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Save Point: The Hunting lodge

Kilseth maintains a hunting lodge up in the mountains. A silva-wood walkway curves out past it, suspended over nothingness, with a view of bush and bay below. The building itself is on firmer ground, entrance fronted by a central support pillar beneath the high of the steeply angled roof as though it was a tribal hut, but the iconography is different, a tall greystone statue of a sethuress grown in place like a tree or a caryatid to hold up the roof. Her tits loom heavy over the scene, to cast a shadow on the entrance-way.

His mother, of course, the official weave-model adjusted to get the angles and weight distribution right to replace the original, authentic thing that she gave back to the modern-day descendants of the hill-tribes that made the first. They looked just like him, in fact more cosmopolitan if anything, and the 'original' was a third-generation copy because dead silva-wood rots, in a damp forest, and has to be replaced every few generations, so he's skeptical of her charitable gesture and sees it as a vainglory more than anything.

The roof-lifting pose makes a six-pack of tits jut out even more ridiculously. Nonetheless she was his mother and he loved her deeply, even if he can't quite understand why, happening on a wealth and power she'd always dreamed of, she sold the beautiful, light, airy house by the sea and spent a huge fraction of it to buy up a remote tract of land in the mountains, with a small estate on their lower, rolling hills and an ancient hunting lodge in the remotest, dampest corner.

The estate gives them a land-claim, true, similar to the one Sethkill's family has and which counts toward the distributed rule, a sort of free first step by way of demonstration, and the lower parts of it were perfect for the riding jackals his mother loved, having 'become acquainted' with them, as she put it, through her job. A reconciliative action toward the hill-tribe, who sensibly got out of there and headed for the Srenen long ago, could even be seen as cementing a local power base.

Yet, what he doesn't understand, is why. It was almost as though she was trying to get something back, but it was something she never had, or perhaps something she'd imagined having.

But it's his now, and he will use it. He could have the statue taken down, but it's his mother, and seeing her fills him with a memory of warmth. This is her private place, remote and hard to get to, unlike the official memorial on the estate, up on the hillside exposed to the sky, which still attracts visitors and oddly inappropriate gifts and dead flowers.

It's a working estate, so he allows a right-of-way, which prevents the weird pilgrims she attracts from disturbing the jackal-handlers and wine-makers and crafts-masters who keep him relevant, who don't care how the largesse first originated.

And of course from disturbing himself, his friends, and his special guests. They have potential. It's about time someone did something to unbalance things. Force a change.