Celyn’s Story of Getting His Adolescence

This is Celyn’s story of his adolescence; don’t read unless it has been revealed in game

There was no glassworker in Clawyn.  They had other craftspeople, of course, the cooper and the blacksmith, the potter, several people who spun the wool off the goats and one weaver to supplement the cloth they got from places that made more of that.  The teenager who was not yet called Celyn had actually done work with the cooper before, going into the woods to make sure that none of the fey objected to the trees that neded to be felled for barrels.  The mill was a walk, down in Nefyn, but of course the trade flowed freely among the villages so everyone could specialize in their terrain’s best production.

There was no glassmaker, so the bottles for wine were brought in, and only filled with the prime stuff, the drinks that would fetch the most in sale, suited to a lord’s table, who would want the sort of prestige display that came of glass bottles.  The middle-tier wine went into barrels, to sell to public houses and inns, in the Drankorian fashion, but that was too middle-class for the earl or any of the people who would pay enough money to buy the sorts of things that Clawyn wanted and did not produce in quantity, like cloth that wasn’t wool for the tailor— or more bottles.

The public house - not an inn, because who would travel to Clawyn? Not anyone who would object to a cot in the temple, at least, with its posts carved with stars - had a barrel, but it also had wine done the traditional way, in tall pots that were buried to their waists in the storeroom.  People had heard that some villages had given up doing things the traditional way entirely, in favor of more Drankorian barrels, but it was the general unspoken consensus that the promises they had made to the fey had been made in ceramic-aged wine and unilaterally changing the terms was a bad plan.

Also, many people - and the teenager who was still called Llinos agreed with them - thought it tasted better.

But really, it tasting better was not the point right now.  Llinos was not sure what the point was, precisely, but something defiant and furious was a part of it.  The physical pain, well, the herbalist could help with that, and had, but that didn’t change the sense of soul-ache, the deep, ringing wrongness of it all.  Stealing a bottle of wine and sprawling out on the temple roof wouldn’t make it better, either, but it would at least make for an entertaining way to pass the night, and if Llinos was hungover in the morning, well, another misty step jump down off the roof was safe enough with a headache and the rest could be slept off.

Some of the shingles were loose up there after last summer’s storms, and that should probably get fixed.  Someone would have to get told.  Tomorrow.  When there’d been enough sleep to get down again.  Because, to be honest, Llinos had not really thought this through fully.  That was tomorrow’s problem, though; tonight’s was drinking, and looking at the sky, and demanding that somehow the stars explain what was actually wrong.  The stars remained uninformative, however, and eventually the one who was not yet Celyn wedged in against an eave and slept, the bottle tucked in safely so it would not roll off the roof and shatter on the ground.

Morning came early, and there had been enough rest to take the magical jump down.  Nobody was awake at home, so it was easy enough to make off with a half-loaf of bread, some cheese, and a fig, and take that, and the rest of the bottle, deeper into the hills, where the vineyards gave way to trees.  Sometimes Ampelos was around here; it did not matter at the moment, as much as the space was quiet and safe enough to not produce interruption.

Most of the food was gone by the time Ampelos did, indeed, appear, unveiling himself from the shadows and shimmers that concealed him.  “You seem unwell, little bird.”

What was there to do but spread hands and shrug?  “My soul hurts.  Also I have a headache.”
The satyr picked up the abandoned bottle and eyed it.  “That is much wine for a mortal to drink alone so quickly,” he said.  “I believe you are prone to headaches when you do that.”

The teenager shrugged again.  “I’m having a bad,” the pause went long enough to get awkward, “year.”

Ampelos sat, bouncing the bottle back and forth between his hands.  “You have lost your joy.”

“That’s because things are terrible!”  There was a stick nearby that was about the right heft for a weapon, more or less, and Llinos scooped it up and took a solid whack at a nearby tree trunk.  “And I don’t even know why.  I just am wrong.  And because I’m wrong, everything I do is wrong, the whole shape of my life is wrong, and I don’t understand,” thwack, “what’s,” thwack, “wrong!”

The satyr had no idea what to do about this, honestly, but he kept the fury company until the teenager sighed, and rested a hand against the tree, and said, “I’m sorry.  I just…”

“An elk might scrape antlers against a tree when it is time for that.  Perhaps it is your time?” the satyr offered.

The one who was not yet Celyn gave him a wild, slightly unhinged grin.  “To scrape off all my soft coating and show the sharpness beneath?  It feels like that.”

Ampelos blinked; the human waved a hand.  “I’m going back home.”

“Be well, little bird,” the satyr said, concern in his tone.  But it was months before they saw each other again, months in which the teenager roiled with fury about the sense that the violence, the pain manifesting, had driven away a friend.

