Archive | December 2015

Calenyena Dictionary Help #lexember

Okay, I’ve been cheating nicely by going to dictionary entries for words that sound the same as my morphemes and that was working fine… except that I can’t think of any palatalized consonants to look up to get the sounds like dyaik in odyaikaar. Help?

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The Monarch

She was, above all else, tired.

The rain was coming down again. It seemed like it always rained, these days. The monarch sipped her tea and stared out at the yard, where the ravens were dancing in the downpour. The ravens had always danced there. Soon, her son would visit, and she would have to have a long-postponed conversation with him. She found herself exhausted at the very thought.

It was the reduction that did it. When her children had ruled over the planet and her empire had stretched over continents, she had never felt tired. When the world itself had been much smaller and she’d had only her little island to rule over, she’d never felt tired.

She stood, although the form she was wearing now protested. She had not gotten this old in a very long time. It suited, however; the aging body’s exhaustion matched the tiredness she felt. She felt the rain in her joints and in her soul, and it never stopped raining.

It had been bright and shiny when she was young, shiny and small.

The world had grown, and she had grown with it; her empire had grown, and she had stretched herself over the planet, sending out children, sending out bits of herself to the New World, to India, to Africa, to Australia. Very little of that had come back; she found herself small again, small and old in a huge and juvenile world.

The monarch paced. This was the fortieth form she’d worn as Monarch, and the transitions grew harder every time. More people knew her with this face than had ever known any of her other faces – perhaps more people could recognize this face, this Elizabeth, than had known all of her other monarch faces together. Not just her face, but Charles’ face and mannerisms, and William’s and Harry’s.

She allowed herself a small smile. Leadership changes you. Thus they had been saying for centuries. People would notice that the new King shifted uneasily under the mantle of leadership. They would notice he seemed different – more somber, perhaps, or older. They would make up a story that suited.

The Queen chuckled to herself. There had been the time where they’d said she was a body-snatching demon, and tried to burn her at the stake. That had been awkward, to say the least. It had taken some fast talking and serious footwork to get out of that with a viable heir left to become.

And now… and now… Now she was laying plans and readying herself to move on to a new face, and the rain would not stop coming down. Something was wrong, seriously wrong.

“This is my country, damnit.” The Monarch punched her own leg, sensible frock and varicose veins be damned. “This is mine.” She raised her voice to shout for her secretary. “Anna! Anna, get in here.” The rain had been falling for three weeks straight. It was no more natural than the Monarch’s endless reign was. “We’re going to save my country.” Again.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1033035.html. You can comment here or there.

Gifts in a Jar: Food

Christmas Food

I mentioned last week that we were going to make Kale & Apple Soup for my mom. It turned out delicious!

We made the following changes:

We started with butter and browned it, then sauteed some mushrooms (baby bellas) in that.

We toasted some cumin, fennel, allspice, and cloves (4 berries, 2 cloves, 1 teas fennel, 1 teas cumin) whole, then ground that up and added it to the butter.

After blending the soup and dividing it between 2 quart mason jars, we sliced a sunchoke and 2 carrots on the bias and sauteed them until they were tender and had some color, then used those as a topping.

Delicious and, well not vegan, def. vegetarian! And using up kale and apples from our garden!

That was Mom; for Capriox & Mr. Cap and a whole passel of co-workers we made Alton Brown’s Hot Cocoa Mix. Like most of these things, good ingredients are key, so we used a nice dark cocoa powder. Following suggestions from other people, we ran everything through the food processor for a bit to get the milk powder down to a much finer consistency, and, because we prefer our cocoa to taste like chocolate and not sugar, we halved the sugar (& skipped the cayenne). We put that in a mason jar, too, quart for Cap and pints/half pints for co-workers, topped or sided with mini-marshmallows and wrapped up with a ribbon so I could tie on an instructions tag.

Mason jars make everything awesome. 🙂 And, strangely, I have a lot of canning supplies in my house…

Next up: seeing if I can turn the tiny mug cakes into a kit/jar mix.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1032584.html. You can comment here or there.

Discovery, Part Four

Discovery
Discovery Part II
Part III

Captain Titrian and his first mate spent a few moments staring at the ship coming out of the harbor.

It was flying a flag, that much they could tell, and although it was no flag they recognized, Titrian at least had not expected it to be. Over a thousand years had passed; nobody still flew the same flags or bowed to the same kings.

It was also flying pennants in every color known to mankind; it was painted in horizontal stripes of red, blue, and green; its sails were red, blue, green, white, pink, teal, and black. It hurt Titrian’s eyes to look at, but he looked anyway. Because under all that brilliant color was a sleek, pointed ship unlike anything he’d seen before, and he could count, painted to match the stripes on the ship, at least ten cannon.

This gaudy thing was a warship, and it was coming out to meet them.

