are not friends because a Tongue does not have friends but who are trusted followers and overlook his flaws. The Daughters of Mephala who bed men for coin and the ale-daughters who bed a Jarl's son for favour and glory.

In the nighttime however, if he hasn't the foresight to bring someone to bed, there's no-one-- no-one but the empty hallways of Mournhold palace, and wary guards, and imagined assassins in every shadow. The ghost of his mother's blood soaking into the rug. His pace quickens--

--And then he's outside, in the courtyard, then passing through the public gardens with all their dappled shadow. The night is cold and dry, the sky clear, the stars violently yellow in their firmament. He's worn a cloak over the silken tunic and trousers, wrapping himself in it like a common thief, and it offers little warmth but compared to other places (High Hrothgar with its bitter blizzards) the city never manages to truly chill him. Chemua does not pause to check whether he is being followed. In the wake of the nightmares it is too easy to feel invisible (Kastav, dark dank Kastav where they lay forgotten) and though no handsome tall man, a fearsome Tongue no less, should ever pass through life with the sense that they are totally unseen, so he does. So he goes. Wondering, all the while, what sort of Tongue…

… Out in Mournhold proper, just beyond the gate in the Eastern district, there is a meadery adjoined to a tall wooden storeroom piled up against the palace walls. Even in these small hours the city does not sleep and Chemua finds the meadery open, its last few customers in low conversation. The barkeep knows him on sight-- there's a glass for him before he asks, but he does not take the drink, not tonight. He passes the counter, goes down a half-flight of steps and through a low wooden doorway, head ducked, down into a brick-lined cellar that smells richly of honey and is occupied by many vats.

He has to wonder about other people, sometimes. Such as Barfok, who was also imprisoned at Kastav, that odd ugly Skyrimisk woman a little older than he. Chemua doesn't like her, perhaps because there's something upstaging about her (what is the mother assassinated when he was a little boy compared to her family massacred before her eyes as an adolescent? His exile to Hrothgar compared to her years in the Vvardenfell wastes?) And still he wonders whether she, too, balks at cellars, and wakes up from nightmares every night, and wants to rip out her own heart at the thought of being caged. He suspects so. The letters she sometimes writes him are cheerful in a false, frantic way, making him suspect that his own attempts at normalcy are just as futile.

Other people, he wonders always about other people-- why not, because it always helps not to be alone. And here in this cellar he is not alone.

Chemua closes the door behind him and in that solitude he finally lets his mind turn to the chatter he's long tuned out.

The doorway he leans against groans the obnoxious groan of domesticated qethsegolle, the sluggish complaining of stone forced to be masonry. The cellar is lousy with it, a chorus of complaints that he's learned to tune out but never fully puts from his mind-- Mournhold itself is a riot of bickering, layers upon layers of architectural wrongdoing, three cities piled atop one another and none of them know how to get along. Even in the solitude of the cellar he can still hear the homesick whine of the Skyrim-pine that makes up the mead barrels, and the ecstatic gibbering of fermentation. Local honey and foreign yeast.

It is obnoxious. Walls do not mute the qethsegolle; somewhere deep below his feet is the unsettling chatter of the earth-bones the Dwemer broke here once (and mustn't they feel awful, tortured down there in the deep dark, bound, forgotten, their broken ribs wearing holes in their-- no.)

He shakes his head clear. He draws in a deep breath. He focuses his attention on the qethsegol that speaks in the corner.

We want the light. We want the light.

Behind a fermentation vat is a slapshod alchemy lab: a shelf of ingredients, a rough-hewn table stained with inexplicable substances. And atop the table are potted plants, some local and some foreign, some old and some young, all straining towards a tiny window set high in the wall. Their leaves are pale, their stalks wilting-- some of them are dying-- Chemua kneels before the table and rests his chin atop the wood, staring up through his eyelashes at the dirt-filled pots. The sad mewling of photosynthesis starved of its nourishment. Eyes unfocused, he listens to them-- We want the light! We want the light!-- the pained gasping of it, the desperation.

He lifts his chin from the table and says aloud: "Nobody is coming to save you."

He's spoken in Aldmeris but there's a note of the thu'um in it. Though the qethsegolle quiver, they fail to understand.

We grow towards the light, whimpers the notion of photosynthesis, We want the light. We want the light.

"So strain harder," Chemua tells it. "Tear yourself apart, if you want, it will come to nothing."

We want the light. We need more to live.

"Shall I carry you outside?" He rises off his knees, then sits in the chair. "Ah, but it's night-time, there's no light to be had. I'd be wasting the effort of saving you."

Barfok called him a monster. Said that his use of the thu'um was horrible-- that all he did was torture the qethsegol-- as if other thu'umcraft were based on anything less than brutal domination. Chemua himself has never considered his thu'um more than idle conversation, sprinkled here and there, perhaps, with a bit of cruel truth. It's all a moot point. He is certain the qethsegolle feel nothing comprehensible to mortals, and that if the Tongues believe they can converse, it is only because every other Tongue is as lonely as he is, starving to believe the world echoes them back. He considers this all a hallucination, his little nocturnal talks with the qethsegolle that govern plant growth, no more real than his nightmares. Still, it helps not to be alone.

When he speaks this time it's a real thu'um-- a single word of draconic that, in his tones, can be loosely translated as surrender, if surrender did not carry a connotation of peace. The desolation of something inevitably awful. Wide-eyed gasping futility. A stalk of wickwheat shrivels in on itself.

The qethsegolle of photosynthesis says, confused, Is there no light?

He still hasn't managed to find the words to get it through to them.

"There is light," Chemua replies in Aldmeris, "But not for you. You will never again taste the light, do you hear me?"

A hole in the world while the qethsegolle falls tremulously silent. It, of course, understands nothing but that single awful word. Then it starts up again, feebler: We want the light.

"You cannot have the light! You will perish down here."

We want the light.

"What for? What good will the light do you now? I've laced your soils with poison, you will perish within the week. The light cannot save you!"

We want the light.

"You may as well be dead!"

There was the thu'um in that, too, unrestrained in form, and Chemua feels reality rustle around him like a blanket. The world has noticed his heavy hand upon its flank for the briefest of moments and that awareness makes him feel naked. Deep beneath them, a pulse beats.

We want the light.

He clenches his eyes shut, turns his face towards the lamp on the wall, and sees through his eyelids the red of blood.

"No light," Chemua whispers. "You qethsegolle all died to birth this world. You're corpses. What for do you need the light? Shor sos nil. You should be rotting already."

And when he looks at the table again, he finds that they are; the air is thick with rot and the stalks of wickwheat are crimson and stunted in their pots. There is no more gibbering of photosynthesis. The world's murmuring makeup is all horror, mute bystander's gossip: the alchemy ingredients on the shelf questioning to each other whether it's true that they should be rotting, the yeast in the vats dying in their own alcoholic excrement. The cellar stagnant as a tomb.

He feels no better. This has not helped. Chemua rests his cheek against the rough-hewn table, closes his eyes, and waits like a prisoner for the morning.

