woah! love and adoration be upon ye

The tragedy of the marr-ed shine in the gold of ye olde golden country lies - lay, rather - in human people dealing with inhuman problems. Taking that as our thesis, we find quite a many none-too-buried classic truths about the overarching characterized symbology of the whole affair. Put another way, it's all so simple, you know I just have to be right.

Lora was an orphan, as were Milton and Mikhail, and Addam was a bastard bereft of caring parents; maybe Hugo also was treated more or less the same. Flora, away at home, could do nought but fret, even though she wasn't often outward with that, and the king, as history tells it, took his death with unpitiable grace (that is to say, with such stalwart honor). We don't speak...no, we don't speak of Zettar and Amalthus.

The point remains: we mourn because of the sheer predictability of it all. Of course they were going to lose, because they were trying to tame immature bioweapons who'd never once been breathing to blink before. So they didn't take the right rests, the right stalls in their pacing, and Flora was so inconsequentially pregnant all alone at the manor when the end came to. It doesn't matter, no, but it's...telling. Just so very telling.

It's telling of Addam's over-good faith that not necessarily does everything come in time, but that there is surely time for everything. Thus, there's time to wait for Hugo's return before clearing the way up through to Hyber and leaving word of where the troupe is gone, in addition to the time he allotted for his and Mythra's crucial journey to round to completion before the gestational period of one miniature Origo would.

So then, two adjustments - amendments, addendums, appendices - will we make in service of this self-indulgent tale. The first will be the installation of young-adult patience on the part of the Origos, and the second will be the move to encounter the Jagron and fetch down Minoth from wayward jaunts while Hugo is away on martial business with Aegaeon, rather than waiting, waiting, waiting.

Upon finding Minoth, the eight other souls present will regroup, bed down at the campfire off of Olnard's Trail, and make plans to track swiftly back down to the estate in the morning. Thus follows our first encounter:

Flora, expecting Addam back as a matter of rote, in the case that Hugo does not return sooner and follow after directly, waits gaily out in the compound. It's a sunny pre-summer's day, and she's young, and she's tethered by belief and love alone. They haven't yet made any particularly bad decisions - and they're not going to either, not right now, but I just thought I'd remind you of it.

And she sits, and she watches, and she waits, because Addam had said they'd make a preparatory forge of the path up and through to Hyber but return to Aletta to regroup there again as a whole if they got done soon enough, and if Hugo came back the militia members should just direct him after the rest, but hopefully there wouldn't be such a rush, even with the threat on the capital, right? Right.

With nothing else to do, Flora spies her sharpest eyes at the trail over the moor, counting Lora with Jin and Haze and Mikhail clutching at Milton's hand as discreetly as he can (Architect only knows how they'd managed to successfully wheedle their way along with the adults), and Brighid who could have stayed behind but chose not to because that would have given Mythra a chance to catch her lacking, and she sees Mythra, and Addam, and...

"Minoth!!"

Now, again, were this not such a contrived piece of self-indulgent fiction, the heroes might be further, farther, on up the road, unable to hear or even see the little lady jump up from her perch on the stone wall through the early morning's misty fog, but instead that selfsame meteorological event is what had and has prevented, and continues to prevent, Flora from seeing them until they're quite close to, and the sun is just that little bit higher, and Mythra turns a smirking face back to elbow the inward-turned cowboy and get him to look up and on as they move in.

But enough of the sickeningly sweet tortuously circuitous prose - and I can say that, can't I?

So Addam and Minoth approached the house.

"Well there, imagine if you were a healer Blade, how would it work then? I can't quite imagine - would you disperse the healing ether into the air, or some such?"

"No, clown, I'd have to shoot you. You think I'd waste time trying to heal the air first? We've already got Haze."

"Aww, Minoth, I'm hurt. You mean to say you wouldn't just come up close and kiss it better for me?"

and as you can see i just gave up on this. over two whole years. but hubbyblanket.png is forever