#lovely promo pic from an old cadastre

[aquietjune]

Little Bird: Chapter 11 is out on AO3

Note: there is a map at the end of the excerpt.

“So, when did you see the light?” she asked her father.

No, she was still on affectionate terms with him, even though the tension was already building, the doubts accumulating.

She must have asked something like, “When did you realize that you made a mistake in raising me that way?”

And then, she tried to answer herself, proposing, “When they told you I would only live up to twenty-two?”

While in Paradis, on her mission, she never let herself entertain the thought of what it would be when she returned home. She couldn’t afford the luxury of that; she couldn’t let herself daydream as if she was someone like Jean.

In the crystal, it was different.

Some days, or rather, some unaccounted amounts of time, the darkness around her was so deep, the silence so deflating, she would think of drowning if she didn’t have something to keep her anchored.

The years passed. She had a rough sense of how many, for Armin read her the newspaper often; he would even summarize some happenings, tentatively thinking that if she only became conscious then, she would feel alienated by an ongoing conversation.

Despite the darkness of the thought, or maybe exactly because of it, those were her moments of light.

So, she knew by then that she had six more years, maybe five, now, to get back home.

(continue here)

Oh, and we have a map of the general region of untrampled territory we're dealing with in the Marleyan continent, as in, the province of Cotta and surroundings provinces*. I will post it on the website as well, but for now please know that MATH DOES NOT EXIST, ok? * I should have marked the line of the end of the Rumbling, but consider Monte Forca and Fort Salta as a boundary, mh?