[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/Cr9MNcF.png[/img][/center][center][color=#2E2C2C]─[/color][color=#302E2E]─[/color][color=#323030]─[/color][color=#343232]─[/color][color=#363434]─[/color][color=#383737]─[/color][color=#3A3939]─[/color][color=#3D3B3B]─[/color][color=#3F3D3D]─[/color][color=#413F3F]─[/color][color=#434242]─[/color][color=#454444]─[/color][color=#474646]─[/color][color=#4A4848]─[/color][color=#4C4A4A]─[/color][color=#4E4D4D]─[/color][color=#504F4F]─[/color][color=#525151]─[/color][color=#545353]─[/color][color=#575656]─[/color][color=#595858]─[/color][color=#5B5A5A]─[/color][color=#5D5C5C]─[/color][color=#5F5E5E]─[/color][color=#616161]─[/color][color=#636363]─[/color][color=#666565]─[/color][color=#686767]─[/color][color=#6A6969]─[/color][color=#6C6C6C]─[/color][color=#6E6E6E]─[/color][color=#707070]─[/color][color=#737272]•[/color][color=#757474]⋅[/color][color=#777777]⊰[/color][color=#797979]༻[/color][color=#7B7B7B]༒[/color][color=#7D7D7D]︎[/color][color=#808080]༺[/color][color=#7D7D7D]⊱[/color][color=#7B7B7B]⋅[/color][color=#797979]•[/color][color=#777777]─[/color][color=#757474]─[/color][color=#737272]─[/color][color=#707070]─[/color][color=#6E6E6E]─[/color][color=#6C6C6C]─[/color][color=#6A6969]─[/color][color=#686767]─[/color][color=#666565]─[/color][color=#636363]─[/color][color=#616161]─[/color][color=#5F5E5E]─[/color][color=#5D5C5C]─[/color][color=#5B5A5A]─[/color][color=#595858]─[/color][color=#575656]─[/color][color=#545353]─[/color][color=#525151]─[/color][color=#504F4F]─[/color][color=#4E4D4D]─[/color][color=#4C4A4A]─[/color][color=#4A4848]─[/color][color=#474646]─[/color][color=#454444]─[/color][color=#434242]─[/color][color=#413F3F]─[/color][color=#3F3D3D]─[/color][color=#3D3B3B]─[/color][color=#3A3939]─[/color][color=#383737]─[/color][color=#363434]─[/color][color=#343232]─[/color][color=#323030]─[/color][color=#302E2E]─[/color][/center][indent][indent][indent][indent][justify][color=bdbdbd][h3][sup][sup]𝕿he nearer the pony clopped and whinnied toward the Ansbourg Imperial Command Academy's gatehouse was all the tighter Tilly tensed in the shoulders; all the more that she indulged her dreadful habit of turning her head this way and that, sensing, whisker-like, for the scrutinies of the quickly-gathering throng. So very cat-like in that way, the countess remarked. How hypocritically her baby sister hungered for contemplation, [i]hunted[/i] the appreciativeness of others; until she had these, pierced and wriggling betwixt her teeth, and knew no longer what to do with them; and so always scorned them in the end, the way cats scorn the mouse once still and silent and spent of all its struggle. Always longing for little considerations—letters, lockets, cameos—anything to prove they cared—but less than a glance and a smile would send her away again to the farthest corners of the room, to the cloisters, to her locked and barricaded bedchamber, red-faced, flutter-chested. Ah. Young, fickle Tilly. How dearly she wanted father in Rodon, mother in the Afterweald, and all her cousins and cadets all over the duchy to see her now, so trim and regal in her uniform. Paradoxically, how shy and scarlet she would turn when came that precious moment.

Helgeða wondered. Was it truly so humiliating to be seen like this?—in clothes unfamiliar, perhaps a bit ill-fitting before the tailor's magic touch, but dashing all the same?—making a bit of an entrance astride a noble steed? (And with such an elegant, beautiful lady clinging to her hip, just like in the periodicals!) Still, with no small arsenal of ways to tease and embarrass the younger Guillarmes daughter, but with no one about to amuse by it, she sighingly obliged; hardly waiting for the rouncey to slow to a trot before sliding off the saddle, and stumbling forward to a halt. She busied herself upturning her pipe and scraping out the last of the ashes onto the dusty white ground while Tilly, at her own pace and with far greater measure of practiced dignity (she was feeling by now, after all, quite bashful around the crowd), also dismounted. The breeze of course had been nice while it lasted, but there again stood the two in the morning heat (growing hotter by the hour), their skins beginning to notice the languid, leaden air, the most unmentionable crooks and crevices of their bodies once more dampening under their fineries. Dignity, indeed.

