![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinThis is the beginning of the promised story about Mackenzie's brothe.
Began: 2/6/2011, 5:00 PM
Status: In progress (11:00 PM)
Hours Writing: 2
Word Count ~2000
[2 hours in. Starting to really take shape now that I'm into the dialogue.]
The house on the hill was a very old and very proud house of stone and timber construction. If it looked a little lopsided, that was only because it was.
It had started its life as a rude fort on a high hill, back when the lords of a land were those who had the immediate and personal ability to hold it through force. As cattle raids and contests of strength had given way to cattle trading and contests of hospitality, a great feast hall had been attached and gradually, more and more comforts of life were added over the generations until the original fort was swallowed up by a sprawling stone manor of very mixed pedigree.
But fortunes may shrink as easily as times may change, and the descendants of the first man who'd lived like a king on top of the hill---albeit as king over not much beyond the hill itself---became subjects themselves to increasingly greater powers, until the current tenant of the stone house became little more than a tax collector for the emperor of the Mother Isles. Technically his title was still a noble one, but when people saluted in his direction it was rarely a gesture to make in front of one's mother.
Parts of the great manse had been demolished over the ages as the cost of keeping them in good repair, the good stone and stouter timbers carted away to pay debts or help cheaply establish a relative's homestead. The great feast hall remained, though as a separate structure. A space bigger than most houses divided it from the remains of the house that still served the function of being a house.
The feast hall likewise remained a feast hall, used for occasional public meetings and the almost-weekly country dances, a ritual that in the local parlance had come to be known as going up to the tor, pronounced as one word, up-t'tor. The noble family were never compensated for or consulted on this use of what was technically still their property, though they were expected to keep the hall cleaned and well-maintained. Traditional duties didn't decline at the same rate as did traditional powers and traditional wealth.
The land the nobles owned had grown as their fortunes had shrank, though the fields and herds were now tended by employees rather than subjects. The lands surrounding the tor were worked with diligence and care. They had to be, as their produce was the main source of income for the landowners, who were required to make up from their own funds for any shortfalls in the region's taxes and could not hope to get away with missing a tithe to the Mother Temple or abstemious behavior whenever a collection was taken up for a worthy cause or a needy individual.
The Corvir family were not poor by any definition of the word, and they did enjoy quite a bit of privilege, but they were not as wealthy as their neighbors almost hereditarily assumed they must be, and every lean year and mean season brought them as close to precipitous ruin as it did those who worked their lands and those who grudgingly gave up taxes to them.
"Corvir" was a hard name to bear. At the time when surnames had become standard in the region, corvir had been an honored title and respected position. Many petty lords would have killed to be able to style themselves thus, and more than a few had. Now it was second only to carnifex on the list of imperial functionaries who would find themselves unwelcome at most doors, and no lord would tolerate a mere tax collector appropriating a more lofty title. Corvirs were still allowed to style themselves as "the honourable", but few did, if only because anyone it sounded like a bad joke coming out of anybody else's mouth.
The honourable Robert Corvir, the current patriarch of the Corvir family and corvir of the realm, was off safekeeping a chest of silver on its way to the imperial coffers the day that the sky exploded and a man fell out of it. His daughter, equally yoked with the name Ardellia had come running out of the stone house headed for the cow pasture when she heard the clamor that preceded the disaster. She had no clue what it portended, only that a noise that could make the honest timbers and ancient stones of her family's house quake so violently couldn't possibly be good for calves.
She reached the fields just as the spell-bolstered wooden keel of a great ship burst out through the bottom of the cloud cover, and then it simply burst.
What followed was not precisely a stampede, because a stampede only happens in one direction. Many calves were lost that day, and two cows were also lost in the most literal fashion, and others injured, though few past the point where healing was still preferable to slaughter. Some of her father's hired men had ranger training, and they were among those who reached the pasture even before she did, otherwise the losses might have been far greater.
Ardellia was a deft hand with a startled animal herself and might have been much help in the effort to calm and recover the cattle, if the naked man hadn't landed right in front of her. The sight of him robbed her of all impetus. It was not that she'd never seen a nude male figure before. She may have been a corvir's daughter, but she was also a farm girl, and one with three older brothers, and two younger ones whom she'd been responsible for bathing.
She'd seen dead bodies, too, even from violent death. But the man who came down in the pasture looked so perfect, so whole... so wonderfully intact. There was blood on the side of his face, and quite a bit of it, but other than that and the fact that he was stone dead he could have been the picture of health. Combined with his obvious youth, it made the whole thing seem hopelessly tragic. She realized, seeing him, that the ship would have been full of people, few of whom would leave behind recognizable remains.
Poor boy, she thought. He'll become a symbol, 'the face of the tragedy', as they say on the telly. What his poor mother will think... I should cover him up, maybe wash the blood off. There is an awful lot of blood...
And it was as she approached closer to him, her gaze fixed on his face, that his eyelids flapped open.
"No... heal..." was what he said, before passing out again.
