#unstrung needs more attention change my mind | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

longsightmyth · 6 years

Text

Chapter-by-chapter, The Naming, Chapter 12

PELLINOR

My love for the innkeeping couple continues.

“She’s a quiet one, your wife, eh?” said Halifax, shrugging his shoulder in Maerad’s direction.

“She don’t like strangers that well,” said Cadvan. “She’s sociable enough on her own.”

“Well, there’s some as never shut up, so I guess it’s swings and roundabouts.” Halifax rolled his eyes comically, and Marta [his wife] kicked him under the table.

“I know who doesn’t shut up around here,” she said comfortably.

I appreciate that Halifax is clearly joking and that Marta is clearly unfazed and willing to point out to strangers that she knows who’s the real chatterbox around here, and both are presented as having a longstanding cheery argument.

All of this is about to change though, because Maerad and Cadvan are nearing the boundaries of Innail Fesse. They bid farewell to the innkeeping couple (Marta packs them lunch) and start riding. After a while a raven comes down to join them carrying a message from Silvia. In these books, ravens are some of the few animals that can make themselves understood without the Speech, so Maerad can understand Lord Kargan when he tells them that Silvia wanted them to know that two hulls entered Innail and Dernhil is dead. Cadvan asks if Silvia is sure they were hulls, and Kargan says definitely.

“Lord Kargan,” [Cadvan] said. “You have already done much, but I seek your help still. We need to pass through Innail Let, and I know not if the Dark has gathered its spies there. It may be that it is yet unwatched, because they think we are still at Innail. I would be grateful if you could fly there and tell me what you see.”

Kargan agrees. After he flies off, Maerad starts to freak out because Dernhil is dead and because people are now actively chasing her. She doesn’t say anything for a bit though as they ride, and it’s Cadvan who finally says, “Alas, he was my friend, and I loved him, and this is a grievous loss.”

Maerad agrees, and says that she didn’t know Dernhil long but he was her friend too, and remembers her dream. She tells Cadvan about it, and how she didn’t know for sure it was Dernhil that she heard but it seems pretty clear now.

“I spoke of you with Dernhil, Maerad,” [Cadvan] said. “I know he loved you. He was one of those who can see clearly into another’s soul, and his feelings were true. Such things have little to do with brevity of meeting. And in that lies our hope: for the Dark understands nothing of love. And if, as it seems almost certain, the hulls sought news of you, maybe his love protected you as nothing else could.”

The soul in question was sixteen, but I approve of the sentiment. As a bonus, we know where I was at least encouraged in my love of commas (Throne of Glass could take some pointers from Pellinor for the elevated language schtick).

Maerad is sad some more, and so is Cadvan. He talks about Bards being able to kill themselves without weapons if necessary.

“It is unutterably terrible,” said Cadvan at last, “to hope that Dernhil killed himself rather than be murdered by those evil beings; yet that is what I hope.”

Yikes.

Kargan returns and reports that the way is clear for now. Cadvan thanks him, and Kargan leaves to report to Silvia that Maerad and Cadvan are alive and kicking. They continue to ride until they eventually find a Bardhome. They take care of their horses, and Maerad complains of stiffness and soreness from riding all day every day. Cadvan tells her she’ll get used to it soon but has her stand in front of him and “passed his hands around her body without touching her.” Maerad feels better, if still slightly sore and tired.

They set up camp and eat dinner, and Cadvan tells Maerad more about the Speech at her prompting, specifically how you never know when you come into it and Maerad isn’t weird for not being able to understand it yet. We get a cute little anecdote about when Cadvan started to understand the Speech (he was about five years old) and a fish spoke to him. We also learn that neither of Cadvan’s parents were Bards. He talks about the different divisions of Barding (there are three broad categories), which are called The Arts: the Reading, the Making, and the Tending. Reading is what most people think of as magic, though it does include actual reading. Making is exactly what it sounds like plus playing music and dancing and writing and stuff. Tending is “knowledge of growing, husbandry, forestry, childcraft, wilding, herbs, healing, bird lore” etc. There are debates about where particular acts sometimes fall on the scale, but Cadvan gives no fucks about that sort of thing. Cadvan and Dernhil practice Reading the most, and Malgorn and Silvia Tending. “…a Bard who counts power and learning as the highest skill, refusing to understand how all of the Arts inform and nourish each other, is a poor Bard.”

Cadvan makes a lament for Dernhil.

“Sweet fall the rains on the mountains of Innail

Leaping like children down through the pinewoods

With voices of ice like melodious laughter

Seeking the harping of Dernhil of Gent.

