Short story - The Shirt

Coffee still cooling in his hand, he greeted the mid-morning day alone on his porch.  The elevated deck was just high enough that his feet didn't touch the ground when he sat on the floor, but low enough that the chickens were able to nibble at his sandal clad toes, waiting expectantly for some scratch or a piece of fruit.  Those birds were her idea too.

It was dry and the air held vestiges of a cool starry night sky and the sweet aftertaste of desert sage and the caramelized pine needles from yesterday's sun-baked forest floor.  In a few hours the sun will have chased away the last remaining traces of the cool morning but even in this early hour, the clothes he had set on the line were already mostly dry.

They hung silently, wavering occasionally as they saw fit, but he was a man of simple tastes and his clothes refused to make a scene of themselves in front of him.  Plaid cotton long sleeved shirt, red with green and black.  Two pairs of his work pants, Carhartts, one a darker beige, the other a greenish beige pulled the line down with their weight.  Another plaid shirt, this one a simple blue and black.  Five white short sleeved shirts, some splattered with hues of blue and yellow, were the rowdiest of his clothing, letting the wind gusts billow them out like sails when it wished to.

He'd take them all down soon, before he got up and off to work.  But he'd leave the last shirt, the only dancer of the group, as he had left her up day after day.

It wasn't a terribly flamboyant shirt, nothing to radiate and essence of proud, sexual womanhood, but it said everything it needed to say.  A medium brown, sleeveless tank-top, a simple v-neck with the cloth below the V stylistically bunched up and sewn together.  While it wasn't her favorite shirt, he had considered having the morgue lay her out in it.  That was before he saw her, before they advised the closed casket.  She was too badly beat up, they told her.  Showing her to everyone else could only upset them.  He guessed they were less concerned with upsetting her illegitimate husband.

He told them to cremate her in the clothes she had died then, in snow pants so unused she had forgotten to take the tag off, in that drab, deep purple gore-tex jacket she said made her feel like a stuffed animal.  The boots would remain on her precious feet, those boots that cost him more than a few times her beloved embroidered clogs and sandals - boots that he loved in equal measure to her aversion to them.  He was only able to buy them through careful trickery, saying that the boots were for him.  The two shared a shoe-size though, and she hadn't seemed surprised when the boots mysteriously ended up in her closet.

While she never really took to the outdoors like he did, it goes without saying that he loved her.  That is why he shared his life with her.  That is why he got on his knee and proposed to her in that restaurant in Madrid, a year ago.  Even when they returned home and were told they couldn't get legally married, it didn't stop his devotion to her.  Nor did it stop her devotion to him.  She never told him she wanted another man.

He was just a stupid, confused little girl from Idaho when he first met her.  Back then he was perpetually frustrated with himself and he could never figure out why.  He grew up alone, the sole daughter of a ranching family's hard talking son and an evangelical real estate agent, but his emotionally distant father and stifling mother weren't the only sources of his misery.  He was only able to find peace from his discontented mind away from the busy eyes and expectant minds of his rural hometown, climbing the neighboring foothills and mountains. 

But even if it wasn't his parents who made him feel clunky in his skin, even if it wasn't the leers from the high school jocks he started noticing as his breasts filled out and his hips became uncomfortably wide who made him question the purpose of his life, even if it wasn't his fire and brimstone preacher who made him question the existence of god when he told him he would be raped by the demons and devils well after he had bled dry in hell, when he confessed that he felt "tingly" around his fellow cheerleaders, all of those factors did finally push him away for good when he announced to his mother and father that he was a lesbian.  Mere months shy of finishing high school, he was assaulted twice in the street by classmates, threatened, and disowned.

When he moved west, he knew he would never return.  He thought that should have been liberating enough, but his skin still did not fit.  His life still seemed a wasted repetition of going through meaningless motions, without purpose or guidance.

He found a lot of what he never knew he was looking for in her.  She was bold and exciting, fresh and new.  When she looked at him, he knew she didn't see him as man or woman, but as a person, a pure, unique personality built on a set of experiences and motivations. To her, he was divorced from prejudice and assumed predispositions that have been forcibly woven into into the fabric of society since the birth of man. 