The bed in the guestroom of the Corvir House where Dan Harris found himself when next he regained consciousness was the first proper, free-standing bed with a real mattress that he could ever remember occupying. He'd grown up on airships and been used to sleeping in a barely-cushioned berth or a swinging hammock, the latter being his preference.
He didn't think much of a mattress, when he realized that was what was underneath him. His first impression upon waking up was that he had landed on his back on top of a cloud, which was somehow just barely managing to support him and was bound to give way at any moment.
Given his experiences, this was perhaps understandable.
"You're with us again, then," a young woman said. She was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair that had been brought into the room and set quite close to the bed... startlingly close, given that the sound of her voice was the first thing that clued Dan in to the fact that he wasn't alone. "Sorry to spook you," she said. "Though, really, it's just a bit of turnabout."
"I imagine so," Dan said. He was acutely wear of an odd itchy pressure and the shadow of something just above his eye. His hand reached for it, then stopped.
"We sewed and bandaged you up as best as we could," she said. "They wanted to call for a cleric, but after you said no healing, I didn't want to take the chance. It weren't as bad as it looked, under all that blood. Small, but deep."
"Thank you for that," Dan said.
"You're lucky to have come down in farm country, you know. Few folks alive today know how to do that sort of thing, unless they work with animals."
"We can do quick-and-dirty bandages on the ship," he said. "Have to. There's just so much that can go wrong in the heat of the..." His face went blank. "Could do. Did."
"Some things are bigger than a bandage can cover," she said. "Some things aren't. The news is coming in of other survivors, some big groups scattered all over the countryside."
"They would be... we were going pretty fast, and it's a windy day," Dan said. "Drift boats... drift."
"Do you think everyone made it?"
He shook his head.
"I know they didn't," he said. "I shoved one particularly pig-headed boy in the direction of the boats not ten seconds before... well, before."
"I'm going to venture a guess," the young woman said. "If I were to go get an alchemical healing unguent out of the stocks and put it on your cut, it'd heal up without a problem, wouldn't it?"
"Don't," Dan said.
"I'm not planning on exposing you," she said. "Though you might have a hard time explaining your survival, if it's not generally known..."
"Not generally," he said. "But it's not a secret, either. Secrets like that are too fragile to be kept on a ship. They break in transit."
"So, how about the unguent then?" she said. "We keep it for cows but it's fit for humans. People."
"No," Dan said, shaking his head.
"Maybe you've never seen what can happen with a cut that's not healed, but you could get a nasty infection..."
"I'll get that cured if it happens," Dan said.
"It'll scar."
"I know," he said.
"What's your name?"
"Dan," he said.
"I've a brother and two cousins called Daniel," she said.
"It's short for Aidan," he said.
"That's a lovely name," she said. "I wouldn't expect it, with that accent. You sound tricky."
"Tricky?"
"Metricky," she said. "It's what they call Metropolitans here."
"'They'?"
"The people," she said.
"Aren't you 'the people'?" he asked her.
"Not while I'm Robert Corvir's daughter," she said.
"You're the local coves?" Dan said, and she nodded, and he laughed. "I doubt either one of us would be too popular right now."
"No, you picked a hell of a time to drop in with that accent," she said.
"I'm not Metropolitan, though," he said.
"Doesn't matter if you're from the City or not," she said. "You're still Metric."
"I'm not, though," he said. "Not by birth. I'm Magisterian."
"Where'd you get a name like Aidan over there?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said. "My mother picked it out of a book, I guess... I'd ask her, but the first time I met her was the last."
"I'm sorry."
"It's fine," he said. "Tell me your name."
"Ardellia."
"Ardellia Corvir," he said. "You know... that just might be the most tragic thing I've heard all day."
She laughed, then stopped.
"That's horrible!" she said.
"I know, right?" he said. "Was it assigned as penance? Was there a bet involved?"
"But you're joking."
"No, honest truth!" he said. "It's an awful name."
"I mean, at a time like this," she said. "How can you laugh?"
"Don't know," he said. He shrugged, then winced as the movement woke up a pain in his joints. "It beats the hell out of the alternatives, though."
"I suppose," she said. "Do you need food?"
"Not generally," he said. "I can think of one thing that would be more tragic than you being named Ardellia Corvir."
"And what's that?"
"If you were named Ardellia anything else," he said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Can't you figure it out?"
[1.5 hours in. While this is obviously a retelling of the story Dell told little Aidan in the previous story, I'm trying to give more direct background on what life is like for them in the Old Empire. The next little bit is going to have more insight into Dan's character and life.]
The house on the hill was a very old and very proud house of stone and timber construction. If it looked a little lopsided, that was only because it was.
It had started its life as a rude fort on a high hill, back when the lords of a land were those who had the immediate and personal ability to hold it through force. As cattle raids and contests of strength had given way to cattle trading and contests of hospitality, a great feast hall had been attached and gradually, more and more comforts of life were added over the generations until the original fort was swallowed up by a sprawling stone manor of very mixed pedigree.
