Cour de Roses – Watermaidens

There is an unexpected courtyard at the heart of this sprawling home. Once you enter it, it seems to be impossibly big, with a garden of wild roses.

You may surprise a lycanthropic gardener here, with gigantic gardening shears, or you may meet a wild-eyed, wild-haired woman in a gown of blood-red velvet muttering stanzas of Italian poetry under her breath. This was a forgotten courtyard before a ferahian ship deposited the last of the Gaernic exiles on Yrejveree.

The wild-eyed lady led her subjects to the domus after her demands to meet “your leader!” met with shrugs and vague fingers pointing in the general direction of the hill upon which the domus sprawled in multiple directions in haphazard fashion. After much hand-waving and vicious squabbles between the wild-eyed woman and the Caretaker of the domus, her people started the long, painful process of rebuilding their world on Yrejveree.

The wild-eyed woman claimed this courtyard as her own, although it is perhaps more accurate to say that she peremptorily occupied it; the exiles of Gaeirn started erecting pavilions as they began the slow process of transforming the surrounding, dilapidated hallways into a court befitting their exiled Lady.

Soon, the wild rose garden on the grounds outside bled into this courtyard. It is hard to tell if there is a competition going on between the rose gardens. It hardly seems so, for the profusion of wild blooms in hues of harsh scarlet, powdery and dusky pink, pinot noir-red and brazen carmine seem to reach for each other, embracing in a voluptuous-yet-deadly tangle of thorns, leaves and trembling petals.

Perhaps, like the forests of Yrejveree, it is simply impossible to tell where one ends, and where the other begins.

The Cour de Roses IF will continue once old thorny pathways through the wild rose bushes are pruned back to protect the arms and feet of unsuspecting new exiles.

The digital art page divider is made by (c) Anita Harris Satkunananthan.