The Glenbrooke Resurrection

Easy now, Yuleth. Bank left and follow that river, nice and low.

The great gold dragon did as her rider bade and swept her huge golden wings down, banking left and following the river that snaked beneath her at a low altitude.

Sandasa once would have been able to use a recognition point to go between to the village of Yarvale, but doing so now ran the risk of careening through time by accident. All of her memorized images of Yarvale, Glenbrooke, and Blackthorn – the three villages destroyed in that fateful campaign of terror some months back – were from before aforementioned campaign of terror.

And Yarvale...looked both nothing like she remembered it and nothing like she expected it.

Yuleth touched down at the edge of the village, landing delicately next to the makeshift cemetery where someone had very respectfully buried the unknown dead and marked the graves with hand-chiseled stone. Sandasa unstrapped and dismounted, thanking Yuleth for the raised foreleg that assisted her in getting down.

The grave markers had no names, but a stranger wouldn't know what names to put on. Sandasa studied the craftsmanship on the chiseled crosses and headstones. Fair work, somewhere between hobbyist and professional in quality chiseling. Someone had felt it immensely important to give the dead dignity, even without knowing who they were. Enough to dig forty three graves and mark every single one of them with a handmade headstone.

Sandasa toured the rest of the village, evaluating the changes to Yarvale. There didn't appear to be a single building left unchanged. In fact, every single one appeared to have been torn down and replaced, and the architectural stylings were so randomly assorted that at first Sandasa was confused. But as she kept walking, kept noticing details, the houses began to speak, in the way architecture speaks, in the way art speaks.

They were all paintings signed by the same artist. The same person had built every single building in the village. Sandasa was willing to bet it was probably the headstone-carver. Someone had happened across the devastation...and had repaired it.

The Weyrwoman jogged back to Yuleth.

"Off to Glenbrooke, my love!" Sandasa trilled cheerfully, strapping herself back onto Yuleth's back. "I have the sneaking suspicion we'll find someone important there."



Sandasa knew she was psychic, but some days she was psychic.

Yuleth came in for a landing passing over the head of a redheaded woman bent over a work bench, sawing a board into size and shape. The gold dragon touched down this time in a small city of workstations, apparently how one lone woman had managed to rebuild an entire village alone.

The woman's coffee-dark eyes looked about fit to pop right out of their sockets, having probably heard wings flapping and looked up, because she was staring at Yuleth like she had never seen a dragon before. Well, maybe she hadn't.

"Weyrwoman Sandasa, de facto head of Haven Weyr," Sandasa introduced once she had unstrapped, dismounted, and made the small hike to get closer. "I saw your handiwork at Yarvale and I suspected I might find you here in Glenbrooke."

"Wh-oh! Yes, Yarvale, that was a sad little town, wasn't it? Hi, I'm, uh, I'm Jenna, Wakeland, sorry, I've never seen a dragon before."

Yuleth may have posed a little, just a bit.

Sandasa grinned. "The wonder of it never really fades. Someday, Aeon willing, maybe you'll Impress a dragon of your own, and that will be a partnership that will change your life. Anyway. I tracked you down here for a reason. It's admirable that you're rebuilding on your own, but you shouldn't be. We've had long enough to lick our wounds. The Weyr – that's where the friendly dragons live -- should be sharing in this rebuild. Carrying the weight. It...it was our failure that allowed the necromancers that did this damage in the first place to make it this far."

Jenna grinned nervously, gaze darting between Yuleth and Sandasa for a bit before what must have been some fantastic survival instincts throttled her nerves. "Well, I'm almost finished, actually. What's left...actually, it could be a two-person job? I mean, if..."

Sandasa waved the poor girl off before she could continue flailing. "Point me in the direction of what needs doing. Hard work is the Weyrwoman's job."

Once Jenna got started directing the rebuilding, it was really quite difficult to get her to stop. Sandasa was less of an effective telepath with people who were not dragonriders, but even still she could sense a deep well of lonely in this young woman. It made sense, though, the layer of rust on her conversational skills. She was knowledgeable, however, on the topic of building, despite apparently having no formal training in it.

Between the two of them, and a huge stockpile of resources Jenna had amassed before beginning -- which was waning, as the project went on, but plenty yet remained -- the rest of the village wasn't difficult to complete. Houses and barns went up in very little time, turning Glenbrooke back into a habitable environment.

It was still the strange, unrecognizable architectural mish-mash that had taken over Yarvale. But construction was solid and it would definitely do.

Together they also built a fair amount of furniture. Nothing fancy, really, but every house needed a few beds and tables and chairs, maybe a few couches here and there. As they worked Jenna explained the world she'd come from. A world that had ended, and she had been one of the few who had had to endure and start again in the aftermath.

What does one do when the world ends? One keeps going. There's nothing else TO do.

Sandasa listened as Jenna talked while they worked and learned that this young woman was a botanist, junior-class. Her education would have continued to further degrees in both botany and animal behavior, perhaps even veterinary medicine, but then a man named Doctor Mors had ended the planet with some bio-engineered plague. Jenna's expertise, then, in veterinary medicine, animal behavior, construction, engineering, architecture, various combat techniques and weapons, and generally everything else came from having had to learn it on the fly. Five years locked in a research facility was great for the intellectual training, but she'd had to leave eventually, crashed a shuttle, and had to build herself a settlement to survive. A settlement that was also an animal park, apparently, for conservation efforts. Curing what creatures were left alive after the plague so not everything would go extinct, and perhaps the planet could build anew with what was salvageable.

In that context, suddenly Sandasa could make sense of what she'd seen at Yarvale and here at Glenbrooke. What would someone with Jenna's background do except bury the dead and rebuild everything when happening across the devastation?

It was the next morning and Jenna was out of voice by the time they were done, and Jenna shared her provisions with Sandasa. Camp kitchen coffee was...less awful than the Weyrwoman anticipated, actually, good and stout and sweetened with just a touch of pure cane sugar. It was indicated she shouldn't ask what was in the sausage.

"So I imagine you're probably tired of building, by now," Sandasa commented between bites and sips, while Jenna gnawed on a length of suspicious-looking salami. "There is one more village that we lost to this tragic sequence of events, and the damage dealt there was...catastrophically worse. Yarvale and Glenbrooke were the beginning. Resources gathered. Blackthorn was the culmination. I fully intend to have my riders begin the rebuilding process now that they have had sufficient time to rebuild themselves, but I would also like to request your assistance, your guidance. You clearly have experience rebuilding."

Jenna chuckled. "You could say that. I was planning to anyway. Er, I didn't know the village's name, exactly, I just...I could see the tracks. I know who or whatever did this here had moved on. And...I don't know, call it habit. I need to make sure everyone is taken care of." She sounded hoarse from talking too much.

Sandasa got the impression that didn't happen a lot.

<<She has it to ride gold, someday. Perhaps. If she rides.>>

It wasn't entirely odd for Yuleth to whisper such things to Sandasa. The great queen was no blue but she had a fair enough sense for who could possibly Impress and how. And frankly Sandasa had to agree, Jenna was a little cracked, but she had the qualities Sandasa wanted in a fellow weyrwoman. Steady nerves, the protective and nurturing instincts that drove her to form and defend communities. Adaptability.

Time would tell. Yuleth didn't seem confident that Jenna would be chosen, despite her qualifications, and that also happened occasionally. Not every great Candidate was destined for Impression.

"However it is you gather up your workstations, I would appreciate if you did so. Blackthorn is going to be a large project and we are going to need all the help we can get."