I know it’s been a while since we touched base in the spring, and I’ve been meaning to catch all of you up on everything happening here at Lion’s Heart, but, well, there hasn’t been anything happening here at Lion’s Heart!
The castle is well. We can now send emails most of the time, though we find the solar batteries “accidentally” drained a few times a month.
Gav, Port, and a bunch of BC34 are in the field with Rasia’s siblings and older kids. We now have more veggies than we know what to do with, thanks to their help. Their village had some pretty destructive floods in early spring, and since we’re on a hill and have a surplus of land, they’ve moved their crops up here. It’s nice having them around more often. They stay for dinner most of the time, and on the weekends, we usually have a bonfire in the courtyard where Gav makes us try the fruits of his burgeoning micro-brewery. (Alajos, Rasia’s oldest son, is polite to Gav but is also secretly growing hops along the east wall of Lion’s Heart because he says Gav’s gruit is “lacking.”) I personally prefer Rasia’s pálinka, which she makes with cherries and plums and is sweet and syrupy and shatters sobriety in less than one mug.
It’s basically a dream. A life I never knew I wanted but wouldn’t trade for anything. Simple, safe, and magical in all the little ways that matter most. Like Helm’s Deep and Hobbiton had a baby, and you’d think that I had only ever read one book series.
Speaking of, Theoden is doing very well and is currently napping under the table after an afternoon trip to the gate ruins, where I watched him antagonize a bird for an hour or so.
Yuri is okay. She and some of the other adepts have been working on regaining the use of their power and understanding the new/old laws of magic without much progress. It’s been really tough on her. The other adepts kind of look to her as their mentor, not only because she had mastered her power, but her power was literally sensing the magimystic. I’ve told her that she can’t put all of this on her shoulders, but it’s obvious she has. We don’t talk much these days, but I can see it, the weight. She hasn’t been to dinner or the great hall in a couple months, and it’s been especially tough on Port. Yuri was her everything, big sister, best friend, especially with Ali gone, and the new age has hit them both, and it sucks that I can’t do anything about it.
So that’s the catch-up, but now onto why I finally sat down to write you.
An old broken wall leading off the south of the castle finally fell over a couple weeks ago, and we decided to use the stone to build a couple of outbuildings for storage. Today, in the rubble, we found something. Something that must have been in that old wall for hundreds of years.
A journal.
It’s blank, except the front page, which was signed by its owner.
So, any idea what our non-dead time-traveling friend Saberlane was doing at Lion’s Heart several centuries ago?
) how would we unlock this journal with it? Speaking to it, writing in it?
(aww, that makes me miss En.)
) its a great starting point.
