[Stables] Indecision (Alea)

[Oluse]

512 Spring 35

Oluse was in a better great mood overall, which was new for him. Avanthal was rich with smells, all but absent when the rime had coated the fair city, and though he wore the same excessive layering of clothes he felt somewhat warm for a change. Sure there was the nagging feeling of procrastination that he had been carrying with him for some time, in respects to informing the people of Avanthal that he was planning to leave. But, even that seemed to fall to the wayside as he headed to his friend's home.

His mood fall somewhat when he discovered that she had been displaced from her former quarters, and instead given a stall for her tent int he stables, with the animals. Oluse, had he more authority, would have argued the point with the intimidating guard he had been speaking with. But, instead politely bit him a fine day and found Alea working away.

From a safe distance he gave a smile. "Aren't too busy I hope?" In familiar Denvali. He of course did not expect the same in response, aware of her vocal issues, which he still had yet to find a cure for. Not for lack of looking, however. Though he had neglected to inform Alea that he had been looking into it, and asking around.

[Alea Davenport]

Alea's head has been a mess of confusing for the past two days. She shoveled manure almost automatically, her mind too busy to really be paying attention. She'd been spending a lot more time inside her mind recently; not being able to speak had left her less willing to surround herself with people. Where she had once been able to make herself the center of attention, now she could only stand and watch. Even if she could make people notice her, she would not be able to express herself, and would only look like a demanding child; moreso against the backdrop of destruction caused by the storm. No, it was much more comfortable to stay among the animals, who had very little notion of the danger and suffering going on outside the stable walls.

At the sound of Oluse's voice, Alea swung around, startled, with a full shovel, flinging horse shyke nearly into her childhood friend's face. Slightly embarrassed, she quickly turned away, scooping up another heavy shovel-full and dumping it into the wheelbarrow before he could startle her again. After that she planted the shovel in the ground and leaned on it, sighing. She had something to say to Oluse, and it wasn't going to be easy (not least because talking was out of the picture).

Finally turning back toward Oluse, she used the tip of the shovel to write words in the dirt at her feet:

did you see that light two days ago

After waiting for confirmation, she added:

they say it came from denval

She turned back to shoveling manure into the wheelbarrow while she waited for the magnitude of this to sink in. The possibilities had had Alea's head spinning even since she heard that something might have happened to her home, but she had never known more clearly what had to be done. She waited patiently for Oluse to make the same conclusion, unconsciously touching the compass that she wore on a chain under her shirt. The compass had been a gift from Oluse, with a very clear message: 'Denvali Forever'.

[Oluse]

Oluse resided in a distant place, not complex, but distant from the rest of the world, and the storm had only pushed him farther into this obscure domain of lapsing time spent with little thought, broken only by unfamiliar waves of pubescent emotions.

He cared for the girl, and yet could not state how, even with his voice in tact. She embodied a bitter past, a forbidden past, yet changed in a way which confused him to perceive. Her body had grown, though not much, yet had felt some call to escape their sanctuary of birth which Oluse could not fathom. Unlike her he hungered for Denval, yet still he feared it. He wished to think fondly on his sisters and parents, but all that he could remember thinking as he looked toward that brilliant flash of light was Adarin. Fear incarnate.

Oluse's accessible eyes sunk into a shaded darkness, with drop of short eyelashes and shift of head to stare into Alea's work below, deliberately expending as little time deciphering her words as possible.

He wondered to himself often why she never spoke of his departure, he suspected that she never knew of the impending exile which threatened his young existence, and with that came hope that his parents remained ignorant as well. Still, fear consistently dominated these thoughts, and somewhere he felt he knew the truth, that they had simply been to ashamed to share their only son's misdeeds with the rest of their kinsmen.

"Yes." The word came drawn out, a near stutter, but ceased there as if the thought itself fell into the cracks between them. Cracks unperceivable but plaguing the whole of Avanthal due entirely to Ivak's wake. Perhaps, this is where Alea's voice had hidden, in the gaps left by unnatural passions. The thought was utterly too profound for the boy, as he struggled to breath the musky temperate air, and conjure from nowhere the words that may sway Alea's mind.

Oluse did know what Alea pondered, for perhaps the first time since their relationship had begun. It was what any good Denvali child would. Virates demanded so. He did not speak clever words with a nimble tongue, however, instead he tried his mightiest to ignore the insight, and found it easy to obscure the thought within the fog of his unorganized mind.

He had received a promise, from something larger than him, something older than him. Possibly even older than Denval itself. When he thought of his duties to Virates his heart sank, and his stomach churned as that vision of cool stone and rolling green wavered weakly within his mind. How much hope he had been filled with that dreadful night, to the brim in fact, as the world melted around him, as if his purpose rested suspended stagnantly in the ice in the unseen placed within himself, and finally something to the south had shaken loose. Freed themselves through those tiny invisible cracks. Called to him, to a duty that only he could perform. Something frightening and awesome. Something special.

His eyes shifted for a flash of a moment to the compass on her neck, and a dull ache swam through the base of his head, moving with a current of morose detachment down his spine to pool within his gut. This only made him feel it more, that urge.

He silently reminded himself in a tone of half hearted certainty that the urge was not cowardice. A coward denies duty, but he considered the commands of those urges to discate the opposite: bravery. He had been called.

Called by a force older than Denval itself.

It was bravery to go, words he tossed lifelessly around his skull as his eyes found themselves to Alea's youthful and delicate face. She was hurt, but he could not see this, all he saw was the anger which never tarried far from her visage.

His mouth opened, wanting to derail the swell of fury that would come, but as always there was nothing to say. No words flowed between his lips to make the world as he wished. Instead a haunting silence filled the stabled around them both.

