Lyra

[Strawberry114 43]

I will never come back to playing LOTC, but I was feeling nostalgic. Well, maybe I'll be less scared of people on the server by posting this?

 

~*~

 

When Lyra Rhiava reached her ninetieth birthday, her life took a long and rough tumble downhill. She accepted that she was losing her ability to hear, her joints ached while doing the simplest activities such as sewing and writing (this was a plight she experienced for years, although she only started to recognize it as one then), and her once-brunette hair finished its transition to grey just as she was running out of her orange dye. Her husband of nearly fifty years, although she hadn’t seen him in twenty, was likely dead along with her only sister too. Though all of this was nothing compared to the realization that she would never have a child of her own.

 

Ninety years, three affairs, all resulting in just barrenness and disappointments.

 

She hated the stupid family of that idiot Bili Hollowmead, him with his beautiful wife and children always playing hide-and-go-seek by the river. Now and then a child would happen wandering right past the front window of her burrow, and she’d immediately draw the curtains shut. If their shrill little voices and laughter became too much of a nuisance, Lyra would descend to her stash in the library room to drink herself to sleep, wondering if children would disturb her habits.

 

On days she was feeling particularly sociable she would take a short walk over to Branborough’s premier tavern, the Drunken Sheep Inn, to share some pipeweed with her few friends in town. Other patrons would meanwhile recite stories of talking bears, tales of Dunfests long forgotten, and once in a blue moon of her own characters Beatrix and Kathryn. Those times she felt like she was thirty again and had a whole lifetime ahead of her for raising a family.

 

Some days she pondered returning to her native dwarven nation to find another husband and give in vain a last attempt for a child. The thoughts were always hopeless dreams. It had been over sixty years since Aegis fell to an army of Undead, and sixty years since she last been inside one of those magnificent dwarven cities carved into the sides of mountains. No one would recognize her face and she would have to work again to afford a home with minas. She hadn’t seen a minas in so long that she couldn’t tell one from a shiny pebble. Lyra’s worst fear if she returned to Kal’Karik (or wherever the damned dwarves were hiding out then) was that she would cross paths with her husband’s halfwit bastard boy again. She would have rather died than meet him again.

 

Tea, knitting, and drinking barrels full of ale were what kept Lyra going through her ninetieth year. On the day before her ninety-first began, she showed a surprising sliver of optimism in midst of unbreakable pessimism for the new year to come. And on the day after, the great floods commenced to ravage Asulon.   

 

[Eleatic 1033]

come back pls

[Rig 17581]

come back pls

[Knox213 10]

Moved to the Archive. It shall be sorted into the appropriate category shortly.