agentlelog | event: a gentle festival

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event: a gentle festival

we're all just working pieces trying to fit somewhere
We wander 'round in circles and we talk in squares

► The OOC plotting post for this event can be found here.

► Direct all questions to the mods at this link.

► All NPCs except for Queen Fayura can be met at this event. Use their top-levels in the plotting post if you'd like a thread with them for this event. For your convenience, you can reach out here: Allairavar, Verim, Loren, Niall, Grejor, and Raya. They may choose to wander into your threads should you not plan anything out with them, too.

PARTY PLANNING
Dawn arrives and brings with it another group of Strangers. Unlike the first group, you wake to a comfortable bed and cheery birdsong. Unlike the second group, you are expected. As you rise, a vase with spring flowers appears on the table beside your bed. Tucked beneath the vase, you find a message of welcome inviting you to join the Queen and her residence for breakfast.

Following directions given by footmen throughout the residence’s winding halls, you make your way toward breakfast, only to find that breakfast is a beautiful disaster.

Maids and footmen rush around you, choreographed by a red haired witch standing on a chair in the middle of the entry hall. She wears an apron and a look of fierce concentration. Beside her, a list floats in the air. Pinned to her hair, her Tiger Eye Jewel flashes and swirls with power. You suspect you should just sneak out, but she’s too observant.

“You there!”

You freeze. Maybe you had a mother with eyes in the back of her head who always knew where you were. Maybe that was a teacher or some other kind of mentor. Regardless, you know this voice. You know this tone. This is a person harried and pressed, and she probably doesn’t care that you haven’t eaten breakfast yet.

“Yes, you! Stranger!”

You turn toward her and abruptly find your arms full of banners. Closer inspection will reveal each flag sewn to the cord bears a different symbol: one for the Guilds (a hexagon with circles at each joint), the Ebon Council (a pair of Jewels side by side), and Fayura’s Court (a strange, spiraling spear against a mountain peak); a sun and a moon; a cloud flush with rain and lightning; and a sprouting plant.

“Make sure those get hung on the eaves outsi—no, I haven’t seen the Lady, Carlisle, but if you—”

A Blood male has distracted her, but you’re left with the distinct impression that if you don’t hang these banners, the Head Housekeeper will hunt you down (you would be correct). Not to worry: you’re not the only Stranger living in the residence, and it takes you little time to locate someone else with an equally bomb-blasted look on their face to help you help the residence prepare for the spring festival! There are flags to be hung, simple breads to be baked, stalls to be built in the Bazaar, and so much more. Your hands work, and so you work.

HOPE BLOOMS ETERNAL
At sundown, the festival begins in earnest: people take to the streets in every section of the city, pouring into the Old Town Bazaar with rosy cheeks and broad smiles. The spring festival will last for the next six days. Three days to celebrate, and three days to work.

All around the city, banners hang from and between homes and businesses. Some fluttering banners bear flags emblazoned with only the Guilds’ symbol or the Council’s or the Court’s, and there are far more Guild banners than any other—a result of the Strangers’ providing support to the Guilds no doubt. But mixed among them are flags bearing both the Queen’s mountain, too, just not as many, and the only place the Council’s flags hang are over Blood homes.

As you make your way through the Bazaar, you hear…

A young landen man: I’ve heard the Queen is going to honor the Earth Mother and Father Sky during planting in a few days, and—
His companion, an older woman: The Blood honor only death and their Darkness. What does she care for our beliefs?

A Blood farmer: …kind of gift. Don’t quite know what to make of a Queen giving anything.
A landen farmer: Anything to help the crops grow. The Guilds mean well, but the land is overworked.

An excited little girl: —ride the unicorn, mommy! There’s a unicorn and a dragon and a centaur and a—

Near the pavilion at the heart of the Bazaar, the landen Guilds have erected technological wonders. A carousel of glittering bronze and metal lights up the night with rainbow colors. Music spills out of it, cheerful and bright as its three rings turn in lazy revolutions. Unicorns and dragons and centaurs and mermaids stand as mounts for the young and old. Nearby, the Elektriline Guild prepares a light show, projecting fantastical shapes in dazzling colors on the sides of buildings and into the night sky itself. Around the park to the south of the Bazaar, the Transport Guild has set up a racing track for unicycles and tricycles.