[quicksilverdrabbles]

Somewhere in Winterhold

Taliesin: *holding his hands to his ears* Mmmnnnghhhhh.. It is far too cold to be wandering about like this.

Kaidan: Would you rather have caught a carriage with that sketchy Nord back in Windhelm? He'd probably have us listening to racist lectures for hours.

Lucien: *turning the map side to side* Uhm.. I think we may be lost.

Taliesin: We WHAT.

Lucien: According to the map, we were supposed to have passed Fort Kastav ages ago..

Inigo: ... Lucien?

Lucien: Yes?

Inigo: Fort Kastav was west of Windhelm. We went east in an attempt to follow the coast and avoid bandits.

Lucien: ... Ah.

Xelzaz: Great. So we're stuck in the middle of a blizzard with no idea where we are.

Kaidan: Do you have a waypoint scroll, starlight?

Morana: *shakes her head, shivering violently*

Styx: *whines, huddling close to Morana*

Gore: We should probably try and get out of the storm before anyone gets too cold.

Taliesin: We're well past that point, I would say.

Gore: Actually, you're covered in the most layers here. I was more worried about Morana.

Morana: I can manage.

Inigo: Your handwriting is shakier than a leaf in fall, my friend.

Kaidan: C'mere. *tucks Morana close to his chest, wrapping his cape around her protectively* Let's find shelter and start a fire.

Taliesin: Now hang on a moment! Let me under there!

Kaidan: What. No, you're too tall to fit.

Taliesin: Then I'll make myself fit! You're always stealing all the warmth with that heavy cape, it's rude not to share with the needy, Kaidan.

Kaidan: Needy is one word for you..

Taliesin: Hmph. *tugs on the opposite edge of Kaidan's cape, pulling it over his head and around his shoulders* Goodness, this is warm. I was trying to joke when I said you steal all the warmth, you know.

Kaidan: And now how do you expect us to move like this?

Taliesin: ... Oh.

Xelzaz: *sighs* I will go find us shelter.

Morana: *poking her head out from Kaidan's cape* Thank you.

[barfok]

wrt last post fuck it. gratuitous nord demon backstory. after the battle of kastav

tw kidnapping/imprisonment

They hadn't bound her hands. Thank Kyne, thank Tsun, thank Mara, thank dead Shor in the ground, they hadn't bound her hands. Even with the gag forced into her mouth, with her hands free Barfok is not without a voice: she can sign, she can make herself known, even if her protestations are witnessed only by the walls of the dungeon and the back of the half-dead boy they threw down here with her, but oh, by Kyne, by Tsun, by Mara, by dead Shor in the ground, doesn't it make everything better? She flips off her captor when he throws her in and it is utter bliss.

So, hours into being in this dungeon, she sits against the wall, practising her signs the way she used to when Ysimr first taught her how to sign it. Ahg. Aak. Ah. Bah. Bah, ah, rah, fu'u, og, kah. Yo, su, mah, ikh, rah. She finds herself keeping tempo with the dripping water coming from one corner. There's a bucket under the drip, and she realises, slowly, that's the Whiterun mens' idea of water for a guest.

Yo, su. It's a slow drip, or she'd go bathe.

She hears a soft groan. Kah, eg, mah, ah.

She's not alone in this prison. Her companion, the boy, proves himself to be a little less than half-dead. He's lying on the ground with his back turned to her, not his fault, just how he landed when they tossed him in. Barfok watches with mild curiosity as he slowly rolls himself onto his back, cranes his neck up, gasping for air. He, too, is gagged. His eyes are closed, his hair is long and only-red-ish and plastered to his face with sweat. His breathing comes very shallowly.

He'd lost the battle for them. His first battle, sorry luck, that. He'd been wielding the thu'um and cantering through a Whiterun wheat-field alongside her when they'd speared his horse and he'd gone flying and landed hard on his chest in a way that Barfok was surprised hadn't killed him. No wonder he now gasps like a fish. Su, tah, ug, hag, nah. The wheezy little breath he's making is profoundly annoying.

The dungeon is cold. The floor is hard beneath the sad clumps of rotten hay that line it. Barfok's hands are growing clumsy, so she tucks them into her armpits for warmth.

She settles back against the wall, listening to her fellow Tongue die. It is going to be a long night.

-

Her fellow Tongue does not die. His lungs learn a way to work despite whatever wreckage lays inside him, and his breathing steadies, and his throat stops its wheezing. After the first night (there's no window, but it feels like a night) he stops moaning in pain. He lies very still in a certain position after that, reluctant to move, but he is breathing deeply, and not moaning in pain.

Their captors realise that as two Tongues of Morrowind they might be worth keeping alive. In the morning they're brought bowls of cold gloopy porridge and glasses of milk. The gag is narrow enough that, with some effort, the porridge and milk can be crammed around it, so Barfok eats inelegantly, smashing porridge through the fabric with lusty grunts of undignified gusto. She's used to being starved, thank Ysmir for his diligent tutorship, and the breaking of a fast never loses its thrill.

The boy half-dead watches her. He's finally opened his eyes and tilted his head to the side to look at her; he has very blue eyes, pretty in his fine features, even bloodshot and puffy-red as they are. Just for fun, Barfok locks eyes with him as she crams fully half of her porridge-coated hand into her mouth around the gag. His eyes narrow, and he looks away from her again, the expression of disgust unmistakeable-- prudish nobility!

Still, she doesn't touch his food. And some time in the supposed afternoon he rises unsteadily, shuffles the cell door, and eats with his hands, just as absent of dignity as she was.

-

There's an old fire-pit in their cell. In the fire-pit, there is charcoal. Some of the charcoal is in sticks. The sticks are long enough to write with.

Barfok thinks the other Tongue broke his ribs. It's in the way he keeps one arm folded over his chest, his shoulder stiff and raised. He favours one side in movement, holding the left, the one he fell on, very rigid. When he accidentally folds his abdomen he hisses and whimpers and then his breathing gets shallow again. Barfok signs to him, and he clearly understands her, but he never replies. He refuses to move his arm from his side. He lets the pain drive him from conversation.

Drawing, however, he can do. When Barfok sits next to him and writes: 'I am Barfok' on the cell floor in Dovahzul, he leans over awkwardly and writes, beneath it, unsteadily, 'Kema.'

So they talk like that. They just write to each other. There's nothing else to do down here, and he can manage it well enough with one hand. They switch to a wall when they run out of accessible floor. They sit close together so that passing the charcoal is easier.

They write to each other about the battle. They write about Morrowind and Monahven. They talk about Ysmir. They talk about his horse-riding. They talk about her home in Whiterun. They talk about their families, and her massacred hometown, and his assassinated mother. They ponder to each other if they'll be ransomed. They ponder to each other if they'll die.

She makes him laugh, by accident. The way he groans she worries it will kill him again.

-

There's no window in the cell. After long intervals a guard comes down to give them food-- porridge and milk, or bread soaked in milk. Mushy food that can be eaten around a gag. Not enough to sustain them but enough to prevent immediate death. Despite the cold, Barfok starts to sleep a lot, out of boredom as much as exhaustion. She does the trick she learned on Vvardenfell, where she curls up with her knees squishing her stomach to make it smaller, to make herself feel less hungry. It helps. She doens't have a choice but for it to help.

