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Wherein Jen loses the thread (Ch. 21)

Jen had never known what to think about the Pontiac. She’d known what to think about the office, she’d known what to think about the station. As a holy girl, these were the important aspects to form opinions about. After all, holy girls were the prospective candidates. Only Jen didn’t know what to think about the woman herself. It helped little that there seemed to be little to know about her, though that seemed impossible to Jen. Had she been friendlier with the hexmistresses and the travelling holy women, perhaps she’d have gained a clue or two about the Pontiac’s early life. Perhaps she’d have formed a plan of attack, a strategy to take the mantle herself one day. But Jen was surly and rude, brusque and somewhat impatient. The thought of long pointless chats with the older women was near enough to trigger convulsions. In a moment that was not quite vulnerable, she stopped to share such feelings with Aroma as they headed towards the Pontiac’s meditation station. ‘When was the l
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Wherein weariness takes its toll (Ch. 20)

  “There was a great cry from the great father of the spruce trees. All his children wept as they saw the father felled, and Kayatta could not nothing about it. Rage and sorrow filled him. He raged at his friends and clan, who’d done the foul deed. He raged at the gods of winter, who’d forced them into so foul a crime. He raged at the fires of war, for all the lives they’d taken. He raged at the spirits of trickery, for planting the vile seed of the scheme in his mind. He raged at the weakness of his soul, that he’d so fallen into the spirits’ plan, and had shared their plot with the clan. And he wept for the saplings and for the children yet born, who’d never know the great father of the spruce trees. But in the end he felt sorrow for the great father himself.   And though he hated himself for it, he felt too a touch of relief, that for their great crime, his ember siblings would live to see another spring” Excerpt from ‘The princes of the west wood’, Jennept’s archive of northern s
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Wherein a mystery is mulled over (Ch. 19)

  In the days before Captain was Captain, those many who’d known him could’ve described him in a true wealth of manners. So it was purely coincidence when they’d invariably choose to describe him as similar to a mineral of some kind: a man as hard as iron, or solid as a rock, or as foundational to the city as the cold marble it lay upon. They could’ve gone on for a while this way, and at times they had, describing Captain as not dissimilar to every inanimate object less pliable than month old flotsam. Since seizing control of Tellyphill people were much less inclined to describe Captain at length, and anyhow he’d seemed to have gone soft in just one area: the hour of his rising. For reasons that none cared to pry into, from the first day upon taking up residence in the old royal quarters, Captain’s hours of slumber were erratic. Mostly erratically long. So it was that Captain’s image was tarnished, but in a way just minor enough to be endearingly human rather than concerningly incompet
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Wherein a day at the point begins (Ch. 18)

  As the sun threated its rise, Hailey was painfully reminded of the scant five days left until the summer prophecy, and despair had long since set in among the holy girls. Hailey was greatly worried, his all-too youthful face finally lined with worry after long years of unearned serenity. He’d ignored Dolstoy at first, and now could not get a hold of him no matter how hard he tried. The anguish would’ve been far greater had Hailey not had matters far more pressing to deal with. Chief among these was the rapid rate at which the holy girls were falling to some unclear despair. “Ruthela’s been unresponsive lately. She’s always been distant, but I suspect it’s something more this time. You have to do something about it Hailey.” He sat with Jen at their daily briefing. The heat never made it up to the point, so the pressure of conversation had to make up for it. As his discussions with Jen were of late mostly about girls despairing of life, this shouldn’t have been a great ask. And yet
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