It was her who first suggested the surgery, but not before she healed his head.  As they dated, he came to understand himself and the source of his malaise as he readjusted the pre-programed algorithms of his life to match his most earnestly held desires.  She helped him every step of the way with kindness and patience.  While his hips still felt too wide to function properly, his relatively small chest felt superfluous and heavy, she helped him at least escape the scathing judgment of dashed expectations.  In return, he wanted nothing so much as to protect her from every harm in the universe and give her a new world to dance and play. Skin like hers was made for caressing, lips like hers were made for kissing, and eyes like hers were made to draw him into her cocoon of compassion and caring.  He did not fail to oblige her body in every way.

Yet he still held on to his womanhood for the first few years.   They spoke of it together, the transformation, but her responses never satisfied a decision.  More, she worked like a gentle interrogator, drawing out his fears and hopes, little at a time, lest the splinter within his heart shatter and become unrecoverable.

Growing up he never felt particularly masculine or feminine.  He enjoyed playing tag football and playing with dolls, though his dolls were more likely to become explorers and mountaineers than fashionistas.  Initially he was worried that he was making a choice to bury a part of himself to favor another; losing a leg to gain an extra arm.

She had laughed at him for that, as she had often found it easy to laugh at him when he was being unreasonable.  She promised that if he went through the process, she'd be sure to remind him that he still liked to do "sissy things like painting" and that she wouldn't let him turn completely into a "mountain hermit".  She took away the fear that all he would do is add new expectations he never wanted to himself, and made the transformation a question of physical and mental comfort.

After surgery, he knew he made the right decision.  He wouldn't miss out on anything life had to offer.  She would safeguard and remind him not only her own femininity, but his as well, and he promised that he would treasure both his own masculinity and hers.  Well after surgery he was still climbing the Sierras and painting the flowers of her garden, but this time, he felt the present was right, and he could start talking about the future.  That was when he planned the trip to Spain.  That was also when the two started thinking about having a family.

A year ago they were still having these conversations on the other side of his proposal.  Even as she helped him escape the expectations of his community and family, the two of them could not escape the expectations of the state.  Idaho insisted he was female, and California declared that two women could have no legal marital bond.  She was in tears about that, and the only reason he wasn't was that he needed to be strong for her. 

Less than a month ago they had decided together to adopt.  While they prepared the paperwork and looked for candidates, they prepared their home, their hearts and their lives.  She said she wanted to do things she had not ever done, to understand him better and to do it before the responsibilities of the child prevented her from joining him again.  She wanted to be his mountain woman, even if just for a weekend.

Sitting on the porch, his coffee well drained he absently wondered what time it was, though he was sure he was late for work, again.  It didn't matter.  His work was a meaningless pattern of repetitive motions he wasn't willing to sacrifice for.  Not anymore. The rockslide had robbed him of that and the helicopter would never be able to return it to him.  In the garden, the flowers were wilting from neglect, his canvas went unused and the adoption papers had been abandoned. 

He had been in this rut for two weeks, since her death.  He could no more escape his reeling mind than take down that brown shirt from the line.

As the two fastened their seatbelts in the car, just before they left the house together for the last time, she had shrieked.  She had forgotten about the shirt she had handwashed and hung up to dry.  They were running late, he had told her, if they didn't reach the trailhead soon they wouldn't make it to base camp before nightfall.  It would be fine to leave it out a night.  She had relented of course, seeing the impatient excitement of a child on Christmas Eve in him.

Whenever he took his own clothes off the line he would stop now, and touch her shirt.  Two weeks later he could still smell her scent, underneath the soap of the laundering, but every day meant that she was growing weaker.  The smell of sage and pine sought to claim the shirt for their own and there was nothing he could do to stop it.  In a few days she would be completely gone.