When she's awake, Kema draws for her.

(That's not his name, she recalls Ysmir using one with more vowels, when planning for that stupid, stupid battle. But she likes the simplicity of Kema. Kah, eg, mah, ah. She's so glad he's in too much pain to write out the extraneous letters.)

Kema is a good artist. He draws her pictures of his childhood home in the elf-land, a marvelous palace with a strange shape. He draws the Queen of that palace, who Barfok finds very beautiful. He draws Monahven, and Barfok stares at it, squints at it, pretends she's looking out of the window in her own childhood home.

Barfok cannot draw. Nonetheless, she tries: she copes his drawings of Monahven, and then adds her own of a stone circle and of a baby goat she once owned. She draws Red Mountain and an implausibly rotund Ysmir with a scraggly beard before it. She draws a bunch of leeks, because it's the only thing she can think of that she knows how it looks.

The drawing of the goat is so bad it makes him laugh again, and then their fun ends, because he goes back to lying very still with his arm bent up.

Later, once he runs out of chapters of his short life, he starts drawing horses. Barfok adds horns to them. Unicorns. A stick-figure Hircine with a spear in the background. He draws guars for her, round fat shapes sharing a banquet of hay. She adds another stick-Hircine, scratching his head in confusion. Did Hircine ever go to Morrowind? He spends a long time drawing a dragon, and Barfok, lying on her belly beside him, adds in a veritable feast for it: homesteads, fleeing figures, hawks, bears, squids, a whole army succumbing to its flames. Lying flat, her stretched-out stomach growls.

-

A few hours after their fifth meal-- or is it a few days, or a few minutes? Is it weeks? Is it years?-- after their fifth meal, as Barfok is trying to doze, the door is slammed open.

Barfok scrambles to her feet, raising her balled-up fists. A string of drool slips out of the corner of her gag.

There is no meal for her.

Here, instead, is Jarl Olaf in the flesh.

She might have lunged. She balls her fists, she prepares for it. But he, unlike they, has no gag in his mouth. The fus he breathes is not enough to send her flying, not enough to even send her stumbling, but it is a warning nonetheless.

Olaf stands in the doorway and surveys his spoils of war. His gaze on Barfok is so loathsome that she worries she might vomit around her gag. She cannot stop shaking, not with fear but with an animal desire to fling herself upon him, to tear, to rip, to maim, to hurt--

And then he is no longer looking at her. "Kul-se-Chimarvir," breathes Olaf towards his other prisoner. "Son of Chimarvir of Mournhold. No?"

When Barfok turns she sees that Kema is folded up against the back wall of the cell. He is sitting. He has not moved. He glares resignedly at Olaf.

"Perhaps not," drawls Olaf. "Mournhold has refused to ransom you."

Then Olaf turns to Barfok, and he says, "And you. None from Monahven know of you. Who do you belong to?"

Barfok's hands refuse to be unclenched from their fists. She takes several short sharp breaths, as if this will make her bloodlust less. She cannot even think for her own rage.

"How feeble Kjoric has become," drawls Olaf. "The Tongues he sends against me, unwanted children and nobodies. Tell me, at least," he addresses Barfok, "Give me the name of someone who will cough up a few coins for your safe return, won't you?"

Thank Kyne, thank Tsun, thank Mara, thank dead Shor in the ground they've left Barfok's hands unbound.

Barfok flips him off.

-

Olaf must think she's of some value to somebody out there, because the beating the guards give her is comparatively light. She ends up with a bloodied nose and a swollen lip and a swollen-shut eye and a few big boot-shaped bruises around her stomach, but her bones are pleasantly intact, and she's not coughing up blood, so she feels a smug sense of satisfaction, like she's gotten away with something.

Nonetheless, the aching starts up a while later, and it sets her in a foul mood. So, after she's washed her face the best she can with her filthy sleeves, she lies down in her corner, grumbling under her breath at every little ache. For not the first time she realises how unpleasant the gag is getting in her mouth, crusty and stinking pungently of curdled milk and her own rancid breath. Her clothing is scratchy for the sweat and dust caked into it. Her joints hurt from lying on the hard floor for so long and the beating hasn't distracted from that. At that dark moment, she feels very sorry for herself.

Kema, too, has been lying very still in his corner ever since Olaf's visit. He hadn't even stirred during her beating-- not that she can blame him for that, really. But lying there in the dark she hears him breathing in a weird way. She hears him shuffle around, then gasp in pain, and then he sucks in some hoarse breath, and moves against the ground again. This goes on for quite some time.

He's trying to puncture his own lung. Barfok realises this with a dim disinterest. This thought comes moments before she falls asleep.

-

Herma-Mora appears to her. She's sitting very still against the wall when the blackness before her blossoms into a thousand emerald eyes. A staring fractal descends upon her, infinity's watchfulness coalescing on a prisoner.

She thinks that he'll have the usual offer: he helps her and her soul wears away a little bit more. But he doesn't say anything. She can't say anything, either.

So she hangs there in a miasma of swamp black and forest green, being blinked at.

After a million years, or three hours, or a minute, or a second-- was she asleep?-- she blinks and he's gone again. The torches have been lit in the hallway again. She wonders if Herma-Mora would pay a ransom for her.

-

One day, the jailor throws in a blanket, so now Barfok and Kema sleep side by side, Barfok pressed against his back so as not to harm his broken-up front. They don't really talk any more, they've run out of charcoal and he still won't move his arm. Barfok paces around the cell sometimes, and washes daily from the water-bucket, and signs poetry to herself, but Kema seems to have given up. Most of the time he just lies there. He seems to like staring at the old drawings they did together, of the horses and the dragon with its feast. When they wrote to each other, Barfok had offered condolences about his dead horse, and he'd said that he was sad about it, too. Krosis. Geh, Krosis. Men love their horses.

One day Barfok tries looking for more charcoal-- she wants to tell him about the Herma-Mora vision, she wants to confess to someone before she's dragged into Apocrypha the moment they die down here-- but they've used it all up. There's no word for Herma-Mora in Nordic Sign so she's forced to keep the secret.

On a different day, Barfok offers in sign to bathe him. He doesn't agree but he doesn't refuse either, and he doesn't fight when she unbuttons his now-crusty tunic and pulls it aside.

Below the fabric his chest is a tapestry of blue and purple and yellow and black. When he breathes the movement is asynchronous, the two sides of him rise at different times. His eyes are closed and he is breathing very shallowly, as if he's trying not to breathe at all, as if he's willing himself to be elsewhere.

Barfok uses a corner of his the blanket to clean the dirt away from his chin and his neck. It must have been trapped there since the battle, since he fell from his horse. There's even still strands of straw in his hair. He blighted all the wheat in the field. She'd never seen a thu'um like that; she found it-- finds it-- so horrifying it doesn't bear thinking of. But her own stomach remains empty, and she cannot help but feel just the tiniest bit gleeful, at the thought everyone up there will be going as sad and hungry as she is.