Booths with games line the streets. Knock down the glass bottles! Throw the ring around the spoke! Win prizes to dazzle your loved ones and delight your children!

While food has certainly been scarce, the bakeries and charcuteries have brought out their best fare at surprisingly reasonable prices. This is a time to celebrate the end of winter and the beginning of spring, and celebrate the city will.

While the Blood dress in nice clothes, the landens bring out costumes. As is tradition, some dress as Father Sky, wearing crowns of gold and flowing robes of white. Others cloak themselves in the vestments of Mother Earth: wearing costumes of green and brown, painting vines over their faces to disguise themselves and crowning themselves in garlands of crocuses and tulips. Whispers through the Bazaar say the Queen is among them, disguised as Mother Earth.

SOWING THE FUTURE
The fourth morning of the festival, the entire city rises with the dawn. Over the past three days, a strange rumor wound its way through Draega: Fayura will join the planting to give a gift unique to the Queens of the Blood.

Members of the Ebon Council and the Guilds organize groups, directing the bodies of the entire city to go to this farm or that as they step out from behind Draega’s tall, protective walls. But before you are dismissed to help till the land or plant grain seeds, you join a larger crowd at a nearby farm. The Blood airwalk, standing above the landen crowds to gain a better view.

At the head of a recently tilled field, Queen Fayura stands with a landen farmer. He grasps his hat, wringing it fiercely in his hands as her Steward, Master of the Guard, and Consort stand guard behind her. Dressed in greens and browns, crowned in a garland of crocuses that drips dried stalks of wheat down her hair, she kneels before a bucket. She calls in a knife. When she speaks, she doesn’t raise her voice, but Craft projects it across the assembled onlookers. “Blood sings to blood. This is a gift: freely offered,” she says. “Freely given.” Bright red blood blooms across her palm as she drags the blade through skin. Vanishing the knife, she closes her fist and squeezes, allowing the blood to fall into the bucket of water and mix with it.

Her Consort heals her wound when she holds out her hand, and then he steps back. She rises, picking up the bucket and taking hold of the ladle on the ground beside it. Her voice lifts in song. Though the language is unrecognizable, the melody is beautiful and full of the vibrant hope of spring. She sings as she walks along the furrows, sprinkling bloodied water on the land. Blood and Strangers alike feel the pull of magic as something in the earth itself unfurls, shuddering awake at the call of the Queen’s blood.

For the next three days, nearly every man, woman, and child in Draega assists with the planting. Children do small, simple tasks, and the older children watch over the younger ones. The adults drag plows through the warming land and spread seeds in the furrows the plows create. Queen Fayura visits each field in turn, and planting doesn’t begin until she’s sprinkled her water over the earth. Throughout the day, her vibrant song echoes around the city, and a few Blood girls, too young to yet wear a Jewel, take up the song and hum along with it.

You would do well to help the farmers. You may not have a strong arm or strong back, but there’s planting to be done and people to organize, feed, and care for.

AIR TIME
Whether you catch the news on a Far-caster in the city or you’re spinning the dial on your own device, you’ll hear…

etiquette with evandra and aren
[Evandra's voice is a little bit rough and a little bit husky, the kind of voice that gives bad ideas to young men and headaches to fathers.] …do we make of a Warlord Prince’s reaction to his Queen’s blood?

[Aren, whose voice is typically chipper and bright, sounds today much more seriously than usual.] It’s a dangerous thing. Elemental, you might say. Like a storm. Every Prince is dangerous when his Lady’s blood spills.

[Evandra:] So, are we in danger when the Queen does whatever ritual she’s doing?

