Notes from Sandrenno of Ferania, Bitrani Ambassador to Lannamer in ~725 R – the paper has been chewed at, leaving us only some of his thoughts.

As found in the Lannamer Museum under “Bitrani and Calenyena Relations.”

[text obscured]
does not grow here with the ease that it grows at home, and thus they must find substitutes, poor as they are. I recommend any posted here to have a strong stomach and an iron constitution, or one will soon grow sick of parsnips and parsnips.

Their sweets, however – and they love sweets – are a curious and yet delicious [text obscured].

In short, be prepared and bring a supply of edible food with you.

Clothing
These people but an almost-superstitious amount of weight on their clothing, and thus, any ambassador here will have to pay close attention to every piece of garb they wear, no matter how it goes against the grain of our plain Bitrani souls.

And yet, even paying attention, we will stand out – they care which side your tunic is buttoned on, where we wear ours buttoned down the center. They care what colors are showing – or how many, or in what order.

Showing, you ask? Yes. They wear layer after layer after layer here – needed in their winters, but I do not know how they handle it in summer – and the fancier the dress, the more wealthy the person, the more the lower layers show and the more elaborate they are.

In addition to the tunics themselves, the accessories speak their own language. To begin with, there are bracelets that their “Bevvai” wear (nobody will explain to me what a “Bevvai” is), bangles that appear to lock on, patterned in the gods’ colors and run through with more sira than any piece of jewelry [text obscured]

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It is a truth of our people that goats have always been with us: we imagine, if we are fanciful, that we rode on goatback from between Reiassannon’s legs, back in the Time Before Time.

A recent paper penned by the learned Scholar Piebryo-Tis seeks to dispel that notion, along with several other of our closely-held family stories, as it were.

The Ideztozhyuh Strode Out of the Mountain, Lannamer Stone Press, tells a story – one nearly as unbelievable as the fable of riding from the goddess’s thighs, if with more scholarly backing – of a possible origin of the Calenyena people, and, perhaps more importantly, of our goats.

In the extensive pages of this tome, Scholar Piebryo-Tis details finds from dusty archives left sitting since The Voyage, as Ideztozhyuh Strode refers to the mythical travel from another world. In these finds, the story goes, lies evidence that the first goats were hardly larger than the horses you’ll see running around some mid-continent valleys.

While every schoolchild knows that goats are bred for stamina, size, wool, milk, and temperament, it is one thing to think of gaining a [term here translates as “knot” but means, pretty much, “hand;” a unit of measurement about 4″ or a decimeter long] or sleeker wool; it is quite another to think of starting from the size of a modern newborn kid.

That is, of course, not the only revolutionary idea in Scholar Piebryo-Tis’ work. Among other thoughts unlikely to come into common acceptance any time soon: that the Ideztozhyuh, Piebryo-Tis’ word for these proto-Calenyena, were illiterate until they encountered the mythical Writing People, who taught them language; that the Ideztozhyuh learned to dye fabric from the Bitrani (ridiculous! We’d still all be wearing brown wool!); and that the Ideztozhyuh learned to ride goats from a stranger from another mountain.

Scholar Piebryo-Tis’ sources are fascinating, and the work involved in finding all of this material was clearly well-done. If the Scholar would stick to the facts and not go off on weasel-tracks, this would be a much more solid read.

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Find This Woman

Lutlin Red

(Woodcut of a sharp-cheeked Calenyena woman with a simple 2-braid hairdo and a scar across her nose)

Stole three goats from Amenet 7 Gidkah
Reward 20 High Kie for the goats
5 High Kie for Lutlin Red

(woodcut of three goats, one with curly horns, one with straight horns, and one with a broken left horn & a curled-back right horn)

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Chapter 7
The End of the War

This history of humanity on Reiassan begins with war, and it nearly ended with war.

The Peace Treaty of 758 would likely have ended as all other peace treaties between the Calenyena and the Bitrani had – with betrayal, deception, violence, and war – save for two facts.

The first – that the tacticians of the Calenyen army engineered a decisive blow against the Bitrani, one which left their army dead or demoralized, many of their officers captured, and their people ready to surrender – is discussed in great depth in Chapter 8.

This chapter focuses on the secondary but no less important reason for the lasting peace, a peace that has, as of this writing, held for two hundred and fifty-two years with only very minor skirmishes to mar its record: Prince Girey of Bitrani.

When the heir to the Calenyen throne, Arinyanca, returned home to Lannamer from the front, she brought with her a single captive, the sole surviving claimant to the Bitrani throne. There is a great deal of debate about her motives in doing so, but one piece of her own writing sums it up quite nicely:

Left where he was, one of three things would quickly happen: he would die as an officer, his identity never known. He would be revealed as a Prince, and die thus to solidify the peace. Or he would escape and foment rebellion.
I chose to make a fourth option.

With that choice, Arinyanca very likely shifted the history of our world.

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The Lannamer Chronicle¹

Fashion Stories

The mid-summer² festival is always a great spectacle and a wonderful time to see what the fashion world holds, and this year was no different.

The Lady Etaememevvyo³ made, as is her wont in recent years, the most impressive splash with her details. You may remember the hat she wore last year, done in an ancient Bitrani-esque fashion but with decidedly Calenyena notes?

This year, of course, Etaevyo⁴ was under obligation to out-do herself, especially with her elder sister’s wedding so quickly upcoming. And outdo herself she did!

Her headpiece this year was a more sedate thing, hearkening back to the ancient styles of her ancestors. It had to be; she presumably wanted nothing to draw attention away from her footwear.

And, for the first time in many a mid-summer festival – or perhaps in her life – everyone was staring at Lady Etaememevvyo’s toes.

The boots she wore – they have to be called boots – went up to her knees, as a riding boot or a campaigning boot might. However, the soft felt of their nature – dyed in streaks and swirls to complement the solid colors of her dress – was attached to a hard wooden sole, which had a wedge heel of at least a hand-span.

What’s more, the felt had been cut away strategically, so that Etaevyo’s toes, the arches of her feet, and her ankles remained bare.

Rumor has it that she will be auctioning off these boots at Kaidebbee’s. Last year, the affectation she called a hat sold for enough to finance the Pyietnaazh Orphanage for an entire year.

1. After some consideration of newspaper titles, I decided, short of making up the Calenyena word for “talking stick (which I should do), “Chronicle” was the closest to a Calenyena concept while still very clearly saying “newspaper.”

5. This newspaper is contemporary with Edally Academy.

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