Barfok is not the caring sort. After a half-hearted attempt to clean him up, she braids his hair for him instead. He has very long, very pretty hair, and now that it hasn't been washed for a very long time, the colour has gone from flirting-with-blond to a definitive rusty red. Like an old wagon's axle, like the half-eaten blade of the sword her little brother found in the forest once. She puts it in very bad braids and then she leaves him to his sulking, overcome with her own misery.

He looks so dumb in those awful braids. They don't suit him at all. But he falls asleep with a peaceful comforted expression, unaware of the violence she just wrought upon him.

-

They are sitting on opposite walls and Barfok signs a question to him:

"When we get out, do you want to keep being friends?"

He's holding his arm rigid by his chest, the way he always does. She's surprised he's even sitting up. He's been growing more and more quiet over the past few-- what unit of time are they in, is it the next era already?-- and she thinks he's looking paler, that he's not breathing very well.

She is more surprised when he uncoils both arms and signs back to her:

"If."

-

The door is thrown open. Barfok had been asleep, and she's barely realised she's conscious again when the jailor barks: "Up."

For some stupid reason Barfok obeys; she's on her feet before she's even fully awake. Flustered with surprise, she flails both hands at the jailor, the universal Nordic sign for "What?"

"You've been ransomed," the jailor tells them. "I'm to take you to Dunmeth pass. Get up, come on, it's a long trip."

There's a drumming in Barfok's ears that she only belatedly realises is her own heart. She signs, "Who?" And then she raps out a series of letters: Yo, su, mah, ikh, rah? And then she signs the symbol for dragons. The symbol for king. She's babbling with her hands before she realises the jailor doesn't read sign.

"On your feet, now," the jailor barks again, and Barfok hears her friend also struggling to his feet. She does not go to help him but she doesn't hear him fall.

Then the jailor is leading them out, and they're walking through the hallway, walking together, walking… out of the cell, up the stairs, out of Oblivion, back into the world of mortals. They're crossing from one plane to another, treading over a billion stars.

Every step hurts. Her muscles feel very weak, the bruises from her beating are groaning with protest. She can hear Kema breathing through his nose in a way that suggests he's fighting back sobs. But the jailor walks before them, leading them boldly out, and he pays no notice to their agonies.

In fact, he's self-absorbed-- he's complaining to himself, though saying it as if he's addressing him. "Primitive heathens," he's spitting, "Imagine leaving your child to languish in an enemy dungeon for a week. A whole week!…"

-

They make it to Dunmeth pass, though Barfok does not recall the trip. Ysmir is there with the ransom, and the elven Queen is also there, and she is much prettier than she was in the charcoal drawing. And then, like wheels of cheese at a farmer's market, two young prisoners of war are passed off to their loved ones, and they're free, and they're safe, and they're home.

… There's a healer from Kogoruhn who sees to them. There's a special knife to pull away the gags, and there's Barfok, yelling, screaming at the top of her lungs just to get it all out. It's a gleeful sort of screaming, the delighted raucous of a goat kid learning to use its lungs for the first time-- incoherent hollering until Ysmir gives her a gentle slap about the head to shut her up. Then there's food, food, food! There's a cup of very strong flin with some sort of medicine in it, there's a clean tunic to get changed into, there's Ysmir, steady as a rock beside her, beside her, here, here. Barfok babbles through her mouthfuls of food, gleeful to be speaking aloud even more than she is for the nourishment and the rescue. She swears to Kyne, Tsun, Mara, Shor, all she wanted to do was talk. All she wants to do is talk and talk and talk. She's never loved the sound of her own voice so much.

They get on the road as soon as they can. There's a whole caravan that's come for them, carts and soldiers, a small army Ysmir's brought, he doesn't trust the Alessians. There's a second army that Barfok is told belongs to Mournhold. Reveling in her regained voice, Barfok hangs off of Ysmir's arm and chatters to every soldier that comes her way. Ysmir pretends not to approve of this display, but he lets her hold onto his arm, and he's never done that before, so she knows he must be pleased to hear her voice again. Ysmir's arm is terrifically warm.

And finally, after she's talked at Ysmir until her throat sounds like a frog croaking, after her lungs are burning and her head is swimming with flin, Barfok wanders off to find her newfound dungeon friend.

She finds him in a cart in the Mournhold half of the caravan. They've made a bed for him, he's lying in a nest of soft wool blankets and silk sheets. His filthy clothes have been changed for some soft-looking elven robes, and the Queen of Mournhold is sitting near his head, studiously untangling his hair from the horrid braids Barfok had put it in. A healer sits at the other side of him, preparing some pungent mixture to slather on his deformed purple-black chest.

In the light of day he looks closer to death than he had in the dungeon. Barfok even thinks he might be asleep, resting so peacefully in this decadent cart-back bedding. But when the Queen stops her work at Barfok's approach, he opens a single eye. He tilts his head very slightly and stares down at Barfok, half-lidded, his bloodless lips drawn into a thin line.

Barfok is half-drunk from medicated brandy, Barfok has an eye swollen shut from being beaten and is wearing an old ill-fitting tunic from Ysmir. She is not fit for an audience with nobility. She greets them nonetheless.

"Wow." Barfok says. And then, "You look like shit."

Now he opens both eyes, and he raises his head from his pillows to stare down at her.

"I'm Barfok," Barfok follows up, her voice unsteady. "And you're, eh, you're Kema, right?" She feels herself sway a little. "Kema of Mournhold. Yeah. Of Chimarvir."

He blinks very slowly. The Queen who sits behind him looks vaguely unimpressed.

"It's pronounced Chemua," he says, hoarsely. "And you are the most annoying woman I've ever met."

[knight-of-moths]

---Heartfire, 2nd, 4E 201---

Another damned word wall.

The worst part is, and I've neglected to relay this in my previous entries, that the words make sense. That as I stare at them, eyes glazed over in a daze, I can read that word and speak it alone.

This one was the dovah word for kill. As it enters my mind, it feels thick and heavy, like a meal that just won't settle. It makes me feel ill, itchy. Like a presense entering my mind that I didn't allow.

And worst of all, I'm the only one that can see what's happening. They can't.

I can't sleep. I'm sorry to them, if they're tired, but we must press on.

In an old abandoned fort, Kastav I think. Infested with rogue warlocks and necromancers. At least it's decently warm in here, comepared to the outside.

I know they're both probably tired, and I am too, but it'll be a great place to find some good stuff for enchanting. Gotta get Gore that flaming sword somehow.

Sadly not as much here as I hoped for.

Came upon a cave. Stillborn cave, the boys tell me. Full of falmer, freezing cold.

I'm ignoring my problems.

Down the road there's mine, with a smelter outside! Very convenient, since my bag is getting a tad too full from all the junk I keep picking up to smelt. Next to a mine too, maybe I can find some good minerals in it.

Mine had a decent amount of iron ore in it! A good haul, all smelted for later usage.

Also, I now suddenly realize I have taken wrong turn somewhere, as we are in Winterhold instead of Dawnstar. It's easy enough to get from one to the other, but I feel a bit foolish for headding in such a wrong direction.