But he cannot hear them, his music is ended.

Where has he gone? His chamber is empty

And bright are the tears in the high halls of Oron

Where once he stepped lightly, singing deep secrets

Out of the heart-vault and into the open.

Dark are the Gates that opened and beckoned

And closed on his steps, in the gray twilight fading,

Folding in silence the weft of his barding.

No more will he sing in the glory of autumn

Gilding the birches of lowen and Braneua:

The groves of Ileadh will wait him in vain.

He enters the meadows of music no longer

To gather us with mirth-sheaves and harvests of pleasure.

His harp is unstrung, his sweet voice is silenced:

Sad now are the streams in the Valley of Innail.”

He fell silent, and then he covered his face with his hands and wept.

Maerad cries too, and they grieve quietly for a while.

Then they have a discussion involving fault: earlier Maerad said it was her fault because Dernhil was teaching her, and Cadvan told her obviously not. Now Cadvan feels guilty for asking Dernhil to teach Maerad. Maerad says that that’s stupid, because Dernhil did know, and also that, as Cadvan told her earlier, it isn’t either of their faults that there is evil in the world. Cadvan says that all Dernhil knew about her was that she was Cadvan’s pupil, and Maerad remembers that she hasn’t shown Cadvan the bit of prophecy Dernhil found for her. Cadvan says to hide it: “I am not certain that we shouldn’t burn it, but I wish Nelac to see it.”

Cadvan is basically like ‘welp this proves it, you’re the foretold” and Maerad sort of scrambles around trying to justify why she’s not, including her name not being Elednor (the truename of the foretold, which means fire lily). Cadvan points out that she won’t know her truename until after she’s instated as a full Bard, argument invalid.

“What if I’m not? What if you’ve got it all wrong? What then?”

Cadvan shrugged. “As I said before, then I am simply wrong.”

He muses that the Dark might now know for sure, and that that makes this whole thing even more dangerous, but he wonders if they knew before or after trying to break into Dernhil’s mind.

“Dernhil would not have betrayed us,” said Maerad uncertainly.

…”it is not a question of betrayal,” said Cadvan. “You don’t know…” A spasm of pain passed over his face, and for a while he was silent.

More Mysterious Past hints. Come on Cadvan, fess up! He continues that the hulls would have wanted to use Dernhil as a spy if they could get into his mind, not kill him, and a murder in the school has brought so much attention that the hulls probably can’t stay, since even hulls would have trouble with Bards like Malgorn or Oron actively hunting them. I personally would rather face Oron or Malgorn than Silvia if she thinks somebody is trying to hurt Maerad, but sure, book.

“I think it is likely,” said Cadvan at last, “that Dernhil killed himself so they could not enter his mind, and I think it is not only my hope speaking.” he shuddered. “Believe me, Maerad, there are many worse things than death.”

We learn more about hulls when Maerad asks. They were Bards, but turned to the Dark to try to live forever and/or get more power. They can be killed, but they don’t die of old age. They can pass as mortals if they work at it because they still have Bardic gifts.

[Cadvan] fell silent, looking into his own memories, and then spoke with a vehement anger that took Maerad aback. “I hate them. They betray everything that makes us what we are, and destroy everything that is worthy of love. I hate them more than the Nameless One himself.”

Note to self: Cadvan’s backstory likely involves hull trauma.

Maerad starts thinking about all the Bards she’s never known and whether or not they might be hulls, and starts to worry that nobody can be trusted, “but she remembered Silvia and Dernhil and Malgorn, and Cadvan himself, and quietened her fears.”

You’re missing Saliman, Maerad. He seems like a key component given future events. Just saying.

She falls asleep afraid anyway.

THRONE OF GLASS

Chapter 24 so I didn’t land three pages into the next chapter. Celaena can’t sleep and talks about the moonlight and how night doesn’t mean anything to her, and then goes on about how “it was just the time when she slept, the time when she stalked and killed, the time when the stars emerged with glittering beauty and made her feel wonderfully small and insignificant.”

That seems pretty meaningful to me but I am but a simple fanfic writer, untutored in the ways of high fantasy or YA lit.

That was sarcasm, for those unsure.

Celaena was too lazy to change out of her old fashioned dress (actual words from the text, not me being judgy for once, and also I am hardly the one to judge based on clothing changing). She looks up to see a tapestry blowing and after a moment of investigation realizes it’s because there is a secret door behind it.

Y’all, they put an assassin in a room with secret passages that are found after like three minutes of investigation. Either somebody in charge of room assignments wants people dead, or everyone here is incompetent.

