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From The Jackals To The Shepherds 20: Two of Diamonds
Manage episode 184800500 series 1412651
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The Woods:
The Map:
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Battlebards Tracks used:
Elven Dirge – Farewell – Score Music – Philippe Payet
Elven Dirge – The Passing Of The Elves – Score Music – Mark Stothard
Transcription:
For a long time, we were at war with The Jackals. But now, we’ve driven them off, and we have this – a year of relative peace. In this moment, there is an opportunity to build something.
A week has passed.
For months we lived under the assumption that we were the only survivors of the war with the Jackals. Only we few living in this mining camp, here to live out the rest of our days and watch ourselves fade into the mountains as an echo of the last cities to fall. Today that changes, as a woman walks into camp an hour before noon. Her feet run bloodied as her torn shoes flap on the forest ground. Her torn and ripped leather jacket hangs near rags over her muscled shoulders, and her eyes glare determined, then soften to relieved, as she sees our concerned faces. As Eileen rushes to her, she collapses in the dirt, and Eileen carries her inside to sleep. As she sleeps she dreams.
She dreams of the dark, when the Jackals came for her wife and for her city. She dreams of the wind-blurred pines that lined her escape, with a glimmer of light between trunks. She fights for a time, as they come in wave after wave. Then she runs, entombed for an hourless night with the world of things unseen.
She runs until the forest chokes from pruned and groomed trees to wilder scrub, and then to feral old growth, where the trunks are wider than her arms can wrap, and then just when she thinks she has lost her hope and herself to the woods the trees thin and she hears two sets of noises. From one direction she hears growling and the plodding of heavy feet, and from the other she hears the sound of our community, and as she hears the sound of laughter she feels a pull and the ground ahead of her puts up a strange fog. Mist, the dust of flowers, leagues, heavy with promise of snow, and a beckoning road ‘twixt vale and hill, with the lure that all must know. Despite it being nearly mid day she sees a light, as if it came from her window’s gleam, soft, flaring its squares of red, she looses the ache of the wilderness and longs for the fire instead.
As the woman sleeps in Eileen’s bed, resting the miles from her feet, the sun moves overhead and dips below the mountains. The night comes down, in ever-darkening shapes that seem to grope, with eerie fingers for the window of the shack—then— to rest to sleep, enfolding her, as in a dream. Faith—might she awaken!
The night temperature drops and clouds form overhead. As our gossip precipitates, so too drips the rain with seeming sad, insistent beat. Shivering across the pane, drooping tear-wise, and softly patters by, like little fearing feet. Faith—this weather!
To warm the woman, Eileen sparks a fire in her hearth, and the smoke rises into the shower, the feathery ash is fluttered; there upon the pane, and as the night winds on the dying fire casts a flickering ghostly beam,— then closes in the night and gently falling rain. Faith—what darkness!
The morning eventually comes, and those able to wrest sleep from the vice grips of curiosity wake to find Eileen, Llyana, Drach, and Clovis, a foursome of welcoming faces, supporting the woman as she gingerly steps from the shack into the sun of the mining camp. Drach and Eileen support her arms and Clovis & Llyana offer encouraging words with her steps. They bring her to a table near the community’s center, and bring food and water to entice her story. She gives her name as Djuna, and thanks the community for her welcoming.
We begin a project, a catalogue of our history. Clovis leads this effort, interviewing Djuna about her time in the forest. The goal is to create a lineage of every one of us in the community, so that nothing is lost when we leave the world.
And a week passes.
Thank you for joining us for the twentieth episode of From The Jackals To The Shepherds. If you like this show please give us a rating on iTunes, tell a friend, or share us on social media. As always the intro for the show was read by Dave Lapru, who is also our mapkeeper. You can find Dave on twitter at plantbird, and I’m at leviathan files. Please consider visiting our website at Riverhouse Games dot com, or supporting this show and other Riverhouse Games work on Patreon at patreon dot com slash Riverhouse Games. Music for this episode was provided by Battlebards dot com. Until next week, I hope your week goes well.
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