sadgalli

You’ve just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As you look around, your gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. You duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? she begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”

((How do you respond?))

Svetozara rolled her shoulder, so that the strap of her rough burlap haversack would fall down into the crook of her arm. Thereafter, she straightened the limb, causing the bag to slide down her forearm, before falling a short distance down onto the soft earthen ground. "My story? I can tell.." The Norlander stated in her cold mutter, setting her hands flat onto her thighs as her eyes drunk in the sight of the sitting pillow. It animated notions in her mind, her thoughts of insensibility and discomfort. Nonetheless, it is rude to offend the hospitality of your host, and so she brought herself before the floor furniture, bending her knees so that the entirety of her body would lower, that her knees would rest on the cushion, so that they may not be strained on the ground. The remainder of her weight, it seemed, fell back onto her ankles, as she leaned her upper body in the direction of the hag, her tongue briefly parsing her lips before she parted them to speak.

"I'm Svetozara, the first daughter of the Nylund family of Norland." She nodded oncely, inclining her head to a side, her verdant gaze falling to some wayside as she deliberated on her next words.

"Your story, swamp elder, would seem to be long, and perhaps concluded already. As of my own, I can say that I know not if it has even began. I suppose it did, at the time when I came to travel here. Though, this couldn't be my destination. This swamp. In no offense to the men here, the swamp is dreadful." The Norlander pursed her lips thin as she looked downward, the silence hanging in the air as she was left without response.

"I can tell of how I was raised, though. Out in the moors of Nyrheim, I was born in a cabin to my mother and father, who lived off the land, as the first of their children. As soon as I could walk, my body was set to labor for survival. The cold, and the hunger, I suppose, have been the greatest.. villains of my life, and.. I'm my own hero, in a sort of way, fighting tirelessly against them. Out there, in the world though, there has got to be more than that. I know it, though I don't. I suppose I feel it. I feel that I can do more than that. Devote myself to a craft, or make some warrior woman out of myself. It is too early to tell. I've got time. Though I shouldn't sit on it.. become a hag with nothing to tell of, and only the ability to ask." She shook her head, taking up her haversack in her grip before she pushed herself up onto her feet to stand.

"That is my story, so far. The rest of it, I suppose I will have to make. Your inquiry is simple, yet it cuts deep into my core. Mark this, that someday I will return to you, and there shall be more notes and chapters of this story of mind."