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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 4, 2013 19:10:01 GMT
An explanation is in order, I think, before you pass on into this running self-commentary, semi-stream-of-consciousness. The layout is still evolving; for now there are simply tidbits of this and that, passages of world-building and comments on personalities, and hints of plots to come. The idea is to continue in this way for a while until I have found my footing, until I know what I want to do and have sprouted enough ideas to wrestle into a short novel. Then, then the planning will begin in earnest; and I will be candid and not hide any secrets.
The general idea is as follows:
Once upon a time (on a celestial body far, far away) there was a girl, who we will call "Alis".
Every day, she played around and lived a carefree, peaceful life. One day her caretaker and stepfather, a man called Lapuco, decided to pursue his own ambitions.
Because of that, Alis' world was uprooted. Because of that, she walked the hard and dangerous way of ambition herself.
Until finally the girl that had lived so innocently was gone, and all that was left was a dictator who had named herself "Alizande".
---
Oh, what to write?
Fitzgerald, that cruel conspirator, wrote "You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say." Far more congenial to my sensibilities are Toni Morrison's words "If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
But fear not, I have an idea or two. Putting onto paper, that is the first step: we must let go of our inherent shyness, our desire to perfect and polish and procrastinate. Pliny - thank you, Kerrah - perhaps does not make it easier; "True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it." A hefty responsibility, writing something which "deserves" to be read? No mean feat. No mean feat at all. Thus roll the ideas around and round. What to write?
There are some preliminaries, some facts, some ideas.
- I envision a setting inspired by mesoamerican cultures. Why? Because they were doomed. In our world, they are the recipients of an apocalypse. The disease and mass extinction brought on by early europeans will serve as a cultural clue the downfall that lies in store. - The astronomics of it all are sketchy, but as follows: the planet of this tale is, in fact, a large moon, rotationally locked to a great gas giant planet, the entire constellation rotating slowly around a star. Thus becomes a fixture (on at least one hemisphere of the moon) on the sky, day and night, the great ever-changing face of the parent planet. O woe, the wildness and despair of the godless heathens living where His Great Face doth not shine. - A language of dreams, of life, of values. I am quite concerned with the language of fantasy, not to mention the languageS actually spoken! One notion, which has stuck to me, is as follows. In certain languages, German very notably, nouns are assigned genders: in this as-of-yet uncreated language, such genders will not signify female/male, but rather the "lifeness" of an object. A rock may be of the "gender" un-life, whereas jade is a "living-stone".
Further. There is a grand scheme, a hazy outline of ideas which entail a civilization's decrepitude and downfall, two bitter rivals, a heartbreaking betrayal, a desperate flight. But let us not go there, not yet.
No. The tale begins, as all tales must, with a name.
Alizande.
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 4, 2013 19:42:45 GMT
"Alizande?", you say?
Indeed.
"Who is he/she?", you say?
She is the beginning. When the latter-day prophets look back to point a finger, to assign blame for all that has happened, they will point to her and say "there, this is where it all began. She started it."
But as every reader of WoT should be abundantly aware of, there are neither beginnings nor ends. And so, too, with Alizande. Before we know what she caused, let us learn what caused her. Before she became the great dark, let us hear the torrid tale of innocence's loss, of perverted ambitions, of a young child's transformation - so full of life, potential, joy! - into the hollow, hungry, hard-eyed cold-souled lost thing that we call "adult".
She is dichromatic, that much, everyone can agree upon. One eye - the left - a startling azure; the other, the deepest chestnut. Her guardian - that discredited, mostly-forgotten figure of myth, Ekelioban Lapuco, a courtier of a long-destroyed court - he, it is said, claimed that within her left eye resided the fiery soul of her cruel mother, Itotia; and from the gentle warmth of her right the noble Mulmapoi Lomul watched the world with world-weary resignation.
Ai! But surely she, she who wrought so great havoc, who upturned oceans and blackened skies, surely even one such as she was a child once, born into this world with a blank slate unpredestined? Surely there were times, before it all began, which the elders now look back upon and "thereād be people sitting together over there talking about the bad old days of jubilee and that one of them would remember and say, Yes, never mind, there were some nice ones, too."