But fortunes may shrink as easily as times may change, and the descendants of the first man who'd lived like a king on top of the hill---albeit as king over not much beyond the hill itself---became subjects themselves to increasingly greater powers, until the current tenant of the stone house became little more than a tax collector for the emperor of the Mother Isles. Technically his title was still a noble one, but when people saluted in his direction it was rarely a gesture to make in front of one's mother.
Parts of the great manse had been demolished over the ages as the cost of keeping them in good repair, the good stone and stouter timbers carted away to pay debts or help cheaply establish a relative's homestead. The great feast hall remained, though as a separate structure. A space bigger than most houses divided it from the remains of the house that still served the function of being a house.
The feast hall likewise remained a feast hall, used for occasional public meetings and the almost-weekly country dances, a ritual that in the local parlance had come to be known as going up to the tor, pronounced as one word, up-t'tor. The noble family were never compensated for or consulted on this use of what was technically still their property, though they were expected to keep the hall cleaned and well-maintained. Traditional duties didn't decline at the same rate as did traditional powers and traditional wealth.
The land the nobles owned had grown as their fortunes had shrank, though the fields and herds were now tended by employees rather than subjects. The lands surrounding the tor were worked with diligence and care. They had to be, as their produce was the main source of income for the landowners, who were required to make up from their own funds for any shortfalls in the region's taxes and could not hope to get away with missing a tithe to the Mother Temple or abstemious behavior whenever a collection was taken up for a worthy cause or a needy individual.
The Corvir family were not poor by any definition of the word, and they did enjoy quite a bit of privilege, but they were not as wealthy as their neighbors almost hereditarily assumed they must be, and every lean year and mean season brought them as close to precipitous ruin as it did those who worked their lands and those who grudgingly gave up taxes to them.
"Corvir" was a hard name to bear. At the time when surnames had become standard in the region, corvir had been an honored title and respected position. Many petty lords would have killed to be able to style themselves thus, and more than a few had. Now it was second only to carnifex on the list of imperial functionaries who would find themselves unwelcome at most doors, and no lord would tolerate a mere tax collector appropriating a more lofty title. Corvirs were still allowed to style themselves as "the honourable", but few did, if only because anyone it sounded like a bad joke coming out of anybody else's mouth.
The honourable Robert Corvir, the current patriarch of the Corvir family and corvir of the realm, was off safekeeping a chest of silver on its way to the imperial coffers the day that the sky exploded and a man fell out of it. His daughter, equally yoked with the name Ardellia had come running out of the stone house headed for the cow pasture when she heard the clamor that preceded the disaster. She had no clue what it portended, only that a noise that could make the honest timbers and ancient stones of her family's house quake so violently couldn't possibly be good for calves.
She reached the fields just as the spell-bolstered wooden keel of a great ship burst out through the bottom of the cloud cover, and then it simply burst.
What followed was not precisely a stampede, because a stampede only happens in one direction. Many calves were lost that day, and two cows were also lost in the most literal fashion, and others injured, though few past the point where healing was still preferable to slaughter. Some of her father's hired men had ranger training, and they were among those who reached the pasture even before she did, otherwise the losses might have been far greater.
Ardellia was a deft hand with a startled animal herself and might have been much help in the effort to calm and recover the cattle, if the naked man hadn't landed right in front of her. The sight of him robbed her of all impetus. It was not that she'd never seen a nude male figure before. She may have been a corvir's daughter, but she was also a farm girl, and one with three older brothers, and two younger ones whom she'd been responsible for bathing.
She'd seen dead bodies, too, even from violent death. But the man who came down in the pasture looked so perfect, so whole... so wonderfully intact. There was blood on the side of his face, and quite a bit of it, but other than that and the fact that he was stone dead he could have been the picture of health. Combined with his obvious youth, it made the whole thing seem hopelessly tragic. She realized, seeing him, that the ship would have been full of people, few of whom would leave behind recognizable remains.
Poor boy, she thought. He'll become a symbol, 'the face of the tragedy', as they say on the telly. What his poor mother will think... I should cover him up, maybe wash the blood off. There is an awful lot of blood...
And it was as she approached closer to him, her gaze fixed on his face, that his eyelids flapped open.
"No... heal..." was what he said, before passing out again.
The bed in the guestroom of the Corvir House where Dan Harris found himself when next he regained consciousness was the first proper, free-standing bed with a real mattress that he could ever remember occupying. He'd grown up on airships and been used to sleeping in a barely-cushioned berth or a swinging hammock, the latter being his preference.
He didn't think much of a mattress, when he realized that was what was underneath him. His first impression upon waking up was that he had landed on his back on top of a cloud, which was somehow just barely managing to support him and was bound to give way at any moment.
Given his experiences, this was perhaps understandable.
[1 hour in. Momentum has been slow to build because I stopped to research a few points that it didn't occur to me to look up during my prep hour.]
