Good morning

Happy Wednesday and, in the spirit of living my non-linear life, today is 'back to The Daighacaer' day.

Before I do that though, I have to show you a little gift which I'm growing for each of my neighbours for when we finally leave for Portugal. The little pot can live on a windowsill and provide a fresh, citrus scent until the plants are big enough to plant into larger pots or into the garden. The plants still have a couple or so months to grow and I'm looking forward to watching their growth.

Teeny Tiny Lemon Trees

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Generations

 The calling of yldryf united the young men as few were ever united. Together they alone among their generation shared in both the delight and burden of being yldryf; that race which was charged with the holding and the sustaining of the Kingdom’s bloodline and the fundamental nature of yldryf through The Knowledge of Ages.

Eryen, Jivdreg, Malmor, and Lebrowen, with his wife Malyran, formed the new generation core of close-knit leadership of Raeldysce.

♦

Eryen and his four closest friends all studied Chronology of the Ages at the same time.

In Lebrowen’s most important service to Raeldysce, he was the Captain of Security. In this capacity he spent many hours each day personally walking and surveying the Kingdom. He did this, not only out of duty, but also out of his very real love for Raeldysce Kingdom.

This day, Lebrowen felt a little stifled within the confines of the buildings and longed once again to witness his Prince’s ceremonial Greeting of The Lady Dawne.

He found a distant vantage point and stood quietly to one side in silent anticipation of the thrill of experiencing the sacred ceremony.

Lebrowen witnessed The Lady Dawne’s rejection of the sacred greeting. He watched in horror and dread as the black lightning attacked Eryen. He saw the storm begin and end as quickly as it had begun; and, within his dread, he understood the magnitude of the state of affairs. He realised that he was too far away to be of any assistance to Eryen during the attack so, after running to assist his sovereign and finding him gone, he did the only thing that he could think of. He quickly made his way to the Archaise, knowing that Eryen would certainly go there to find the answers he sought.

♦

With a final glance, the friends both stood aside, emerald eyes meeting jade as one stepped through and one stayed on the outside to watch as the door sealed itself once more.

♦

Lebrowen paced the wide marbled passageway, feeling that he should ask Malyran and Jivdreg to join him.

No sooner had the thought entered his head than his cherished wife moved into view and, as usual, he felt his heart skip a beat.

Even after twelve years of marriage, his pulse still raced when he saw or thought of Malyran.

She smiled as she turned her face up to him. He wondered again at the sight of her perfect lips, her large gentle almond-shaped hazel eyes and stunning elven features, framed by auburn hair, which flowed unfettered to her waist. To Lebrowen, Malyran was the epitome of beauty.

Lebrowen kissed his wife and smiled his welcome. “Malyran, My Love, I was just about to invite you to join me here” he said quietly.

Malyran moved gracefully into the circle of Lebrowen’s arms, which closed protectively around her.

As tall as she was, her head only just reached Lebrowen’s shoulders. She looked up at him and he knew that she fully fathomed the concern in his eyes, which, even if he were able to, he would not withhold from her.

“I know, my husband. I felt your need immediately I awoke and came to you without delay,” said Malyran as she gazed deeply into his eyes.

“Something terrible and disturbing has occurred, hasn’t it?” she asked. “What is it?”

Lebrowen walked with Malyran to the nearby divan so that they could try and make some sense out of the morning’s troubles.

♦

Jivdreg felt a tug on his consciousness.

It was nothing substantial, just a vague impulse of sorts.

Something was amiss.

Jivdreg considered yielding to the impulse to find out what it was but then shrugged and relaxed casually back down on to the lush lawn under his favourite tree.

He had been thinking a lot about how dull his life was lately.

He felt smothered. His whole life seemed to be languishing in a state of muddled chaos. He still felt no particular inclination to specialise in anything specific, such as Eryen, Malmor and Lebrowen had done.

Although he was certainly clever, Jivdreg was indolent by nature.

He told anyone who asked that he was fundamentally lazy. “I never run when I can merely walk, nor do I ever sit if given the opportunity to lay my head down somewhere. Yes, I suppose that that qualifies me as fundamentally lazy,” he would laughed with them.

He just could not see the point of the exertion.

Jivdreg often considered that his own yldryf blood must be so vastly diluted by his dra’en heritage that it became an insubstantial abstraction and nothing more. Since early childhood he always believed that his mother’s heritage was dominant in him and he embraced the notion wholeheartedly.

As a dra’en, Jivdreg’s mother, Rinaedra, was always more concerned with the slow growth of her groves of trees, which counted each cycle of day and night as merely one heartbeat, than with what she perceived to be the undue hustle and bustle of life around her. Her life and the life she enjoyed sharing with Jivdreg was a slow and gentle one.

Yet even within the gentle nurturing of his mother, Jivdreg’s indolence was a family joke.

He smiled now, reminiscing about his childhood with happy contentment.

♦

Rinaedra still loved to quietly spend her days walking among the vast groves, communing with the nature she loved so dearly. Jivdral often walked with her, with his mind turned both inwards and outwards at the same time, constantly drawing from his inherent yldryf knowledge and always adding to it the knowledge which he gleaned from his daily life.

Jivdreg’s upbringing was diverse to say the least yet, despite all the years of teaching that Jivdreg received, his father’s greatest joy was in instilling in his son the passion that he himself had for his yldryf heritage. Jivdreg soaked up the traditions shared by Jivdral like a sponge, but that was all that they were to him – traditions - customs from ages past.

Jivdral never expressed his regret to either Rinaedra or Jivdreg but he was disappointed that Jivdreg could not feel the passion of yldryf. Profoundly disappointed.

All the knowledge was, of course, imbedded in Jivdreg’s mind already but knowledge in and of itself neither was nor ever has been sufficient. It was the passion for yldryf which needed to be passed down to descendants from within their lineage from parent to child. It was that passion that Jivdreg did not seem to have and Jivdral often wondered if he had failed as a father in not passing his own very real yldryf passion on to his son,.

Knowledge, without passion, enthusiasm and a commitment to necessary continual growth, is always a dead thing. Many cultures and languages continue to die because of exactly that apathy.

“I suspect that if my yldryf inheritance depended solely on me, it would go the same way,” Jivdreg thought wryly.

♦

The tug on Jivdreg’s mind intensified without warning and he sat up with a start.

“Something is definitely wrong,” he thought.

He felt the desperate need to run.

The sensation was so foreign to him that he laughed out loud at himself, but only for a moment.

He was instinctively obeying the yldryf call of aeons, although if anyone suggested it, he would have thought that they had lost their mind.

He picked up his shirt and quickly drew it over his head and, while still getting his arms into the sleeves and smoothing out the creases, he found himself running as fast as he could towards the Archaise.

Jivdreg was out of breath and his legs felt like jelly from his unnatural exertion when he rounded the corner and saw Lebrowen and Malyran just about to sit down.