The two set their hands to dusting the road from their boots, smoothing the seats of their hems; Tilly, for her part, knew then as the time to affix her shako, straighten the plated strap about her ears. While they preened, the countess could not help noticing that the thickest of the throngs had gathered 'round a particular four-wheeled coach, its team of draft horses caparisoned in a vivid orange. (Or was it [i]tenné[/i]?) One of a station as modest as hers should not risk venturing too near, lest she presumed to stand in the presence of an Emperor's son, a Prince-Elector's second cousin, or gods know who; but she made the most of her vantage, rising to her tiptoes and straining for a better look.

"What are you doing?"

"Oh," exclaimed the countess, arranging, in its surprised, flighty sort of inflection, for that curt syllable to come off rather offhanded, less like absentmindedness than an interruption, "I don't suppose we know the next time we will be able to meet, do we?"

"With my luggage to unpack, my [i]Fahnenjunker[/i] certificate to notarize, campus to find my way around, first classes to attend," Tilly, having either not noticed or not minded, rambled off with a lengthy, contemplative pause—"......no. I would suppose not."

"[i]C'est la vie.[/i] Not the moment I would have chosen, but, 'tis the moment which will have to suffice."

"Moment?" replied the curious, smirking, and only slightly alarmed Hloþhilde. "Moment for what?"

Turning her gentle, quiet contempt from the clamorous crowds back to the pony she still clutched by the mouth, reins to bit to teeth, Hellie gave a nod toward its haunches. "Saddlebag. Starboard side."

Hloþhilde looked, too, and gave the animal's strong, skittish hindlegs a wide berth while wandering over to its other shank.

Afforded a second moment to catch a glance at the visitors in the coach, Hellie looked just in time to watch its doors swing wide. Two—no, at least three of them stepped out from the carriage, offering the coachmen no regard. However, someone who stood eminently prominent amongst the gathering crowd, in his tall and plumèd bicorne, and full dress beneath that—he had their full attention and address.

"Damn," Hellie whispered, not afforded a good look at any one of them with the wide-swung carriage door obscuring the arrivals' faces, and the backs of all those heads obscuring the host. She looked back to her darling sister, who rooted through the wrong saddlebag, and rolled her eyes. "The [i]other[/i] starboard."

"Silence."

"Thank the gods 'tis not the naval academy you enrolled for, ay, Tilly?"

"Shut up!"

"Oh, my lord—just [i]open it already.[/i]"

Having said that, Helgeða could all but read her darling Tilly's thoughts in their unfurling metamorphosis from irritation to confusion to wonder. A gift—what could it be, and whom from?—how precious, her childlike enthusiasm, overtaking her like a fever! First she found the right compartment, and identified the thing by its velour wrapping, its silk ribbon, not a crate of punches and stains for re-tooling a broken saddle, no mere cigar box or half-sack of rations, but [i]the[/i] box, [i]her[/i] box—and drawing it from a leather tube-scabbard, seeing that it was many times longer than its breadth, feeling in her delicate hands the weight and the balance of it—the girl-woman, without yet reaching to unravel the knot, already had begun to infer.

Her disappointment matched only her need not to show it; to let the expected courtesies prevail.

"I cannot accept this," she said pensively.

"You can and you will."

"Hellie......"

"Darling," she interrupted. "Dearest. Respectfully, I did not spend ten [i]gyldmarks[/i] and three weeks back-and-forthing with that—......horny toad of a blacksmith for you to rebuff now. [i]Then,[/i] I did not spend three days by train, then one more by horseback coming all this way, bringing it to you, all for you to not even open it up and look inside." She stepped nearer, and Tilly had under her belt a lifetime of knowing what to expect from her elder sister when she was feeling saucy and enraged. But in lieu of the expected flick to the forehead or tug of her downy, drab hair, Tilly was pulled in close, and held taut about the shoulders. "'Tis yours," said Hellie. "And I will hear no more argument."