The house on the hill was a very old and very proud house of stone and timber construction. If it looked a little lopsided, that was only because it was.
It had started its life as a rude fort on a high hill, back when the lords of a land were those who had the immediate and personal ability to hold it through force. As cattle raids and contests of strength had given way to cattle trading and contests of hospitality, a great feast hall had been attached and gradually, more and more comforts of life were added over the generations until the original fort was swallowed up by a sprawling stone manor of very mixed pedigree.
But fortunes may shrink as easily as times may change, and the descendants of the first man who'd lived like a king on top of the hill---albeit as king over not much beyond the hill itself---became subjects themselves to increasingly greater powers, until the current tenant of the stone house became little more than a tax collector for the emperor of the Mother Isles. Technically his title was still a noble one, but when people saluted in his direction it was rarely a gesture to make in front of one's mother.
Parts of the great manse had been demolished over the ages as the cost of keeping them in good repair, the good stone and stouter timbers carted away to pay debts or help cheaply establish a relative's homestead. The great feast hall remained, though as a separate structure. A space bigger than most houses divided it from the remains of the house that still served the function of being a house.
The feast hall likewise remained a feast hall, used for occasional public meetings and the almost-weekly country dances, a ritual that in the local parlance had come to be known as going up to the tor, pronounced as one word, up-t'tor. The noble family were never compensated for or consulted on this use of what was technically still their property, though they were expected to keep the hall cleaned and well-maintained. Traditional duties didn't decline at the same rate as did traditional powers and traditional wealth.
The land the nobles owned had grown as their fortunes had shrank, though the fields and herds were now tended by employees rather than subjects. The lands surrounding the tor were worked with diligence and care. They had to be, as their produce was the main source of income for the landowners, who were required to make up from their own funds for any shortfalls in the region's taxes and could not hope to get away with missing a tithe to the Mother Temple or abstemious behavior whenever a collection was taken up for a worthy cause or a needy individual.
The Corvir family were not poor by any definition of the word, and they did enjoy quite a bit of privilege, but they were not as wealthy as their neighbors almost hereditarily assumed they must be, and every lean year and mean season brought them as close to precipitous ruin as it did those who worked their lands and those who grudgingly gave up taxes to them.
"Corvir" was a hard name to bear. At the time when surnames had become standard in the region, corvir had been an honored title and respected position. Many petty lords would have killed to be able to style themselves thus, and more than a few had. Now it was second only to carnifex on the list of imperial functionaries who would find themselves unwelcome at most doors, and no lord would tolerate a mere tax collector appropriating a more lofty title. Corvirs were still allowed to style themselves as "the honourable", but few did, if only because anyone it sounded like a bad joke coming out of anybody else's mouth.
The honourable Robert Corvir, the current patriarch of the Corvir family and corvir of the realm, was off safekeeping a chest of silver on its way to the imperial coffers the day that the sky exploded and a man fell out of it. His daughter, equally yoked with the name Ardellia had come running out of the stone house headed for the cow pasture when she heard the clamor that preceded the disaster. She had no clue what it portended, only that a noise that could make the honest timbers and ancient stones of her family's house quake so violently couldn't possibly be good for calves.
[Half hour in. No, this isn't the absolute beginning... there's going to be a few more lines of description in the first paragraph. I just jumped in to where the vibe was the storngest.]
It was a very old and very proud house of stone and timber construction. If it looked a little lopsided, that was only because it was.
It had started its life as a rude fort on a high hill, back when the lords of a land were those who had the immediate and personal ability to hold it through force. As cattle raids and contests of strength had given way to cattle trading and contests of hospitality, a great feast hall had been attached and gradually, more and more comforts of life were added over the generations until the original fort was swallowed up by a sprawling stone manor of very mixed pedigree.
But fortunes may shrink as easily as times may change, and the descendants of the first man who'd lived like a king on top of the hill---albeit as king over not much beyond the hill itself---became subjects themselves to increasingly greater powers, until the current tenant of the stone house became little more than a tax collector for the emperor of the Mother Isles. Technically his title was still a noble one, but when people saluted in his direction it was rarely a gesture to make in front of one's mother.
Parts of the great manse had been demolished over the ages as the cost of keeping them in good repair, the good stone and stouter timbers carted away to pay debts or help cheaply establish a relative's homestead. The great feast hall remained, though as a separate structure. A space bigger than most houses divided it from the remains of the house that still served the function of being a house.
The feast hall likewise remained a feast hall, used for occasional public meetings and the almost-weekly country dances, a ritual that in the local parlance had come to be known as going up to the tor, pronounced as one word, up-t'tor. The noble family were never compensated for or consulted on this use of what was technically still their property, though they were expected to keep the hall cleaned and well-maintained. Traditional duties didn't decline at the same rate as did traditional powers and traditional wealth.
The land the nobles owned had grown as their fortunes had shrank, though the fields and herds were now tended by employees rather than subjects. The lands surrounding the tor were worked with diligence and care.
