Carabas

A fragment where a character was referred to first as Silverhand, and then specifically as Airgetlám.

An army and civilian followers are camped around a castle they're allied with, south of their home. Their next ruler is with them, but he hadn't officially taken the throne yet. Now, someone still in their home country is making his own move for the throne; in response to that, the one with the army is standing up in front of his people and officially declaring himself king. This gets a mixed response - some people ask, by what right? Even though they were already following him, you still can't just crown yourself.

A woman's sitting on the outskirts of that crowd listening to his speech, by the top of a cliff, with three gnome-like creatures. She seems amused by the speech. One of the gnome-things distracts her from it by making too much noise - she casually kicks it off the cliff. One of the other gnome-things then grabs her by the foot and does the same to her, much to her surprise.

A couple who've been married for about a year are traveling together through another country in a vaguely historical-inspired setting. The husband, who's in the military, suspects his wife is unfaithful. He comes back to their room at the inn with a gift for her: a set of cords for her to use to make knotted ornaments, to hang from the wooden cases he travels with. They both behave as if this is a sincere gift, but he gave it to her to convey something unpleasant: normally, a newlywed couple would have made such things months ago, when they were first married.

I'm driving through a familiar IRL location, semi-lucid - aware I'm dreaming but still just automatically following the dream storyline. While thinking about this being a dream, I go fully lucid and remember a lucid goal, one that involves traveling to a particular building, so I set out to find it. I'm at a crossroads, and I think to myself, oh look, there's the road that leads to that place! I drive down that road for a while, and the scenery gradually stops resembling IRL.

Eventually the road curves, and rather than turning with it, I drive off the road, directly through a dry yellow bush, although it gives my car no resistance at all. I drive through the forest for a while, without a road, and I pass construction crews - men in hardhats, bulldozers, and a vast number of tree stumps that they've cut down. I begin to have trouble with visuals, things start going black and I worry that I'm waking up, but I'm able to clearly see a tree branch against the sky as I drive up a hill, looking upward, and I keep focusing on that vivid image, wondering why I can see some things and not others.

I exit the forest, away from the construction crews, and am now at the top of some rolling hills covered in green grass. In the distance, I can see a blue building flanked by white pillars, and I decide that must be the place I've been looking for. As I get closer, I see that it seems to be a school - which is not what I'm looking for - but I keep heading for it anyway, figuring it'll work out when I get there. I cross a bridge, and looking down I can see some land covered by a thin layer of water far below, a sort of web-like network of tiny streams. The place I'm looking for has a vague connection with water, so I think of this as promising.

I park in a small parking lot, a good distance away from that building. You have to walk from here, this place is the official entrance. There are a few other people around heading toward that building too. I hear sea birds. Over to my left, the opposite direction from the building, there's a low wall; I walk over to it and look down into a bay. I can smell the sea air. The bay is filled with fish - some of them are on the rocks instead of in the water, but they seem fine with this, and I have the feeling it's a visual trick to allow me to see them clearly. Similarly, there are giant versions of some sea creatures that would normally be much too small to see from this distance. I think of this as something like an aquarium. I can hear triumphant-sounding orchestral music.

I walk back to the entrance that leads to the building. The 'entrance' mostly consists of a large wooden message board with various things posted on it, including a place where people have left written messages about their visit to this place. I look it over briefly and continue on the path towards the building. At the other end of that wooden board, someone's left a backpack behind. As I look at it, I realize I'm waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's conducted a study of the languages in his country, who's so far cataloged over 300 languages and dialects. He's currently walking down a dirt road with a lot of foot traffic. Ahead of him, some people are setting up a kind of gate. A man who he's meeting here arrives through that gate, accompanied by a small escort of soldiers.

Now that they've met up, the soldiers move on ahead, leaving the researcher and this man a little separate. One of the soldiers says something to the man, and he starts to address him as 'my captain' or something similar, a title involving rank, but he catches himself after the 'my' (or the equivalent rather; this wasn't in english). This man isn't his captain (or whatever the rank was) anymore. Both the soldiers and the man are a little sad about that, though none of them show it, but walking together with the researcher rather than with the soldiers sort of rubs it in. He'd served with this group of soldiers for a long time, and he was just recently forced to resign from his post due to something that was revealed about him. It wasn't any action on his part; it was some inherent quality that he had been unaware of, something he thinks of as something like a taint, although as a disembodied observer, I believe it's not actually a bad thing in itself, whatever 'it' is.

Addressing the researcher, he identifies himself as 'language group 246' - that is, although he doesn't expect the researcher to remember him, they've met before, when he'd participated in that researcher's survey of dialects. He takes some food out of a bag - a corn cob sliced into halves - and he offers one to the researcher, who's surprised but accepts. The man is reflecting on the opportunity for conversation with this researcher now, versus with the soldiers he used to command.

3rd person, Julia's fighting something from a distance and thinking that at this rate she'll run out of supplies. She's thinking about trying to start a dialogue.

Loosely FMA-based: I/Mustang am skimming a file Julia/Hawkeye wrote, something private or at least not intended for me to read. The text's very small and I don't bother reading it in detail, but it has to do with problems she saw in the military. There's photos with it, mostly pictures of us and someone else who'd joined up with us when we were younger; the last picture is of our whole unit on a train, out of uniform. Unlike the text, they're all positive images.

On that train, when that last photo was taken. I'm waking up and realizing me and Winry fell asleep sitting up, she's wound up leaning against me, the table in front of us is covered in papers, diagrams, there's a bowl of something next to me that's gone cold. Switches to 3rd person, showing us and the rest of the unit, some other people who've been working with us, and Julia/Hawkeye sitting a little apart. She's looking around at all of us and feeling fond but conflicted: she's always had to stay a little aloof, because she can't let us find out she's working against us.