Submission (#3552) Approved

Wordcount: 1191 (whoops; ~2EC for over 900 words)
AP Region: Kyendi, northeast of Sulapei tucked into the bottom of one of the sloped mountains.
Elnin: Lunarity #1432 (viewpoint), Shiwu MYO#384 (mentioned briefly)
Region feature: If y'all want, this is a blanket 'feature anything I do if you guys like it' permission so.

He had returned from Zevija as the miasma had withdrawn, and there was something about sitting on the deck of an airship and watching the miasma pull back, foggy black wisps of certain death drawing away from centres of civilization and spiriting themselves away into the depths of the unexplored wilderness. He leapt off the airship onto the docks and took the first ride he could find back to the depths of Sulapei where he lived.

His house was virtually unchanged from when he’d left just before the miasmic tide had rolled in, finding that maybe journeying a bit would be better than tempting the various fey creatures within the mists. Truthfully, that was on him for finding and moving into a small abandoned house on the edge of the Rajasana, on the edges of the Overwild, but he wasn’t fussed. It was uphill and away from others, that was about all he cared for.

But he hadn’t lost his front key, and it fit as perfectly as it always did as he unlocked the door and stepped inside. There wasn’t anything on his dining room table, low and carved out of a few trees that had fallen into his garden after a storm. He hadn’t actually expected there to be. He set his backpack gently onto one chair and stretched, puffball tail in the air for a moment before leaning forward to stretch his hind legs. It was good to be home, however long he lingered, for whatever definition of ‘home’ he felt like entertaining.

It didn’t mean there wasn’t work to do, though. He had to climb onto the table to light the chandelier that would reach light where the windows didn’t, and even after he got all the windows open, all it really did was amplify just how much dust was everywhere.

He’d planned on returning home for less than a week, just long enough to sort out how exactly he was going to route his next journey. There was enough dust and cobwebs around the house to take sufficient shape to become another elnin and argue with him personally that it was going to be at least three weeks before he could consider sitting down and planning a journey anywhere farther than his nearest neighbour’s well. (The stream was closer, and it wasn’t deep, but it was moving water and that was far too much for his sensibilities. At least his neighbour didn’t mind him robbing them of freshwater in the night. He always left berries and trinkets from his travels when he did it, and they never left a note at his door to tell him to stop, so they couldn’t have been that upset.)

Getting water was relatively easy, his nearest neighbour was a quarter-mile away and the well was almost firmly between their two houses. On his way to the well, he took note of all the places he could currently gather berries and tea-leaves and flowers, and on his way back, gathered as many as he could carry. Soapwort and lye and hyacinth and wildrose and albafica, everything he was going to need for the next couple of weeks save for a trip to the market for flour and meat from the local hunters.

The hearth-fire, at least, had gotten up to a nice temperature by the time he was home with cleaning supplies and water; and he tipped a third of his bucket into the cauldron with the soapwort and lye to let it boil into proper soap that he could use.

He paused, studying the room. It might actually be easier to barter a favour from one of the local fey than to attempt to clean everything by paw. Not that it was going to help much, though- Shiwu had rescued him from the spirit world once, and he wasn’t particularly inclined to try his paws at surviving a second time without her help.

Sighing to himself, he opened his front door, and resolved to do most of the cleaning outside, where a passing merchant might notice he was home and stop by for a trade or two.

 

The Kyendi afternoon was warm and sunny, the fog driven back by the warmer temperatures and the lack of miasma pushing the fog closer to civilization to hide its poison in seemingly-unassuming gray. It wasn’t so late in the day that the sun would be hidden behind the Rajasana and cast his home into darkness lit only by the alpenglow, and he didn’t mind the sunlight while it would last.

But he’d aired out the house, at least, and set some hyacinth and albafica above the front window to dry and release some fragrance into the air as he dragged the laundry outside to be done. He’d learned somewhere between returning from Strynhalde and setting out again for Zevija to always do the laundry first, so that when he was too exhausted to clean any more, he at least had a nice clean bed to pass out in.

The fur on the back of his mane stuck up, for just a moment, a shiver crawling down his spine. He stiffened, twisting his ears back as far as they would move, listening for the forest behind him, now eerily quiet as opposed to constantly full of birds and critters and the nearby stream. Even the stream seemed to be silent, for a moment.

He didn’t look behind him: he knew better than that. But he did withdraw his paws from the bucket he was using to wash all the dust off his dishes, and lift his chin to stare straight ahead. “Whatever’s going on behind me, I don’t want to know,” he said, voice calm and clear and hopefully carrying. “But if you leave me out of it entirely and keep to your side of the yard, tonight at sunset I will leave out half the pie I got earlier today in town, and I will not question what happens to it. If I am not left out of it, I will bite, and I will yell very loudly and then someone will want to know what all the racket’s about.”

He heard nothing for a moment, and then he heard faint rustling from the bushes directly behind him, chiming with the noises of redbell flowers that he’d planted to mark the boundary between ‘his house’ and ‘the fey territory up the nearest sloped mountain’. Fey liked bells, so he’d heard, and it was a good way to tell if someone was in his yard or not when they shouldn’t be.

The redbells stopped chiming, and a bird chirped out a snatch of song, and the forest’s normal singing resumed. He nodded decisively, turning his attention back to his dusty silverware. A pie it would be, then, and if they liked the pie, the cleaning would go easier tomorrow.

He sure hoped it would. He was only so tall, and getting the cobwebs off the ceiling without asking someone else for help was certainly a task he wasn’t looking forward to. But he plunged his paws back into the soapy water, and continued on.