We've arrived at the Winterhold inn. I've rented a room, and I intend to relax. Hopefully I can get some privacy for, frankly, personal reasons.

I went and found a secluded spot in the inn's basement to, well, relieve myself, as it were. The entire time I just kept having vivid fantasties of varying things, of werewolves, of dragons.

And yet I can't get him out of my mind. I feel like I'm losing it.

As I came upstairs he was sat in the chair across from the bed I rented. An oddity, he's usually in the main room or at the bar itself, drinking mead. Maybe he doesn't like this inn?

Maybe he's there for me.

Gods I feel ill. Mara give me strength.

[albertanimation]

The Skeleton Dance (1929) - Directed by Walt Disney

Imagery of the dead dancing is not a new concept; artistic images of corpses and cadavers cavorting to their graves has been common since the Late Middle Ages (1300-1500). Simultaneously horrifying and comedic, it has long been a method for artists to contend with the grim inevitability of death, while acknowledging the humour in its unification of people of all stripes. No matter how they struggle, the king and the pauper will ultimately find themselves in the same place - the grave.

Danse Macabre, Painted by John of Kastav, finished in 1490, Church of the Holy Trinity in Hrastovlje, Slovenia

The first of Disney's experimental Merry Melodies series and one of the most beloved of their early run of animations, The Skeleton Dance has continued to be enjoyed almost 100 years after its creation in 1929. Though not explicitly based around Halloween, it is frequently revisited in October for its dark, mischievous tone. As well, its imagery, though slightly ghoulish, has aged remarkably well as compared to its contemporaries of the time, such as another Disney short animated and recorded concurrently to Skeleton Dance, The Opry House (1929), which featured elements that would be considered xenophobic and transphobic today.

The concept of an animated short choreographed to prerecorded music was originally pitched by longtime Disney collaborator and acquaintance Carl W. Stalling, and supposedly led to some consternation between the two otherwise friends. At the time, most musical accompaniment of film or animations would be produced following completion of the visual aspect. This lead to the development of an early prototype of something known as a "click track", a metronome-like series of audio cues to help synchronize music to a visual element. This early method involved punching holes in a roll of undeveloped film, that when run on the soundhead would produce a series of clicks and pops to guide the animators. The soundtrack for Skeleton Dance was recorded in the Cinephone studios in New York under Pat Powers, Disney's short-lived distributor.

The Skeleton of Death Comes for the Bishop in the Abbey, Lithograph by Thomas Rowlandson, Undated.

Animator Ub Iwerks was supposedly inspired by drawings of skeletons by British cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson and imagery from the walls of Etruscan tombs. Animation on Skeleton Dance began in January of 1929 and took almost 6 weeks to complete, of which Iwerks animated all but the first scene, which was animated by Les Clarke.

Aside from the titular boneheads, the animation features many horror tropes - a cold, ominous wind blows throughout the film, an owl leers at the camera, silhouetted by the moon, ragged black cats hiss and spit at each other perched upon gravestones, bats flutter and spiders scurry.

It's not hard to see why this film has become closely associated with Halloween despite being completed nearly 7 months away from the holiday. Although America's devastating economic downturn would not begin in earnest until September of '29 following the Wall Street Crash, it's easy to draw parallels to the untold loss of life due to starvation and sickness during the Great Depression and the emaciated stars of Skeleton Dance, not wholly unlike the Danse Macabre of the victims of the Black Death in the mid 1300s.

Reactions to The Skeleton Dance were unsurprisingly mixed. It was originally previewed on March 20th to a lukewarm response, then screened at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles, Fox Theatre in San Francisco, and the Roxy Theatre in New York. Pat Powers, Disney's then-distributor, upon receiving negative reactions from exhibitors displeased by the short's morbid tone, allegedly returned a note to Disney: "They don't want this. MORE MICE." Skeleton Dance was allegedly even banned in the country of Denmark for its morbidity, judged to be unsuitable for children.

However, not all reception was negative. Many lauded the film, such as an article from Variety that stated "Title tells the story, but not the number of laughs included in this sounded cartoon short. The number is high." Another article from The Film Daily called it "a howl from start to finish". In 1994, it was voted 18th of the 50 Greatest Cartoons ever made by industry professionals. These days, The Skeleton Dance is regarded as a masterpiece of classical animation and is considered highly influential as one of the first films to feature highly synchronized visuals and audio.

References:

https://www.thedisneyclassics.com/blog/the-skeleton-dance

https://mouseplanet.com/the-skeleton-dance-story/7655/

https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-spooky-story-of-the-skeleton-dance/

https://www.wdw-magazine.com/today-in-disney-history-the-skeleton-dance-debuted/

https://screenrant.com/disney-horror-movie-banned-too-dark-skeleton-dance/

https://archive.org/details/variety96-1929-07/page/n203/mode/2up

[wynteol]

Elder Scrolls Online Storylines: Kastav Varo

It has taken me some time to do this but at least now I can make a post here . I'm trying to do a push to have it where ALL as of this post going up , 19 characters , completing their respected storylines as soon as possible .

Anyways , here is the storylines I completed with Kastav here as well as some bonus stuff as well .

Deshaan - 5 / 29 / 2024

Fighters Guild - 9 / 20 / 2024

Mages Guild - 9 / 21 / 2024 ( JUST before midnight as well )

Shadowfen - 8 / 20 / 2024

Eastmarch - 9 / 20 / 2024

Total Gold Earned: 217, 384 gold

Time Played: 9 days , 1 hour and 40 minutes ( roughly 217 hours and 40 minutes )

Up next for Kastav Varo : The Rift , Coldharbour , the Main Quest , Stros M'Kai and Betnikh storylines

[izdavanjenekretnina]

Kuća Kastav : 100m² - 265,000€ - NEKRETNINE ZA IZDAVANJE

[zemljacina]

Radio reklama

Zajedno sa našim prijateljima iz Radija Kastav složili smo reklamu za 2024.

[visualpoett]

The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Stars (1490)

Artist: Janez Kastav

[drazen-katic]

PATRIAM CROATIAN *********************************** Dipl.-Ing. Dražen Katić mr.sc.: Vaš zastupnik za grad KASTAV - Dipl.-Ing. Dražen Katić mr.sc.

[eurovision-revisited]

2001 Copenhagen - Number 18 - Ksenija - "Igra"

Ksenija Sobotinčić-Štropin seems to have fallen victim to one of the classic national finals errors. She's been surrounded by interpretive dance that bears little relation to the actual song. As she's belting a power anthem/mediæval battle accompaniment in the form of a song called Igra (Game) in my head this a celebration of chess. Please don't correct me, this is now my head-cannon.

In what is becoming a boilerplate excuse, I don't have the lyrics to this and unfortunately, I do not understand or speak Croatian. All I know is that this song is written by her and Fortunato Antić. The song lends itself to drama with a plinky-plonky piano intro that is soon overwhelmed by the orchestra and a strongly distorted electric guitar. By the time of the first crescendo it feels like a triumphant chorus from a musical. Then the backing singers join in to add to cement the effect. I feel that the strength of the song has blasted me back in my chair at this point and threatens to fully push me back across the room.

