I swear on Queen Alyse’s grave that I didn’t know this.

Well, perhaps I did pick it up somewhere along the way when reading linguistics under the table in boring geography classes (or above the table in boring English classes; my teacher encouraged it as long as my grades stayed above 8-out-of-10 and what I read was in English) but it wasn’t a conscious choice, unlike orla “eagle” which I borrowed shamelessly from Church Slavonic because it analysed perfectly in Ilaini as “grand master bird” or “magic bird”.

But if I’d been aware of this connotation, I’d probably have gone out of my way to call him something else.

It felt very strange to be back in Valdyas, even though Sarabal is full of Síthi. It didn’t help that we were in Turenay rather earlier (in real time) than I’d expected and I had to take over almost unprepared.

Note: I don’t have much in the way of notes of this part; some of the facts may be inaccurate. If you were there and know better, don’t hesitate to tell me!

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Athal’s last entry —well, the first part of it, because it’s another long one and I know that at least three people are waiting to read it— because we’re back in Valdyas and I’ve taken over the campaign again. I’m unlikely to stop posting roleplaying writeups, my own and others’, but this story arc is finished.

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Here’s Athal catching himself thinking like an Iss-Peranian, more than once. Fortunately, it’s likely that he’ll be on the next <shudder> ship home, and only because it wasn’t feasible to catch the one that was just leaving.

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Was this really only one day? I think yes, though we slept for a few hours in the middle of it. It did end around midnight— the in-world day, that is, we ended neatly at 10:50.

Unresolved questions: what on earth was Selle’s message? It must have been important. And who was it that called Athal “priest of Timoine, Anshen and Mizran”? Sounds like the merchant-guild sisters, but I’m not sure.

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The break in the story doesn’t coincide completely with the break in the session; we stopped just before the allies came in and picked it up again from there. It wasn’t long after that until we gained too much momentum to stop. At one point I was worried whether I’d be able to write the writeup in first person, because I was far from sure that there would be a first person to write from the POV of. Only the baby prince has script immunity, after all.

Thanks go to Prima for scanning the drawing when technology failed me. Athal and I had no words for it. Also, I was too busy virtual-fighting to take notes and my (and Athal’s) memory of the events of the fight is likely to be quite imperfect.

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I had such a spiffy title for this, but it went away, confound it. Posting in two parts to stop myself thinking I need to finish writing it all in one go; next one (with action!) coming today or tomorrow.

The session was interrupted by Raisse’s player trying (without success) to catch the last train, and when he came back we decided to have “just half an hour more”— and it got out of hand so much that we went on to what is probably the climax of this story arc. The GM had planned for the events to happen, but perhaps not precisely now.

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Writing this between services, waiting for eggs and prosphora and rye bread, things like that. If I don’t do it now I won’t do it until Easter Monday at the earliest, and it won’t be so fresh (and I know that some people are very eager to read it).

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Regular readers will probably have noticed the technical difficulties I’ve just been having. That slowed the writeup a lot: somehow I couldn’t set myself to it without a blog to post the result to. But now everything except comments seems to work again.

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There was too much wind for skating, otherwise this would have been the last writeup of the season written in the Skating Cafe (as most of the rest have been since October). I’ll miss my weekly hour of ambient noise that’s practically guaranteed to be nothing to do with me, so I can shut it out and be more focused than even in silence.

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