Of the wynd Mym said nothing. Its passage was so dark only her probing toes and the [whispering] stones kept her from smashing her head or her da's on the close walls and cramped ceilings. One wynd joined another and another. Some went down perhaps to the very black heart of the world, but theirs always went up. Her da weighed ever more or maybe the air just thinned and held less of the stuff of life. She could not see him yet she knew how he looked. She hated not seeing and she hated knowing and she hated Khaz for his help and his muttering and his black wynd, and finally after days in the dark she felt the stones warm and saw the forge's light and vowed to never again enter the wynds.
They carried him along the flume and past the forge and up their little walk past her stonewrought sister and brothers and the [hind] they took before the [hornkeeper] blew the horn. The carcass rotting across her sister's shoulders. It was too much for her. It was all too much: the airy, empty delving, her da's breathing lighter than a moth's fluttering, her impotence. She could not make a life. She could not save a life. It was too much. She sent Khaz away with undeserved bitterness.
She sat her da on their porch with his back against the facade and his legs straight out before him. His eyes were closed. If only they'd open he'd see his children. Two beautiful and serene and so close to life, and one holding a corpse starting to smell like he had started to smell.
She took the [hind] by its four ankles, gripping them hard to keep their hide from sloughing over the hooves like pulled off socks. She dragged it along the delving's stone floor past empty house after empty house. Coming back she wiped her stinking and slick palms over and over on her trousers. She scrubbed them in the flume and dried them under her arms. Everything was colder than she remembered. Even the forge was dimmer.
Her da sat as before. A glimmer of drool in one corner of his mouth. She wiped it on her sleeve.
"Up we go," she said. She put him on her back again and carried him to the forge. Two survivors sat with their hands to its heat. Their dark eyes wide, watching and pitying and mourning for the one who refused to. Mym nodded at them and placed her da on the opposite side of the bellows and hoped its heat would help. She left him there and walked back their dwelling. She looked around at everything that was theirs. Chairs shaped like the founding stones of ornate columns and brushed pelts and mounted trophies and the hickory keg and silver tankards etched with their sigil and her ma's wax mask. None of it mattered. He was going to die.
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Outside she [told] her brothers and sister, "Da's dyin. If yer te be wakin, now's the time."
They didn't move. They never moved.
Back at the forge she saw he wasn't any better. His face and feet and chest were warm to her touch but the heat came from outside, not inside. She kissed his forehead and again said, "Up we go," and carried him back to their dwelling, and sat him again on their porch facing his children.
He sat there. The light outside darkened and the Karakos' house across the chamber turned orange from the forge's light. Its windows black like empty sockets and its door hanging open like a lax jaw. Khaz came by and called for Mym, but Mym didn't come. Later Khaz came by again with Thayne. Thayne's arm was all done up in a sling. They stood in the yard while Thayne watched his oldest friend and Khaz watched the ground. Khaz asked him something and Thayne shook his head and wiped his beard to his eyes and said something back. They shuffled away.
When the outside light came again someone came with it. Backlit with a leather strap over their lowered head and both arms behind bearing a wicker basket against their sacrum that held a slab of rough white granite. Their tendons and their muscles and every other bodily fiber outstanding under the load. They turned away from him and slowly lowered the basket onto the porch. They came around and he saw her face, and she drew an [alpenstock] and [longarm] from the basket and she laid the [longarm] across his thighs. As the first rays of sunlight flooded the delving her eyes glinted and she raised the [alpenstock] and cleft a fragment from the slab's crown.
She said, "What'll we call her?" never expecting a reply.
A tear welled in his eye. "Mym," he exhaled for only the stones to hear.
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> +1 [Belonging]...but there ain't nothin like coming home to remind you of what matters and what don't, and sometimes what don't is the place and folk you're coming home to... (6/10)
> Gained Item: [Mym's Alpenstock]
> Gained Item: [Da's Longarm]