Ksenija certainly has the voice to pull this off - she's a regular of various Croatian music festivals and competitions and she knows how to fill a huge room with the power of her lungs. She competed in Dora once before, in 1997 when she finished 17th out of 20 songs. This year she's gone one better and finished 16th. Her only recorded output that I can find is on the compilation albums that accompanied those festivals she sang in from the late 1990s and well into the 2000s. She does have a very small YouTube channel on which she has narrated a couple of children's stories.

The most recent clip of her singing I can find is from the Kastav Čansonfest in 2007. Here she is, without her glasses, singing her own song Naši Puti (Our Ways) and showing what she's capable of.

[bitchwhoreofastorm]

gratuitous nord demon backstory. following the battle of kastav, 1E392. tw: imprisonment/kidnapping

They hadn't bound her hands. Thank Kyne, thank Tsun, thank Mara, thank dead Shor in the ground, they hadn't bound her hands. Even with the gag forced into her mouth, with her hands free Barfok is not without a voice: she can sign, she can make herself known, even if her protestations are witnessed only by the walls of the dungeon and the back of the half-dead boy they threw down here with her, but oh, by Kyne, by Tsun, by Mara, by dead Shor in the ground, doesn't it make everything better? She flips off her captor when he throws her in and it is utter bliss.

So, hours into being in this dungeon, she sits against the wall, practising her signs the way she used to when Ysmir first taught her how to sign it. Ahg. Aak. Ah. Bah. Bah, ah, rah, fu'u, og, kah. Yo, su, mah, ikh, rah. She finds herself keeping tempo with the dripping water coming from one corner. There's a bucket under the drip, and she realises, slowly, that's the Whiterun men's idea of water for a guest.

Yo, su. It's a slow drip, or she'd go bathe.

She hears a soft groan. Kah, eg, mah, ah.

She's not alone in this prison. Her companion, the boy, proves himself to be a little less than half-dead. He's lying on the ground with his back turned to her, not his fault, just how he landed when they tossed him in. Barfok watches with mild curiosity as he slowly rolls himself onto his back, cranes his neck up, gasping for air. He, too, is gagged. His eyes are closed, his hair is long and only red-ish and plastered to his face with sweat. His breathing comes very shallowly.

He'd lost the battle for them. His first battle, sorry luck, that. He'd been wielding the thu'um and cantering through a Whiterun wheat-field alongside her when they'd speared his horse and he'd gone flying and landed hard on his chest in a way that Barfok was surprised hadn't killed him. No wonder he now gasps like a fish. Su, tah, ug, hag, nah. The wheezy little breath he's making is profoundly annoying.

The dungeon is cold. The floor is hard beneath the sad clumps of rotten hay that line it. Barfok's hands are growing clumsy, so she tucks them into her armpits for warmth.

She settles back against the wall, listening to her fellow Tongue die. It is going to be a long night.

-

Her fellow Tongue does not die. His lungs learn a way to work despite whatever wreckage lays inside him, and his breathing steadies, and his throat stops its wheezing. After the first night (there's no window, but it feels like a night) he stops moaning in pain. He lies very still in a certain position after that, reluctant to move, but he is breathing deeply, and not moaning in pain.

Their captors realise that as two Tongues of Morrowind they might be worth keeping alive. In the morning they're brought bowls of cold gloopy porridge and glasses of milk. The gag is narrow enough that, with some effort, the porridge and milk can be crammed around it, so Barfok eats inelegantly, smashing porridge through the fabric with lusty grunts of undignified gusto. She's used to being starved, thank Ysmir for his diligent tutorship, and the breaking of a fast never loses its thrill.

The boy half-dead watches her. He's finally opened his eyes and tilted his head to the side to look at her; he has very blue eyes, pretty in his fine features, even bloodshot and puffy-red as they are. Just for fun, Barfok locks eyes with him as she crams fully half of her porridge-coated hand into her mouth around the gag. His eyes narrow, and he looks away from her again, the expression of disgust unmistakeable-- prudish nobility!

Still, she doesn't touch his food. And some time in the supposed afternoon he rises unsteadily, shuffles the cell door, and eats with his hands, just as absent of dignity as she was.

-

There's an old fire-pit in their cell. In the fire-pit, there is charcoal. Some of the charcoal is in sticks. The sticks are long enough to write with.

Barfok thinks the other Tongue broke his ribs. It's in the way he keeps one arm folded over his chest, his shoulder stiff and raised. He favours one side in movement, holding the left, the one he fell on, very rigid. When he accidentally folds his abdomen he hisses and whimpers and then his breathing gets shallow again. Barfok signs to him, and he clearly understands her, but he never replies. He refuses to move his arm from his side. He lets the pain drive him from conversation.

Drawing, however, he can do. When Barfok sits next to him and writes: 'I am Barfok' on the cell floor in Dovahzul, he leans over awkwardly and writes, beneath it, unsteadily, 'Kema.'

So they talk like that. They just write to each other. There's nothing else to do down here, and he can manage it well enough with one hand. They switch to a wall when they run out of accessible floor. They sit close together so that passing the charcoal is easier.

They write to each other about the battle. They write about Morrowind and Monahven. They talk about Ysmir. They talk about his horse-riding. They talk about her home in Whiterun. They talk about their families, and her massacred hometown, and his assassinated mother. They ponder to each other if they'll be ransomed. They ponder to each other if they'll die.

She makes him laugh, by accident. The way he groans she worries it will kill him again.

-

There's no window in the cell. After long intervals a guard comes down to give them food-- porridge and milk, or bread soaked in milk. Mushy food that can be eaten around a gag. Not enough to sustain them but enough to prevent immediate death. Despite the cold, Barfok starts to sleep a lot, out of boredom as much as exhaustion. She does the trick she learned on Vvardenfell, where she curls up with her knees squishing her stomach to make it smaller, to make herself feel less hungry. It helps. She doens't have a choice but for it to help.

When she's awake, Kema draws for her.

(That's not his name, she recalls Ysmir using one with more vowels, when planning for that stupid, stupid battle. But she likes the simplicity of Kema. Kah, eg, mah, ah. She's so glad he's in too much pain to write out the extraneous letters.)

Kema is a good artist. He draws her pictures of his childhood home in the elf-land, a marvelous palace with a strange shape. He draws the Queen of that palace, who Barfok finds very beautiful. He draws Monahven, and Barfok stares at it, squints at it, pretends she's looking out of the window in her own childhood home.

Barfok cannot draw. Nonetheless, she tries: she copes his drawings of Monahven, and then adds her own of a stone circle and of a baby goat she once owned. She draws Red Mountain and an implausibly rotund Ysmir with a scraggly beard before it. She draws a bunch of leeks, because it's the only thing she can think of that she knows how it looks.

The drawing of the goat is so bad it makes him laugh again, and then their fun ends, because he goes back to lying very still with his arm bent up.