Began: 2/6/2011, 5:00 PM
Status: In progress (11:00 PM)
Hours Writing: 2
Word Count ~2000
[2 hours in. Starting to really take shape now that I'm into the dialogue.]
The house on the hill was a very old and very proud house of stone and timber construction. If it looked a little lopsided, that was only because it was.
It had started its life as a rude fort on a high hill, back when the lords of a land were those who had the immediate and personal ability to hold it through force. As cattle raids and contests of strength had given way to cattle trading and contests of hospitality, a great feast hall had been attached and gradually, more and more comforts of life were added over the generations until the original fort was swallowed up by a sprawling stone manor of very mixed pedigree.
But fortunes may shrink as easily as times may change, and the descendants of the first man who'd lived like a king on top of the hill---albeit as king over not much beyond the hill itself---became subjects themselves to increasingly greater powers, until the current tenant of the stone house became little more than a tax collector for the emperor of the Mother Isles. Technically his title was still a noble one, but when people saluted in his direction it was rarely a gesture to make in front of one's mother.
Parts of the great manse had been demolished over the ages as the cost of keeping them in good repair, the good stone and stouter timbers carted away to pay debts or help cheaply establish a relative's homestead. The great feast hall remained, though as a separate structure. A space bigger than most houses divided it from the remains of the house that still served the function of being a house.
The feast hall likewise remained a feast hall, used for occasional public meetings and the almost-weekly country dances, a ritual that in the local parlance had come to be known as going up to the tor, pronounced as one word, up-t'tor. The noble family were never compensated for or consulted on this use of what was technically still their property, though they were expected to keep the hall cleaned and well-maintained. Traditional duties didn't decline at the same rate as did traditional powers and traditional wealth.
The land the nobles owned had grown as their fortunes had shrank, though the fields and herds were now tended by employees rather than subjects. The lands surrounding the tor were worked with diligence and care. They had to be, as their produce was the main source of income for the landowners, who were required to make up from their own funds for any shortfalls in the region's taxes and could not hope to get away with missing a tithe to the Mother Temple or abstemious behavior whenever a collection was taken up for a worthy cause or a needy individual.
The Corvir family were not poor by any definition of the word, and they did enjoy quite a bit of privilege, but they were not as wealthy as their neighbors almost hereditarily assumed they must be, and every lean year and mean season brought them as close to precipitous ruin as it did those who worked their lands and those who grudgingly gave up taxes to them.
"Corvir" was a hard name to bear. At the time when surnames had become standard in the region, corvir had been an honored title and respected position. Many petty lords would have killed to be able to style themselves thus, and more than a few had. Now it was second only to carnifex on the list of imperial functionaries who would find themselves unwelcome at most doors, and no lord would tolerate a mere tax collector appropriating a more lofty title. Corvirs were still allowed to style themselves as "the honourable", but few did, if only because anyone it sounded like a bad joke coming out of anybody else's mouth.
The honourable Robert Corvir, the current patriarch of the Corvir family and corvir of the realm, was off safekeeping a chest of silver on its way to the imperial coffers the day that the sky exploded and a man fell out of it. His daughter, equally yoked with the name Ardellia had come running out of the stone house headed for the cow pasture when she heard the clamor that preceded the disaster. She had no clue what it portended, only that a noise that could make the honest timbers and ancient stones of her family's house quake so violently couldn't possibly be good for calves.
She reached the fields just as the spell-bolstered wooden keel of a great ship burst out through the bottom of the cloud cover, and then it simply burst.
What followed was not precisely a stampede, because a stampede only happens in one direction. Many calves were lost that day, and two cows were also lost in the most literal fashion, and others injured, though few past the point where healing was still preferable to slaughter. Some of her father's hired men had ranger training, and they were among those who reached the pasture even before she did, otherwise the losses might have been far greater.
Ardellia was a deft hand with a startled animal herself and might have been much help in the effort to calm and recover the cattle, if the naked man hadn't landed right in front of her. The sight of him robbed her of all impetus. It was not that she'd never seen a nude male figure before. She may have been a corvir's daughter, but she was also a farm girl, and one with three older brothers, and two younger ones whom she'd been responsible for bathing.
She'd seen dead bodies, too, even from violent death. But the man who came down in the pasture looked so perfect, so whole... so wonderfully intact. There was blood on the side of his face, and quite a bit of it, but other than that and the fact that he was stone dead he could have been the picture of health. Combined with his obvious youth, it made the whole thing seem hopelessly tragic. She realized, seeing him, that the ship would have been full of people, few of whom would leave behind recognizable remains.
Poor boy, she thought. He'll become a symbol, 'the face of the tragedy', as they say on the telly. What his poor mother will think... I should cover him up, maybe wash the blood off. There is an awful lot of blood...
And it was as she approached closer to him, her gaze fixed on his face, that his eyelids flapped open.
"No... heal..." was what he said, before passing out again.