When they pulled away she could see Hloþhilde's curiosity getting the better of her, working hard to eat away at and supplant all her reservations. But what reservations they were. A lifetime of such disappointments had turned the thing gloomy since girlhood. Already she was expecting it to snap in twain in its first swing; or for the hilt to start rattling, such that no glue or binding could make it [i]cease[/i] rattling, as with the piece she had once deemed her favorite, a cheap, skimped-upon thing purchased at groaning duress by their pinch of a father, as if buying a wide-eyed daughter her first blade had massively burdened the house coffers. If not that then some bullyish upperclassman would steal it from her, or it would slip from its frog and be lost forever in the sucking muds of a riverbed, or destiny would assure one or another way that she was deprived of her keepsake in the very same hour wherein she'd finally allowed herself to grow fond of it.

In one final burst of abstinence, Hloþhilde protested, "'Tis not regulation dress......They surely will not bid me wear it on campus......"

"Then wear it on the weekends," Hellie countered. "On fine, cool evenings after class. While walking the streets of Ansbourg, riding through the woods beyond the outskirts, going dancing with your new friends, treating them to noontime supper—surely these headmasters and disciplinarians cannot decide what a gentlelady wears then?"

And there it was: the final blow to beat down all of Tilly's gates, her portcullises, her ramparts. Her sensibilities had stood no chance against Hellie's doggèd obstinance, but they had certainly put up a better fight than usual. Unfurling the ribbon and allowing it to snag on the breeze, fluttering and scuttling away along the white, foot-tamped ground, the younger sister opened the lid of the box by its hinge, and stared down into the plush silk cushions which safeguarded her gift from all possible scratching; so soft they seemed knitted from rainclouds, from birdsong on a summer night.

"It's beautiful," she sighed, working tirelessly to dam up her affections while they threatened to overwhelm her, and burst out all at once as a single deluge. "Thank you, Hellie."

"'Tis from all of us. And we are all so very proud of you," Hellie said. "Please remember that."

"I will." But Hloþhilde hesitated to ask; had to muster up the courage to ask. Employ all her little tricks, refusing to make eye contact, pretending she spoke to herself......

"......Even father?"

"Especially father." The countess drew a breath she hadn't noticed she needed until her chest started aching, the last breath gone stale and hot inside of her. "Well! I can hardly be holding this beast during the ceremony, can I? I'd better go and have him stabled. Ah, and I should find a few locals to ask about some decent restaurants nearby. We cannot have your going-away supper being dry and stodgy like that cake—[i]hoomph![/i]"

"Prithee stay," Tilly whimpered, muffled by the fabrics at her sister's back; for she'd very nearly tumbled the both of them over with the running, tackling hug she'd sent slamming into Hellie's waist just after the latter had turned to find a stable-boy.

"Urgh—uh—" Hellie struggled—"sweet sister, is this not conduct unbefitting a—?"

"I don't care." The squeeze tightened, the breaths, already laboring in the heat and the fine clothes and the nearby stink of hay and manure, grew ever the more difficult to draw. "I cannot wait until Solstice to see you again. Please, please leave me not."

Hellie gasped, and upon hearing this found herself the one having to be stoic. It was nothing at all like she'd come to expect of courage, surrounded by all this pomp and circumstance. Not at all like the reassurances offered to an aging old earl who feared for the slow death of his legacy. Not at all like sitting at the end of the birthing bed. The deathbed. Countess Helgeða du Guillarmes smiled softly.

"We will meet for dinner in a few days, and you will regale me about your first week at academy," she promised, in her reassuring, cooing, big-sisterly way. A tone Tilly had heard all her life, from broken toys to scraped elbows to the burial of an old and sickly hunting-dog. "Thereafter we will write. Every week if you wish it. And in three years, just three short, miniscule years, you will not have to be brave anymore. Because a hero you will be, and a hero returned to us. But for now—" wriggling about face in the midst of this death-squeeze which had not yet relented, Hellie put a hand to the small of her sister's back, and another to her collarbone, and softly but sternly corrected Tilly's posture. "Dignity. Poise. And courage in all things. Promise me."

Sweet, darling Tilly's face, wrenched with grief and trembling; about the lower lip, about the wrinkles of the nose. "I promise," she mewled.

Helgeða embraced her once again. "Good girl. I love you so much."

"I love you too. All of you."

The countess pulled away again. "I shall return in time to find a seat by the door," she said, and knew there and then that she had to turn, to leave at once, and decisively; using the pony as an excuse again if she must, but to depart. Quickly; heartlessly. Before she, herself, no longer had it in her to be brave.