Not that there weren’t other things to occupy time.  Cousin Ifan let the goats get into the vines not once but twice, which wouldn’t have been so bad if goats could be trusted to just eat the leaves - which needed trimming back anyway - but they’d eat the fruit too, and that was no good at all.  Not that explaining anything to Ifan made a difference, in the end; he’d forget, or he’d do something boneheaded and a goat would headbutt him in the knee, or some such.  At least nobody let him near the pigs, he’d just fall into the pen or let them out to run wild in the hills.

There was the careful trip into the edge of the wooded hills, too, with two woodcutters, the cooper, and the ox team, to find trees to fell that would not offend the fae.  Llinos had told people about the temple roof, and had been both gratified and infuriated that the information was simply accepted, without asking its provenance.  People who minded the boundaries and the fey spaces were supposed to just know things, so it had clearly been chalked up to “that one’s uncanny” rather than the actual mischief.  They did find some trees, and left the appropriate loaves and the ceramic jug of wine, and made it back without any incident other than finding an empty wine bottle at the standing stones, the one that had been left with Ampelos.

There was the strange traveller, too, who came up, accepted the Wanderer’s Cot in the temple, stayed two days, and then went up into the hills on his own and did not come back.  That provoked immense speculation in the village which eventually interrupted the teenager on the way to the well.

“Llinos, Llinos!  Was the stranger a fey?” Tegan was absolutely the sort of person who would interrupt and want to know.

“If I knew I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”  The words came out abrupt and snappish.  It wasn’t that the question hadn’t been considered, but there were some things that everyone ought to have the sense to not bother with.

“Why not?”  Clearly, she did not have the sense to not bother, and a grating whine to boot.

“If he wanted you to know, he would have said something.”

“But you might know.  You’re…” There were all sorts of ways of putting this, and the one she chose was more or less neutral.  “You’re touched.  He might have told you.”

“And if he told me and nobody else, then it was something for the touched to know.  And not anyone else.  And I wouldn’t tell you he’d told me.  Because I am not in the business of making them angry with me, and spilling their secrets will make them angry.”  It probably came out full of the contempt and disgust that was boiling over, really, but honestly, these were basic things, things people ought to know.

Tegan had rolled her eyes and huffed off with a “What’s her problem, anyway,” and that somehow made it all worse, and sent the one who was not yet Celyn into the hills again, swinging a stick wildly at trees.

“Here, little bird, try this instead,” said a voice.

“Ampelos?”  Llinos spun to face him.  “I thought you’d gone.”  Head drooping, the teenager added, “Because I was so angry.  Hitting the trees.”

“And here you are hitting the trees again, little bird, and yet here I am.  But I have a new trick, maybe it will help.”

“A new trick?  To teach me?”

“No, little bird, to show you.”  The satyr hopped upwards, dissolving in silver mist, and reappeared on a tree branch, pipes in hand; after a pause he started to play.

Llinos’s shadow changed position, straightened, and started to move with the music, and for the first time in perhaps months, the teenager laughed.  “What are you doing?”

“Try fighting that!  The trees did nothing to you, but your inner shadows seem to be tormenting you!” the satyr responded, before resuming his enchantment with the pipes.

“Ha.”  Llinos turned on the illusion, stick raised, and prodded it, then started to fight in earnest.  The thing danced away, prancing like a satyr, with a lightness afoot that Llinos never had, but it was impossible to blame the fey for how he did his magic.  Instead, the teen pursued, and tried things.  Never one for strength, it was still possible to find ways of using speed to fight, and precision.

And over the next while of meetings, the skill came, too, and the ability to distill the forge-hot fury of the painful world into the sharp elegance of strikes.  This, to the shadow’s knee.  That, to the face.  All the strokes that would dispel the illusion and leave the human fighter panting with effort and eventual victory.

Llinos could not bear to tell Ampelos that it didn’t make anything hurt any less.  It was enough that he was back.  And even if it didn’t make the rage and pain go away, even if it didn’t make Llinos feel less out of synch with the whole world, it provided something to do with that feeling other than go around and smash things or steal things or make other mischief.

There had been the broken amphora that needed to be smashed up into little bits to mix in with the clay, and someone, knowing Llinos was full of fury at nothing anyone understood, had suggested the opportunity.  That had been good, to let out as much destruction as was lodged in one small frame on something that needed to be destroyed.  “Good grog here,” the potter had said approvingly, when Llinos had come back with the buckets of powdered clay and the mallet.  On a different day, Llinos might have asked why it was worth doing, but that day it had just been an acknowledging grunt before shuffling off.

Life continued as normal outside of Llinos’s head.  The standing stones and fairy rings and all such things got tended, and the rest of the village cycled through the season of vegetables.  Ifan did boneheaded things, and people cleaned up after them.  The goats got into the vines again, but it probably wasn’t Ifan’s fault; it was entirely likely it was just that goats are clever.  Teenagers got older, and some of them started flirting, and Llinos ignored it.