The bed in the guestroom of the Corvir House where Dan Harris found himself when next he regained consciousness was the first proper, free-standing bed with a real mattress that he could ever remember occupying. He'd grown up on airships and been used to sleeping in a barely-cushioned berth or a swinging hammock, the latter being his preference.
He didn't think much of a mattress, when he realized that was what was underneath him. His first impression upon waking up was that he had landed on his back on top of a cloud, which was somehow just barely managing to support him and was bound to give way at any moment.
Given his experiences, this was perhaps understandable.
"You're with us again, then," a young woman said. She was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair that had been brought into the room and set quite close to the bed... startlingly close, given that the sound of her voice was the first thing that clued Dan in to the fact that he wasn't alone. "Sorry to spook you," she said. "Though, really, it's just a bit of turnabout."
"I imagine so," Dan said. He was acutely wear of an odd itchy pressure and the shadow of something just above his eye. His hand reached for it, then stopped.
"We sewed and bandaged you up as best as we could," she said. "They wanted to call for a cleric, but after you said no healing, I didn't want to take the chance. It weren't as bad as it looked, under all that blood. Small, but deep."
"Thank you for that," Dan said.
"You're lucky to have come down in farm country, you know. Few folks alive today know how to do that sort of thing, unless they work with animals."
"We can do quick-and-dirty bandages on the ship," he said. "Have to. There's just so much that can go wrong in the heat of the..." His face went blank. "Could do. Did."
"Some things are bigger than a bandage can cover," she said. "Some things aren't. The news is coming in of other survivors, some big groups scattered all over the countryside."
"They would be... we were going pretty fast, and it's a windy day," Dan said. "Drift boats... drift."
"Do you think everyone made it?"
He shook his head.
"I know they didn't," he said. "I shoved one particularly pig-headed boy in the direction of the boats not ten seconds before... well, before."
"I'm going to venture a guess," the young woman said. "If I were to go get an alchemical healing unguent out of the stocks and put it on your cut, it'd heal up without a problem, wouldn't it?"
"Don't," Dan said.
"I'm not planning on exposing you," she said. "Though you might have a hard time explaining your survival, if it's not generally known..."
"Not generally," he said. "But it's not a secret, either. Secrets like that are too fragile to be kept on a ship. They break in transit."
"So, how about the unguent then?" she said. "We keep it for cows but it's fit for humans. People."
"No," Dan said, shaking his head.
"Maybe you've never seen what can happen with a cut that's not healed, but you could get a nasty infection..."
"I'll get that cured if it happens," Dan said.
"It'll scar."
"I know," he said.
"What's your name?"
"Dan," he said.
"I've a brother and two cousins called Daniel," she said.
"It's short for Aidan," he said.
"That's a lovely name," she said. "I wouldn't expect it, with that accent. You sound tricky."
"Tricky?"
"Metricky," she said. "It's what they call Metropolitans here."
"'They'?"
"The people," she said.
"Aren't you 'the people'?" he asked her.
"Not while I'm Robert Corvir's daughter," she said.
"You're the local coves?" Dan said, and she nodded, and he laughed. "I doubt either one of us would be too popular right now."
"No, you picked a hell of a time to drop in with that accent," she said.
"I'm not Metropolitan, though," he said.
"Doesn't matter if you're from the City or not," she said. "You're still Metric."
"I'm not, though," he said. "Not by birth. I'm Magisterian."
"Where'd you get a name like Aidan over there?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said. "My mother picked it out of a book, I guess... I'd ask her, but the first time I met her was the last."
"I'm sorry."
"It's fine," he said. "Tell me your name."
"Ardellia."
"Ardellia Corvir," he said. "You know... that just might be the most tragic thing I've heard all day."
She laughed, then stopped.
"That's horrible!" she said.
"I know, right?" he said. "Was it assigned as penance? Was there a bet involved?"
"But you're joking."
"No, honest truth!" he said. "It's an awful name."
"I mean, at a time like this," she said. "How can you laugh?"
"Don't know," he said. He shrugged, then winced as the movement woke up a pain in his joints. "It beats the hell out of the alternatives, though."
"I suppose," she said. "Do you need food?"
"Not generally," he said. "I can think of one thing that would be more tragic than you being named Ardellia Corvir."
"And what's that?"
"If you were named Ardellia anything else," he said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Can't you figure it out?"
[1.5 hours in. While this is obviously a retelling of the story Dell told little Aidan in the previous story, I'm trying to give more direct background on what life is like for them in the Old Empire. The next little bit is going to have more insight into Dan's character and life.]
The house on the hill was a very old and very proud house of stone and timber construction. If it looked a little lopsided, that was only because it was.
It had started its life as a rude fort on a high hill, back when the lords of a land were those who had the immediate and personal ability to hold it through force. As cattle raids and contests of strength had given way to cattle trading and contests of hospitality, a great feast hall had been attached and gradually, more and more comforts of life were added over the generations until the original fort was swallowed up by a sprawling stone manor of very mixed pedigree.