I genuinely wish we had murderous steward on our hands.

Celaena exercises some caution when going exploring, which on the one hand I applaud - nobody wants to get lost in the deep dark of an ancient castle - but on the other hand, didn’t she know exactly where she was going from counting steps and noticing corridors in the first chapter when she had never been in the building before while blindfolded? Why doesn’t she utilize that ability now? Also she has a prince and a captain of the guard popping in and out of her room like there’s a revolving door with an ‘Open - free cookies’ sign on it, so shouldn’t she be worried about discovery?

Celaena held the candle aloft, her cape trailing behind her, leaving a clean wake on the dust-covered stairs.

Y’all. This behavior is excusable in an inexperienced sneaker, but in someone who is supposedly the best assassin in the land this is just sad.

She reaches the end of one passage and realizes it’s probably an escape route for the king and leads to a waterway with a rusted iron gate and rotting boats, which begs so many questions I don’t know where to start. She can see trees and stuff outside and considers escaping through the gate, but she slips while climbing around and freaks out. She goes back and takes a different turn, whose passage she follows to spy holes overlooking the great hall and the Samhuinn feast. Celaena is indignant that the other champions are allowed to attend and she isn’t, and honestly so am I. If they’re worried about Celaena the Braggy Assassin in company, they should be doubly worried about the people who have actually murdered people. They do appear to have left Cain in his room, though.

She spots Dorian and decides she’s just happy to see his “unusual grace, and the kindness in his eyes”.

Stop trying to make me like Dorian, book, I am never going to like Dorian. You can tell me about the kindness in his eyes all you want but until I see that shit backed up with action and him considering women aside from our protagonist to be human beings it ain’t gonna fly.

EXHIBIT NUMBER UNCOUNTED: he enters Celaena’s room without permission to watch her sleep after she’s returned and gone to sleep. I thought we all agreed this was bullshit after Twilight, y’all, why is it still showing up? Why are we still considering Dorian a good guy when he routinely uses the literal power of life and death he has over this woman to show up in her private space without permission and watch her sleep? Y’all. Come on.

Chaol kicks him out, which would get him points except he then chills in Celaena’s room considering whether or not she’s a virgin and watches her sleep for a minute. At least he wakes her up when he approaches the bed? But it’s not on purpose? Y’all, he came by to drop off a ring from the party favors for her, he couldn’t have just waited until morning when he could fucking knock? I hate everyone. Chaol throws another blanket over her and leaves.

COMPARISON

Well Cadvan was basically tailor-made for us, wasn’t he? Mysterious Past, hot, respectful, badass, in touch with his emotions… too bad he’s in his seventies. ANYWAY. I appreciate that Pellinor has people in touch with their emotions being a good thing, and I appreciate that affection and cordial teasing are shown to be hallmarks of a good relationship, thank you innkeeping couple. Other things I appreciate about Pellinor: we’re actually sad about Dernhil. He had an effect on the narrative and an effect on our characters, and he’s on the Ride or Die squad with Silvia, only thankfully Silvia is still in the riding part of it.

In Pellinor this was a lot of exposition relayed in dialogue, but it was interwoven with a discussion of Dernhil and gives us more hits of Cadvan’s Mysterious Past, which obviously involves hulls. Cadvan really doesn’t like them, y’all. Also I appreciated that it was a Tending Bard that was mentioned as being too much for hulls to handle, while a Reading Bard was not. It helpfully underlines the fact that the Arts are in fact equal even if Cadvan is a Reading Bard and we have no idea wtf Maerad is. I’m guessing Indik is a Making Bard (because I don’t actually remember if that’s ever explicitly stated) and he is also later proven to be hardcore. So many books and/or movies pay lip service to everything being equally important while only showing one school/art to be actually effective, and Pellinor actually shows that it’s true even in small ways. I like that. (I also like that later Silvia is acknowledged as Super Hard Core, but I think we have to wait until The Singing to see exactly how hard core our ride or die team mom is. Bad with a sword or a spell she is not.)

I appreciate nothing about Throne of Glass this chapter, not even a single solitary second. There are six purple tabs marking general displays of incompetence in this chapter and a short pondering of virginity that made me angry. Fuck off, Chaol. Dorian can fuck off even harder, jesus christ on a pogo stick.

STATS

Throne of Glass:

Pages: 11

Fragments: 16

Em-Dashes: 32

Ellipses: 10

Pellinor:

Pages: 18

Fragments: 3

Em-Dashes: 3

Ellipses: 15

#myth reads The Books of Pellinor #myth reads The Naming #myth rags on throne of glass #myth reads

13 notes · View notes

dunmerofskyrim · 7 years

Text

There are places in Old Ebonheart where the dead walk. At the time I didn’t know why. Nor did I question it.

