The Woods:
The Map:
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Battlebards Tracks used:
Elven Dirge – Farewell – Score Music – Philippe Payet
Druid’s Grove – Vision Quest of the Bearheart – Score Music – Geronimo Snijjtsheuvel
Transcription:
For a long time, we were at war with The Jackals. But now, we’ve driven them off, and we have this – a year of relative peace. In this moment, there is an opportunity to build something.
Two weeks have passed.
Summer is fleeting, and the weeks pass almost unnoticed. The first seven days go by as normal, but on the eighth day the river floods. Llyana, having helped to clean the shore of the river, now plants thistles and brushes, aromatic wild brushes gathered from the scrub trees nearby, to pad the river’s shores and break the sting of bugs as we play on the shores. Stirred by the summer storms, great mountainous glaciers break and melt and over the days past the storm we are allowed some peace before we feel their floodwaters. However, on this eighth day we see the sweep as the river swells and drags one of Llyana’s sage bushes with it, the whole purple herb, a stray branch among meltwater teeth, they chewing weeds that line the shore,- perhaps tomorrow’s moon will grant us refuge and community again.
With the tenth day the rush of the river pulls us back from its edge, much to the annoyance of the insistent girl who’s been with us a long time. The floodwater does not push up to our homes in the mining camp, but we stay wary of its currents and marvel at the rush of the new rapids, somehow divine in their strength. We take in the sight, sleepless as the river under, vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend and of the curveship lend a myth to God, perhaps, and, despite his ongoing grieving for his late husband, even Clovis comes to see the magnificent waters flush.
You will not hear it as the sea; even river stone is not more hushed by gravity. But slow, As loth to take more tribute – sliding prone Like one whose eyes were buried long ago, The River, spreading, Bows – and spends our dreams. What are we, lost within this tideless spell? And bows within itself, heaps itself free. At the end of the twelfth day All fades but one thin mirror of skyline ’round on the water’s surface. Ahead No embrace opens hut the stinging sea; The River lifts itself from its long bed,
Imponderable the dinosaur sinks slow, the watery saurian ghoul, the western bank, While rises along the coastwise range, slowly the hushed land – Combustion at the astral core – the dorsal change Of energy – convulsive shift of sand. But we, who watch the bends, the promontories Where strange tongues vary messages of surf Below grey citadels, repeating to the stars The ancient names – return home to our own Hearths, and as the rush of the river settles so too does our excitement over the floodwaters. For the rushing shift of the river clears out the bank and washes the outstretching log where Drach loved to sit and journal, and in it’s crater left behind we find rich clay, no more of the muddy silt of the river, but a deep rusty red. Eileen immediately gathers some in her hands and declares that this discovery will supply us with an abundance of resources to build, sculpt, and use in healing.
Our project to dig out space for a cemetery has come to its conclusion and as we put up tombstones for those lost, we look upwards, the stars have grooved our eyes with old persuasions of love and hatred, hirth,-surcease of nations. But who has held the heights more sure than us, o listener!- Ascensions of you hover in me now As though at junctions elegiac, there, of speed with vast eternity, do wield the rebound seed. As we clear the cemetery for the night the competent loam, the probable grass, pushes forth a seed and sproutling, red stalk and rose colored budding flower, a twin to the flower clinging to the Jewel of Gerrard, a pure natural impulse bred to answer deepest soundings! 0, upward from the dead it grows, to represent our grief in death and celebrate the blooms of our living brotherhood.
This acceleration of summer sparks our energies, but as we feel our happiness, love, magnificence rush as the river does, we feel in the back of our minds the lost time as autumn speeds towards us as well. We know that we must begin to start preparing, as the summer weeks are finite, and our loving celebration may need to give way to amorous patience to shield Love from despair – when love foresees the end, leaf after autumnal leaf break off, to descend descend.
And a week passes.
This week we drew the King of Diamonds which discards two cards from the Summer deck in an acceleration towards autumn. You may have noticed that we missed an episode last week as I was in Saint Louis for Geekly Con. As we follow our game in real time this lost week takes the place of one of the discarded cards in Summer. The other lost week will be the week of August 20th, when I will be in Indianapolis for Gen Con. I thank you for your patience between weeks as con season takes time out of our production schedule, and hopefully this narrative cheat will cover the weeks lost in our story to the interruption.
Thank you for joining us for the nineteenth episode of From The Jackals To The Shepherds. If you like this show please give us a rating on iTunes, tell a friend, or share us on social media. As always the intro for the show was read by Dave Lapru, who is also our mapkeeper. You can find Dave on twitter at plantbird, and I’m at leviathan files. Please consider visiting our website at Riverhouse Games dot com, or supporting this show and other Riverhouse Games work on Patreon at patreon dot com slash Riverhouse Games. Music for this episode was provided by Battlebards dot com. Until next week, I hope your week goes well.
From The Jackals To The Shepherds 