But fortunes may shrink as easily as times may change, and the descendants of the first man who'd lived like a king on top of the hill---albeit as king over not much beyond the hill itself---became subjects themselves to increasingly greater powers, until the current tenant of the stone house became little more than a tax collector for the emperor of the Mother Isles. Technically his title was still a noble one, but when people saluted in his direction it was rarely a gesture to make in front of one's mother.
Parts of the great manse had been demolished over the ages as the cost of keeping them in good repair, the good stone and stouter timbers carted away to pay debts or help cheaply establish a relative's homestead. The great feast hall remained, though as a separate structure. A space bigger than most houses divided it from the remains of the house that still served the function of being a house.
The feast hall likewise remained a feast hall, used for occasional public meetings and the almost-weekly country dances, a ritual that in the local parlance had come to be known as going up to the tor, pronounced as one word, up-t'tor. The noble family were never compensated for or consulted on this use of what was technically still their property, though they were expected to keep the hall cleaned and well-maintained. Traditional duties didn't decline at the same rate as did traditional powers and traditional wealth.
The land the nobles owned had grown as their fortunes had shrank, though the fields and herds were now tended by employees rather than subjects. The lands surrounding the tor were worked with diligence and care. They had to be, as their produce was the main source of income for the landowners, who were required to make up from their own funds for any shortfalls in the region's taxes and could not hope to get away with missing a tithe to the Mother Temple or abstemious behavior whenever a collection was taken up for a worthy cause or a needy individual.
The Corvir family were not poor by any definition of the word, and they did enjoy quite a bit of privilege, but they were not as wealthy as their neighbors almost hereditarily assumed they must be, and every lean year and mean season brought them as close to precipitous ruin as it did those who worked their lands and those who grudgingly gave up taxes to them.
"Corvir" was a hard name to bear. At the time when surnames had become standard in the region, corvir had been an honored title and respected position. Many petty lords would have killed to be able to style themselves thus, and more than a few had. Now it was second only to carnifex on the list of imperial functionaries who would find themselves unwelcome at most doors, and no lord would tolerate a mere tax collector appropriating a more lofty title. Corvirs were still allowed to style themselves as "the honourable", but few did, if only because anyone it sounded like a bad joke coming out of anybody else's mouth.
The honourable Robert Corvir, the current patriarch of the Corvir family and corvir of the realm, was off safekeeping a chest of silver on its way to the imperial coffers the day that the sky exploded and a man fell out of it. His daughter, equally yoked with the name Ardellia had come running out of the stone house headed for the cow pasture when she heard the clamor that preceded the disaster. She had no clue what it portended, only that a noise that could make the honest timbers and ancient stones of her family's house quake so violently couldn't possibly be good for calves.
She reached the fields just as the spell-bolstered wooden keel of a great ship burst out through the bottom of the cloud cover, and then it simply burst.
What followed was not precisely a stampede, because a stampede only happens in one direction. Many calves were lost that day, and two cows were also lost in the most literal fashion, and others injured, though few past the point where healing was still preferable to slaughter. Some of her father's hired men had ranger training, and they were among those who reached the pasture even before she did, otherwise the losses might have been far greater.
Ardellia was a deft hand with a startled animal herself and might have been much help in the effort to calm and recover the cattle, if the naked man hadn't landed right in front of her. The sight of him robbed her of all impetus. It was not that she'd never seen a nude male figure before. She may have been a corvir's daughter, but she was also a farm girl, and one with three older brothers, and two younger ones whom she'd been responsible for bathing.
She'd seen dead bodies, too, even from violent death. But the man who came down in the pasture looked so perfect, so whole... so wonderfully intact. There was blood on the side of his face, and quite a bit of it, but other than that and the fact that he was stone dead he could have been the picture of health. Combined with his obvious youth, it made the whole thing seem hopelessly tragic. She realized, seeing him, that the ship would have been full of people, few of whom would leave behind recognizable remains.
Poor boy, she thought. He'll become a symbol, 'the face of the tragedy', as they say on the telly. What his poor mother will think... I should cover him up, maybe wash the blood off. There is an awful lot of blood...
And it was as she approached closer to him, her gaze fixed on his face, that his eyelids flapped open.
"No... heal..." was what he said, before passing out again.
The bed in the guestroom of the Corvir House where Dan Harris found himself when next he regained consciousness was the first proper, free-standing bed with a real mattress that he could ever remember occupying. He'd grown up on airships and been used to sleeping in a barely-cushioned berth or a swinging hammock, the latter being his preference.
He didn't think much of a mattress, when he realized that was what was underneath him. His first impression upon waking up was that he had landed on his back on top of a cloud, which was somehow just barely managing to support him and was bound to give way at any moment.
Given his experiences, this was perhaps understandable.
[1 hour in. Momentum has been slow to build because I stopped to research a few points that it didn't occur to me to look up during my prep hour.]
