"Duweyno Nuy Kinazhi"

Synopsis

"Duweyno Nuy Kinazhi"

The dragons had a habit; of celebrating the dawn of each new year. Although there was no concept of calendars in the Chasm of Stars where they were from, many cultures smaller than their own had them and most of those did something to mark the shift from one set of months to another. The dragons called each month kinazhi, or "time-span", and had a phrase to welcome each new one into the world, duweyno nuy kinazhi, or "welcome new time-span".

Griffin Haggard had never met a dragon, but he knew the phrase he used, because his mother, Aurelia Haggard, who owned the Grimstead Antiques Emporium just off Bleaker Street, had met dragons in her life and had a passing familiarity with their language, Dragorean, and some of their cultural practices as well.

The new year, for most of Inglenook, was a time to memorialize the dead; it was when the period of Soultide began, a ponderous holiday during which the "oldest spirit in the world", the Alderghast, would emerge from Elder Hollow and collect the lost spirits still wandering that year. Families would gather in graveyards, spend last moments with their lost loved one's spirits, and watch the Alderghast collect it as he went by, if things went according to that plan.

In Grimstead, however, the Alderghast never showed; there was something about the Veil that surrounded the Grim Grove that kept him from turning up there, or maybe the town was just too corrupt for him to bother with. Over time, Soultide had essentially been forgotten by the people of Grimstead, and passed into the lore of uncelebrated days gone by.

The result was that folks there were left to fill in their own blanks, and being that Aurelia Haggard knew of cultures from beyond the Kingdom of Inglenook, where there were no spirits to collect nor the Alderghast to collect them, it was a new year's celebration she and her son filled the blanks with.

"Duweyno nuy kinazhi!" Griffin kept saying, as 1979 turned to 1980 OE. He was on the porch of their house beside the Antique Emporium, a warehouse-sized building where artifacts from all over the world, and the Other Realms and the Chasm of Stars too, were sold to the curious people of Grimstead when they actually managed to stop in for a spell or two.

"Here," Aurelia said, and gave him an aetheric projector which would shoot sparks of aetheric mist when he pulled the trigger.

He did so, and it began sparking, drawing on the cartridge of mist attached to the barrel for its supply.

"They always used to say dragons breathed fire," Aurelia said, "but they're really just inordinately flammable. All that scale oil, goes up like that. It can do weird things to the environment, but it can also..."

She had just finished preparing a dragon's lamp, as the Silvani elves called them; essentially, a hurricane lamp using scale oil instead of kerosene, a dragon's lamp burned bright, burned long, smelled like th3 stars if you could get up close to one, warmed up the environment, and occasionally altered it through Dragorean transmutation too.

Most of them were protected by lead shielding worked into the glass, so the effects of the transmutation were at least stymied (although lead wasn't as effective on scale oil or dragon "magic" as it was to good old Other Realms-style sorcerous workings), so it was thought that it might be safe to light such a lantern by Aurelia on that particular night.

"There," she said, setting the lantern on the porch to light things brightly for a while. "It can light up our porch and keep us warm all night long."

"That's what the other lights are for, isn't it?" Griffin asked, as there were street lights up and down the street beyond their home, and lights inside it as well.

"Technically, yes," Aurelia said, "but this is cultural. The dragons wouldn't have done this, but the Silvani sometimes do. Scale oil lantern to celebrate their hatred of the dragons-beasts, a warning to ward them off they'd put out for almost every holiday they could do so with it. Especially important at the new year, though, that's when the dragons come back to the Other Realms for another fly-by to ring in the new year each time it shows up."

Aurelia shrugged and leaned back in her chair. "Or so they say."

"I've never met an elf," Griffin said, looking from the lantern on the porch to the buildings of Grimstead beyond, all lit in the dull yellow glow of the electric street lights between them.

"Maybe you will this year," Aurelia said, looking also into the lights.

"Maybe," Griffin said, and launched more aether into the mist as the day shifted from the last of 1979, through Soultide between the years, and back toward the first day of 1980.