He threw his coffee mug at a nearby rock, startling the chickens and they ran away.  As it shattered he put his hands up and started to cry.  He couldn't be strong for her anymore, he failed at that.  He failed at protecting her when she needed it.  He got up and ripped his plaid shirts from the line.  The Carhartts came down as well.  The white shirts he pulled off and ripped them with his bare hands.  Nothing remained on the line except for that brown shirt, dancing in the gusts of wind.

Again he searched for her scent in its folds, weak as it was, and cried into it, feeling as lost as he had when he was a little girl.  She had been everything for him.  His guide, the one who gave him purpose and meaning, while helping him to hold onto the things that mattered most.

Clutching the hem of the shirt, he hesitated, then pressed on the wooden clothespin , releasing the shoulders from the line.  Both shoulders bore an indent where the pins had been but that too would fade in time.  He removed his shirt, his now flat breasts exposed to gentle breeze and hugged the brown shirt one last time.

He put the shirt on, and went inside to grab his paints.

Bioware is a bunch of raaacists

Soooo unlike most of the world, I just started the ME trilogy within the past year.  This means I have not had to wait one second for each subsequent game, or all of the DLC from the first two.  It means, basically, that I have had nearly seemless gameplay.

This also means any problems with character import translations have been that much more annoying to me.  The transition from ME1 to ME2 wasn't terrible.  Yejny Shepard seems to have gotten some rosier lips.  I can deal with that.  Cerberus fucked up and injected red paint or something.  Especially where half of the game I was sporting some intense renegade scars, it even kinda fit in.

Yejny kicking it old school

Yejny well after the peak of her renegade scars, since I had run out of room to renegade grow, while every paragon action made her heal.

Yejny after scar surgery

All in all, not bad I'd say.  She's got mostly a pan-southeast asian look to her (I think).  The bronze skin, asian eyes, high cheekbones and wide-ish head, thin wide lips.  Her nose is not asian of course, but this is the 22nd century, I'm sure she's got some weird European ancestor somewhere there.

So yesterday I finally get to import my ME2 Yejny to ME3.  This is what they gave me:

Bioware says: no pan-southeast asian for you!  You get, what, a black haired irish girl?

Who the fuck is that person Bioware?  I don't know her.  Her lips have all of a sudden become pouty, and how do you translate brown eyes to aquamarine?  What the hell happened to her skin?  She been playing a lot of video games in her mom's basement lately, not seeing the sun?

I did what I could to customize her as much as possible to approximate who she really is.  I'm completely not satisfied with the result:

If this picture were on ME2 Yenjy's passport, she would not be allowed to board a plane.

This is the absolute best I could to and you know what?  it still sucks.  Why?  Two major reasons and a small minor one:

1) skin color
2) eye shape
Minor) lack of prior large forehead

The problem is that the skin color and eye shape options no longer exist.  Bioware helpfully included every possible european white skin tone under the sun, and one, and only one, other skin color that approximates one of those whiteys getting hit in the face with a sack of charcoal ash.  I think that is their version of a black person.  Not sure.

Any Mexicans, Egyptians, Vietnamese, forget about making a character that looks like you.  That was Yejny's skin color, and now it is GONE.  Not to mention anyone from India or Sub-saharan Africa.

Then we have the eyes.  They have a couple of strange diagonal eyes which basically are reminiscent of a Picasso work of art, but otherwise, 100% Caucasian.  They gave Yejny these huge eyes, and really the closest thing I could get was just to make those eyes smaller.  Look at ME1 and ME2 again, those very distinct almost sideways teardrop eyes.  They go from wider to thinner as they approach the outside of the face.  This eye shape was no longer an option in ME3.

What the hell bioware.

The lack of forehead I can only assume was a design change as a whole.  ME1 gave larger foreheads in general.  Not to mention that with each successive ME, Bioware felt Shepard would be using a hair dryer more and more often (I assume) since hair keeps getting puffier and puffier.  I'm not hugely complaining about that, and if that were the only issue, I'd get over it quickly.  Developers have a right to augment style, and lets face it, ME1 Yejny did kinda look like she plastered her hair to her head.

