From The Jackals To The Shepherds 22: Eight of Diamonds

From The Jackals To The Shepherds

The Woods:

The Map:

Dave – Taylor

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Battlebards Tracks used:

Elven Dirge – Farewell – Score Music – Philippe Payet

Gnome Village – Tinkertown (Short Loop) – Score Music – Kevin MacLeod

Crypts of the Dead – Stain of the Departed – Score Music – Evan Kitchener

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.

Yuen dances on the river’s shore, cloudy and blustery as Summer begins its descent into autumn; What need has she to care for wind or water’s roar? She tumbles her hair spraying wet river drops; being young she has not known the fool’s triumph, nor yet love lost as soon as won. The hesitant girl who has been with us a long time watches as Yuen plays, watching also the foragers in the woods, Drach finally goaded into assisting. He, the best warrior, whose violence now lays dead and all the sheaves of river reeds to bind it! What need that yuen should dread the monstrous crying of wind?

The conflicted girl who has been with us a long time hears the brawling of a sparrow in the eaves, looks up and sees the brilliant moon and all the milky sky, and all that famous harmony of leaves, which had blotted out The Beast’s image and its cry.

She rises, noting the indentation her legs leave in the grass and the mud near the river’s edge, the way her scales, hidden so well from human eyes, leave tessellated imprints in the wet soil. As she rises so too does the wildness on the river, and on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, and all that lamentation of the leaves, could but compose her image and her cry.

Venturing to the ring of pines where once she sheltered Yuen, the headstrong girl who has been with us a long time crouches into the woods and begins to draw circles and lines in the dirt of the forest floor. As she draws, the outline of a face begins to appear in the air, the pines pull into the center of the ring, and the birds go quiet. With the last circle she traces in the soil, she looks back to the path to the river.

The face in the trees solidifies into reality, etched into the bark of each pine for moments, then incihng and creaking down the trunks to slough into the earth. Rising from the clay is a prone body, a sleeping man. The magical girl who has been with us a long time rests her eyes on his face, and her memories turn back to those who first came to this mining camp. She can see him still— the freckled man who goes to a gray place on a riverbank in gray mining clothes at dawn to cast his flies— it’s long since she began to call up to the eyes this wise and simple man. All day she’d looked in the face what she had hoped it would be and the reality: the living men that she hated, this dead man that she loved, and how when the Frost Shepherds came, the work of The Beast, The Creature, and her The Monster tasked with the beating down of the wise and all the great art beaten down.

She knows this ritual, and despite having never cast it before she knows the length she’ll need to afford it. Waking up after a chilled afternoon nap, Eileen finds a note from the absent girl who’s been with us a long time, devoid of details but noting her disappearance. Not to return to the community for six weeks since suddenly she began, in scorn of this forested audience, imagining a man, and his sun-freckled face and gray mining cloth, climbing up to a place where stone is dark with river froth, and the down turn of his wrist when the flies drop in the stream— a man who does not now exist, a man who is but a dream; and the pines themselves moan around his sleeping form, “Before we are old we shall have written him one poem maybe as cold and passionate as the dawn.”

High in the mountains, the Frost Shepherds stir. Now as at all times they can see in their mind’s eye, in their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones appearing and disappearing in the blue depths of the sky with all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones, and all their helms of silver hovering side by side, and all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more, being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied, the newest inhabitants of the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

In the community proper, Ezekiel begins a small project of his own. Becoming of age and maturity, or at least approaching those steps, he realizes his past mistakes. Though still very much a child, he can see the damage his fight with Yuen has caused on their relationship and regrets the lost weeks of their friendship together. He remembers how Yuen would look in wanting at the doll tied to the watchful girl who has been with us a long time’s belt and begins to gather materials for his own creation. A bit of unused cloth here, a stray bead or button popped from its original home there, in two weeks he’ll have a present, a peace offering to give to his friend. With this new project in his heart, Ezekiel begins to work his creativity and keeps in his mind the joyful memories the two youngsters have shared.

And a week passes.

Thank you for joining us for the twenty second 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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