Archive | February 14, 2019

Time Passes

Feb14

Originally posted on Patreon in February 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
After The Fairy Road and Planting Some Good on my blog and The Cats’ Ways and  Community Service here on Patreon.

🏞️

There was not, Whitney had thought, an easy part to the restoration of the Crossroads Park.  The whole thing was a challenge, and the whole thing was back-breaking work, work that ate time, hours and weeks and seemingly years passing by while she dug.  The whole thing was the hard part.

That was before she got to the really hard part.

There was a corner of the park now that looked fresh and beautiful — so fresh that not only had the local newspaper taken pictures, one of the national magazines had come in to tell her story.  The plantings, mostly perennials, had been picked to thrive with minimal care, the grass was trimmed weekly by a local kid who wanted something to do for a school project, and the local fae and spirits had taken to sharply … reprimanding… anyone who littered in the cleaned area or near it.

But that meant that first, the rest of the park looked far worse than it was, and secondly, Whitney was now faced with a wall of brambles where a raspberry bush and a rose bush had gone feral and started fighting over a statute of a Revolutionary War hero. Continue reading →

The Visit

Feb14

He could have had any man or woman in the whole nation — probably in several of the adjacent nations as well. He was a brilliant man,a dashing pirate, and his airship was one of the finest known to navy nor fleet. He was a folk hero the likes of which had not come since Dywin Talizen in the age of stories and myths.

And his airship had ducked in, dodging the royal navy ships and the cannons, to visit a political prisoner in a quiet exile in a mountainous corner. He had brought her a rose, the sort of gift that fit the stories, risking everything for a romantic gesture.

He couldn’t stay long; he couldn’t even risk a kiss, even if she would have accepted it. But he brought her a rose.

And he brought her a key.

Continue reading →

Conlang, Calenyen

Feb14

I wanted to write the Calenyen classic blessing-on-parting, “smooth roads, clear skies.”

Turns out I had almost none of the words! Well, I had 2 out of 4 if you don’t consider the implied “May you always have” or “let there always be”.

What I had:

the word for under-clothes comes from the word lur, meaning smooth, easy: from kiprat-lur to kiplur and eventually down to kur.

eetan – sky

Subject-verb agreement
-unu beyond use (the sun, the moon, the stars)
ah- makes a verb be “always”

Plurals:
–ootun beyond use , plural
-ak useful, singular
-anan useful, plural
Two: -te or -tye
herd: -be or -bye
Many, unknown: -ne or -nye

New words:
kaab – to be

tidzieg – a path, a road
tidziegnye – Many roads
gud – clear

Which brings us to

ahkaabanan todziegnye lur
(Smooth Roads, or “may your roads always be smooth.”

ahkaabootun eetan gud.
(Clear skies, or “may your skies always be clear.”)

ahkaabanan todziegnye lur
(Smooth Roads)