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--- campaigns:taika-daagru:2023-04-09 [2023-06-11 01:01] – pinkgothic
+++ campaigns:taika-daagru:2023-04-09 [2023-07-30 01:49] (current) – pinkgothic
@@ Line 74: / Line 74: @@
 "Let's go," she said.
+**Concavenator**:
+Despite that worming sensation, the walk away from the Pole was easier, with their ration packs lighter, their objective safe (almost -- they still had to bring the numbers safe between standing walls, and under a solid roof); and most importantly with the wind at their backs, almost as if driving them on rather than pushing them away. Almost as if the glaciers didn't want Kukri to linger among them.
+But it would take several more days to reach civilization again, and all that time the glaciers would follow her, would fill the creases of her brain as they filled the valleys of the Mountains of Thunder. She had to find a way to keep her mind occupied, to push out the shadows of overlapping numbers that threatened to invade it.
+**pinkgothic**:
+And so she spoke to Giya. She intended nothing in particular with it, so it was easiest to simply teach, shaping her thoughts into presentable chunks, the act of preparation filling the silences when their physical effort forced them into silence.
+She shared with Giya the basics of meteorology - some of the most practical knowledge she could share with someone who might yet refuse the offer to learn the sciences, out of frustration with them. It was in the spirit of the offer to mentor her and Giya would have her own intuitions and memories of weather patterns as a baseline from which to expand her knowledge from. It would not be information that lived in a void.
+Meteorology gave way, by way of the sky, to what she could say of astronomy. It wasn't her deep interest, like the rocks, the ice, the weather and climes, but it was enough to bring them to their first resting place without her mind wandering.
+And when they did rest, the sky was still there, vast and empty and cold. It sunk into her dreams, swelling to filling them, displacing the lights of civilisation and the soft of feathers and the warmth of a beating heart, drowning her in black ice, casting her limbs and lungs into frozen shackles.
+She made a soft, reflexive mewling sound as she woke. The clear sky, that firmament that all traces of warmth bled into as the long night continued, colluded with the exhaustion in her bones: It was too early. Sleep, they said. Go back to sleep.
+Kukri squeezed her eyes closed, but it was out of dread, not to sleep. Her rational faculties were still thawing; she didn't yet have the intellectual strength to banish the emotional certainty that she would drown if she went back to sleep. And so she lay awake for a few minutes, calming herself back down.
+The numbers, though.
+If she hadn't been certain that she needed the sleep, she would have taken to lighting a lamp and reviewing them, but it seemed obvious that it was the worst course of action. There was no peace of mind there.
+And so, eventually, by sheer deprivation of action or reasonable thought to linger on, she did fall back into sleep.
+**Concavenator**:
+In a way, sleep by exhaustion was welcomed, as it was the darkest and quietest, and least disturbed by the rumors of wake. But she could not count on exhaustion forever; she felt as if her brain would slowly fill with poison, until it was wrung out by dream, even nightmare.
+Cycle after cycle, as spring slowly and painfully broke through the crust of winter, Kukri find that her embryonic lectures to Giya were the only part of the day in which she could be at rest. She could stroll in mind, abreast of a friend, through the well-tended gardens of natural philosophies, even as her body had to trudge across crumbling snowdrifts and knife-sharp morains. She could point at the equations of orbital motion, at the taxonomy of climatic regimes, lighting the way brighter and more fixed than the actual stars.
+Often she found herself repeating a statement for the second or third time. Repetition could be good for learning, after all, without the benefit of scrolls or tablets; wasn't by repetition that penguin herders learned their songs, and !Aakau'a shamans their incantations? Giya listened to all. Kukri couldn't always be certain if it was out of genuine interest or simply deference to whom she'd been taught to see as her superiors but she asked questions sometimes -- if clouds are made of liquid water, why do they not fall? if the globe turns at such a speed, why does it not shake off all its water? how can one measure how distant is a star?
+But night came again and again (although later, imperceptibly, with every cycle) and she had to return to her body of feathers and blood, huddle closer to Giya's own vessel, and surrender to the necessity of sleep until dawn.