[Aren:] No. The Blood put great importance on, well, blood. It’s the memory’s river. Power sings in blood. It carries strength and Craft. I’ve never seen a Queen do anything like this before, but her Princes—and her court—treat it like ceremony. And it probably is.

the weather
[A soft-spoken man’s voice rumbles out of the Far-caster. He’s pleasant to listen to, with a soothing cadence to his voice.] …continued rains with intermittent sunshine over the next few days as the days grow steadily warmer. Remember that rains coming out of Askavi are dangerous to your health, and salves for lesions from exposure can be purchased from the Medicos at…

the news
[Garret speaks at his brisk pace, hurried and harried as though he has too much to say and not enough time to say it.] A new development in the story of the young landen man who shot and killed Councilwoman Vera last month: the Strangers have influenced the Queen to bring together a Tribunal not of other Queens—

[Wilt, as usual, is put upon and nasally.] As though there are many of those to go around.

[Garret, continuing as though Wilt didn’t interrupt him:] —but of the landen man’s peers, both landen and Blood.

[Wilt, sighing:] That’s correct, Garret. It seems this Tribunal of three landens and three Blood will listen to the young man’s account, as well as the stories of other witnesses, and determine a suitable punishment. This will be presented to the Queen, and she will carry out the sentence.

[Garret:] Looking now to the warming weather and what that means for trade with the mercenary settlements outside of Draega—

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Guts does pause what he's doing to look back at her. He recognizes the voice, and for all his bluntness, he was at least getting used to Sansa's presence over the last few days. She was certainly persistent enough to merit that.

"Why're you givin' me an apology?"

He was more used to getting an angry earful after blowing people off. Made sense to him, actually. It's not like he wasn't aware of his less than friendly tendencies. In that light, he can't really fathom why she kept coming back.

He accepts the water, though. After working for hours now and drenched in sweat, he didn't mind a small break if encouraged enough.

Edited 2019-03-23 05:10 (UTC)

"Because I was pressuring you to participate in something it was clear you weren't comfortable with," Sansa insists. "Though if you don't think it merits an apology, I will cease apologizing. I just didn't want you to feel as though I was being pushy."

Sansa likes to think herself as someone with good manners, someone polite and cognizant of the feelings of others. To think she's failed at this hurts her deeply.

Is that what noblewomen really thought was pushy? Guts was learning new things every day here in Draega. He takes a few seconds to drink the cool water, letting it soothe his parched lips and dry throat. For all that he’d been on edge at the Festival, he seems pretty at ease in fields, even with the physical hardship.

"It wasn’t you," he says dismissively,"Parties just ain’t my style. Too many people."

If he’d found her attitude offensive, he would’ve said a lot worse.

Sansa can understand this a little better. Crowds and people seemed to have bothered the Hound, long ago, and that had not helped him much when he was on Joffrey's Kingsguard. Jon himself likes quiet most of the time and it'd been she and Robb who'd truly enjoyed parties at Winterfell.

"I know many people who might agree with you. One of my brothers is among them and I'm not certain he even went to the festival. He might have but I would not have been shocked if he didn't go at all."

Guts fixes on her this time, searching her face and eyes for the scent of some hidden ulterior motive. He supposes he should say thanks for the drink, but he can’t bring himself to. He can only stare back with a quiet intensity and natural suspicion creasing the lines of his brows and mouth.

“There a reason you’re worried about me all of the sudden?”

Perhaps someone with more tact might have had a better way to ask the question - but he never had much of that. Maybe it was the sheer fact he’d been on his own for so long that left him unable to really know what to do with her.

Sansa's brows draw together, equal parts worried and quizzical. She supposes she might ask the same, given this is a new place and they are all Strangers thrown together. While she has been slightly relaxed here given the relative safety of the Queen's residence, blind trust is never a good thing.

"I suppose you should be suspicious. Any person with a whit of sense would be, considering we've only just come here from our homes bound only by fealty to Fayura in so long as we are in her service. Still, I don't mean you any harm, Guts, and I certainly wouldn't want you to feel uncomfortable around me. It was just a friendly gesture, I swear."

“It’s not that.”