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 4, 2013 20:11:28 GMT
"Pfafh," you say, "Ashenmoon, get a grip! Tell us what it's all about, really!"
Aah, I evade the directness of your gaze, and I invite you instead to consider yet another peculiarity of the Ground (or the "Lacac", "oLacac" as the natives of Cahaul would utter the concept of the world and all encompassed within it; natural existence). And this is how the practictioners of the Arts work their thaumaturgic craft.
For it is known to each and every man, woman and child of the Lacac that a thaumaturg is unable to harm another human being. As the priests would have it, the divine powers which endow sorcerers with their powers will simply refuse any request which would harm another human. Cynics will comment that the gods and great Attala are blind indeed, for the thaumaturgic schools of many calpulli practice what is denounced as heresy by some and exploited by the powerful: namely, the cruel art by which two or more thaumaturgs combine their - on their own, innocuous - powers to render harm unto humans. Oh, the high and holy Tlolacatl Ceptalmi may rage, and preach all the rage and fury of great Attala himself, but the systematic heresy of "tloatluchcotsutl" - "to harm against the laws" - or tloa for short, "harm", is widespread.
Verily, it takes but one man to build a temple; but two to wage a war over it.
Even so, there is a check on the tloa and those who would use it, for thaumaturgs are inherently distrustful of one another, envious of each other's abilities, even as they are forced into the intimacy of their destructive pact.
("They're stuck with each other and they got to ride all the way to the end of the line and it's a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery.")
Thus no tloa could rise to power.
Until Alizande, four hundred and seventy-five Turnings and sixty-nine Great Rounds after Athan built the Wall, showed the world a tloa who needed no partner to wreak her destructive havoc.
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 4, 2013 21:08:04 GMT
"Aaah!" you say, "Ashenmoon, aren't you spoiling the story now?"
Well, reply I, first of all, I do not believe in spoilers. We better understand, and evaluate, and appreciate a story if we know it: if we know where it is heading, why it is being told. Why read for cheap thrills and surprises, I ask? Alizande will bring great darkness to the world: by the seventy-second turning there is barely a child alive who does not know - and fear - Her name! This all should come as no news.
But, this is not yet the tale of Alizande's influence. These are the years of the twilight empires, of proud Cahuali past his zenith and now a fumbling senile, tumbling on the precipice, already crumbling, falling. And it is of the girl that was before She was created, and how the world knew her back then - her playmates (have any survived?) and the true name by which Lapuco called her in to supper (and perhaps which he alone ever knew); let us drape upon that hideous frame the diminutive "Alis" so as to approximate what they, her contemporaries, felt and knew.
But first I feel compelled to surrender yet some further particulars of oLacac, which may better help you understand oLacac itself. For while the inhabitants of that world are accustomed to viewing the world's cycles with expectant predictability - before Alizande, was there not Athan to counter Xaotl's evil, and before that in legends, did not Attala cast down voracious Xatltlim? Thus the people await, patiently, the coming of Alizande's undoing. Ah, but we, we see the world as a progression, thus doomed to repeat our mistakes indefinitely, and impatiently we ask the question, "when? when did this happen? how long before this, and how long before that?" Questions that any inhabitant of oLacac will surely know to be meaningless; what are facts in the face of meaning? What is knowledge in the face of comprehension?
Ah, but even so, let me elucidate the subject. For as strange a world as oLacac might seem, human biology and nature remains the same. Thus it is common among the Twilight Empires for people to sleep three times each Turning, often with naps during the middle-day; and a man may grow old and die of age before he has seen his sixth Round. We might by our standards say that a "Turning" is the oLacac way of referring to one orbit of their home moon around the planet which they revere as the god Attala; its orbital period equals about 93 hours (of which a portion of some hours, the only true "night", is spent travelling through the darkness of Attala's shadow from the system's star, oZosa.) Further the Great Rounds is the oLacac's astronomer's way of referring to the orbits of Attala himself around oZosa, to which oLacac's Turnings are but a small movement of little significance. And each such Great Round is approximately 12 earth-years in length.