Now only time would tell whether Hloþhilde could break free of her most childish tendencies. No longer could she be seen clutching at her big sister's skirt, or running to her dour father to grudgingly solve her problems. Albeit in a circumstance the young countess could never have anticipated, the time had come to see what Tilly, her Tilly, could accomplish on her own. Her own skill, her own wits, and her own reputation. Yes. One last bravery, just this once to see the babe off on a high note, and then it was Tilly's turn.

Like a trout gutted of its innards did Hloþhilde stand there, watching Hellie go; feeling like some vital part of herself, priceless and irreplaceable, was departing from this world forever. For three months would she go without seeing her [i]château[/i]—feeling the cold mountain air blustering between the pillars of the cloister, smelling the air perfumed down in the valley by the flowering Nierreux grapes—the same manservants changing her sheets, the same grandfatherly castellan who saw to her breakfasts and lessons......Three little months and yet to a girl who had gone not three days without these comforts at a time, they seemed a cold and desolate lifetime. So there she stood, clutching the box, her only memento to remember them by, seeming still warm with Hellie's tender touch.

And before her, the very first first step to take in her journey, the very first threshold to cross over on her way to heroism: the academy's gatehouse, replete with raised portcullis and imitation murderholes, and beneath those features, an older gentlewoman standing at a podium, admitting a queue of students in uniform one family name at a time.

"Good morning, sirs. Lansbach, is it? Let's see, L, L......here it is. Young Herr Lansbach, you will be seated in section B, with Professor Aberstein. Yes, godspeed and best of luck to you. Good morning, sir, last name, please? Let's see, Pfalaner......Is that by chance spelled with an F, or a P-H? Ah, I see......You're also in section B, with Professor Aberstein. Have a great year. Good morning, [i]Fräulein.[/i] Family name, please?......"[/sup][/sup][/h3][/color][/justify][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][center][color=#2E2C2C]─[/color][color=#302E2E]─[/color][color=#323030]─[/color][color=#343232]─[/color][color=#363434]─[/color][color=#383737]─[/color][color=#3A3939]─[/color][color=#3D3B3B]─[/color][color=#3F3D3D]─[/color][color=#413F3F]─[/color][color=#434242]─[/color][color=#454444]─[/color][color=#474646]─[/color][color=#4A4848]─[/color][color=#4C4A4A]─[/color][color=#4E4D4D]─[/color][color=#504F4F]─[/color][color=#525151]─[/color][color=#545353]─[/color][color=#575656]─[/color][color=#595858]─[/color][color=#5B5A5A]─[/color][color=#5D5C5C]─[/color][color=#5F5E5E]─[/color][color=#616161]─[/color][color=#636363]─[/color][color=#666565]─[/color][color=#686767]─[/color][color=#6A6969]─[/color][color=#6C6C6C]─[/color][color=#6E6E6E]─[/color][color=#707070]─[/color][color=#737272]•[/color][color=#757474]⋅[/color][color=#777777]⊰[/color][color=#797979]༻[/color][color=#7B7B7B]༒[/color][color=#7D7D7D]︎[/color][color=#808080]༺[/color][color=#7D7D7D]⊱[/color][color=#7B7B7B]⋅[/color][color=#797979]•[/color][color=#777777]─[/color][color=#757474]─[/color][color=#737272]─[/color][color=#707070]─[/color][color=#6E6E6E]─[/color][color=#6C6C6C]─[/color][color=#6A6969]─[/color][color=#686767]─[/color][color=#666565]─[/color][color=#636363]─[/color][color=#616161]─[/color][color=#5F5E5E]─[/color][color=#5D5C5C]─[/color][color=#5B5A5A]─[/color][color=#595858]─[/color][color=#575656]─[/color][color=#545353]─[/color][color=#525151]─[/color][color=#504F4F]─[/color][color=#4E4D4D]─[/color][color=#4C4A4A]─[/color][color=#4A4848]─[/color][color=#474646]─[/color][color=#454444]─[/color][color=#434242]─[/color][color=#413F3F]─[/color][color=#3F3D3D]─[/color][color=#3D3B3B]─[/color][color=#3A3939]─[/color][color=#383737]─[/color][color=#363434]─[/color][color=#343232]─[/color][color=#323030]─[/color][color=#302E2E]─[/color]

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