But the lack of options that let you make Shepard anything other than Caucasian is the reason why Bioware is a bunch of racists.

Chapter 7 - Part 1

The hall was cold, but not one of the four men dared clear the ash and charcoal and light the fireplace.  Even in the stronghold of their allies, they would not give anyone privy to their conversation.  Sitting on their legs in the dark room they spoke in hushed tones, though few in the keep spoke the middle tongue with anything more than an ability to engage in small talk.

"I have found evidence of him.." the man in grey acknowledged to the group.  His partner grunted, the information not new to him.  "But he is gone."

"Then he is dead?  The jack rabbits nibble on his bones?" the man in oiled leathers asked.  Under the darkness his pale face relaxed in a deepness only made possible by the past 6 minor moons.

The grey man continued, "No, there is no evidence of that either"

The leathered man rose up onto his knees and leaned toward the speaker, "What does that mean," he hissed, "You have found him or not?!"

His partner who had been hushed to this room while still undressing from his last foray was still wearing a silver breastplate that gleamed in the dim light provided by the minor moon and its stars.  Never whisper secrets when the minor moon inhabits the sky, he thought of the popular saying, he'll come back the next day and tell your tale.  The major moon at least holds on to your secrets for half a tide cycle after she leaves.

"Wuob-Rduap,"  (put in comments section: Rduop literally translates to "master" but is used any time in the middle tongue when an inferior addresses a superior) Arms Master by the common tongue of Pho-Boteth.  The armor clad man bent his back down slightly and offered no further words.  He need only say the title of the man in leathers, while paying deference to him, to help him recollect himself and his station.  The nüdwuob (literal translation of secondsword) everywhere often held the responsibility to support their superiors in following the code.  A life of a Secondsword was not all blood and battle.

The Wuob, backed down, his oily leathers sliding easily as he settled back into place.

"I believe he is alive." the man in grey continued, "but injured."

"Then he is in hiding?" the partner of the man in grey prompted.

"Possibly, but those bastards know better than to cut communications for long, lest we destroy their queen."

"What if he were incapacitated?  Unconscious?" the Wuob suggested.  The air hung thick at the throats of each of the four men.  They did not want to quickly exhaust their alternate hypothesis and hear the worst possible scenario.

"I thought that first as well.  There is evidence that somewhere, he was attacked, mugged possibly.  I found blood, his blood, at Aedak's crossing and again at Geibin's (Small Eirdred coastal towns' connecting roads).  After that the trail runs cold."

"How is that possible?  I thought they were damned near invisible, to the rest of the world." the Wuob reasoned.  It was his neck on the line, for this mistake.  If somehow he could make the claim that their messenger was at fault, perhaps he might yet survive the courts.  That is, if he even made it to the courts.

"I did find something more telling. Men, we must face the reality.  I believe he is abducted."

The Wuob's face when white.  Though it was not possible to see it in the darkness, his comrades likely knew it.  "Then tell me, bih'kepk'opb (the middle tongue's words for a bei'thal.  prior to contact with Pho-boteth, the Chosen empire had no word for compromised.  They had the word disloyal, but that was it.  Bih transformed to Bei when it hit their tongue.  Kepk is the indigenous word in the middle tongue for keeper, "opb" is the suffix to a title used to indicate peers), how could you possibly suspect that?"

The man in grey produced a thin, silver collar.  "There was not much to see, of the body I found this on, but it was most certainly human."

"Someone took it off?" asked the man in grey's partner.

"A peasant, superstitious that it might contain magic?" suggested the Wuob.

"Then where he? Why take the creature and not the treasure?  And if someone did that the body, how could such news really be contained in any one of those gossip hovels?"

"So who are we looking for then?" asked the Secondsword, eager to be in the realm of decisions and action.

"Someone traveling in a small party."

"Someone who could afford to kill a man to keep a secret."

"Afford, or had the strength to?"

"And burn the body afterward." the man in grey added.

"A fire would attract more than a few eyes on the road.  Particularly one large enough to burn a body."