Though eventually it turned into a rather entertaining study of human nature.  Gwawr, the village beauty, was flirting with a good half-dozen boys, none of whom seemed to be aware that she was taking their antics back to Tegan, her actual love, to gossip over; Tegan had never grown out of the impulse to gossip.  Tegan was also accepting the courtship of Cadwgan the potter’s son, who was polite and earnest about it, because being on the young side for settling down didn’t mean that some people weren’t dreadfully earnest about it.  On the other hand, the Crowther twins, whose family were gifted with worksongs and performed in the public house and went down to Nefyn to play music there, were a pair of rakes who, in Llinos’s estimation, had probably broken the hearts of, fooled around with, or at the very least flirted with a good two-thirds of the youth, with Ellis more likely to make eyes at the boys than Llew.  Delwyn only flirted with the boys, but he was pretty enough that more boys than average seemed interested in flirting back.  Even cousin Ifan got in on it, though his big sister, old enough to be actually settled down, occasionally glared at people she thought might take advantage.  Nobody bothered Llinos with any of it, so it wound up interesting to observe.

Nesta, on the other hand, came to Llinos one day and just sat on a rock nearby, not starting the conversation she clearly wanted to have.  When Llinos did not oblige her by asking she said, without looking over, “I was wondering something.”

“What?”

“Do you think it’s more likely my baby will be fae-touched if I don’t tell anyone who the father is?”

“I—”  It was an impossible question.  “I know who my parents are?”

Nesta nodded, said, “That makes sense,” and wandered back down to the village, scattering a handful of berries she’d collected to the chickens, and Llinos had spent a while thinking about it and chose to be unsurprised when the pregnancy was announced, to tremendous amounts of gossip.  Interestingly, none of the village boys appeared to be anxious about it, which suggested that Nesta’s lover (or lovers, one supposed) was either older or down in Nefyn.  Llinos suspected the latter.

The problem in all of it was Idris.  Idris thought he was a catch, and was finding it difficult to get anyone to agree with him.  He was nice enough to look at, perhaps, but that was where it ended; he was belligerent when he did not get his way and seemed to think that his strength in particular should earn him special status.  He might have gotten away with that somewhere there was a guard to join, or where the farming needed that sort of power, but the vines were perennial and the vegetable field needed the plow in the spring and then weeding and care rather than force.  Since Idris did not have the dedication to craft required to do something as useful as apprentice with the blacksmith, possibly because she would not tolerate his notions about himself, he was left being generally unpleasant and irritable that not only would none of the girls give him the time of day, neither would Ellis or Delwyn.

One day, though, Idris decided that the thing he needed to do was pick fights with everyone.  He picked one with Ifan, who was almost as big as he was and impulsive enough to get into it, though his sister managed to get him to back down before anything got broken.  He picked a fight with Gwawr for flirting with other boys that weren’t him, which got Llew (currently involved in the mess around Gwawr) improvising a mocking song about him and singing it all the way down the lane.  Eventually he settled on Rhian - a mousy girl who was definitely too young for him, barely fifteen and unsure of herself - and spent a while trying to convice her to give him a kiss.  It was loud and aggravating and Rhian looked about ready to cry.

Llinos felt that the situation required more than spectating, and so hopped down and stomped over, looking up into Idris’s face.  “She’s not interested.  Leave her alone.”

Idris was visibly confused at being confronted by someone who was probably half his mass, but put his head to one side as Rhian scrambled away, looking at Llinos like he had never noticed anything there before.  “How about you, then?  You haven’t got anyone, do you?”

The concept that someone might consider Llinos a player in the flirtation game had not even begun to occur to the teen.  The blank stare that resulted was probably not terribly dignified, but it was, at least, not hopelessly out of character.

“I know, nobody’s looking to you for brains,” Idris laughed, “but you’ve got that gold hair, that’s pretty eno—”

He never finished the sentence, because Llinos punched him hard in the stomch.  Not with strength, but definitely keeping in mind where to hit.  If there had been a knife in that hand, it would have been very bad indeed.  As it was, Idris was bent double and wheezing, and Llinos was running for the hills.

It wasn’t about looking for Ampelos, or anything else, it was just a matter of getting away.  When Llinos ran out of running, the teen sat, or rather collapsed, at the base of a large tree, and pulled out a knife, tugging hair around and sawing it off in heaps of wheat-colored strands.  The teen scooped up the hair then, and held it up, and shouted incoherence to the forest.

A female figure appeared, shimmering with the colors of leaves, and gathered up the hair, gently, arranging it into a plait with a flicker of magic.  “Come, mortal child,” she said, and held out a hand.

Llinos took the hand to stand, and then let go, rather than presume.

“Come, son of the holly tree,” the nymph said again.  “You have given me a golden crown, and I will take you where you belong, to a place where I think you will be healed.”

Mutely, the person who would soon be Celyn followed.