By still waters where dark horses and black sheep rock to the rhythm of another beat

[sovay]

My niece is dedicatedly staying up until midnight to watch the ball drop in Times Square and hear me blow the conch from my parents' front steps. She curled up with me and spatch on the sheepskin in front of the fire my father built; she showed me how her newest dragon falls with his wings tightly closed against his body and then snaps them out at the last minute to catch the updraft and soar away. From the way she was curling back over my arms, my mother asked if she could do a backbend, and when she didn't know how, I showed her and she did eight in a row. I braided her hair to keep it out of her face and then she wanted to see my hair in different styles. The following results were actually created by my mother, but I record them for posterity.



It is not the worst way to see the year out. A safe one, all.

Comments

[selkie]

I knew your illustrious history! I was kidding.

(You can shoot and I can fight on horseback! We could live through at least twenty minutes of the Hundred Years' War! But let's not! Hey, 2021, forget I said anything!)

[sovay]

I knew your illustrious history! I was kidding.

I thought we were still nested in asakiyume's comment and I couldn't remember if she knew!

(You can shoot and I can fight on horseback! We could live through at least twenty minutes of the Hundred Years' War! But let's not! Hey, 2021, forget I said anything!)

Do you think it would be safer to be 75% of a nomadic steppe culture or are we just now really tempting fate?

[selkie]

I am going to carefully state that I suck at sewing anything as thick as felt, I don't like those ponies and they don't like me -- they'd probably like you, you have that revoltingly good lower posture; and we'd be in real trouble for a pharmacopoeia if we were relying on me once we crossed east of the Volga, which would put a person in a steppe culture, it's true, but at serious risk of eating the wrong headache plant.

You speak Massagetaean, right? Or at least you know a couple epics in Scytho-Sarmatian? We'll be fiiiiiine.