[center][img]https://www.lagedorre.net/rp/skara/fyrkat-01.png[/img][/center]
[h3]Fyrkat ܟ [i]Skolt & Pite[/i][/h3]
Rain skirts along the dark, stacked basalt of the dozen or so squat, square towers in Fyrkat’s niþroh. Cold, it glazes the jutting uneven edges of unmortared stone with clear clean ice. Along those glimmer-tracks, the rain races and leaps into a muddy rill, normally a fine dirt path when the weather is fair. Fair it is not, flanked by a fist’s depth of dank, stinking, soot-tinged snow. So today the road wends wet through the fishing village like a tributary of the nearby Tofyrvin, itself, even now, at the start of the thaw, more a babbling brook than a river; narrow, just sufficiently deep to support passage of the lateen-sail rigged dhow traveling northward and seaward.

Like nests atop the towers, precarious hunch single room shelters of unfinished timber gable-capped with shaved bark shingles, mostly fir. There is a square hole in the side of a particular one, passable as a window. Two sets of intense black eyes, large and luminous, peer out and contemplate the overcast, mist-mantled village, the rain, the dawn fast approaching, the forceful lethal current of the river that, at this hour, must sing to better without eyes be seen.

[i]“It has been nine nights since we’ve seen the twins of day,”[/i] chirps a masculine young voice, agitated.

[i]“Skolt, we trust they follow the paths they always have, in time with timeless time,”[/i] chirps back a female voice, crisp, anxious.

It is the way of things in Fyrkat, to express a fear without giving it a name—without breathing into it evil life. Their mother, absent these nine nights, her fishing voyage taking her north upon the Tofyrvin, out to the coast, to the great western water called the Kvelhav. She was due back three nights ago. The nest felt empty. Worse, it was nearing, the day of anticipation, of day of departure. They didn’t want to leave not knowing her fate, not bidding her farewell. 

[i]“In time with timeless time, Pite,”[/i] assents Skolt, echoing the litany. 

He lifts his black, broad wing and drapes it over his sister’s round, sloped shoulders, although neither feel cold. For warmth, they have their cloaks, scarlet and violet. They have a clay stove with lump of coal burning in its belly. They are well-fed on carp and barberries. They have hope, auspiciously audible on the wind. A melody, a chirp, a call. The birdsong of their mother paddling against the current with the help of her living boat-dragon Vanptadra.