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rainbowfic2025-11-05 08:24 pm
thisbluespirit) wrote in rainbowfic2025-11-05 08:24 pm
Entry tags:
Vert #11 [Starfall]
Name: Sweet Interlude
Story: Starfall
Colors: Vert #11 (Marriage)
Supplies and Styles: Silhouette
Word Count: 2343
Rating: PG
Warnings: None?
Notes: Portcallan, 1313; Leion Valerno/Viyony Eseray. (A rather slight linking piece).
Summary: Leion and Viyony attend a wedding.
Viyony slipped through an archway out of the crowded main hall and into a quiet corridor that led to a stairway up to the next floor. She straightened her wayward gauzy fuchsia shawl and stopped in front of a painting of a fabulously dressed dark-skinned woman who glared back down at her out of oil and canvas. What are you doing in my house? she seemed to demand of the observer.
"There you are."
Viyony hid a smile. She had hoped Leion would follow. "I wanted to speak to you."
"And I you."
He leant against the wall next to her and held up his arm, showing off a short length of tri-coloured silk cord hanging from his wrist. Viyony had one of her own; the same pink, green and silver threads twisted into an elaborate knot at the top.
"What am I supposed to do with this?"
Viyony removed hers and turned it over in her hand. "It's a wedding token," she said. "You must have seen one like it before."
"For the wedding party, possibly. Guests usually get sweets, regular tokens of wood or starstone, or fruit. Flowers sometimes. Is this a North Eastern tradition or is it to do with everyone being in textiles one way or another?"
"More Northern District, actually. And, yes about working in textiles, but it's the same principle as any other token—a pretty thing to help you remember them in your Ennean devotions. The threads represent the three of them twined together."
"So, we should beg that they remain suitably industrious, I take it?"
Viyony closed her hand around the token. "That's not fair. Besides, is that really so terrible? We've had the celebration—now the work begins, after all."
"Will you have these?" Leion waved his arm about. "You and Imoren."
Viyony crossed to the flight of stairs and sat on the lower steps in a puff of light fabric. Her shawl snagged on the bannister, and rather than risk tearing it, she cast it off, letting it hang there, echoing the reams of bright blue cloth that had been draped all about the house, in doorways, windows, mirrors, and round the portrait. Her throat constricted. "I don't think so. Imoren may have money, but not the kind flying around here."
"Aren't they your friends?"
She shook her head. "Itiya Qerenta is a connection of Aunt Diyela's. I know Ayllo Sirayne quite well, but I've only seen Omenna Ghiyid once before. We do business with the Sirayne family, so I had to come with Ivina on Eseray's behalf. I didn't expect to see you."
"My mother and Imai Diyela have a whole set of friends and connections in common," said Leion. "The Valernos are from Eastern originally. So, being as busy as usual, she recklessly asked me to represent the family." He moved nearer and put a hand on the bannister, looking down at her. "She said you'd probably be here, so I agreed."
Viyony raised her head. "I wanted to see you too, but if you're going to make comments about Imoren, I'm not so sure."
"I'm sorry." He smiled at her, unfairly, and then set about freeing her shawl from the bannister. Once he had extracted it, he dropped it, letting it float down onto her lap. "I thought it'd be an excellent chance to run into you casually and ask you to go to the Sea Festival with me without seeming as if I was pressuring you about whether or not our fling is ever to be."
Viyony shifted to one end on the step, making room for him, and he sat down beside her.
"Tana said Chiulder tried to hurt you. Are you all right?"
"Tana told you?"
"She thought I'd know," said Viyony. "She imagines you and I talk to each other. Are you all right, Leion? What happened?"
He held her gaze. "It wasn't fun, but I'm fine. I'll live—and all he achieved in the end was his own destruction."
"What do you mean?"
Leion screwed up his face. "He took something to amplify his affinity. Stole the whole bottle, from what we could make out. More, maybe. He -" Leion's voice failed. He leant in nearer and lowered his voice. "He dispersed. Physically, not metaphorically. Right in front of us."
"That's not possible!"