Thus it might interest the curious to know that the timekeeping of the period is kept from Athan's building of the Wall, and Alizande's debut occurred...
GR69, T475 = 12*365*69 + 475*3,5 = 302220 + 1662,5 = 303882,5 earth-days ago, that is to say, 303882,5/365 = approximately 832 earth-years ago.
But it is not at the sixty-ninth Round which we will begin our tale, but earlier, at the first days of the sixty-eight when proud Ekelioban Lapuco fled the destruction of his home altepetl, the tongue-twisting and famed Lilitlitlatltospo.
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 4, 2013 23:16:25 GMT
But, yet again, I find I must order a tactical rearwards deployment, and retreat back from the heights which we were braving, and return to the recurring theme of my thoughts: that of premeditation, of spoiling, of knowing where we are going. Oh, who can recount all the tales of Alis, the child, or her early exploits when she was referred to simply as the Dame by her companions Cezipec and Acipa - the Drowned Man and the Bright Man, as they were to be known later, let alone all the exploits of Alizande the conqueror? But before we delve into the voice of Lapuco - for so we will - let us first chart the map of the first half of the great Round, which was the season when oLacac travels through its perihelion around the orbit of oZosa - let us simplify and refer to the latter simply, anachronistically, as the Sun, and this period (which we would estimate to be four or six years in length) as "summer".
These were the bright days, of Alis' childhood. Let Lapuco recount them in his own way. But know that Lapuco and the young Alis, in the turnings and cycles (different altepetl counted time in different ways in those days; while most reckoned the ages by the Turnings and Rounds in the same way, several subsets of various celestial bodies caught in the gravitational pull of Attala were used for time-keeping) following Lilitlitlatltospo's fall, lived in the region on the outskirts of Cahuali known as Etlacan.
A backyards coastal community, far from prying eyes, was where Alis' early days were spent; but such a place - suited for hiding - little suited a man of Lapuco's stature. Thus they began to travel, and Lapuco - a thaumaturg and tlao of considerable skill - earned their living by shady deals and dark pacts. Exiles of fallen Lilitlitlatltospo conspired, and mercenary captains acquired his skills, and feuding lords recruited him for their vendettas; thus was their upkeep paid for. And eventually Lapuco was to find his protege to exceed him in ways not even he - brilliant as he was lauded! - could have foreseen, until at last he was utterly surpassed and could only with horror see what befell the world by the hands which he had trained.
That is the tale of woe that is the life of Ekebalian Lapuco; about "... those who were defiled with their own works and sent a-whoring with their own inventions."
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 4, 2013 23:33:35 GMT
The Unsent Letters of Ekebalian Lapuco; selected excerpts.
From the balconies of my palace prison I watch my daughters, playing in the gardens below. I watch them, and I say: "These are the last of my line; after these there will be no more to carry my name on a bridge through the ages. I, and the long line which passed before me through all the cycles of oLacac, are ended here, with those three girls' laughter."
Of course that is unfair, for the blame is entirely mine, or at the very least, not theirs. The reason I live within this splendour is my first-daughter, my one daughter by whom I will be remembered (if at all!) - if only she had been truly the child of my loins, how different it all would have been! Itotia, my cruellest queen, my sweetest dragon, I picture you even now with scorn-twisted-smile beside me. Would you be proud of her?
She, whose name has been forbidden to me (what naive cunning!), she to whom I gave my all now gives me all that which I have. They say a great teacher must be surpassed by his students; that is his measure, and the cycle of ages are thus inexorably improved until, one day, we shall all be perfected.
Surpassed I was, indeed. Have I been good, pray tell?
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 5, 2013 19:40:47 GMT
No, I think not. Lapuco's voice will have to wait, for we still do not have our story clear.
