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a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building

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#1 2019-08-22 04:51:04

qunari
Member
Registered: 2018-09-29
Posts: 1

The Ballad of Red Sky

I lived a very poignant life, and Red Sky would not leave me alone until I wrote her story.
The village (excuse me, town) she settles with her offspring is the former Trexler town, where I had been born earlier today. (It was the life I had lived just before her!) Needless to say, upon realizing all my family from the previous game had been wiped out, and here I had been given a second chance - well, I had to take it. And write it. Because what is a town without it's people, right?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

what my body knows
is not a lie     it’s not
a lie i tell you     it is not
it’s nothing short of truth
and nothing larger
my past lodges
in my marrow     and if
i wanted a transplant
there’d be no match
- The Small Claim of Bones, Cindy Williams Gutiérrez



The Ballad of Red Sky, The Lost Eve, The Wanderer, She Who Returns, Woman Born and Woman-Eternal.

PT. I
Mother. Mother I know not; for she leaves me amongst leafy ferns heavy with ripe fruit shortly after I am born. She clothes me in furs and leaves me to the wet-nurse. Son, I am told, and shortly thereafter - worthless. Not by mother. She is not around. The truth of this settles in my bones. A half-remembered tenet from another life?
Not worthless, an aunt interjects, You are Red. She is not holding me when she says it. I am named Red regardless.

A childhood spent amongst the reeds and grasses, without the pangs of hungry bellies (save when I miss the dinner bell) does me good. I grow, and grow, and strike out in a direction of my choosing with nothing but the shirt on my back and a basket clutched betwixt my fingers.

I find some stones.
I dig for roots and other good things to eat. Now I begin to learn the cost of a hungry belly. Between hurried foraging I learn - slowly, painfully - how to set a snare. How to build a kiln. The earth nourishes my body with the labors of hers.

Eight years after I left the village, I all but trip over the remains of an early civilization. There are no bones - only the tools left behind, a forge long gone cold; two rabbit carcasses dried to mere bones in the sun. I like it here. (There are wolves to the west.) But it is for naught. Between the span of two breaths my entire world changes - a baby, a baby blips into existence next to my basket. I am so started I drop my basket. How, I think to myself, between breastfeeding this child and digging roots to eat along the way (the way back, what a joke.) How can I have a son? Wasn't I a son?
A mother, it turns out, should look at these things more closely before clothing her child from head to toe.
Still. A son, who wants to live as badly as I do. (I do not tell him I am lost by my own doing. I had thought there would be no-one to depend on me. I had wanted to live in the woods. To learn. Now I must return to my settlement or die. There are not enough berries here.)
I follow the green until I can follow it no more.
We cross the badlands together, skirting ravines filled with wolves; meander around a land so cold the ground has frosted white. I do not stop to let my son see penguins. There is no food here.
After a year I spot grass once more. (I am not so foolish, now, to believe that I have managed to find my birthplace as well. The Goddess does not smile upon me, not by giving me a son; not by giving him to me when I was Lost. Perhaps the Goddess refuses to smile upon him, as well.)
"I am lost," I tell my son, haltingly, who still does not have a name. I had feared the worst, before. I do not fear his death now. "On purpose."
No sooner do the words leave my lips that we stumble upon a plate. A plate, abandoned this far out? No. There must be - civilization - somewhere. I put my son down. He is big enough to walk, now.
Two days later, we stumble upon the first road.

PT. II
The road leads us to a town, and the town - the town is empty. For a single blinding moment I think this is my hometown. But - no. The fields are rectangular instead of square, there is a cow in the sheep paddock that I have no recollection of. Tools litter the ground as far as the eye can see.
There are no people.
No people, even when my son and I shout hellos to the rooftops, even when we send a flock of pigeons wheeling away with our ruckus. Our search for others leads me to the cemetery. My bones seem familiar with this land, and a walk among the graves leads me to the headstone of Manaih. I know this name. Why do I know this name?
"Settle?" My son asks after we have scoured every last vacant house, his liquid brown eyes staring up at me.
I pick him up and say "You are Jon."


'Settle', as it turns out, is a loose word.
The village is a good place, if as empty and cold as a mausoleum on some days. Jon grows up strong, and capable, even at his short ten summers; he seems older beyond his years. The Goddess blesses me with a daughter, then - and this time it is a blessing, rather than a shock; I am Woman Born and Woman Eternal - and she is my legacy. "Clara," I tell her, "You are Clara."

She grows up in the reeds and lilies as I did. There is no danger of us starving - not in these sprawling, ancient fields. In rejection of my own upbringing I stick near to her, balance her on my hip as I traverse the town. (One well is a village. Three wells is a town.) "We are alone," I tell her. "You and your brother and I. You are my legacy."

When she is eight I take the crown from my brow and place it atop her pile of black curls. She is so small. My heart aches with it.
"I am grown," she tells me over lunch one day, both of us sitting in the fields and eating berries while Jon cooks rabbit over the fire.
"Oh?" A daughter can be humored, after all. "Then take this." I wrap her in sheepskin and soft fur boots. "Work hard, like your brother."
"I will, mama."
Somehow, I believe her. (The Goddess has never smiled upon me or my children.)

PT. III
An old woman, getting older. Two more sons, both taken from me within hours of their birth. I do not curse the Goddess. I do not.
Instead, I busy myself with love for my children. I fletch arrows with my son to kill a bear in the fields, I stoke the forge with my daughter. I do not know how to milk the cows or shear the sheep. The few books in town are messy, convoluted diagrams that leave me more confused than I started out.
Still. The town provides.

By the time my daughter has a child, my eyes have clouded and my hands can no longer curl around the handle of an axe. "You don't need to, mama," my son tells me, and leads me to the fireside to sit.
"I am a burden," I argue with him, "Clara's children need my food. My clothes." Jon has never let me get out of anything easy.
"We will not starve even if we had ten grandmothers living here, mama."
"Go bother your sister," I reply, and put more wood on the fire.
My son rolls his eyes, tips his hat back to feel the sun on his face. "Whatever you say, mama."

I live long enough to see Clara have her child. A boy, hale and hearty; a squalling ten pounds with the darkest eyes I've ever seen on a baby. (Not that I've seen any other babies besides my own.)
I tell my children I am proud. That they are - of all my lives - the best children I have ever had.

The woods are calm. Soothing, after so long under the shadows of the trees; I hear the heavy tread of wolves and am not afraid of them. (An old woman, getting older.)
This is the way I choose. To lie on a carpet of green grass, to stare up at the sky; to watch the colors fade from blue to bruised purple and then - finally - red. Fitting, that I should end my life under that of my same name. (After all this time - I greet the Goddess as one greets an old friend.)

FIN


Notable lives (male): Jax Weed
Notable lives (female): Joya Wolf (daughters Hope, Sara, and Joyann, son Malacai), Mona Sunseri (born into the town Joya settled!), Maria Game (killed by my family from a past life - thank you, Legend and Hero Sunseri! Brats c: )

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