The house on the hill was a very old and very proud house of stone and timber construction. If it looked a little lopsided, that was only because it was.
It had started its life as a rude fort on a high hill, back when the lords of a land were those who had the immediate and personal ability to hold it through force. As cattle raids and contests of strength had given way to cattle trading and contests of hospitality, a great feast hall had been attached and gradually, more and more comforts of life were added over the generations until the original fort was swallowed up by a sprawling stone manor of very mixed pedigree.
But fortunes may shrink as easily as times may change, and the descendants of the first man who'd lived like a king on top of the hill---albeit as king over not much beyond the hill itself---became subjects themselves to increasingly greater powers, until the current tenant of the stone house became little more than a tax collector for the emperor of the Mother Isles. Technically his title was still a noble one, but when people saluted in his direction it was rarely a gesture to make in front of one's mother.
Parts of the great manse had been demolished over the ages as the cost of keeping them in good repair, the good stone and stouter timbers carted away to pay debts or help cheaply establish a relative's homestead. The great feast hall remained, though as a separate structure. A space bigger than most houses divided it from the remains of the house that still served the function of being a house.
The feast hall likewise remained a feast hall, used for occasional public meetings and the almost-weekly country dances, a ritual that in the local parlance had come to be known as going up to the tor, pronounced as one word, up-t'tor. The noble family were never compensated for or consulted on this use of what was technically still their property, though they were expected to keep the hall cleaned and well-maintained. Traditional duties didn't decline at the same rate as did traditional powers and traditional wealth.
The land the nobles owned had grown as their fortunes had shrank, though the fields and herds were now tended by employees rather than subjects. The lands surrounding the tor were worked with diligence and care. They had to be, as their produce was the main source of income for the landowners, who were required to make up from their own funds for any shortfalls in the region's taxes and could not hope to get away with missing a tithe to the Mother Temple or abstemious behavior whenever a collection was taken up for a worthy cause or a needy individual.
The Corvir family were not poor by any definition of the word, and they did enjoy quite a bit of privilege, but they were not as wealthy as their neighbors almost hereditarily assumed they must be, and every lean year and mean season brought them as close to precipitous ruin as it did those who worked their lands and those who grudgingly gave up taxes to them.
"Corvir" was a hard name to bear. At the time when surnames had become standard in the region, corvir had been an honored title and respected position. Many petty lords would have killed to be able to style themselves thus, and more than a few had. Now it was second only to carnifex on the list of imperial functionaries who would find themselves unwelcome at most doors, and no lord would tolerate a mere tax collector appropriating a more lofty title. Corvirs were still allowed to style themselves as "the honourable", but few did, if only because anyone it sounded like a bad joke coming out of anybody else's mouth.
The honourable Robert Corvir, the current patriarch of the Corvir family and corvir of the realm, was off safekeeping a chest of silver on its way to the imperial coffers the day that the sky exploded and a man fell out of it. His daughter, equally yoked with the name Ardellia had come running out of the stone house headed for the cow pasture when she heard the clamor that preceded the disaster. She had no clue what it portended, only that a noise that could make the honest timbers and ancient stones of her family's house quake so violently couldn't possibly be good for calves.
[Half hour in. No, this isn't the absolute beginning... there's going to be a few more lines of description in the first paragraph. I just jumped in to where the vibe was the storngest.]
It was a very old and very proud house of stone and timber construction. If it looked a little lopsided, that was only because it was.
It had started its life as a rude fort on a high hill, back when the lords of a land were those who had the immediate and personal ability to hold it through force. As cattle raids and contests of strength had given way to cattle trading and contests of hospitality, a great feast hall had been attached and gradually, more and more comforts of life were added over the generations until the original fort was swallowed up by a sprawling stone manor of very mixed pedigree.
But fortunes may shrink as easily as times may change, and the descendants of the first man who'd lived like a king on top of the hill---albeit as king over not much beyond the hill itself---became subjects themselves to increasingly greater powers, until the current tenant of the stone house became little more than a tax collector for the emperor of the Mother Isles. Technically his title was still a noble one, but when people saluted in his direction it was rarely a gesture to make in front of one's mother.
Parts of the great manse had been demolished over the ages as the cost of keeping them in good repair, the good stone and stouter timbers carted away to pay debts or help cheaply establish a relative's homestead. The great feast hall remained, though as a separate structure. A space bigger than most houses divided it from the remains of the house that still served the function of being a house.
The feast hall likewise remained a feast hall, used for occasional public meetings and the almost-weekly country dances, a ritual that in the local parlance had come to be known as going up to the tor, pronounced as one word, up-t'tor. The noble family were never compensated for or consulted on this use of what was technically still their property, though they were expected to keep the hall cleaned and well-maintained. Traditional duties didn't decline at the same rate as did traditional powers and traditional wealth.
The land the nobles owned had grown as their fortunes had shrank, though the fields and herds were now tended by employees rather than subjects. The lands surrounding the tor were worked with diligence and care.