"Oh, it is. And I don't want to see anything like it again." He grasped her hand suddenly. "So you be careful."
"I've said I will," she assured him. "Besides, whatever happens, I wouldn't do something like that to myself on purpose."
He released her. "Yes. I know. Now, answer my question—will you come to the Sea Festival with me?"
"Probably."
"Probably?"
Viyony laughed. "Provisionally, then. As in, yes, I would love to, but I will have to make sure that Aunt Diyela and Ivina won't mind."
"Well, if they can't spare you for the first night, I'll take you to any of the other events on any of the other days you choose," said Leion. "All of them, even, although I suspect you wouldn't like the fish market."
She shook her head. "I'll let you know! Come on, we must go back to the party."
"Must we? I was thinking of taking my leave. This is rather more of a grand affair than I'd expected, although I suppose I should have guessed it might be. Ghiyid is a cousin of some branch or other of the Hyans and clearly, as you say, there's money in the air."
Viyony glanced about them, checking no one else had come this way. "You don't need to tell me. Itiya has had three engagements over the past four years, and I think they've now found the richest possible combination—and here we are."
Leion raised his eyebrows. "Don't you approve?"
Viyony sighed and pressed her head against the bars of the bannister. "No! It's not as if they have to. Besides, you saw the ceremony—they had an avowal. Imoren and I aren't going that far. If people are going to be mercenary about things, I think they should at least be honest."
"They might actually like each other," said Leion. "It does happen, you know. Even in these circles."
She wrinkled her nose. "Maybe."
"It's a shame I'm not fabulously wealthy," Leion mused, gazing off into the middle distance.
Viyony straightened so fast she nearly knocked her head against the top of the bannister. "Leion! Do think what you're saying for a minute. You're not proposing a hypothetical mercenary match, are you?"
"No," said Leion. "Only think, though. I could invest my money in a promising dye works in the Eister Ranges called Eseray, and then you would be free to go back to the back end of nowhere and marry whomever you like, whenever you like, because I don't make conditions about marrying people before I sign business deals."
"I won't go to the Sea Festival with you if you're going to be tiresome."
Leion jumped up. "How about I go to Copperfort and make my fortune? What then, eh?"
"Then you'd be rich," she said. "And you'd keep it all for yourself and be obnoxious, because that's what people do. Besides, all the fortunes in Copperfort belong to other people already."
"Exactly. They say some are so wealthy they have whole underground vaults of gold and gems and starstone that they've forgotten -"
"Oh, now it's a robbery," said Viyony. "Or you're planning to dig your way into unstable lost tunnels and caves, I suppose. What could possibly go wrong?"
"Everything, with that kind of attitude."
She rolled her eyes.
He leant against the end of the bannister and looked down at her. "You will let me know about the Sea Festival? I've got tickets to the party in Aliate Green, and I'd love to take you. It's quite something. And purely as information, I've got a client of sorts who goes away during the week of the Festival and I look after his Riverside apartment while he's away—and I can use it if I like as long as I leave everything as I found it."
"On both counts," said Viyony, "I will let you know."
"Just so you know," said Leion. "I mentioned nothing—I shall wait. Hoping for a yes, and before it's too late, but I'm not asking."
Viyony got to her feet. She readjusted her shawl and took a step back towards the main room. "All right." She smiled at him, and was about to say something else, but before she could open her mouth, one of Itiya's relatives marched down the corridor, Leion in her sights, and pressed a tiny basket still full of wedding sweets into his hands.
"For your mother, Leion," she said, and kissed his cheek. "As promised. And a few extra—we have so many left!" She drew back. "Now, don't forget."
"I won't," he promised.
They both watched as the woman moved away in a softly rustling cloud of vivid pink.
"Who was that?" Leion whispered.
Viyony shrugged. "One of Itiya Qerenta's family, but I'm not sure which. She knew you!"
"Maybe she thought I was someone else." Leion sat back down on the stairs, and examined the contents of the little woven basket. "Oh. Ivedene's. Mother does have a thing for -" He rattled it gently, to reveal the full range of differently shaped and coloured sweets and poked at a white, square-shaped piece of candy. "Yes. These, I think? There's a shop in Aiamance Arcade. Very exclusive."
