Exc. I.iv
From Chronicles of the Lotus Wars by Helman Loth, R.S., R.H.
(1st Ed. published P.V. 1001)
During my long voyage to chronicle the finer details of our ravaged eon, I have encountered thousands, if not tens of thousands, of men and women who claim to have had an intimate first-hand encounter with a major player of the Lotus Wars. While some make note of Northmage encounters, sightings of the blight-drake, or galvanizing encounters with young generals before they became generals, the more common route for this form of attestation is to have encountered one of the individuals whose names have become immortal and whose stories have become the stuff of legend.
One learns, in a journey such as my own, to approach any such claims with skepticism. There is one tale that was offered with such embarrassed and sublime simplicity that I, for one, am in fact prone to believe it. I will recount now, based on my hasty scrawlings and my best memories of the day, the unembellished story offered to me by a widowed and, I believe, honest farm-woman:
The night was to the point of being all dark when we heard the knocking. We didn’t know who it could be, not at that hour. When my husband got up to answer, though, we were surprised. A young woman, still nearly a child, was standing there bleeding from a gershek attack.
Now, you’ve probably heard of gershek birds. They go by other names, too. Gersh birds or gersh flies. Sometimes mosk birds or just great-flies. But the poison they carry with them, oh, bless me you don’t want to feel it yourself. To keep standing after one drain is a thing on its own, but here was this girl with three, four, maybe five deep wounds on her body. I remember she was thin, too. Spry-looking, maybe, at other times, but right then it just made her look like any wind at all should have knocked her over.
Anyway, my husband, my late husband, was a good man and did what he could to patch her up and give her rest. When he came back to our bed, though, he was so still. More still than ever he was when he was sleeping. I knew he was kept up with the same thought that had me lying there. When we woke up, we were likely to have a corpse on our hands.
Here, I will note, the kind, widowed farmer-woman took several deep breaths before she was willing to continue. It is, perhaps, the look of self-doubt she next gave that most reassures me of her honesty.
Now, we’re not complicated people here. We live in dangerous places and we know what the unkinder parts of it can bring. We shore up against that. But soldiers? And magic? That’s not our kind. So in the morning when my husband went to check on the girl (I was too scared to go myself, fearing that she would just be a limp thing) he was, we were both, more than a little surprised.
A gershek wound will keep you from patching up, will keep you from working the fields even a hair, for days. And to be well enough to go on a journey? Weeks at least. But here she was, wounded all over the night before, and in the morning she was…. Well, she was well enough that she left that day.
My late husband wasn’t the sort for wonders. He made reasons for it. That the wounds only seemed deep or that she’d been struck by some other creature before the gershek and that the blood and wounds had all mixed together in a way that was more frightening than it ought to have been. He said that the folk out in the Wyldes were a tougher stock, and that may be true enough. And I listened to my husband’s talk and I didn’t fight against it, because what else are you to believe at a time like that?
What got me rustled again was something small. You see, there was this plant, a rosemary plant we’d brought in with a pot of dirt in the hopes that it would sweeten the air that crept in through the window out of which we emptied the family pots, only my late husband was never good at watering things unless he could count on the rain to do it for him. The plant, I swear this is true, had withered and died days, maybe weeks, before.
After she left, the girl I mean, when I was tidying the corner of hay we’d let her sleep on below the window, I saw that plant there. Not only alive, but blooming.
It wasn’t until much later that the stories of White Silk started going about. And by then, to tell the truth, I couldn’t recall many details of what she wore or what she looked like except that she was young and thin and marred with blood. Only, and maybe it’s just my head, but I think back to when she was here and I can’t help but picture her wearing….
Here she trailed off, seeming distracted. “The white silk?” I prompted. “From the stories?” She only bit the tip of her thumb, looked into her lap, and nodded.
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