2024-07-24 - Delicious in Dragon 4.6.5

Ilrioth wants to taste things.

Of course he wants to hear, and see, and touch, and smell. But many of these it already has had a rudimentary introduction to - muffled voices through the shell, dim light from mood and sun, brushes of hands and hide and fur. Smell is something difficult when one is floating in amniotic fluid, and it is something they imagine is very like taste, two notes that ring in harmony.

Mother is eating now. She has eaten before, of course, many times he thinks, though there is something different about this meal. Mother feels, hm, what is this feeling? It is sour, discordant, very unlike her usual tune. A word floats into his mind and he knows it describes the feeling - guilt. It is almost like regret, but somehow more personal, with less sorrow. Mother feels... guilty? For eating?

Tuning in, Ilrioth discovers something astonishing. Or somethings, rather. Food is limited??? Food comes from Holds??? Holds are more people, far away but still somehow linked to the Weyr through food, and there must be more than that but that is not the focus of Mother's thoughts. She worries she takes too much, that others are suffering after the quake (the thought of that event, the details hazy but the emotions vivid, causes Ilrioth to twist uncomfortably) and it is unfair, perhaps, that she feasts and they do not.

The sensation is uncomfortable, unwelcome. Ilrioth understands wanting to help others, even over the helping of oneself. But if food is necessary, if Mother is allowed this food, needs this food because she is Mother - creator and guardian of the Clutch, injured in her guardianship, then is the guilt truly warranted? Then again, perhaps it is one of those feelings one cannot help. Perhaps that is why Mother is savoring the meat so, in honor and memory of those who must go without.