Oh, when should he should he begin his narration? And how shall he do so, how shall he explain himself - to whom - and how his ward, Alis, became Alizande? Will he excuse her - will he say that her role in history has been exaggerated? That her role in the darkness that followed was mere coincidence, bad luck, in the wrong place at the wrong time? That anyone could have begun it, and hers was merely the unfortunate convergence of fateful turns of events which began long before she was born, and that will continue to turn long after her passing? Will he say, perhaps, that as much sorrow as she is said to have inflicted upon the world, she has herself suffered such sorrow tenfold?
And as for when to begin - certainly not at the four hundred and seventy-fifth Turning of that Round. Although oLacac was all but unaware of Alizande until her debut at the Court of the Pillars (and after it, who could forget? The bloodstains took weeks to wash away) Alizande had transformed from Alis a long time before that. Perhaps the tale should begin when she first discarded that now-lost name and simply was the Dame, and accrued her first motley crew of followers? Or when Lapuco took up the first assignment which brought them from the placid stillness of Etlacan? Or when they fled the flames of Lilitlitlatltospo?
Or perhaps when he first gazed into her mismatched eyes - a deformity which anywhere in Cahuali would have branded the child as a cemotla, a harbinger of misfortune to be cast from the temple steps? But not so in Lilitlitlatltospo, at least not to the offspring of Itotia and Mulmapoi Lomul. Oh, how the righteous have since railed against that royal couple's decision to forego tradition in favour of the right of one baby girl to live...
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 5, 2013 20:15:30 GMT
The Unsent Letters of Ekebalian Lapuco; selected excerpts
... and in those days, when at last I had no recourse but to accept the inevitability of my continued failure to excert any meaningful control over [censored], I went to her and I said:
"[censored], my beloved daughter, do you not hear them on the streets, and all the terrible things they cry and accuse you of, and blacken the name that you have taken (as if to renounce me)? [censored], my beloved daughter, I - who as ever is faithful to you - am troubled of certain things which have recently come to pass as a result of orders carried out, they say, on your authority, and I beg your indulgence to inform me, your faithful servant, of what your plans are, so that I might faithfully serve you more adroitly."
And with Lomul's eye she met my gaze, and she said:
"Lapuco, my beloved adoptive father, I have only ever acted out of necessity, and I have only ever done the very least which I must, in order to live life truthfully and justly. Thus will I continue to act."
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 5, 2013 22:25:40 GMT
Ah, true, too officious. Lapuco might be a statesman, and of an age where literary conventions required a certain amount of fanciful embroidery, but a text of any length in that vein of writing would prove unreadable.
That will be the challenge now: the tone, the characters. Before we delve deeper into the workings of the Plot, of the protagonist and antagonist, of the actants acting against and for each other, of rising and falling action, of pacing, of momentum; the characters are next. For surely we have sketched out, to some satisfaction, the facts of events. The fall of Lilitlitlatltospo - alright, I submit, let's say "Lili" from now on - a city-state on the borders of the empire Cahuali. The quiet summer years spent on the beaches of Etlacan, among the reeds, chasing ibis-birds and playing nonsensical children's games. The period of Lapuco's mercenary activity, the wars, the strife. Alis' transformation into the Dame, a leader in her own right, with her own agenda, and many adventures over the course of the Turns. And then the Debut at the Court of the Pillars, in the eponymous capital of Cahuali - the climax of this prequel, the bloodbath visited upon the old order of the twilight empire.
Now for the cast - nay, first, some points of consideration.
Cahuali, then, is Rome, or if you will, the US, surrounded by a web of lesser city-states; together they are the twilight kingdoms. Lili would then be recognized as a border state on Cahuali's northwestern border, before its conquest. But in oLacac, terms such as "west" and "north" carry a different significance. The word "north", translated, is taken to be the direction of Attala, the gas planet around which we move. The northern hemisphere is that portion of the Ground which can always see Attala on the sky; the southern hemisphere (denounced as barbarian wilderness, if not desolate emptiness) faces away from His Face. There is a peculiarity to be discovered by our protagonists - for though nobody would voluntarily escape to the southern hemisphere, any practitioner of the Arts would find his thaumaturgic craft impotent there. The distance is great, and the fact of that failure is generally ascribed to legend, or at the very least, Attala granting his boons only where he might see them practiced. In any case, then, north is in the direction of Attala. East and west becomes the movement around the second axis. The question of true, or, "magnetic" north; the poles, remains unanswered, a question of later scientific investigation.
