Evangaline clucked in disapproval at the vaguely-translucent Aunt standing between her and the fireplace; the Aunt, in turn, shook her head at her.
“Who,” Evangaline asked carefully, “thought that this particular tradition was a good idea for our family?” She should have studied more fashion in school, and her only reference on that sort of thing was upstairs. She wasn’t going upstairs right now.
Continue readingafter Discovery
If pressed, the captain would never admit it, but Titrian had always been skeptical about the concept of the Lost Colony. Ships just didn’t go over the Fire Sea.If they were only now figuring out how to safely navigate north of the Fire Sea – and that only by using dirigible technology in tandem with new boat designs – there was no way that that their ancestors more than a millenium in the past had managed to work it out.
So Captain Titrian had always believed. But when the gods and the government paid your salary, there were times that you had to go against your own beliefs.
Since he’d never told anyone that he didn’t believe in the lost colonies, Titrian had nobody but himself to know his uncomfortable shame when they found themselves looking up at a fully-developed city. A garishly-colored city, he noted, with even the cliff face covered in paintings.
His first mate coughed. “That, sir, uh. It doesn’t look like a Tabersi city.”
Titrian had to agree. It didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before. “Signal the admiral. This might be more complicated than we thought.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1028023.html. You can comment here or there.
Today we get a phrase!
“This barley grows here.”
toppotzhu
barley, toppot
-zhu, -this
here, ikiek
toor, to grow
in- currently, presently
-anan conjugating a verb to a plural useful subject
toppotzhu ikiek intooranan
This means somewhere between “that was then, this is now” and “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” with maybe a bit of “que sera, sera.” The Calenyena, who began life as a herding culture, use this phrase to answer changes in environment that they cannot alter.
It colors their attitude towards food and crops: this is the food we can grow here. It also informs the way they look at gods; these are the gods we have now.
It’s a philosophy, and, of course, not everyone always adheres to it. Sometimes it’s just the phrase a parent uses to answer complaints by a child. “You can’t always have what you want; this barley grows here.”
It’s useful to note that most Calenyena use barley, toppot, to loosely describe all cereal grains.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1027753.html. You can comment here or there.
Evangaline clucked in disapproval at the vaguely-translucent Aunt standing between her and the fireplace; the Aunt, in turn, shook her head at her.
“Who,” Evangaline asked carefully, “thought that this particular tradition was a good idea for our family?”…
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1027351.html. You can comment here or there.