Jade Fern Grove landwirtschaft

nts: june 2, 2024 for timeline. maybe a @Heda, @Druid and/or @Anselm? <33

from the lip of the grove, he could see it, imaging its uterus shape.

he places the tracing paper over his memories with new vigor—his formal introduction to husbandry—

what he planted resembled makeshift trench burial for martyred guerilla soldiers more than anything but mahler solmenized alongside his nonetheless.

mahler.

he was still standing there!

he abruptly made start, as if crossing the forest with seven-league boots, fret as ever.

there was no green knight that would demand a blood-debt with the satyr's head, but he moved like a flighty and fearful animal, not bothering to take in arboreal backdrop in silent rumination as he once would have.

he thinks he is going to see his vater, finally.

<3

the green land below the bypass invited the temporary flight of the overwrought heda. salt stained her face amid the barred shadows which descended in and out of verdant shadow.
why didn't anselm want her? why did he stay away from the mother of the children he knew were now his? why did he not want to fix things, to mend them? did she deserve nothing? did she ask for too much?
on and on and on, until her mind drove her to dispel the tears outside of rivenwood.
she did not see the man with the scars vining along his eye-socket; she curled in a stand of ferns, shoulders jerking with the silent sobs of a rejection she could not allow to be glimpsed by anyone in the bypass.

he was in no mood to defeat the public’s perception that he was a hermetic recluse, but the spring of tears the girl wept due to her imagined apocryphal meanderings drew him in.

his persistent migraines had given him reason to believe his memory betrayed him, and he had never met “bracelet”, and (sadly) therefore “m’heda.”

when her quintessential rubicund dorsal stripe appeared in rearview, he only wondered if he was losing it.

his initial thought, he should just keep walking.

the adjacent thought that threw a wrench in his designs was, he couldn’t howl at the borders because of his disability. waiting for a patrol was less than conventional, and going from rivenwood’s first iteration trespassers and dissenters weren’t exactly sent off on their way armed with a gift basket and cheese and wine at the hip and good alms.

so partly to selfishly get passage into the bypass and partly because melancholy to him is what a porch light is to a moth he makes himself known, quickly glancing at the underglow that assaulted his eyes at the scene from the forest definitely a perfect place to sit and sob.

klaus’ own brackish countenance, steely and unreadable, raised an accusatory eyebrow, he couldn’t tell if it was a staged public display, but he’d done the proverbial oil change with his eye glands to keep himself from crying when he definitely should have indulged--so he was no expert on the matter.

she loved her children so much, but perhaps that was the very definition of performativeness. she needed to go after her small ones, the children she still thought of as so very little; even if she could not heal them, she could at least gather them beneath the eyes of god.
and yet — her heart burst with such love for her boy and for the children of druid that she knew she was bound here, and wished to be bound.
there was a shadow and then there was a man, staring at her with an expression vaguely familiar in the very sheen of its dourness.
her eyes traced with a briefly widening shock at the clawing upon his face; her ears faded, and she felt suddenly foolish to be so soaked with grief beneath the gaze of a stranger.
clearing her throat, a woman pulling a handkerchief from a faded bodice, heda wiped her eyes and offered a self-mocking parody of a chuckle. "sorry if i disturbed you," she murmured, inching up and back. "i can go," and she took a step to do just that, unable to muster more as her jawline went rigid with renewed emotion.

he lets out an unmistakeable scoff, tincutred with surprising hurt and defiance, and he remembers why his inclination for solitude provided a guardrail to the inevitable hit-and-run that were the gruesome reactions to his blemishes.

klaus pointedly focuses on her forehead than meet her eye.

heda is demure, and her sides that had melted the fat after obvious pregnancy surprisingly threadbare limbs upon observation, and to him burns without a source—not that he could have helped if he’d wanted to.

the satyr is miffed at the apology first and foremost, she lived here but was not brimming with caution!—but guarded emotion that was ready to spring.

he pushes forward with a sudden clip to keep the white moon there, a beraggled shoe-shiner on the cobblestone street who's hinting for a tip and finds the lady’s crying makes this an awkward overture.

his face softens only enough that niceties allow and he mouths not with the tone of a question but with mayhaps misplaced, desperate sureness in source: ”rivenwood.”

that shoe-shiner tugs at the sleeves at her blouse now, the hair on his arm blades of molasses, he wants the neuralgia to end.

his eyes were studiously avoidant, and heda pulled her own away with planing ears. but his bid for communication went registered with a widening of the self-same gaze. "rivenwood? is that what you said?"
there had been no sound to beckon her ear; she had only seen the name of that hallowed and winsome place spoke enough times to see it for what it was.
"i'm heda. rivenwood is — was —" her breath caught, and she searched the man with a familiarity bordering the indecent intimations of one who knows she must know.
"do you know mahler? because it's — it's the girls he raised who hold that bypass now."
and could she bear to share roof with another son of that dour gargoyle?

he forgot how short his fuse was when plainly pomping his head around like a male peacock to communicate basic phrases like, “the weather today, huh?” or “please direct me to my, while misguided, saving grace.”

yes, that’s what i said! he nodded tenaciously.

he knew not of the priest speaking gothic lyricism over head, her failed sons and daughters at such a young age, the names of the men she placed in her throat like national anthems—he could only see his suffering in this conversation and her as a obstacle in singularity.

his name placed him on the quicksands of ambivalence: viewed in both the airs of contemptible or suspect or excess versus reverent or pure or deficit.

girls? girls, plural? as in multiple girls?

he squints at her briefly but skips over this comment, how many children did this guy churn out again? he was so touch-and-go with him, relapsing on childhood memories that he hardly paid attention, in from rivenwood to paleo ….

where is he?, he mouths slowly, simmering with boyish impatience.

he rushed her, not in physical force or step, not even in bearing; only in the near-needful way he asked for mahler.
heda shook her head. "he's not here. he's not been around for a very long time." she squinted up at the scarlaced man, fighting a wince that in turn prepared itself for the force of anger she had come to expect from shadowmen with dour things to fulfill.
"last i knew, he was in the mountains." through anselm she knew he'd gone, but to say that was to remember anselm at all and it was something from which heda needed respite. he already occupied so much of her mind.
quietly she waited.
and for what, she did not know.