LA AÑORANZA DEL MAR

[Axelu 4333]

 

LA AÑORANZA DEL MAR

Leanor had been born between two sovereignties, and though she was yet too young to name them fully, she felt their differing claims upon her all the same. From her father, Marlon’s, line, the storied House d’Asturia, came the inheritance of distant waters and old maritime glory, of a dynasty said not merely to have crossed the sea, but to have been fashioned by it, its memory preserved in prows cleaving black waters, in sails swollen beneath foreign winds, and in the hard-won splendor of horizons subdued by courage and command. Theirs was a greatness rooted wholly not in one land, nor bounded by the sight of one shore. It was carried abroad upon tide and tempest, and housed in the remoteness of foreign coasts. It was said of them that the sea had not only served them, but known them, and that in their blood there lingered something of its restlessness, its grandeur, and its terrible longing.

Her mother’s kin, by contrast, were of the great Horen House, whose claim was not to wave or wind, but to the realm of Man. Where the d’Asturias had mastered distance, the Horens had mastered dominion. Theirs was the world of citadels, banners, fealty, and law, of fields measured, frontiers guarded, and men gathered into obedience beneath enduring stone. In Joan Mariana there abode all the still gravity of that lineage, the quiet authority of those who govern what lies before them rather than dream upon what lies beyond. If House d’Asturia belonged to departure, Horen belonged to possession. If one looked ever outward, to the uncertain horizon, the other looked inward, upon the ordering of the mortal world.

Thus did Leanor grow, a child of wave and wall alike, though her heart inclined ever toward the elder and more mysterious inheritance. For the sea exerted upon her a fascination too deep and tender to be dismissed as childish whim. She loved the water not only for its beauty, though she found it beautiful beyond words, whether silver beneath the morning light or darkened under the evening's hush. She loved it because it seemed to her alive with memory. When she gazed upon it from the palace windows, where the salt gathered faintly upon the panes, she felt as though she looked upon something vast and knowing, something that had borne her father’s people from distant lands and still remembered the passage of their keels.

Whenever she was permitted to go down to the shore, attended by nursemaids and ladies, and sometimes even her aunt Valentina, who watched her with indulgent caution, Leanor would at once busy herself in the singular occupations of her little heart. She wandered the tideline with her skirts gathered in her hands, pausing wherever the foam receded to leave behind its small and glimmering offerings. There she collected seashells with great seriousness, stooping to retrieve each one as though it were a jewel or relic rather than a trifling remnant cast ashore. The smooth white shells, the rose-hued ones, the broken spirals still wet with seawater, all delighted her alike. She kept them in a carved box within her chamber, and the prettiest among them were lined carefully upon her window ledge, where the sun might strike them in the morning and make them shine like pale treasures.

At times she would press them to her ear, listening with all the solemnity of one receiving confession. The others smiled at this, as grown persons will smile at the earnest rites of children, but Leanor did not smile. She listened in truth, persuaded that the murmur within was not mere fancy, but the sea speaking softly through the hollowed bones of its own making. In that ceaseless sound she imagined distant coasts, forgotten voyages, her father and late grandfather riding beneath storm-dark skies, and the old grandeur of ships vanishing beyond the edge of the world. She could not say why such images stirred her so deeply, only that they did, and that with each shell she gathered, and each wave she watched unfurl and perish upon the sand, her love for the water grew only more profound.

So it was that the young Infanta, though cradled in the ordered dominion of her mother’s people, belonged in some quieter and more sorrowful fashion to the sea. Others might have seen in it danger, distance, or the road by which men were taken from those who loved them; Leanor saw these things too, dimly, as children sometimes do, yet she loved it nonetheless. Perhaps it was because the sea seemed to her to contain all that was beautiful and mournful at once; it bore all that departed, all that returned, and all that remained forever just beyond one’s grasp. And thus, with seashells gathered in her small hands and the wind stirring her hair about her face, Leanor would stand at the water’s edge as though in the presence of something both ancestral and beloved, feeling within her breast that strange and wordless longing by which the sea had already claimed her for its own.

 

[trinn 5128]

Joan had not known her own mother long, the Empress fallen ill in her childhood; and her father sought to spare his young children the sight of his dying wife. A mother's love was something scarcely felt and more imagined, their interactions short, and instead told through the cold ink of letters exchanged or words imparted by others. Perhaps it mattered little when she was younger, frivolous and surrounded by brothers and her father who might otherwise fill in that space of silence. A gap of a mother's love. 

 

But time came quick, and she found herself thinking of the matter of being. She found herself at the age her mother would have been, and considered how she would soon grow older than her mother ever could. She found herself a mother, and there were suddenly children of her own. Yet she found nothing to draw from her heart to give them; that gaping hole, left to fester without acknowledgement, felt empty and confused. She realised quickly, she didn't know how to be a mother, and had no memories of her own to guide.

 

It was little surprise that her daughter, Leanor, took to her father and the sea more keenly. At least the sea might welcome her presence, the tide drawing her close. Little of that could be said for Joan, and the quiet halls of Salia Palace. 

[Pharoahdabz_yt 121]

Off in the distant cold, where the winds whistled and snow as the Othman, a child too torn tween' his Othaman lineage a 'hound' of the Othaman family lingered within the shivering snow.

"So cold..." 

The child spoke as too did he ponder his cause in life; would he follow in the path of his family? the path that had gained the title of hounds or would he walk upon his own path. Rorislav Othaman's father Ivan, the current head of the family had his influences on the child's mind seeing his father a strong man who fought against the urukhim who warred the empire he wanted to take after his father wielding his blade honed with a fine edge made to fight against the ilk who mean ill upon the empire, but his own wants too did sway on him as his own mind, a curious mind lingered within the mortal plane he asked perhaps too much, but none the less he wanted to know.

"I wonder..."

The words echoed in the youngling's head, as he thought as he wandered down a different path a path of not just, but also a path of curiously as he asked, and asked attempting to figure out his cause in the world, and his place perhaps too similar to the situation of the princess that lingered.