[Alea Davenport]

Alea kept shoveling while she waited for Oluse's to reach the inevitable conclusion from her words. And shoveling, and shoveling... When she had finished clearing out two stalls and was about to move the wheelbarrow further down the row, she happened to glance at Oluse standing there with his mouth open. She gave him a look of pity. Really, the boy was so slow sometimes. She would have to spell it out for him.

we have to find out the truth

She wrote this in the most patronizing manner she could manage. In truth, almost as soon as she had seen the flash, as soon as she because aware that it was in the direction of her home, she had asked around (with reusable sentences scratched on scraps of wood or paper), trying to see if anyone had any plans to investigate the disturbance.

The impression she had gotten from the Vantha was that, they would love to investigate, but Avanthal came first. She understood, with their home in such distress, they could hardly spare resources at the moment. The only thing for Alea to do was to help Avanthal recover soon in the hopes that they would send an expedition to Denval as soon as possible.

Though, waiting for an expedition did mean one thing Oluse wasn't going to like. It was unfortunate, but Denval was important, the place of their birth, and came first.

we can't got to riverfall

She waited for the gravity of this to sink in. She realized that Oluse liked his new Dricus friends, but he was just going to have to grow up and give up his childish dreams of adventure until they knew their families were safe. She looked straight into his eyes, not willing to let him get away with silence this time.

[Oluse]

Fear itself possessed the boy, and as if his body were no longer under his governance his head swung first to the right then slowly a reluctant movement to the left. His eyes remained fixed on her's, those steely resolved eye that no doubt perceived the world in ways he never could. His expression held not the mirrored resolve to say the single syllable word to his would be companion. "No" seemed as frightening to him as the opposite and so he floated there, with frightful pinpricks across his face as his pores dilated to allow cool sweat passage as he tried to swallow down the vacuum of words from his dry mouth.

In that moment the young man who had overcome illnesses and saved lives was nowhere within him. That indomitable confidence that governed his nimble hands during surgery had somehow dissipated, and he felt like he had whole in passage deep in the bowels of that creaking ship a year before. He felt like her eyes, those Denvali eyes could strip layers of his essential parts away like flesh from bone, and leave nothing but weakness, like Adarin's wicked stare.

"Riverfall is important." The words came with a jolt that appeared almost painful to Oluse, and left a disgruntled look upon his face. He hadn't mean to say it like that, but he hardly understood what he had implied. The recollection would come given another moment, as Alea attempted to sober him with her actions.

His heart beat furiously and he wanted to brace himself against her inevitable violence, but instead he felt a wave of indignation wash over him and pool along the surface of his new eyes. They burned and with it his chest swelled. It was happening again, and for the first time it summoned no disgust in Oluse, but some perverse pride he would no doubt regret once the swell of emotion passed.

A deep fiery gold glimmered in his stinging eyes, but he did not squint at the pain. Words came again, and though they left a sickened sensation in the pit of his gut he continued the arduous process of extracting them from his murky mind, clumsily one after another. "We have to go to Riverfall, Alea. You said that you would." If ever he had uttered childish words it was that moment, words he would still feel a present regret for even years later. He cared for the girl, but those words were misguided, and unfair. He would hope in those silent moment during the seasons of travel along the melted tundra that it was the dreaded Vantha spell that drugged him into such selfishness, that perhaps he would have carried out Virate's will had he been so unaffected and clear headed.

There would always be doubt, for he still felt a valiant justification in his heart, an echo of pride from that distant dream that held such essential importance to him.

[Alea Davenport]

Oluse's words... Alea could not explain the effect they had on her, except that it felt like her entire chest was full of hot coals, burning whiter with every disloyal syllable he uttered. She threw her shovel aside, and it bounced across the wheel barrow with a clang. The noise caused a few snorts from a couple of the horses, but Alea's attention had narrowed to Oluse alone.

It was Alea's muteness that saved Oluse from a painfully horrible beating that day; if she'd had the capacity to scream her words, she would have accompanied them with all of her fury directed at his body. As it was, she could only say what she had to say by writing. She grabbed the nearest long narrow object--she wasn't even aware of what she'd picked up--and scratched into the dirt with the deepest and biggest words she'd yet written:

denval is important

She was breathing heavily when she'd finished. Her initial instinct to beat some sense into him had dimmed only slightly. She briefly thought about hitting him with her stick, but was barely coherent enough to realize he wouldn't be able to investigate Denval's fate if he was bleeding from the head.

Dropping her writing implement, she stalked toward Oluse, rage in every step, and accusation in her eyes. Disloyalty. Deliberate disloyalty. Was he even Denvali anymore? Was the compass he'd given her a joke? With both hands, she grabbed his collar, and viciously threw him down onto the words she'd stabbed into the ground.

She pulled out her compass, the gift he'd given that had meant more to her than she could say (mute or not). She opened the cover to reveal the words inside. She held the inscription up to his face, forcing him to read it. Denvali forever. If those words meant anything to him, now was his chance to show it.

[Sira]

Grade Awarded Oluse If you ever return to us, feel free to resubmit this thread for your portion of the grade. Alea Davenport Skills: +1 Animal Husbandry +1 Intimidation Lores: Communication via Shovel Animal Husbandry: Cleaning Stalls Denval is Important Denvali Forever Additional Comments: So obviously I couldn't award a whole lot here, but I gave you animal husbandry because I know when I was first learning to take care of horses, keeping a clean stall was part of it. If you'd rather I give you the point on horsemanship let me know and I'll change it. Too bad this thread couldn't go further, but it's kind of at an okay ending point anyway. If this were a TV show, "To Be Continued" would appear on the ground right above "DENVAL IS IMPORTANT." Also, please edit your request to show that it was graded.