The lines in his face ease. No, she didn’t cause any real discomfort. Her motives weren’t malicious at all. It wasn’t really about what the woman did or didn’t do, beyond the audacity of wanting to talk to him more than once. She was just being polite, and he’d almost forgotten what human company was like.

There is a thoughtfulness in his eye as he keeps searching hers, almost antithetical to the brash way with which he speaks. What he was looking for was a mystery even to him.

“Guess it’s just been a while…” the sentence trails off, and he breaks away, closing himself off behind that same cool stoicism. The cup is placed back into her hands.

Sansa curls her hands around the cup and nods once. She can understand going a while without a gentle word, without a comforting touch. She's been in a war camp before and even though she was Jon's sister and therefore treated with great deference, war camps aren't nice places to be. The time she'd spent as Ramsay's captive had neither been gentle nor bearable, either, so she understands being skittish.

Sansa handles her fear of others by facing it head-on. She forces herself to talk to people and to learn them. She forces herself to know them and know their minds because even though Petyr Baelish is dead, his mark is still on her as indelible as ever. She will never be quit of him, not truly.

"It's all right. If a few words frightened me away, I wouldn't be much of a woman. It takes more than that to scare me."

That quiet resilience again…

Guts still couldn't quite wrap his head around why she kept coming back. There weren't many Strangers aligned with Fayura, certainly, but there were enough others she could keep company with for him to wonder: Why him?

Griffith had always been the gallant knight in shining armor, appearing like a man out of a fairy tale. The White Hawk could navigate a court like he’d been born to do it. Guts was the one that frightened others away with his roughness, and he liked to keep it that way.

One thing he was quickly gleaming from their few times together was that she wasn’t like the Windham nobles at all. She was kind, but she was strong - in her own way. She wouldn’t be dissuaded by mere words.

As long as she didn't get in the way, he supposes this is fine. They’d need to collaborate to get the Queen what she wanted, right? And then...

“Thanks for the drink,” he says, picking up the mattock from the ground. There is at least a little gratitude he allows to show in his voice.

"You're very welcome," Sansa says, giving him a bit of a smile. "It's the least I can do since you've been working all day. I would work myself, of course, but it's not something I'm really built for."

She'd been reared a lady, not someone to work in the fields doing manual labor. She should help, honestly, but she thinks she's better at fetching water and doing healing than planting itself.

“Planting seeds ain’t too hard. Calms the nerves.”

Guts had already done most of the arduous work plowing and tilling the field. Now it just needed to be seeded according to the farmers’ instructions.

He crouches over the seeds he’d been given and glances back at her, with a silent invitation to join him. She’d get a bit dirty, of course, but he seems willing to show her what he’d been taught.

"If you promise to be patient with me and my fine lady's hands, I'll help you plant," Sansa says, only half-joking. She had been gently reared, same as Arya, but unlike Arya she'd never gone outside her station. Her power is within the constraints of being a proper lady.

"And then, afterward, I'll go find us something to eat?"

Ever the articulate man, Guts grunts in response. He probably wouldn’t reject a meal after toiling for so long.

“Why do you nobles always fuss over your hands?” he says, before offering a bag of seeds for Sansa to hold. She wasn’t entirely serious - but the joke held its truth to it. Casca seemed so shy about her scars, too..

His own bag is held in the crook of his arm, held in place by the iron hand. The dirt trenches he tilled into the soil bed should be simple enough to follow. Once they’re both ready, he would start spreading them, two or three seeds at a time, into the straight rows.

"Well, in my case, it's because I'm meant to be married off to whichever lord has the most money or the most power," Sansa says bitterly. "And I would suspect he'd like me as pretty as possible."

There's parts of her that aren't so pretty any longer, not after Ramsay, but she doesn't think it will be an issue here. Fayura hasn't requested she marry anyone here in Draega and as a Stranger, she doesn't exactly fit into the Blood hierarchy. She is completely unworthy of notice for once in her life.

She didn’t sound too happy about that. It didn't seem at all different from how things worked in Midland. Things were rough for a woman no matter what her social status. He didn't know much beyond what he observed, but he did know he can’t stand being treated as someone else’s plaything. In that way, he understood the bitterness in her voice.

