Evenings on the Transdarian: Coralie

Outside the city of Drache lies a number of cities, towns and provinces of varying size and populace. Most of the people living outside Drache are natives who speak Arangothian and observe the native customs and rituals. Click here for a list Arangoth's locales, and here to view a map.
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Pigasus
Baronet
Posts: 65
Joined: Wed Aug 29, 2012 5:59 pm
Preferred Title: Setting Whisperer

Evenings on the Transdarian: Coralie

Post by Pigasus »

In which cause and effect make poor lovers.

--

The two men sat at Torrothresh Landing, waiting for the ferry to Drache. There, the younger man would stay to make a name for himself, while the older would continue on to Antara-Ethcabar, where his nephew had recently struck it large. Neither was sure how they started talking but the warm evening breeze on the water and the apricot sunset predisposed towards friendliness.

“You want to be a physician? Noble trade,” said Tils Brathwaite, the older man. He had a drawn up but respectable face filled with a myriad of aging features: little veins, folds and other artistic complications.

“I want to be many things,” said Noachim Fray. He had a short dark beard grown in transit but his eyes were distant and philosophic. “Physician is the most directly useful, I feel. When my other paths are philosopher and storyteller…”

“You are correct,” said Brathwaite. “But storyteller isn’t a vocation but a parallel life: the shadow puppet of your everyday experience.”

“Spoken well,” Fray agreed.

“I used to be somewhat of a storyteller myself,” said Brathwaite. More people appeared on the ferry landing; among them, a family with a shy-looking, strawberry-blonde young woman. Brathwaite pointed her out with a turn of his chin.

“There was another girl just like that who used to stay at Torrothresh Landing with her matronly frumps, a decade or so ago.” He continued. “She gave me a good idea for a story. I doubt I will pen anything at this point but you might.”

“That remains to be seen. But pray, tell me your idea. Young women are good subjects at any age.”

“Indeed,” said Brathwaite. “She looked much like that one, maybe a little thinner, smaller. Twoscore times more heart than common sense, open like a big nerve to the universe.”

The girl from a decade ago belonged to that class of educated poor that can, without boasting, claim status among The Most Tormented. These are the people who, having nothing, read novels about nobility, intrigue and decadence and yearn helplessly from the kitchen soot tracked about by screaming children. They know what they’re missing. She always had one book or another in her hands and her occasional carnation blush revealed their subject matter better than any spyglass.

One summer, after observing her for an evening from across the landing commons for several minutes, Brathwaite decided to pen a fake love note and observe the reaction. A well-read man, he had no trouble with making his spectral admirer sound compelling and mysterious. And, when night fell, he tucked it in the hollow of an oak tree, near where she always read her books.

The following day, he went to the landing early to drink tea on the inn’s veranda and observe the girl cross over to the tree and open up her book to a page. A furry squirrel-head stuck from the hole and disappeared and the girl reached her hand in to pet it. It came out with the note. Brathwaite squinted as the girl squinted and a bright burst of crimson overtook her. Smug satisfaction rippled over across his tea. Silly girl.

Next day, he composed another and put it in the same place. She checked it religiously now and her books turned into a pretense to sneak down to the water, her happy little secret tucked in her bodice. The invisible paramour never revealed why they couldn’t be together but she could guess. The books informed her all about star-crossed catastrophe. And so, it became habitual. Sometimes she wrote back but her poor hand could never match his eloquence.

He had her where he wanted her until the summer showed signs of fading and failing and the girl rode away on a mail-coach one autumn day, looking wistfully out the window.

“Decent story, no?” asked Brathwaite. Fray smiled politely and shook his head.

“I would say that it’s a phenomenal beginning to a story,” he said. “But it’s not the whole thing. It needs an ending.”

“Ah yes. I suppose you’re right,” said Brathwaite. “Girl returns home to the bleak contrast of her poverty.”

“No no,” said Fray, catching the storyteller’s enthusiasm. “The girl no longer concerns me. She’s served her role. It’s the man behind the letters that will become the main character. He doesn’t yet realize when he returns the following summer that he is no longer in control, that the game has overtaken him and that she won’t leave his thoughts. He waits for her, catching glimpses, hoping to come clean but knowing that he can never measure up to the figment he created. The figment becomes the storyteller and the original prankster becomes…”

“Enough!”

The word cut jaggedly across the idyll but the warm breeze and laughing children quickly smoothed it over. Fray turned away, hiding his own blush as he realized what he had just touched. But Brathwaite returned to normal, pedantic as before.

“I can see how you might get an idea for such a narrative but it’s wholly unrealistic. A younger man might lose the line between cause and effect but not the way I told it. Anyhow, it’s something to consider. I believe our ferry is here.”

The bells rang. Noachim Fray stood up, as did Tils Brathwaite. They shook hands. Fray went first, hiding belowdecks from embarrassment, while Brathwaite lingered a moment and looked across the water, to the hollow in the old oak tree.
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