+**pinkgothic**:
+A little under half a day's travel away from Yakak'ratu, with their rations depleted - as expected, and in themselves not cause for alarm, as they could fast until Kukri could spend favours for a meal for them both, and Giya in particular was an expert in fasting - Kukri slipped.
+It was a foolish mistake to make this late on the journey, but sleep, while mostly guided by exhaustion, had been less reliable since the glaciers, and her attention not quite as much on the treacherous landscape as it should, especially as it gentled.
+She gave no curt yowl, no drawn whimper, she simply sank with one limb into a shallow crevice, its angles twisting at her left knee. Some sound that was neither a wet squelch nor a neat snapping sound - and far softer than either of the two - came from the limb, accompanied by a tense, drawn out exhale from Kukri, and the far more overpowering sound of the rucksack sloshing to the side.
+It took long seconds for Kukri to recover enough to make deliberate movements. Giya was there, of course, and could offer assistance, but Kukri gestured with muzzle and limb that she was capable of extracting herself.
+Ten minutes later, she'd done so, sitting with her weight mostly carried by her right leg, testing the integrity of her left. "I can walk," she promised, finally, giving Giya her verdict, her tone one of grim self-admonishment. The knee was in pain from the torsion, but not broken or dislocated - and its pain would be a good lesson to her not to think so much of the future as to forget the present.
+**Concavenator**:
+After so many attempts to ignore it, Kukri's body had reasserted itself in the bluntest, least deniable way. Or perhaps 'Au'a the Watchful had decided to chastise the unworthy servant who had forgotten to be watchful for too long. Either way, at least the culprit had been merciful enough to wait until they were in reach of 'ikrakind.
+There was little to do but force herself back to Yakak'ratu; they could not afford to sit down and wait for improvement. Kukri pulled a tentpole out of the baggage and improvised a cane, both to help support her weight and to probe the softer snow, something that she should have done with much greater caution all along. This, if nothing else, would take her mind away from her usual reverie of numbers; hard to focus on anything else, when lances of pain shot through her legs at nearly every step. What a marvellous invention was pain, and how dull her ancestors must have been if this was necessary to prevent them from destroying themselves.
+Perhaps this could have been an opportunity for teaching too, but in truth at this moment she felt far too foolish to teach anything to anyone, save perhaps herself. Giya was delicate enough not to offer advice that would only have been useful before the fact, and merely offered to take some of Kukri's baggage to make the burden on her feet lighter. When the mist cleared, the lights of Yakak'ratu were already visible in the distance; they could pull through yet.
+**pinkgothic**:
+The embarrassment of the fall was quite manageable. It wasn't Kukri's first expedition into treacherous territory and she knew fine well that it was the end of the journey that was the most dangerous for such things, when one's mind considered the dangers already overcome. She should have known better, yes, but it soothed her, in between the barbs of pain, that it had happened when it could, rather than when it would have consigned her to certain death. Now it was merely an inconvenience and a bruise to her pride.
+"Thank you for your guidance," Kukri said, when she was sure that the pause between spikes of pain would last long enough to say it. "I might not have made it on my own."
+Technically, she had not yet made it. Even if they crossed the final steps to Yakak'ratu, it was still not Grikaa. The world could offer her no guarantees that she would make it there, only a generous probability. But it was enough.
+**Concavenator**:
+In the end, Kukri did have to walk leaning somewhat onto Giya, if for no other reason than to avoid listing on one side and spilling her baggage on the ground. But step by painful step, the lights, then the sounds, then the scents took them back. The snow became trampled to mush, scraped to its gravelly bed, and littered with all sorts of rubbish chips of wood, animal dung, frayed rags, gnawed fish bones. How beautiful, how tender, how comforting that rubbish was, a promise of soft beds, warm meals, standing walls, and fires to thaw frozen feathers and drive away roving //yachakri//.
+The weary travellers took the last wavering steps that brought them within the borders of Yakak'ratu, last sentinel among the cities of the deepest south. Wind from the glaciers still lapped at their back; but now it was reduced to the strength of a breath. Wooden shacks rose to greet them, creaking and smoking, glowing a warm yellow through crevices and boarded windows. People, real living people, the last stragglers of the early spring feast, paced all way on the greyish sleet of the alleys. There was civilization, finally, to a degree.