He spends a quiet few moments at his task, gradually moving further down the row. His voice is contemplative when he finally responds:

“Why not reject it - like your sister did?”

"When I was younger, I wanted to be like our lady mother. I believed all the songs and stories and I thought that I would marry someone gentle and true and live happily ever after."

There's a bitter tinge to Sansa's voice, both regret and a bit of anger. She had never got her happy ending and it doesn't seem likely that she ever will. Anyone who marries her will do so for political gain and Sansa doesn't know if she'll be able to give him the children that will likely be desired out of such a union.

"My sister didn't want those things. When our parents died, my sister disappeared. I was held hostage. I did what I had to in order to survive and she did what she had to; it just turns out that we had different ways of handling it."

“Everyone wants to believe their fairy tales are true,” he remarks, perhaps in a cynical attempt at trying to get her to not be too hard on herself. He’d thrown his own happiness out of the palm of his hand when already he had it, which is worse than naivete in his eyes.

If he knew anything, it was that the anger and bitterness in her voice could only come from a deep pain inflicted on her. A person doesn't harbor those feelings without good reason. He can’t help but be reminded of a young Charlotte, pining after her shining knight - probably clambering after the same foolish hope for a happy ending.

"Sounds like you wizened up."

"I'm a slow learner, it's true, but I do learn." Sansa had said those words to Baelish shortly before she'd had him executed by Arya's hand and they are words she holds close to her heart. She'd let Baelish and Cersei poison her, trick her into thinking one thing when she should have thought another and she has trouble trusting people now because of it.

Sansa is good at courtesies, of course. She has no issues with being kind and having surface conversations, not really, but when it comes to exchanging truths or revealing something that could be leveraged against her? She holds these things close to her so they cannot be revealed and stolen.

"I learned quite a bit from my cruel tutors."

"Would you even want to go back? When this is all done..."

He knows it's quite a while until that day comes, but he's been thinking of his supposed promise with Fayura. For him, there is no other option. Even if he wanted to run, even without the apostles and the spirits of the Interstice at his heels, he'd never truly be able to rest. The last moments embedded in his right eye would make sure of that.

He could gleam that her world has beaten that anger into her, but he couldn't sense the same self-destructive black flame. Maybe she could find some kind of solace here, away from her tormentors.

"I have to," Sansa admits. "I cannot leave my people without a leader, not with war and winter coming on. I have my duties that I simply cannot abandon and I would feel impossibly guilty about remaining here when there is so much to be done back home."

She bites her lip a bit, thinking. "No matter where I go, Winterfell is my home. I fought for my home with my own body, with my own blood. I can never abandon it. Not even for solace."

"You got a lot of people counting on you, huh?"

And she wouldn't abandon them. That kind of loyalty is rare to find in a leader, that much his experience told him. It also gets him to think of other things... but, no. Now was not the time to stray from his own plan.

"Maybe you can use that jewel of yours to help them."

"I hope that the magic comes with me when I return to Westeros. It could help a lot of people, I think, since we don't have this sort of thing there. Even if it doesn't, Fayura's aid would be better than nothing and I trust she'll come through on her end of things. She doesn't seem the sort to open her home to strangers without meaning what she says," Sansa says.

"I used to not be very good at reading people but now, I think, I am somewhat better at it."

"I think you're right about Fayura - even if some of the court seem nervous about her."

For what it's worth.

He could sense these things too, despite seeming quite brash at first glance. There is something odd about the Queen, something not quite human, but her desire to help her people was true. The effort she'd put in was indicator enough of that. If he'd felt any indication otherwise, he probably would have left on arrival.

"She's a bit of an enigma, I confess. I haven't spoken with her since I accepted my contract," Sansa admits. "But some of the things that are done here seem strange to me. Perhaps my Westerosi ways seem quaint and strange to them, too."

She knows there are others such as Calvin who think her way of life very different than her own.

"Adjustment is always a valuable skill, though, and can mean the difference between life and death."

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event: a gentle festival

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