"Maybe it wasn't burnt.  What exactly was the condition of the body?" the grey man's partner asked.

"No tissue or vitals.  All that was left was bones, and they were brittle at that.", the grey man answered.

"Were they charred?  Did you see black streaks on them anywhere to indicate the smoke?"

"They were black, but not in streaks."

The grey man's partner contemplated the situation, trying to decide what to say, and what to withhold.  The room's darkness did well to hide his deliberations.  "Wuob-opb, we have a substance in the laboratory that devours flesh and eats away at the bones.  It has been used for decades now, and we know its secret was released some time ago, though it remains rare.  But the ingredients are neither easily obtained nor cheap."

"So our culprit is wealthy, and worldly.", the Wuob observed.  "Men, that leaves us one very obvious group of people in this province.  It is time we put on our dancing sandals and join the music."

Chapter 6 - Part VIII

"You shall be as he was I suppose," she glanced over his shiftless clothing. "You shall be the Mountain-I-See. That is how I will know where to go."

"Don't live like that Vren," Gregor implored. "You can be your own mountain. Here." He opened a sack that had been lying on the floor and rummaged around for a bit. In seconds he produced two objects: a round disk with a glint of silver, and a book, twice as thick as the leather in which it was bound. First, he tossed the disk to Onion.

"Open it."

A small switch when compressed split the disk in two on a hinge, which Onion proceeded to fiddle with.  She nearly ignored the moving arrow dancing on unfamiliar symbols that lie on the inside of the disk. "What is the purpose of this?" Onion asked.

"It is a compass. This is how we determine where we are headed, this is how we know where and how to go. It is yours now. Use it, and when you come out of the University, you will never be lost again." Next, Gregor gave her the book which she readily clutched, studying the embroidered silver lettering without a shred of comprehension.

"This was my closest companion during my days in the Outer Crest. The Nü dialect is standard north, and it is Lithenese, not Eirdren, but both are close enough to help you some at least.

"Make this life your own, or you will simply be a web without a spider." Gregor offered, though the Tales of the Spider were obscure and antiquated among the Nüish tribes he interacted with. He continued, "Learn our words; that is a power, that is your compass to this world, these cultures."

She smiled for his gift and words, and his earnestness won her over. For her part, she could not refuse his gift and admit to him the simple truth about herself:

Onion could not read.

Chapter 6 - Part VII

"Your destination is the heart of the Empire, Pho-boteth.  That much I can tell you, but I don't know much else.  Maybe one of the Orders will wish to take you on, perhaps the Learned of Exotics will want your first hand experience of your culture and language.  Perhaps the Empress will desire you to take up the brush and scroll yourself and become a Learned.  Perhaps the Bei'thal will want you for themselves."

He paused to himself for a moment, his face darkening quickly, "I will not let them make you bei though.  You have my oath.

"But mostly it will depend on your skills and loyalties.  And that fate will be determined after your main purpose."

"What is that?  What is my purpose?"

"We," he paused, "Pho-boteth is interested in the Nü.  Well, we're interested in all the races of the Outer Crest."

"I'm sure you could have found another, less intractable subject." Onion quietly observed to the man before her.

"Don't be so sure of that.  Even when I have come across your people, you always travel in herds!  You are not an easily co-opted group you know." he said.  "And what Nü do you know of who would willingly leave their home alone to travel to a strange world?  After the start of the Three-pronged War, we dare not try anyway."

In the back of her mind Onion knew Rejnev might have delighted at the chance to travel to the University on High, but her brother was a strange man to have ever gone alone to the continent.  There was no life outside of family.  "No I doubt many of us would."  she admitted.

"So yes, it's not ideal.  I know, I'm taking advantage of you, of your sad circumstance, but there was no way around it.  If you were Lithenese, as I am, you'd not have gotten a chance at all.  Anita would have slit your throat rather than let you see the hangman and give you the chance to tell our tale.