Later, once he runs out of chapters of his short life, he starts drawing horses. Barfok adds horns to them. Unicorns. A stick-figure Hircine with a spear in the background. He draws guars for her, round fat shapes sharing a banquet of hay. She adds another stick-Hircine, scratching his head in confusion. Did Hircine ever go to Morrowind? He spends a long time drawing a dragon, and Barfok, lying on her belly beside him, adds in a veritable feast for it: homesteads, fleeing figures, hawks, bears, squids, a whole army succumbing to its flames. Lying flat, her stretched-out stomach growls.

-

A few hours after their fifth meal-- or is it a few days, or a few minutes? Is it weeks? Is it years?-- after their fifth meal, as Barfok is trying to doze, the door is slammed open.

Barfok scrambles to her feet, raising her balled-up fists. A string of drool slips out of the corner of her gag.

There is no meal for her.

Here, instead, is Jarl Olaf in the flesh.

She might have lunged. She balls her fists, she prepares for it. But he, unlike they, has no gag in his mouth. The fus he breathes is not enough to send her flying, not enough to even send her stumbling, but it is a warning nonetheless.

Olaf stands in the doorway and surveys his spoils of war. His gaze on Barfok is so loathsome that she worries she might vomit around her gag. She cannot stop shaking, not with fear but with an animal desire to fling herself upon him, to tear, to rip, to maim, to hurt--

And then he is no longer looking at her. "Kul-se-Chimarvir," breathes Olaf towards his other prisoner. "Son of Chimarvir of Mournhold. No?"

When Barfok turns she sees that Kema is folded up against the back wall of the cell. He is sitting. He has not moved. He glares resignedly at Olaf.

"Perhaps not," drawls Olaf. "Mournhold has refused to ransom you."

Then Olaf turns to Barfok, and he says, "And you. None from Monahven know of you. Who do you belong to?"

Barfok's hands refuse to be unclenched from their fists. She takes several short sharp breaths, as if this will make her bloodlust less. She cannot even think for her own rage.

"How feeble Kjoric has become," drawls Olaf. "The Tongues he sends against me, unwanted children and nobodies. Tell me, at least," he addresses Barfok, "Give me the name of someone who will cough up a few coins for your safe return, won't you?"

Thank Kyne, thank Tsun, thank Mara, thank dead Shor in the ground they've left Barfok's hands unbound.

Barfok flips him off.

-

Olaf must think she's of some value to somebody out there, because the beating the guards give her is comparatively light. She ends up with a bloodied nose and a swollen lip and a swollen-shut eye and a few big boot-shaped bruises around her stomach, but her bones are pleasantly intact, and she's not coughing up blood, so she feels a smug sense of satisfaction, like she's gotten away with something.

Nonetheless, the aching starts up a while later, and it sets her in a foul mood. So, after she's washed her face the best she can with her filthy sleeves, she lies down in her corner, grumbling under her breath at every little ache. For not the first time she realises how unpleasant the gag is getting in her mouth, crusty and stinking pungently of curdled milk and her own rancid breath. Her clothing is scratchy for the sweat and dust caked into it. Her joints hurt from lying on the hard floor for so long and the beating hasn't distracted from that. At that dark moment, she feels very sorry for herself.

Kema, too, has been lying very still in his corner ever since Olaf's visit. He hadn't even stirred during her beating-- not that she can blame him for that, really. But lying there in the dark she hears him breathing in a weird way. She hears him shuffle around, then gasp in pain, and then he sucks in some hoarse breath, and moves against the ground again. This goes on for quite some time.

He's trying to puncture his own lung. Barfok realises this with a dim disinterest. This thought comes moments before she falls asleep.

-

Herma-Mora appears to her. She's sitting very still against the wall when the blackness before her blossoms into a thousand emerald eyes. A staring fractal descends upon her, infinity's watchfulness coalescing on a prisoner.

She thinks that he'll have the usual offer: he helps her and her soul wears away a little bit more. But he doesn't say anything. She can't say anything, either.

So she hangs there in a miasma of swamp black and forest green, being blinked at.

After a million years, or three hours, or a minute, or a second-- was she asleep?-- she blinks and he's gone again. The torches have been lit in the hallway again. She wonders if Herma-Mora would pay a ransom for her.

-

One day, the jailor throws in a blanket, so now Barfok and Kema sleep side by side, Barfok pressed against his back so as not to harm his broken-up front. They don't really talk any more, they've run out of charcoal and he still won't move his arm. Barfok paces around the cell sometimes, and washes daily from the water-bucket, and signs poetry to herself, but Kema seems to have given up. Most of the time he just lies there. He seems to like staring at the old drawings they did together, of the horses and the dragon with its feast. When they wrote to each other, Barfok had offered condolences about his dead horse, and he'd said that he was sad about it, too. Krosis. Geh, Krosis. Men love their horses.

One day Barfok tries looking for more charcoal-- she wants to tell him about the Herma-Mora vision, she wants to confess to someone before she's dragged into Apocrypha the moment they die down here-- but they've used it all up. There's no word for Herma-Mora in Nordic Sign so she's forced to keep the secret.

On a different day, Barfok offers in sign to bathe him. He doesn't agree but he doesn't refuse either, and he doesn't fight when she unbuttons his now-crusty tunic and pulls it aside.

Below the fabric his chest is a tapestry of blue and purple and yellow and black. When he breathes the movement is asynchronous, the two sides of him rise at different times. His eyes are closed and he is breathing very shallowly, as if he's trying not to breathe at all, as if he's willing himself to be elsewhere.

Barfok uses a corner of his the blanket to clean the dirt away from his chin and his neck. It must have been trapped there since the battle, since he fell from his horse. There's even still strands of straw in his hair. He blighted all the wheat in the field. She'd never seen a thu'um like that; she found it-- finds it-- so horrifying it doesn't bear thinking of. But her own stomach remains empty, and she cannot help but feel just the tiniest bit gleeful, at the thought everyone up there will be going as sad and hungry as she is.

Barfok is not the caring sort. After a half-hearted attempt to clean him up, she braids his hair for him instead. He has very long, very pretty hair, and now that it hasn't been washed for a very long time, the colour has gone from flirting-with-blond to a definitive rusty red. Like an old wagon's axle, like the half-eaten blade of the sword her little brother found in the forest once. She puts it in very bad braids and then she leaves him to his sulking, overcome with her own misery.

He looks so dumb in those awful braids. They don't suit him at all. But he falls asleep with a peaceful comforted expression, unaware of the violence she just wrought upon him.

-

They are sitting on opposite walls and Barfok signs a question to him:

"When we get out, do you want to keep being friends?"

He's holding his arm rigid by his chest, the way he always does. She's surprised he's even sitting up. He's been growing more and more quiet over the past few-- what unit of time are they in, is it the next era already?-- and she thinks he's looking paler, that he's not breathing very well.

She is more surprised when he uncoils both arms and signs back to her:

"If."

-

The door is thrown open. Barfok had been asleep, and she's barely realised she's conscious again when the jailor barks: "Up."

For some stupid reason Barfok obeys; she's on her feet before she's even fully awake. Flustered with surprise, she flails both hands at the jailor, the universal Nordic sign for "What?"