In Bodram I’d seen weeds and stunted shrubs and loose masonry, and a disarrayed abandon of bones, and the bloodied bodies of the new-made dead, all made to move by ghosts. I’d seen corpses pull and claw and beat at the living til they were corpses too. I’d seen a starveling tree grow roots through a mer from below and crush the life from them with its branches. And I didn’t question it. Not out loud.

To find Old Ebonheart plagued with undead seemed no great surprise after that.

But first came the city’s outskirts. Lumberyards gone to worm-feasts, dank breeding fields for bruise-coloured fungi, banquets for foraging scribs. Saltrice terraces swallowed by silt. The lodges and huts of fishermer, collapsed now, their foundations gnawed through by rot.

Walking once, my half-ruined boots uncovered a glinting rigid something in the sucking mud. It was a Velothi windchime, hollowed from polished bone and preserved in the bog. I picked it up, blacking my already dirt-blacked hands. A long tether of braided twine spooled up from the ground dragging chime after chime from where they’d been hid. But decay and the sudden violence of my curiosity snapped the line. I gathered three of the chimes in a net bag, reckoning to wash them and polish them again.

“It wasn’t just Nords came to trade here, then,” I said to Tammunei as we carried on. “Velothi too, from off the plains. Leatherwares and bonecrafts. Nix and shalk shells..? Wasn’t aware the Vereansu were known for their crafts.”

Tammunei gestured for my attention. I followed their hand as they pointed to one of the Vereansu among us. A warrior, head shaved but for a long grey braid that hung from the back of his scalp. They led a saddle-guar, slow and careful by the reins through these fenlands, too cautious to ride.

“Herds?” I asked. “Guar and horses?”

Tammunei nodded.

But I looked at the warrior’s bow, unstrung and wrapped in resined soft-leather, against the damage of the damp. The long-hafted axe at their belt, headed like a dagger on one side, like a hammer on the other. “Mercenaries too?”

Tammunei tilted their head, gave a small uncertain shift with their mouth, then nodded. A ‘sometimes yes.’ A ‘maybe yes.’

With time the land rose. As we dragged ourselves from the marsh, so did the lay of things, and the city-ruin itself.

We passed through a sunken mess of slums. Sagging once-huts of mud-brick with roofs long gone, opening their insides to the elements, like Nordic barrow-pits. There in the gutter-faced remains of the city’s poorest parts, something lingered on the air. Not a scent, nor quite a sound, but the sense that something was speaking, but couldn’t quite be heard. I wondered if this was how it began for Tammunei, hearing the voices of the dead? But it faded and didn’t come back. And in terraces shored up with stone, tier by tier, we clambered in switchback progress up into the long ridge of headland that crowned Old Ebonheart’s mainland half.

That was the best part of a day and the beginning, after, of its evening. Cold shade in the morning, as the east-rising steps of this east-rising city hid us from the sun, and the sun from us. Cold sunshine the colour of tin at noon, tricking our brows into beading with sweat.

Often the old paths were blocked. The upsloping streets were choked with refuse and rubble. We found unorthodox ways over wreckage and terrace-walls, and made our progress something more like the climbing of a mountainside than the navigation of a city. Our path began to wind through alleyways, up the tumbledown flanks of fallen homes, and then through the rooms of homes themselves, preserved somehow like grotto-caves, all but buried in all this destruction.

Tammunei was first to see the dead. Of course, of course, it was Tammunei. Stealing through a half-collapsed badger-set of rooms where families once had slept, we saw one that still remained.

A mother and child they’d been once, but death and time had diminished them. In the lightless one-room pit of what had been her home, she paced a figure-eight, holding a bundle of rags in her arms, and the creak and grind of her bones and tendons was all she sang as a lullaby. A faded age-thinned yellow dress hung from her. What flesh she’d worn had turned to leather, parched like the skin of a last-year’s apple, kept since in the dark and the dry. I might have expected skeletons – clattering bones and bleached hard lines – but this was worse. A person whose soul was too shocked or too stubborn to leave their body or quite let it rot.

We waited, watching, horrified-silent. But it seemed that we were as dead to her as she was dead to us. Trapped in our separate worlds, though we shared a space. She only carried on pacing, rocking her bundle of rags.

Tammunei urged us onward with gestures of their hands.

