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--- campaigns:taika-daagru:2021-11-06 [2022-01-22 02:26] – Today's rounds pinkgothic
+++ campaigns:taika-daagru:2021-11-06 [2022-07-17 00:12] (current) – Added stuff from the 5th of March pinkgothic
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 They walked forth, with little hope of taking sleep again. Hopefully in a few hours they would be able to take shelter among rocks. The mountains were still far, and the air so cold.
+**pinkgothic**:
+Kukri had not expected them to be as successful in rescuing their supplies as they had been, but eventually the adrenaline from the encounter ran low and she noticed she was paying the price for the constant tension of those moments, joints aching from more than just the cold.
+Her mind was slow and sluggish from the aftermath of the stress, but clung to one insight: She would have to draw these beasts and report on them as best she could. She held on to the mental images as though there were any risk of her forgetting them, as if they had not already been etched into her soul.
+It was not a good time to stop and rest, that much she knew. It was better to keep walking for a little while, slowly but surely, and rest by gentling herself in those motions, not by sleeping. There was no telling what sleep would do while she was in this immediate post-adrenal state.
+Far too easily, she could picture herself settling down in a place where the snow and ice would simply consume her in her sleep.
+**Concavenator**:
+Giya strode with little visible effort through the snow, now ankle-high, the great sediment slope that had drifted from the mountains year after year. She did not seem too shaken by the recent event, and even as it transpired she had kept a cool mind. Was this a common occurrence in this place? The common wisdom of Grikaa charged the people of the far south with a preternatural resistance in face of the worst hardships, though opinion was divided on whether such resistance was innate or a matured over a lifetime of exposure. In this particular moment, Kukri did not believe she could ever grow accustomed to a night like this.
+Then her companion -- her guide, really -- said: "If we reach the rocks of the mountains, yachakri don't hunt on rocks".
+**pinkgothic**:
+Kukri muttered some form of assent. She wanted to pick Giya's brain on the yachakri, find out more about what she knew of them, preserve that information -- but not now. Unlike Giya, Kukri's gait was less accustomed to the snow, and while she did not quite //struggle// forward, she did lag behind increasingly, if only slightly.
+But there was one thing she could say and mean it: "Thank you for your help."
+**Concavenator**:
+To that, Giya responded by quickly muttering something in her dialect, then paused for a few heartbeats, turning to look back at Kukri, and said: "I want to say-- is my duty". Finally she turned her head again to the field of rock in their front, slowing down her pace, as if contemplating the vast graveyard of stone that lay in front of them.
+The glaciers started to appear in the mist, heavy and swollen and unnaturally white. At that alien sight, Kukri briefly wondered what, exactly, she had just thanked Giya for, and whether the absurd events around their icy wall had not been just a frightful dream. She shook her head, feeling her brain almost as numb as her fingers. She could not let a low temperature take away her faculties of reasoning and observation, could she? What power could a mass of water claim over her, just by virtue of being in the solid state?
+The wind was not even at its worst. There were places in the Polar Fields, on the other side of the mountains, where the ground had been stripped bare of all snow, naked black ground shivering under starlight, and the air was so dry that not the smallest trace of frost could form. One could be there and believe that the world was still a young egg of bare rock floating around a budding Sun, any form of life being a strange dream of the far future; if not for the corpses of mummified seabirds strewn here and there, wherever blind storm-winds had tossed them.
+So, they went forward.
+**pinkgothic**:
+Something about the glaciers made them look like large, slumbering oceanic beasts, white bodies streamlined and smooth but for the scars of ancient battles.
+The adrenaline was fading, making way for a sense of awe simultaneously eroded and intensified by the her deep exhaustion. They would have to set up camp soon and rest, whether she wanted to or not. They couldn't continue walking indefinitely, no matter how much the glaciers erased all feeling for the distances they still had to cross.
+"Let's look for a safe spot to set up camp," Kukri suggested.
+**Concavenator**:
+"Yes, let's," Giya agreed, "when on the rocks". This much exertion as this hour of the year was as unnatural as a behavior could be while still being physically possible; every part of the body of the two travellers protested against it, from stinging eyes to aching toes down to the hereditary corpuscles screaming deep within their tissues. //We did not travel through your ancestors a thousand thousand times for you to throw us away into the waste.//
+Soon the crunch underfoot changed its pitch; like reefs uncovered by a falling tide, crests of stone arose out of the snow, dark granites of incalculable age, worn smooth by the wind. The polar breath had sculpted them into towering walls and carved into them deep canals, flooded by snow. Many had narrow openings that could easily be closed by piling ice blocks or fixing a strong canvas, saving the trouble of raising two walls out of four.
+**pinkgothic**:
+It was the kindest gesture the harsh environment would ever offer them. This was a desert of ice and stone, providing at most shelter, and in discovering the relative gentleness of the eerie landscape they were entering, Kukri felt a sense of terror knot in her chest.
+She knew it was mostly her exhaustion causing it, the ache in her bones, the lingering emotional effect of their earlier encounter with the yachakri, the extreme solitude as they were choosing to rest, not any rational concern for her own safety - for they had come well prepared - but that made it no less compelling.
+Even Giya in her extreme poverty in some sense was used to being embedded in a civilisation that would help provide for her. For Kukri, the effect was stronger still. But they were perfectly isolated here, far from any support, in a place where nature would give them none.
+Kukri fervently hoped that sleep would let her catch her mind before it spiralled into madness.
+**Concavenator**:
+Soon the gaps were filled, north and south, and the canvas was thrown above in the manner of a roof, keeping the howl of air out for once. By their own hands, as if they were the last survivors of a vast catastrophe that left the rest of Tagra still and silent. Which they might well have been, far as they were from any communication with the wider world. (Poorly suited, of course, to repopulate it; but Kukri would not have appointed herself matriarch of 'ikrakind even with the best possible mate.)
+Slowly Kukri's mind sank back into sleep, though yellow eyes and hissing bellows took form in the smoke of her thoughts, and made her jolt and twitch in her bed. The canvas flapped in the wind above, but with a soft and steady rhythm that seemed to promise it would not break free. That much, at least, was comfort. Giya's breath suggested she was at peace, perhaps already sleeping; 'Au'a knew what sort of life was one in which that day's experience was an unremarkable one.