That itself was cause for alarm.

Standing at the helm of the ship, however, dressed in as many colors as the ship if not more, was a man who looked to be a hundred years old if he was a day, his beard and hair both white and both braided into many tiny strands. In the spy-glass, Titrian noted a crown. He also noted that the man – king, what have you – had dark brown skin and a face far more like the Ideztozhyuh than like Titrian’s own people.

“‘What happened to the lost colony?'” he muttered. It was the question everyone had been asking when this mission left. “Clearly, they were lost.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1032193.html. You can comment here or there.

Discovery Three, a continuation of a story of Steam!Calenta

after Discovery and Discovery Part II

The Emperor’s secretary was having a hard time understanding. “Sir. Sir, if you go out onto the ship, you’re at risk.”

The Emperor shrugged into a heavily-embroidered vest. “Exactly. Otondyoo, if I don’t go out there, what kind of ruler am I?”

“An aging one, sir?” Otondyoo had not gotten to the position of Emperor’s secretary without learning how to be very very blunt with the monarch.

“But one that can still sit in a saddle with the best of them. We’ve forgotten a lot lately, in this long era of peace, but I believe we’ll never forget that.”

“…But it’s a boat, sir, not a goat.” Otondyoo tried to sound reasonable, even if the Emperor was being anything but.

“The theory still holds. I will be on the boat that greets these visitors. And if they attack us and I am killed, my heir will have sufficient diplomatic reason to kill them all and begin war on whence they came. But Otondyoo? If it comes to that, tell her to save the boat. You’re going to need it.”

The Emperor was smiling. Otondyoo had not seen that in quite a while. The Emperor’s secretary bowed deeply. Let him have his boat ride. He had been cooped up in the palace for far too long. “Of course, sir. Give me a moment to leave those notes with my assistant. I’m coming with you.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1031838.html. You can comment here or there.

Christmas Prompt Call!

Hello and Merry Christmas!

Today I’m doing a “for me and for you” prompt call.

Here’s how it goes (Thanks for the idea, Cal)

You can either prompt something you want to read or something that would be fun for me to write. The former gets 100 words and the latter gets 500.

For every $15 in total donations I receive, I’ll add 50 words to non-tippers’ prompts and 100 words to tippers’ prompts, or write to a second prompt for each tipper.

In addition, for every $5 you tip, I’ll write 300 words of whatever you want.


Leave a prompt!

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Day and Night, #Lexember day 24

Day and Night!

[personal profile] rix_scaedu asked for Day and Night, which is coincidental, because tomorrow’s Edally holiday post is IetTienaabaa, which means “The Day of Tienaabaa.”

Iettie, actually, is day in the sense of a a whole day, from sunrise to sunrise, while Ietta is most often day in the sense of “day of;” birthday, gods’ day, coronation day.

The time from sunrise to sunset is anez /’a nez/, meaning, from sun to stars, and the word for night comes from the old phrase Odyidai ahkaarununu, “demons come.” While the word for “demons” in this sense is lost to history, it is still seen in words like dyid, darkness, and odyaikaar, night.

(If you are guessing that the Calenyena historically had an unpleasant relationship with nighttime…)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1031215.html. You can comment here or there.

Light a Candle for me, a story of Edally Academy, is up for Patrons

Light a Candle for Me

In Calenta, there was an old tradition – born out of a much older story, and that itself born out of an ancient event – that you did not count the dead as gone until the cold season had passed without them returning to life…

(read on…)

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First, Catch the Rabbit… Making things from your own yard

I’m making my mother Kale & Apple soup for Christmas.

I try to make her a soup most years. This isn’t just feeding her – she can cook plenty well by herself – it’s also test-driving a recipe that almost always has some meat product in it and making it tasty and vegetarian for her.

This year’s recipe, for instance, has bacon in it. I think we’re going to start with mushrooms and perhaps a little bit of gelatin (I know, horse hooves, but she’s only mostly vegetarian…) to get the proper umami and texture going on.

It’s also going to be made – aside from the mushrooms, which I’ve not gotten around to trying growing at home yet, and the gelatin, which, uh, no – entirely from homegrown stuff.

Apples, of course. My house is still full of apples. You can’t turn around without running into a box of apples.

Apple cider for some of the liquid. When we make it, it has stock in it; I’ll probably make some leek stock as a start. The leeks are still sitting in the garden, wondering when I’ll do something with them. And the cider we pressed ourselves, from the apples our trees produced.

And then there’s the kale. Kale is a marvelous thing. It just keeps growing. Last year, it lasted until February. This year, I imagine I might have to pull it out to plant new come June – since there’s no snow to speak of yet.

There’s something satisfying about giving homemade gifts; there’s something even more pleasing about doing it from ingredients your yard grew.

I wonder if she’d want duck egg something next year…

But first we have to get the ducks.

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