bread can be a curse

A sourdough starter needs a careful, controlled environment, with just the right temperatures and light sources, to feed and grow properly. It can't handle being jostled around in a rucksack, being left out in the Tornan summer sun, being accidentally neglected if the trials and tribulations of the day were just too tiring. Yes, in ways it can be hardy, can be resourceful and flexible, can be infinite, but who has the patience, the strength of heart, to dispose of three-quarters of the hard-earned yeasty stuff every three days?

Who has the strength of heart to let a Blade return to its Core and reset every nuanced, hand-nurtured feature back to ground zero once every fifty years, huh? Maybe that's the thing about it.

Lora can't be trusted to feed it, or to deal with anything that's wrong with it after it's been fed, because she's only ten and even though Jin would like, is practically compelled, to believe only the very best about her, the ratios of water to flour need to be exact, and they don't have a scale. Her fingers are still a little chubby; her thoughts are still a little broad, about mathematics or otherwise.

Too, the Paragon of Torna doesn't have a house; he's an itinerant. Was he always? Will he always be? Will he be happy, if someday he isn't?

(Even now, even early, he has flashes of realization that he doesn't ever want to think about another life outside of this one.)

There's no icebox, there's no bench scraper, there's no bench to be scraped. Just logs cleaned as best as they can be with ice, with rope, with nature battled against nature.

(Nature against nurture? Wood isn't grown dirty. It's made that way, gradually and over time, but one submersion in the ground can do it all at once, too. All it takes is one mistake. All it takes is one mistake.)

So they can't have leavened bread, is the point. Only flat cracker-like things or pancakes that are either overly sweet (when Jin makes them, thinking that all children must like sweet things) or completely bland (when Lora makes them, unsure of how else to cross over to the fabled savory world), with no middle ground in between.

When they get a little extra spending money, from a particularly crafty but generous client or a particularly stupid but impressible one, bread - real fluffy, crusty, salty-sweet rosemary-thyme bread - is one of the first splurges on their list. And of course, neither Lora nor even Jin, most times, stops to consider the sheer complexity of the organism that is this starchy stratification of air and flour and water made corporeal by tempered fire and stone.

Fishing a slice aimlessly through her beloved Ruby-Stew Buloofo, watching it soggify, become craggy and saggy and devoid of all structure, Lora, now fourteen, starts, "Jin, do you think we'll ever have a...stable situation?"

They're still on the run all the time, more or less. If they stay anywhere for too long, people will recognize Jin, newly-fashioned mask or not, and like as not they've already started doing so, and thus the need to incessantly pack up and move, move out and move on what little life they have.

"I hope we will, Lora," answers Jin, and he means it. He hopes that one day they won't need to put up with all the senseless shortchanges that come with having a price on his head because he's a trinket and not an individual. Mark him no wrong, it's not even pretentious possessiveness that he feels; he holds onto this life so dearly not because Lora is Lora and he is Lora's Jin, necessarily, but because he knows he could be mercilessly killed at any time, and in this life that is a harsher reality than it has been in any other.

Why does he have this gift, this curse, of preternatural consciousness about it? How does he even know he's the Paragon? Probably, Gort brought news of the theft to a borderland deputy who passed it up and on to some substantial dignitary who officially ordained the theft back into circulation, and up went the thinly-veiled wanted posters.

Who is the criminal, here? It's not Gort, apparently, and it's not Amalthus before him, and it shouldn't be Lora because she's not of age to be charged for any such crime...so it's Jin? So Jin is to be brought before a senate for the theft of his own life, when he's still alive? When there's been no taking?

Cruel world. Cruel, cruel world. Veneration is not love. Much as they'd like to believe it so. But anyway.

A loaf of bread risen doesn't know why it's done what it's done; it's not even one singular organism, but in fact some hundreds, thousands, millions, billions (Jin doesn't know, truly, and he really doesn't care to think about counting, introspective or not) of bacteria working together to gnaw through their sustenance and expel the gassy product of their labors.

It represents life, new lives made and the cycle of it all, but pacifistic Jin doesn't even kill all those organisms, because he can't bring them to life first.

Did he perhaps create a new life by fusing the forces of his and Lora's? Defiling, profaning, desecrating...oh, Jin. Oh, Jin. There is such a thing as good decay, and this isn't it.

So then, to Mikhail. Science-minded and bored out of the very same, he mopes on the Monoceros, begging Jin to teach him how to sew, how to cook, how to do anything at all because he may be brave and inquisitive but that's really all he's got going for him. (Sound familiar? Even a little bit?)

Jin mulls on that. There is something, something cautious, exacting Mikhail would be perfect at. Something Jin himself never got to explore doing. If they learn together...that's bonding, right? And it would be better for this iteration of the child rescued from violent, uncaring abuse, instantiated and effected in not one but two hostile houses of worship or the lack of it, if the bonding was more natural, less unfortunately intrinsic.

"We'd have to be very patient," he warns.

Mikhail shrugs. "Okay. 've got nothing but time anyway."