In any case, it is established that a Turning be the passing of a full orbit of oLacac around Attala, and is a bit more than 90 hours in length. It follows, then, that about 45 hours of this is night; the period when Attala is the fullest (facing the sun) whereas the air grows cold on oLacac. Still, the reflected light of Attala offers surcease from the night, and verily, the far north is a place of deserts and strange life-forms where there is hardly any night ever to be had.
No, oLacac is a place of extremes, of finding an uneasy balance between the elements - and this is found on the twilight rim; not far from the equator, where oLacac lies low on the horizon, but high enough to create a climate mild enough for human habitation. Thus lie a ring of Empires 'round this narrow band of Twilight latitudes, of which Cahuali is the one we are primarily concerned with. Here life is good, the earth bountiful, and Men are thronged far too thickly for their own good. Peace: that is what is lacking from this picture of perfection.
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 5, 2013 23:00:48 GMT
Interlude, a quote and a song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LAs1YQ9cig&list=PLNyY2F1OurUbDBCtILijHYI52YAiIvSX5#t=1472Is your sorrow only yours? The solitude you carry on your back, does it end with your life? Surely, this life, given birth unasked hasn't yet been assigned any meaning or value. Your life is just a particle of the universe's life but its brilliance reaches all the stars. This life you live with all your might is a bridge between the ages. Let us cast its brilliance past the rainbow and its colors
I love the clumsy translation, the hinted-at concepts buried beneath the words. "Solitude" means so much more than "being alone"; it is the weight of fate, of destiny, of existentialism in a world bereft of meaning and coherence, of context; of the entire Human Condition. "Given birth unasked" is as strange a sequence of words that I have ever heard strung together, utterly bereft of any poetry of sound, yet in its childish simplicity denotes all the concepts of tabula rasa, of man making his own destiny, of having one's destiny and purpose forced upon you by others - and so on. In its early-90's Japanese karaoke tunes, those two minutes of end credits sum up more about life than I have in two decades on this earth.
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 5, 2013 23:38:53 GMT
But what of the cast so far?
We have mentioned four thus far who might be of interest; Lapuco the caretaker, Alizande herself, and her two parents; Itotia and Lomul. Of the last of these, Lapuco had to say:
"Wise and benign they called him; plain to outward appearances but with a deep compassion which inspired men to follow him, not out of ambition, but out of a desire to protect such a noble spirit; in his bitterest rivals he could recognize the face of a wayward brother, even as he righteously upheld those ideals which he held to be true. So he is described. But he was, in fact, a vain man; like all chiefs of that time he was prone to an affected mannerism reeking of falseness. His namesake, the tiger, he boasted of as a signal of bravery (and was never to be seen without the skins of at least two great such beasts draped across his broad shoulders). More fitting would have been the attributes of a tiger to move stealthily hidden through the long grass, for as noble as men perceived him to be, and as generous he was with his gifts, those indebted to his magnanimity always were called upon to pay their dues before the end. Thus was his gift: to appear noble to the outward world, and to secretly extract the utmost from this calculated charade.
Itotia, though men these days are wont to call her cruel, was carried by a different type of spirit altogether. With her, the deception was ever superficial, her emotions plain. She engaged others straight-away, and expected nothing less but that you keep up with her own tremendous pace. And when she found you lacking, she did not hesitate to exploit such a fact, and made certain that you were aware that in the game that was played you had lost. It was her belief, I took it, that this would foster a spirit of a "brave loser", but the honesty of her tactics were lost on the vapid vanity of her contemporaries."
As for Lapuco, what do we know of him? A courtier at Lili, the scion of a noble family, a brilliant tloa and a man scarcely contained by his own ambition. His eyes were set on Itotia, and at least by his own (unsubstantiated) records they were briefly, passionately, lovers. His life, and his motivations, we will visit again soon.