"Like Dala's?"
"Dala's are gutter goods in comparison," said Leion. He studied the basket's contents for a short while longer and then picked out a pale lemon coloured oval.
"Leion!"
He popped it in his mouth, and brushed sugar dust from his fingers. "She said I could!" he said, rather indistinctly and held out the basket to Viyony. "But not the white ones, because those are Mother's."
Viyony pulled out a round sweet. She bit into a hard, candied bitternut shell and found a soft orange centre, and then clapped her hand to her mouth as the full range of flavours came through. "Oh, that's strange!"
"I'm sorry?" Leion tilted his head. He reached for a tiny pear-shaped pink pastille and ate that too, before reluctantly setting the basket aside.
"It's odd," said Viyony, more coherently now she had swallowed hers. "But the kind of odd where you need another one to decide whether or not you like it."
Leion laughed and then held out a second to her.
"Your mother -?"
"She'll be happy for you to have the odd ones."
Viyony looked down at him. He looked back at her. "I don't mind if you try to persuade me a bit more," she began, more quietly. "We were both rather tired last time, so -"
"Oh," said Leion, and stood up. "You want me to provide further evidence in support of my case?"
"I like to be thorough."
He tugged her round the bannister's end, and into the shadows of the space under the stairs. "Well, that sounds promising." He kissed her—candy-stained kisses that tasted vaguely of roses and lemon—and then drew back, a dent forming in the middle of his brow, and said in her ear, "You're right, those sweets of yours are strange - but -"
She laughed and pulled him in closer, and entirely forgot about returning to the main party, but suddenly it found them, as a group of people headed along the corridor towards them, careless footsteps and loud voices approaching from the other side of the stairs.
They froze under the steps, Leion with his arm around her. "Burn it," he said under his breath.
She put a hand up to his arm, gently signalling him to let go, and she emerged into the path of the newcomers. "Imor Sirayne, isn't it?" she said to one of the men. Leion, pressed back against the wall under the stairs, straightened his shirt, and then, after a pause, emerged as casually as he could and strolled over to stare at the large portrait Viyony been looking at before he turned up.
"Yes, ah—er -?"
"Imai Eseray," Viyony said to Sirayne, and smiled. She put a hand up towards the material draped as wedding decoration over the archway, around the portrait's frame and covering the door at the far end of the corridor. "Is this the new fabric Ayllo mentioned last time we met? I was admiring the texture earlier. Wasn't I, Leion?"
"If you say so, I'm sure you were."
"We may be able to put in an order with you again soon," Viyony said. "Once Imoren is here, I could get in touch -"
Sirayne swayed slightly, and the man with him had to catch his arm to steady him. "Yes, yes, splendid—another time, eh? Not a day for business!"
"No, of course not." Viyony stepped back and clasped her hands in front of her, lowering her head, and watching them walk away through the door at the end.
Leion retrieved the basket of sweets. "Well," he said, "we are not the brightest sparks in the communal oven, are we? Carrying on at a party full of people who do business with you and your betrothed, and for good measure, a whole set who know my mother and your great-aunt."
They weren't discreet, were they? Viyony's heart twisted. Leion wasn't, and she was beginning to think she wasn't, either. She pulled down her mouth. Then she said, "Where's my other sweet?"
Leion dived down and retrieved it for her. "Is that all you can say?"
"No," she said, more soberly as she took it from him, their fingers touching. "The next thing is that I should return to the party—and I think you said you wanted to go home?"
He drew himself up, his amusement falling away from him. "Yes. So I should. And the Sea Festival -?"
"Yes," she said. "I'll be there—I'll make sure of it."
Story: Starfall
Colors: Vert #11 (Marriage)
Supplies and Styles: Silhouette
Word Count: 2343
Rating: PG
Warnings: None?
Notes: Portcallan, 1313; Leion Valerno/Viyony Eseray. (A rather slight linking piece).
