In the country I cannot have [Kavala]

[Trista]

Trista approached her work with a singleminded dedication, and she seemed utterly lost in it. Nonetheless, when Kavala spoke, she turned immediately. "No -- you have a very nice voice," she replied. "It reminds me of the time I spent on Mura."

Then she shrugged, her bare shoulders rippling. "To be Akvatari is to know loss." It was not a complaint, simply a statement. "And I am alone."

It was an abrupt way to conclude, but it took Trista several seconds to think of what to say next. There were things she dared not say, of course, but more than that, there were things she didn't know how to say. As a writer, she knew all too well the inherent limitations of language, the way that it suggested, but all too often was powerless to convey precisely what it meant.

"I've wandered for a long time," she began at last, and there was a change in her voice, one that made her sound more confident and engaging, though scarcely less sad. It was, truth be known, the voice of a storyteller, one who had spent a long time listening to some of the greatest tellers of tales in Mizahar.

"I've been to Mura and spoken with a deity. I've flown through the streets of the many-armed Eypharians and seen their glittering, half-ruined towers beneath the cruel sky. I've been to the isle of Dira and been guided through its shifting passages by the dead themselves. I've soared around the fabled spires of Abura, swam the waters of the Suvan Sea, and seen Konti Isle unrolled before me like a scroll from the tower of the Suviak. I've spoken with creatures in dreams who sang a song to me that seemed somehow to be my own. I've been to a place I can't explain, beneath a sky that was too close, surrounded by colors that were too bright, and bargained with a nameless shade for a dead girl's hands."

She allowed herself a brief pause. "But, though I've met many people, when I've moved on, it was always alone. I can touch the world, Kavala, but I can't hold it. There are places upon places, stretched from one coast to another and farther even than that, but I belong to none of them, and none of them belong to me."

Her voice fell almost to a whisper. "The last time I saw Ezebel, beneath the pear tree in the desert, I asked how I would find her again. I do not think we shall meet again as we are, she said. Perhaps when we are undone into something new. The promise of that something new, that place and time where all stories don't end in loss, where the liminal space between endings and beginnings is truly bridged, wraps around the corners of my dreams and whispers words to me that I can never quite catch. It is a place that would be beautiful, I believe, but I can't tell you for certain, given that I've never seen it."

She fell silent now, the brush in her hands almost forgotten, lost as she was in her own thoughts.

[Kavala]

Kavala felt an intense sense of sorrow, almost loss, at listening to Trista. The akvatari had the saddest eyes she'd ever seen. If she'd been pressed later to describe them, she'd call them wells of anticipated sorrow. You just couldn't help but grieve looking into them. And when her words fell on Kavala's ears it was like a blizzard froze her heart.

"It must be an incredibly difficult life. I can't walk through life without touching it and living within it. To be forever an outsider would seem to me like a mighty piece of driftwood washed by the waves always in sight of land but never allowed to roll up on the shore, even in storms." Kavala said, reaching out and touching the Akvatari on the shoulder.

The Konti healer thought on the Akvatari's words until suddenly she smiled. It was a slight smile, bright with potential but as yet unfulfilled. "Then the Akvatari are not so different than the humans or the konti or the Akalak. We always covet that which we cannot touch or hold. We always want to know the unknowable and see that which is not yet time to see. Humans have a saying that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence while the Akalak's say that the enemies blade is always just slightly finer than your own. Us Konti try and not compare blade to blade or grass to grass. Instead we live in the moment always heeding our Calls when they come. It is not the same life as you live, for certain, but it is a good life nonetheless." She said. Then, with determination, she picked up the brush again and began working on a new section of underwater reef.

[Trista]

Something of a smile came to Trista's face. "The Konti are wise," she said softly. "The Akvatari are rarely living in the present moment, occupied instead by the emptiness of the past and the weight of the future. Perhaps this is one of the gifts of Avalis: to know both the future and the past, so that wherever and whenever one is, one is always present."

Almost without looking at her hands, Trista traced the dappled skin of a flatfish in a soothing brown. "Though I often wonder -- how does one see all that one can and not lose oneself in the vision?"

She would listen if Kavala had an answer, but the question wasn't asked as if Trista were expecting a reply. So many of Trista's conversations tapered off this way, with a subtle shift between the Akvatari talking to another person and talking to herself.

However, she tilted her head, and glanced from the wall to Kavala. "Do you have a favorite song?" she asked. The connection to the previous conversation was oblique, but Trista's poetic habit of drawing lines between seemingly unrelated things often spilled over into her everyday conversations. "And if you do...would it be too much trouble to ask you to sing it?"

[Kavala]

Kavala smiled. "I know a few songs, but my favorites are in Pavi. They were the ones my mother sang to me." She said softly, thinking over all that Trista had said. "I'll sing it, of course, but... I know the answer to your question. Do you want to hear it?"

Kavala paused a long time, knowing that the Akvatari was speaking rhetorically. But the truth was Kavala DID know the answer to the woman's question. It was a hard truth she had to learn about herself and about the world in general.

"You'll never loose yourself, Trista, if you take the time to truly get to know yourself. Once you know who you really are and what you really care about, the things you like and dislike, what drives you.... then there's never ever any danger of getting lost. It doesn't matter if you look forwards or back, or even tip your head to the stars and dream about life beyond this one. If you know what home is, how can you ever be parted from it? You can't. Not really. It will draw you with more force than a fresh icy river will draw a thrusting man out of the desert." Kavala said softly, smiling.

It was then she began to sing. Her hand never wavered from the paintbrush as she worked on the mural, going only where the Akvatari allowed her. Currently she was filling in waves of blue along the boundaries of detail fish that Trista would have to come back later and fill in.

The song was in Pavi. It started out softly, the words filling the silence with almost questions until it rose in intensity and stretched out across the room. It seemed to harbor all sorts of emotions - sadness, wonder, hope. It gave Trista the impression of great expansion, as if somehow the song was growing and expanding and flowing over unclaimed silence. Kavala sang it for a long time, the words foreign and almost exotic in Trista's ears.

When she was done, Kavala spoke quietly. "Its the Song of the Sea of Grass... about its birth and expansion. About what it used to be and what it will eventually become." And with that, she dipped more paint, climbed on a stool, and began adding even more blue to the work on the wall.

[Cayenne]

I hereby award the following: Kavala Rhetoric: 3 XP Animal Husbandry: 1 XP Painting: 1 XP Horseback Riding: 1 XP Singing: 2 XP Philosophy: 1 XP Lore: Akvatari and their Melancholy Lore: Akvatari Dietary Habits Trista Rhetoric: 4 XP Drawing: 1 XP Painting: 1 XP Teaching: 1 XP Philosophy: 2 XP Lore: Stones and Shoes and Frogs Lore: The Sanctuary