"You've been ransomed," the jailor tells them. "I'm to take you to Dunmeth pass. Get up, come on, it's a long trip."

There's a drumming in Barfok's ears that she only belatedly realises is her own heart. She signs, "Who?" And then she raps out a series of letters: Yo, su, mah, ikh, rah? And then she signs the symbol for dragons. The symbol for king. She's babbling with her hands before she realises the jailor doesn't read sign.

"On your feet, now," the jailor barks again, and Barfok hears her friend also struggling to his feet. She does not go to help him but she doesn't hear him fall.

Then the jailor is leading them out, and they're walking through the hallway, walking together, walking… out of the cell, up the stairs, out of Oblivion, back into the world of mortals. They're crossing from one plane to another, treading over a billion stars.

Every step hurts. Her muscles feel very weak, the bruises from her beating are groaning with protest. She can hear Kema breathing through his nose in a way that suggests he's fighting back sobs. But the jailor walks before them, leading them boldly out, and he pays no notice to their agonies.

In fact, he's self-absorbed-- he's complaining to himself, though saying it as if he's addressing him. "Primitive heathens," he's spitting, "Imagine leaving your child to languish in an enemy dungeon for a week. A whole week!…"

-

They make it to Dunmeth pass, though Barfok does not recall the trip. Ysmir is there with the ransom, and the elven Queen is also there, and she is much prettier than she was in the charcoal drawing. And then, like wheels of cheese at a farmer's market, two young prisoners of war are passed off to their loved ones, and they're free, and they're safe, and they're home.

… There's a healer from Kogoruhn who sees to them. There's a special knife to pull away the gags, and there's Barfok, yelling, screaming at the top of her lungs just to get it all out. It's a gleeful sort of screaming, the delighted raucous of a goat kid learning to use its lungs for the first time-- incoherent hollering until Ysmir gives her a gentle slap about the head to shut her up. Then there's food, food, food! There's a cup of very strong flin with some sort of medicine in it, there's a clean tunic to get changed into, there's Ysmir, steady as a rock beside her, beside her, here, here. Barfok babbles through her mouthfuls of food, gleeful to be speaking aloud even more than she is for the nourishment and the rescue. She swears to Kyne, Tsun, Mara, Shor, all she wanted to do was talk. All she wants to do is talk and talk and talk. She's never loved the sound of her own voice so much.

They get on the road as soon as they can. There's a whole caravan that's come for them, carts and soldiers, a small army Ysmir's brought, he doesn't trust the Alessians. There's a second army that Barfok is told belongs to Mournhold. Reveling in her regained voice, Barfok hangs off of Ysmir's arm and chatters to every soldier that comes her way. Ysmir pretends not to approve of this display, but he lets her hold onto his arm, and he's never done that before, so she knows he must be pleased to hear her voice again. Ysmir's arm is terrifically warm.

And finally, after she's talked at Ysmir until her throat sounds like a frog croaking, after her lungs are burning and her head is swimming with flin, Barfok wanders off to find her newfound dungeon friend.

She finds him in a cart in the Mournhold half of the caravan. They've made a bed for him, he's lying in a nest of soft wool blankets and silk sheets. His filthy clothes have been changed for some soft-looking elven robes, and the Queen of Mournhold is sitting near his head, studiously untangling his hair from the horrid braids Barfok had put it in. A healer sits at the other side of him, preparing some pungent mixture to slather on his deformed purple-black chest.

In the light of day he looks closer to death than he had in the dungeon. Barfok even thinks he might be asleep, resting so peacefully in this decadent cart-back bedding. But when the Queen stops her work at Barfok's approach, he opens a single eye. He tilts his head very slightly and stares down at Barfok, half-lidded, his bloodless lips drawn into a thin line.

Barfok is half-drunk from medicated brandy, Barfok has an eye swollen shut from being beaten and is wearing an old ill-fitting tunic from Ysmir. She is not fit for an audience with nobility. She greets them nonetheless.

"Wow." Barfok says. And then, "You look like shit."

Now he opens both eyes, and he raises his head from his pillows to stare down at her.

"I'm Barfok," Barfok follows up, her voice unsteady. "And you're, eh, you're Kema, right?" She feels herself sway a little. "Kema of Mournhold. Yeah. Of Chimarvir."

He blinks very slowly. The Queen who sits behind him looks vaguely unimpressed.

"It's pronounced Chemua," he says, hoarsely. "And you are the most annoying woman I've ever met."

[rijeka2023]

#6

Dziś poranne leniuchowanie. Zwyczajnie nie chce nam się. W nocy była burza, godzinka wichury, błysków i ulewy - dziwny, niepokojący klimat, jakoś w Polsce nie robi to takiego wrażenia co tutaj.

Pogoda jednak od rana taka sama jak poprzednie dni, chcemy odpocząć od słońca i spędzamy czas na tarasie. Po obiadku ciągnie nas jednak nad wodę, ale po dojściu na plażę sami nie wiemy czy się cieszymy. Ten skwar jest nie do zniesienia a skóra błaga o litość. Robimy sobie cien w naszej zatoczce i rzucamy piłką, skaczemy do wody, szukamy krabów, układamy kamienne wieże.

Zmywamy z siebie sól i ruszamy... Kastav... no i posypały się fotki...

Małe miasteczko 378 mnpm, morze widać z góry, teraz można dostrzec wyspy Krk i Cres, oraz Opatiję, w której wczoraj byliśmy i z poziomu morza oglądaliśmy górskie miasteczka oświetlone wieczorem.

Ciekawe miejsce, z średniowiecznym charakterem, gdzie trafiliśmy na Kastavskie Lato Kulturalne. Zajęliśmy chyba ostatnie legitne miejsce na parkingu, bo do koncertu trwały jeszcze przygotowania, potem zaczęli się schodzić, zjeżdżać - ledwo stamtąd wyjechaliśmy, taki tłok.

Takiej Chorwacji szukalismy tu na północy, taką chcielismy pokazac dzieciom, bo to co widzieli 3 lata temu, zapewne mało pamiętają. Wąskie uliczki, piękne budynki i zabytki architektury. Widoki, wszedobylskie koty i kamienie, okiennice, kwiaty. Aż miło tu pospacerować wieczorem, choć schody pojawiające się na naszej drodze co chwila przypominają o zmęczeniu (zwłaszcza najmłodszemu).

Ale dziś już nie chcieliśmy czekać do zmroku, koncert był biletowany, więc to jest dobry moment na wieczór w domu przy winie, rocznik 2022 ;)

PS. Właśnie dostaliśmy newsa że wczorajszą burza w Chorwacji była groźna: "Burza zostawiła za sobą zniszczenia, których na tych terenach nie widziano nawet podczas wojny lat 90". Rok temu trafiliśmy na pożar w Czeskiej Szwajcarii, teraz na burzę stulecia. Na szczęście nas tylko smyrneła, ale na kolejne 2 dni też nadają opady. Ciekawe jak to będzie wyglądać... czy da radę coś zwiedzić, popływać, czy czekają nas planszówki ;)