Summary: Leion and Viyony attend a wedding.
Viyony slipped through an archway out of the crowded main hall and into a quiet corridor that led to a stairway up to the next floor. She straightened her wayward gauzy fuchsia shawl and stopped in front of a painting of a fabulously dressed dark-skinned woman who glared back down at her out of oil and canvas. What are you doing in my house? she seemed to demand of the observer.
"There you are."
Viyony hid a smile. She had hoped Leion would follow. "I wanted to speak to you."
"And I you."
He leant against the wall next to her and held up his arm, showing off a short length of tri-coloured silk cord hanging from his wrist. Viyony had one of her own; the same pink, green and silver threads twisted into an elaborate knot at the top.
"What am I supposed to do with this?"
Viyony removed hers and turned it over in her hand. "It's a wedding token," she said. "You must have seen one like it before."
"For the wedding party, possibly. Guests usually get sweets, regular tokens of wood or starstone, or fruit. Flowers sometimes. Is this a North Eastern tradition or is it to do with everyone being in textiles one way or another?"
"More Northern District, actually. And, yes about working in textiles, but it's the same principle as any other token—a pretty thing to help you remember them in your Ennean devotions. The threads represent the three of them twined together."
"So, we should beg that they remain suitably industrious, I take it?"
Viyony closed her hand around the token. "That's not fair. Besides, is that really so terrible? We've had the celebration—now the work begins, after all."
"Will you have these?" Leion waved his arm about. "You and Imoren."
Viyony crossed to the flight of stairs and sat on the lower steps in a puff of light fabric. Her shawl snagged on the bannister, and rather than risk tearing it, she cast it off, letting it hang there, echoing the reams of bright blue cloth that had been draped all about the house, in doorways, windows, mirrors, and round the portrait. Her throat constricted. "I don't think so. Imoren may have money, but not the kind flying around here."
"Aren't they your friends?"
She shook her head. "Itiya Qerenta is a connection of Aunt Diyela's. I know Ayllo Sirayne quite well, but I've only seen Omenna Ghiyid once before. We do business with the Sirayne family, so I had to come with Ivina on Eseray's behalf. I didn't expect to see you."
"My mother and Imai Diyela have a whole set of friends and connections in common," said Leion. "The Valernos are from Eastern originally. So, being as busy as usual, she recklessly asked me to represent the family." He moved nearer and put a hand on the bannister, looking down at her. "She said you'd probably be here, so I agreed."
Viyony raised her head. "I wanted to see you too, but if you're going to make comments about Imoren, I'm not so sure."
"I'm sorry." He smiled at her, unfairly, and then set about freeing her shawl from the bannister. Once he had extracted it, he dropped it, letting it float down onto her lap. "I thought it'd be an excellent chance to run into you casually and ask you to go to the Sea Festival with me without seeming as if I was pressuring you about whether or not our fling is ever to be."
Viyony shifted to one end on the step, making room for him, and he sat down beside her.
"Tana said Chiulder tried to hurt you. Are you all right?"
"Tana told you?"
"She thought I'd know," said Viyony. "She imagines you and I talk to each other. Are you all right, Leion? What happened?"
He held her gaze. "It wasn't fun, but I'm fine. I'll live—and all he achieved in the end was his own destruction."
"What do you mean?"
Leion screwed up his face. "He took something to amplify his affinity. Stole the whole bottle, from what we could make out. More, maybe. He -" Leion's voice failed. He leant in nearer and lowered his voice. "He dispersed. Physically, not metaphorically. Right in front of us."
"That's not possible!"
"Oh, it is. And I don't want to see anything like it again." He grasped her hand suddenly. "So you be careful."
"I've said I will," she assured him. "Besides, whatever happens, I wouldn't do something like that to myself on purpose."
He released her. "Yes. I know. Now, answer my question—will you come to the Sea Festival with me?"
"Probably."
"Probably?"
Viyony laughed. "Provisionally, then. As in, yes, I would love to, but I will have to make sure that Aunt Diyela and Ivina won't mind."