I've caught you in my web as you say, and I know what that means.  I'll try to get back to the University on High as soon as I can, and see the right of it.  But if not, give your hatred to me.  It was my choice in the end, and I thought it was the best one for you.  On this side of the Torrent Sea, nothing comes for free.  When something is too cheap, know that somewhere, someone is paying something."

Not another word crossed between the two for the remainder of the meal.  Onion reflected for a moment, that while her dish of par'la was savory in its own right, it lacked the distinct flavor of grixi  smoked cooking, a staple of the southern Nü.  Even that small treasure she'd kill for now.

~~~~~~~~~

Later, in a small tent Vaughn had prepared for them, Gregor began the process of wrapping Onion from fingertip to neck in the yellow-white gauze of a leper, a garb that would continue to irritate her dry-air loving skin for weeks to come.

The Lithenese man donned a robe that was reminiscent of the cloak worn by the man Gregor had referred to as the "Gegleth".  The dull grey weave of the fabric was coarse on the exterior, but light.  Under the cheesecloth material was a light cotton of solid charcoal color.

Under the hooded cloak was a similarly fashioned long sleeved tunic, bound and cinched on the forearm and cinched again just above his calf-high rough leather boots.  Around his hood a face scarf bearing the only color of the ensemble, light purple, hung loosely, ready to be utilized at any moment.

Onion would later  learn that this was the traveling garb of the Vrit Wilders of the Benge Wastelands which lie on the other side of Pho-boteth.  In crossing the sunless desert for the first time, in ages long past, the scholar kings of Old Boteth had learned the valuable lesson of cultural adaptation and they adopted it as traveling clothes to just about anywhere..

Chapter 6 - Part VI

Gregor knew his response, the answer he had to give her before she even begun her plea but could not find the strength to stop her impassioned speech. Words hung on his lips, waiting to be pushed out into the air. Not until the Nü stopped speaking, not until there was a vacuum of dialogue could he finally respond.

"I am truly sorry, but your old life is gone; that is the price of your freedom. You have seen the hidden hands that shape the world, you know of techniques practiced and studied in secret for over five decades. Your body was spared, but your life is now the Empress's."

Onion felt her heart well up and her extremities grow lifelessly cold. "Then I have not bought freedom as you say. I have bought an existence, nothing more."

"That may be true. That may be the right way of it. Perhaps. You will have as much freedom as any in the world truly. Tell me, when you traveled with your brothers, were you free to leave then? Perhaps physically you could walk away, as you could do now, but your chances of survival would be quite slim. No ability in the language, no skills that could help you survive. Do you even know how to gut a rein properly without spilling its poisonous bile and contaminating the meat? Or did you survive on the coin you brought in, as most mercenaries in these parts do?"

"That is entirely different!," Onion shouted back, "I wanted to be with my brothers. I wanted to be close! I..."

"Freedom has nothing to do with desire.", he whispered, bringing the conversation back to a manageable decibel. "That you wanted to be where you were stuck was only happy coincidence. If 'want' is all you require, then want to go to Pho-Boteth. Want to become bei'thal. Or want to work in the University. I can't know what you are most suited for, but there are opportunities for limited choice under the Empress."

How can someone you've never met lay claim to your life? Onion thought, but she was beyond explaining this to Gregor. He was right, of course, freedom was never her objective. Perhaps of any Nü she ever knew, Rejnev was the only one to have that desire. But he could not understand the power of each person's spider. He could not see the strands of the web, and how they bound the Nü close to each other. She could not feel the web of this 'Empress' and she certainly was not caught in it.

Since the annihilation of her brothers, and double and again with her encounter with bei'Anita, she had been cast adrift. No dew-kissed thread was there to guide her to her place in the world. Her life now was one in a state of constant shock. Gregor's words of ownership to her own desires had a flavor of sage advice now, considering her position, but that acknowledgment could come only through hollow rationalization now. She could not make herself "want" anything.