“And you?” I mouthed and motioned, silent by instinct, so as not to disturb this room.

“I’ll stay,” Tammunei’s lips shaped back. “If there’s something I can do…”

“Then I’ll stay with you.”

But Tammunei shook their head, firm, hair fretting free and into their face. “Alone. Please.”

I frowned, face shifting uneasy, then nodded. “You won’t be long?”

A shrug. “Perhaps.”

I never knew how much or how little they needed me, then. My protection or help. Mine was the violence that shielded them from violence. Perhaps I was little else besides. This wasn’t a situation to be solved with violence, or well-placed words, but that didn’t mean it was safe. Still I turned away, dour as pulling teeth, and led our long line onward.

That night we camped in the upper-city, in the dusty tile-strewn square of a tier-roofed townhouse. The shattered shell of a dome lay in the wide weed-choked boulevard outside — scraps of painted bronze and shards of painted purple. I huddled under a colonnade that leant now like a drunkard against an outer wall.

It was there that Tammunei found us again, and their presence came over us like a broken curse. Purpose and guidance in sight again.

There was a sweet scent in the air. The splintered pillars of the fallen veranda were of fragrant mauve-brown wood. Slow down the decades they had been bleeding all the while, like cracked bottles of perfume. A dark and oozing aroma, amber-coloured in my mind, and heady to breathe for too long.

A chill came down with the sunset, and deepened as night drew on. The walls around us blocked the worst of the wind and saved us from its keen cold teeth. Still we heard it, moaning round the severed trunks of fallen towers, adding salt sea to the courtyard’s scent.

We cooked what was left of our hunters’ meat over stones I called fire to heat. Kagouti is stew meat, unfit to roast save for two exceptions: when roasted a whole day and basted constantly, or when only the cheeks are eaten, for where those hard tusks grow the tenderest meat’s to be found. We had it roasted all the same. We had weathered worse things than chewing tough meat. Or meat burnt almost black…

I asked Tammunei what they had done below. Had they been able to help?

“I listened to her sing,” they mouthed to me. “Heard her. Said her child was sleeping. And she slept sound after that.”

Strange. Tammunei always spoke of the uncanny as if it were the most natural thing. As if anyone could do the same, and anyone in their right heart would.

After, we huddled round the stones, starving and greedy for what remained of their warmth. In bedrolls and bundles of clothing and rags, and in heapings of travel-tired limbs, we stockpiled the heat of our bodies.

This had all turned to habit by then. Every night, and every night, as the nights themselves grew colder. And every night that passed that way, I spent trying not to breathe, thinking of nothing but sleep. Useless — like praying so hard for a thing that you never get up off your knees to go out and get it.

That night, Tammunei’s shape furled over me. Some bone-rigid part nestled into me. Chin to chest, jaw to shoulder; a tangle of knees and elbows. Warmth worked between us, trapped in the folds of our clothes. I thought about breathing. Counted every conscious twitch of my lungs.

Touch had never come easy to me. Ever a kind of invasion at worst, and at best it stuck like a burr in my mind so I could think of nothing else — like I’m bound up too tight in the skin that’s doing the feeling. And there was always guilt in that too.

With Tammunei it had stopped feeling like an affront, an assault. Hard to say when the change had come, or if it had always been there. But with them I suffered touch without suffering. And at the time that felt so precious it scared me. So sweet that to sleep through it would be a waste, some part of me almost felt. So it had felt for weeks maybe, and I’d gone the whole while without rest.

Our bodies were tangled. I felt their shivers through me, as if they were my own.

“You’re shivering,” I said, soft and stupid, unheard in the dark. But I was used to telling Tammunei what they felt. Telling the truths their nerves wouldn’t report. By now, that too was habit.

How could they be cold, I wondered? How, while my skin prickled so hot? While my breath and my blood both came so fevered?

The coarse grind of clothes on clothes. A sound like knots tied in rope, made fast, making mooring, tightening round me. Everything came world-resounding loud when the cold and the city-ruin had made everything else so silent. The closeness of it all trapped me, bound up in all this sharing. The terror of it and hunger of it, febrid-hot in my hungry hands, and tugging tight in my coward heart.

In my belly I felt the moment uncurl. A blossoming brute desire. I laid a hand on Tammunei’s hip. A question, but they had no voice to answer. In the silence, I hated that I’d asked at all.

The cold of the morning made that night feel distant as a dream. That was a mercy, but not a reprieve.

#TES #Morrowind #Dunmer #Simra Hishkari #SH Forth and Back #SH New Canon #Tammunei Ereshkigal

9 notes · View notes