"Well, if they can't spare you for the first night, I'll take you to any of the other events on any of the other days you choose," said Leion. "All of them, even, although I suspect you wouldn't like the fish market."
She shook her head. "I'll let you know! Come on, we must go back to the party."
"Must we? I was thinking of taking my leave. This is rather more of a grand affair than I'd expected, although I suppose I should have guessed it might be. Ghiyid is a cousin of some branch or other of the Hyans and clearly, as you say, there's money in the air."
Viyony glanced about them, checking no one else had come this way. "You don't need to tell me. Itiya has had three engagements over the past four years, and I think they've now found the richest possible combination—and here we are."
Leion raised his eyebrows. "Don't you approve?"
Viyony sighed and pressed her head against the bars of the bannister. "No! It's not as if they have to. Besides, you saw the ceremony—they had an avowal. Imoren and I aren't going that far. If people are going to be mercenary about things, I think they should at least be honest."
"They might actually like each other," said Leion. "It does happen, you know. Even in these circles."
She wrinkled her nose. "Maybe."
"It's a shame I'm not fabulously wealthy," Leion mused, gazing off into the middle distance.
Viyony straightened so fast she nearly knocked her head against the top of the bannister. "Leion! Do think what you're saying for a minute. You're not proposing a hypothetical mercenary match, are you?"
"No," said Leion. "Only think, though. I could invest my money in a promising dye works in the Eister Ranges called Eseray, and then you would be free to go back to the back end of nowhere and marry whomever you like, whenever you like, because I don't make conditions about marrying people before I sign business deals."
"I won't go to the Sea Festival with you if you're going to be tiresome."
Leion jumped up. "How about I go to Copperfort and make my fortune? What then, eh?"
"Then you'd be rich," she said. "And you'd keep it all for yourself and be obnoxious, because that's what people do. Besides, all the fortunes in Copperfort belong to other people already."
"Exactly. They say some are so wealthy they have whole underground vaults of gold and gems and starstone that they've forgotten -"
"Oh, now it's a robbery," said Viyony. "Or you're planning to dig your way into unstable lost tunnels and caves, I suppose. What could possibly go wrong?"
"Everything, with that kind of attitude."
She rolled her eyes.
He leant against the end of the bannister and looked down at her. "You will let me know about the Sea Festival? I've got tickets to the party in Aliate Green, and I'd love to take you. It's quite something. And purely as information, I've got a client of sorts who goes away during the week of the Festival and I look after his Riverside apartment while he's away—and I can use it if I like as long as I leave everything as I found it."
"On both counts," said Viyony, "I will let you know."
"Just so you know," said Leion. "I mentioned nothing—I shall wait. Hoping for a yes, and before it's too late, but I'm not asking."
Viyony got to her feet. She readjusted her shawl and took a step back towards the main room. "All right." She smiled at him, and was about to say something else, but before she could open her mouth, one of Itiya's relatives marched down the corridor, Leion in her sights, and pressed a tiny basket still full of wedding sweets into his hands.
"For your mother, Leion," she said, and kissed his cheek. "As promised. And a few extra—we have so many left!" She drew back. "Now, don't forget."
"I won't," he promised.
They both watched as the woman moved away in a softly rustling cloud of vivid pink.
"Who was that?" Leion whispered.
Viyony shrugged. "One of Itiya Qerenta's family, but I'm not sure which. She knew you!"
"Maybe she thought I was someone else." Leion sat back down on the stairs, and examined the contents of the little woven basket. "Oh. Ivedene's. Mother does have a thing for -" He rattled it gently, to reveal the full range of differently shaped and coloured sweets and poked at a white, square-shaped piece of candy. "Yes. These, I think? There's a shop in Aiamance Arcade. Very exclusive."
"Like Dala's?"
"Dala's are gutter goods in comparison," said Leion. He studied the basket's contents for a short while longer and then picked out a pale lemon coloured oval.
"Leion!"
He popped it in his mouth, and brushed sugar dust from his fingers. "She said I could!" he said, rather indistinctly and held out the basket to Viyony. "But not the white ones, because those are Mother's."
