OPEN :: A golden bird was singing

[baedalites]

Who: Everyone!
What: St Kelley's evening
Where: The Apache and surrounding environs.
When: Veerdi evening.
Notes:
(1) The topic threads are just suggestions; if you've got somewhere else that your characters simply must be, make your own thread.
(2) All mementos will appear overnight in some part of your character's apartment.
(3) Dance!

St Kelley's is one of the more sedate occasions in Baedal, at least as holidays go. It passes more or less unnoticed by the majority of the population as many of them feel it doesn't concern them. It's not their holiday; it's for the others. Those with severed ties and broken hearts. The temple and church preach that it's a time for reflection or for glorifying the generosity of the gods. It's one of the few days on which no one looks askance at first generation Citizens mourning their missing loved ones publicly.

As night rolls around and floating lanterns are set to sea, the Apache in Mog Hill prepares to accept guests from the newer cohorts. It's something that happens every year, making it a practical tradition. The alcohol will be cheaper for first timers, and the music will be kept at a reasonable level.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

It's a disconcerting realization of difference that she-- already knew, really, but doesn't like to think about. Sunny talks about they with a conscious separation, but Ilde's distance feels more like isolation on the day to day level; human context is all that she knows, no matter how she hates that or struggles with it. Even the way that she tries to connect with her heritage and ancestry is filtered through the human experience and it...isn't fair.

She doesn't hate them so much as she's afraid, and it makes her angry and upset and tired. She hates the way that they were treated at the facility (it's easier to be angry for the others, easier to stop herself from wondering if she deserved it when the thought makes her a traitor to them, tacitly permissive of what was done to them), and she hates the way that what was done to them colors her every interaction with humanity since then; she hates that it goes so far into her bones that she keeps flinching that way, and she tries not to. But even if she doesn't want to be always hurt, it seems so unfair that she knows no alternatives, not really. That she and her father were abandoned the way they were, that she has to claw her way into something, that they have no roots under them and she wants a connection.

She doesn't want to watch humans be sweet to each other, she wants to feel something, to belong to something, to have a history that she can touch with her hands and feel solid underneath her when she's smallest. She wants to understand traditions from the inside, and all she has is the knowledge that her understanding of her father's language will always be imperfect at best.

“I think they're nice,” she says, vaguely, instead of any of that; she withdraws, because it's easier.

[yeouiju]

Maybe it is easier, for Sunny. Human ritual and tradition is something he is a part of; a beast that walks from the river to the village, soaking wet and smiling, taking gratefully a seat by the fire and eating dinner with the farm wife's children, some several hundred years ago. They prayed for the gifts he bestowed, sent lanterns of the equivalent for him. He wants to watch them dance in a circle and put boats in the water for their loved ones than fight stupid wars and tear a country, his country, in two.

Which doesn't make him different, really. It is just where his thoughts drift.

The answer from the fairy is vague but he doesn't sense dishonesty. It's more like a flash back of reflected sunlight on murkier river, distracting. "So are your shoes," he says, instead.