So the Nü suppressed the cloying helplessness sticking to her mind, and echoed the words she knew he wanted to hear, "I see. Very well, if this was the life that was to be for me, then I shall make it my life, damn this spiderless empress. Then what is our trajectory? I would know our path that I might be the one to lay my feet on it." she uttered, though a hint of futility pervaded her breath. The lips are far easier to convince than the heart.

Chapter 6 - Part V

"You cannot know this..." he muttered, "Just stay away." hoping the matter closed.

Onion did not press further. She was very aware of the ease with which he might again sink into moodiness. It was now or never, she had to make her case before they parted ways again. Gregor was perhaps the only person she might consider an ally; the only person who might allow her to slip away now. Three years on the continent had taught her little of diplomacy, but she would have to try.

"I realize I walked a knife's edge between this world and my death." she offered, choosing the path of humbleness to endear her cause in his eyes. "I was not the purpose of your actions. yet, without your help, without your bei as you call them, I'd have shared the same fate as my brothers. " she finally managed, "You did not have to send your people down there for me, that is painfully obvious. I have seen how they look at me; I have heard their tone as they talk of me. I may not understand the words but I feel the intent. To them, I am at best I am a complication in the execution of an already difficult strategy. At worst, a potential enemy."

"Even the chef, Cedric views me with suspicion, "she acknowledged. How often his beady eyes had darted through the bars of Onion's cell when she was meditating or he thought she was not looking! Perhaps he blamed her for his troubles, Onion could not say, but her isolation was not a mere tool to manipulate Gregor. She felt the distinct lack of anything on her web. "I doubt he knows why you retrieved him either."

She did not look at him, preferring to study the oak table's rich lacquer and cracks slowly forming at the edge of each plank. Vren rubbed her fingers mindlessly along the deep crevasses presented by the aged wood.

"I cannot fathom what motivations you might have had in mind with my escape." Left unsaid was an equally evident lack of curiosity in the matter. The wind elects its direction without question, why should she worry about why it takes her? Though, Onion did not lack in appreciation.

"You, Gregor, are my yejñi, my great mother bear, to put your claws into the fight and shield me from harm like a cub." A smile enveloped the pause of her words as Onion did her best to avoid begging. "But my brothers are dead. There is nothing for me here, and this country will only find more ways to kill me. I must return home, I must return to Deezhul. I must prepare the spirits of my brethren and take them up to Toch'vik. The web of the ancestors await them and I dare not make their souls wander."

Gregor felt compassion for the girl, recognizing the tradition among most ethnic Nü to send the ashes or personal items of a departed loved one to a nearby alpine mountain of local importance. The name of the mountain, Toch'vik, was unfamiliar to him, but the seriousness of the ritual was not. A spirit whose body still occupied the earth would become irrevocably confused, not sure whether the ancestors or the corporeal world called more loudly to them. And those wretches would soon lose their memories, according to Nüish myth, being so far lost, to become wandering spiders, haunting the minds and lives of loved ones with vengeful purpose.

He did not mention that these rituals did not translate to the continent outside of the Dutchy of Vem, and that her brothers, and all of their personal belongings likely had already been tossed to the sea. It was information that could serve only to hurt her and it was not worth upsetting her creative superstitions when he could not let her go anyway.

Gregor's prolonged silence did not go unnoticed by Onion and she felt a tinge of panic that she would be forced to go to Heilth afterall. "I do not know what I would do here anyway. This is not my tongue, the culture here is unfriendly and strange. I have no clear path!

"My spirit is a flood upon the grixi reed plains. With no riverbed, I am set to flow in every direction. Only Rejnev stood as our mountain, our guide, only he carved out the crevasses from the mountain cap that let our river flow.

"Please, I must return to my people. The wife sisters of my dead brothers are siblings to two young men of my age. Perhaps it is time I marry, as my aunts had always hoped." Moisture collected along the ridge of Onion's eyes and she pleaded to her spider that the word vomit she had just expelled bore any resemblance to a convincing argument. She was not sure if she even believed the life of domesticity was one she desired, but she was sure that Deezhul was her only place of refuge now. She knew Gregor possessed some level of empathy for her, but was it enough to buy her way home?