And this brings us to the fourth, or first, of our main cast mentioned so far. What of Alizande herself? Will we ever hear her voice speak to us directly, to explain herself? No, I do not think so. Like we are wont to name great storms by female names, she similarily is a storm to her world. What one sees in her is a reflection of the beholder.
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 6, 2013 23:16:18 GMT
It becomes clear, from other activities, that we must put onto paper a Story. So far I have cheated, and not really written anything; simply spoken about it. We must make a brave first attempt. Let us commit to some pointers (and change them if we will, later):
- The tale of Lapuco's first meeting with Itotia. - As a guiding quote, "They're stuck with each other and they got to ride all the way to the end of the line and it's a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery." - It will, subtly, contrast how different people "make themselves", how their ambition drives them to recreate themselves in their own dreamed-ideal image, and wherefrom such an ideal image might spring (or, perhaps? be rejected).
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 9, 2013 12:02:40 GMT
Time flies! All two days of them, gone, and this weekend aint looking promising. But! I decided to quickly whip up five quick ideas for the meeting I wanted to write. Why five? A literal interpretation of Pixar's storytelling rule #12...
1. A throne room meeting, a young and frightened Lapuco - come to make a plea on behalf of his infirm father - is awestruck by the ice queen Itotia.
2. A cold and windy, and snowy, march of defeat through the night. Past the straggling lines of freezing soldiers ride Lapuco to carry a message of some import - to the King himself! But with the old king rides his daughter - Itotia.
3. In the pleasure gardens of Lili, amid the foppery and whim of high nobility, dashing lord Lapuco entertains his circle of friends. It is announced that great Lomul has returned from another war-raid... with a captured woman he intends to marry.
4. Lapuco, the most skilled of his class, is in training at a prestigious thaumaturgic school for tlao - when arrives the entourage of the King and Queen to speak with the headmaster. It seems they are looking for an ambitious and daring student to carry out a dangerous mission.
5. Adventurer and mercenary Lapuco arrives to the court of Lili. Although young, he is already a man of some renown, and with him he carries news of a great enemy/offer of alliance/hidden treasure. He has betrayed/left/been betrayed by his former master and comes looking for employment.
There, now that I've gotten the obvious out of the way... I'll wait for inspiration to strike for a sixth idea. Or maybe go with #3. Or perhaps someone else has any ideas?
Ta-ta.
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 9, 2013 13:30:34 GMT
It should be, perhaps, repeated that as the moon of this setting orbits in about 90 hours around its planet, its night is 45 hours long. So for two full days of waking and sleeping the peoples of oLacac live merely by the light of bright Attala. Further, I haven't quite decided on the inclination of our orbit around Attala - it may be that for a few hours of midday during the sun-lit part of the cycle, bright Attala does in fact blot out the sun and cause the "short-night" of day.
6. A war-camp. After victory - or was it a loss? Who could tell with a war such as this? The dead litter the fields. Lapuco is haughty and brilliant, and worn-out for spinning tlao spells with his brethren throughout the second-night. He is called on to work healing sorcery - and finds himself caring for Itotia, the queen, as she gives birth to a child with two souls...
7. Lapuco, proud and drunk, stumbles past the palace walls, held up - and holding up - two tlao brethren. They hear sounds of battle, and rush into the fray - leaping over carefully-tended pleasure gardens, breaking apart carved-ebony gates to protect their king and queen. They find themselves in the midst of a palace coup - whose side will they choose?
8. Lapuco, magister of a tlao school and lord in his own right, oversees the execution of a rebellious lieutenant. And while at it, his cut-out heart will serve as a sacrifice to the gods. But the High Priest he had expected is not the one that arrives - but she who is called Itotia, the only woman in the higher echelons of the priestly orders. They say she is the king's concubine... or is it the other way around?
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Post by Timeon on Nov 9, 2013 14:33:47 GMT
The string of your thoughts begins to make sense, weaving an ever-clearer image - but nonetheless, in each string and each post, a great deal is hinted at, but much left to the imagination. Such is your style. I continue to read and await more content, and the story that surely must follow! Aside from praise, I can't think of much else to say (yet).
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