Viyony pulled out a round sweet. She bit into a hard, candied bitternut shell and found a soft orange centre, and then clapped her hand to her mouth as the full range of flavours came through. "Oh, that's strange!"
"I'm sorry?" Leion tilted his head. He reached for a tiny pear-shaped pink pastille and ate that too, before reluctantly setting the basket aside.
"It's odd," said Viyony, more coherently now she had swallowed hers. "But the kind of odd where you need another one to decide whether or not you like it."
Leion laughed and then held out a second to her.
"Your mother -?"
"She'll be happy for you to have the odd ones."
Viyony looked down at him. He looked back at her. "I don't mind if you try to persuade me a bit more," she began, more quietly. "We were both rather tired last time, so -"
"Oh," said Leion, and stood up. "You want me to provide further evidence in support of my case?"
"I like to be thorough."
He tugged her round the bannister's end, and into the shadows of the space under the stairs. "Well, that sounds promising." He kissed her—candy-stained kisses that tasted vaguely of roses and lemon—and then drew back, a dent forming in the middle of his brow, and said in her ear, "You're right, those sweets of yours are strange - but -"
She laughed and pulled him in closer, and entirely forgot about returning to the main party, but suddenly it found them, as a group of people headed along the corridor towards them, careless footsteps and loud voices approaching from the other side of the stairs.
They froze under the steps, Leion with his arm around her. "Burn it," he said under his breath.
She put a hand up to his arm, gently signalling him to let go, and she emerged into the path of the newcomers. "Imor Sirayne, isn't it?" she said to one of the men. Leion, pressed back against the wall under the stairs, straightened his shirt, and then, after a pause, emerged as casually as he could and strolled over to stare at the large portrait Viyony been looking at before he turned up.
"Yes, ah—er -?"
"Imai Eseray," Viyony said to Sirayne, and smiled. She put a hand up towards the material draped as wedding decoration over the archway, around the portrait's frame and covering the door at the far end of the corridor. "Is this the new fabric Ayllo mentioned last time we met? I was admiring the texture earlier. Wasn't I, Leion?"
"If you say so, I'm sure you were."
"We may be able to put in an order with you again soon," Viyony said. "Once Imoren is here, I could get in touch -"
Sirayne swayed slightly, and the man with him had to catch his arm to steady him. "Yes, yes, splendid—another time, eh? Not a day for business!"
"No, of course not." Viyony stepped back and clasped her hands in front of her, lowering her head, and watching them walk away through the door at the end.
Leion retrieved the basket of sweets. "Well," he said, "we are not the brightest sparks in the communal oven, are we? Carrying on at a party full of people who do business with you and your betrothed, and for good measure, a whole set who know my mother and your great-aunt."
They weren't discreet, were they? Viyony's heart twisted. Leion wasn't, and she was beginning to think she wasn't, either. She pulled down her mouth. Then she said, "Where's my other sweet?"
Leion dived down and retrieved it for her. "Is that all you can say?"
"No," she said, more soberly as she took it from him, their fingers touching. "The next thing is that I should return to the party—and I think you said you wanted to go home?"
He drew himself up, his amusement falling away from him. "Yes. So I should. And the Sea Festival -?"
"Yes," she said. "I'll be there—I'll make sure of it."
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Aw.
(I like the escalation to theoretical robbery.)
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Love how Leion was getting paranoid about someone tampering with her bath soap before, and now he is accepting baskets of candy from people he doesn't know and eating it without a second thought, haha.
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XD You've got to have ambition!
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Though I admit to being briefly suspicious of Candy Lady and her Candy. But no poison, only candy kisses and you breaking my heart specifically.
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Though I admit to being briefly suspicious of Candy Lady and her Candy. But no poison, only candy kisses and you breaking my heart specifically.
Candy Lady is very random, but this was mainly a bit of worldbuilding and fluff smushed together, as I was thinking about rites/traditions etc and also, I fear the fluff may have been necessary... Poison not allowed here!