#Freelorn of Arlen

[dduane]

Your occasional reminder that, sooner or later, any King is just some guy with a fancy chair that's powerless to keep him from screwing up.

[dduane]

...Working on a scene from Tales of the Five 3: The Librarian, in which the King of Arlen is (as his job requires, once or twice a week) “holding court” -- real court, at which any of his people who want to demand the King’s Justice to solve some problem can turn up and do just that.

...Dealing with early character-placement and lighting issues at the moment, and nibbling at something else about it that’s not quite complete.

Artist Brain: There’s something missing here. What’s this thing missing...?

(in the back of the brain, after a little while, an amused whisper)

Freelorn: ...They’re not all yelling at each other. And at me.

(long pause)

Artist Brain: ...Yeah, that’s it. (sigh)

[dduane]

Yeah, typical. You start working on updating the furniture and installing some new upholstery, and five minutes later somebody shows up to shed on it. (eyeroll)

(And no, of course that's not Lorn's cat. She would reject any such suggestion out of hand. Implications of one being possessing another are so crass. The two of them are, uh... associates. That's it. Colleagues. And if she has to sleep on his bed two nights out of three to keep him out of trouble, well, that's just the burden of dealing with royalty, isn't it? And all the purring's hardly her fault. It's comfortable in that bed. Especially right behind his head, on those nice pillows. A perfectly natural response...)

[dduane]

It's all about the Light

People were commenting yesterday about the surprisingly photographic quality of this image, so I want to deal with some of those inquiries here.

First, though, since the main character's clothes were a mess in that one—as I was beginning the process of tweaking about six different things at once in that set—I wanted to redo the render with that problem fixed. So here we have Freelorn back in the "dress casual" he'd have been wearing in court that morning, in this soon-to-be-published work, when the magpie first becomes an issue.

The first question most people seem to have had about this lighting setup is: "How did you do that?" And in all honesty, even after backing out to have a look at the set as a whole, I'm still not entirely sure how I did it...except that over time and multiple uses, more and more light sources of various kinds got hooked into that set. Tl:dr; I got lucky. (shrug) ...A more detailed discussion, with wider images of the set, is over here.

The first time I got lucky that way was in this shot. Just a joke render: a take on the concept "short king". "Hey," I thought, "I've got a king sitting around here, and he's short.* Let's emphasize how short. For fun."

(I wound up rendering that shot several times, over several posts, as a diagnostic. I'm nothing if not persistent about establishing for certain that I have no idea exactly why something's happening.) :)

...And then after a while another opportunity for a joke came up, in a meme-based mode, and who was I to pass up such a thing? Especially when all I had to do was change some positions a little.

(caption: "We lost focus and had a consensual workplace relationship." ...Yeah, did they ever.) :)

In any case, you'd best believe that I went out of my way to preserve the original file/version of that set, so as not to accidentally mess up that overall lighting effect; and then occasionally used duplicates of it to stage other work, including the topmost image on this post, and various others that followed it.

Like this one, more an atmosphere piece than anything else, in which the man sitting in the Throne is having a bad day—

—and this one, of the very first time he sits in that chair, preparing to do justice on the surviving leaders of an army of people who the day before were trying to kill not just him but everybody he loves.

(ETA: noting a minor eye problem with the above: something technical. Will do another render and put it up in the morning.)

...Anyway, I've been meaning for some while to put aside the time for serious work on the Throne's textures.** Partly it's just a desire to have it look nice. But also, this isn't just some fancy chair; at least not to the people whose rulers sit in it. It's been intimately associated with the descendants of a demigod for hundreds of years—in fact, no one's really sure how many centuries. And popular opinion in Arlen has it that the Throne's routine adjacence to even quite dilute divinity has over time elevated it beyond mere furniturehood: has, indeed, caused it to become sensitive about whether the person who sits in it is in fact entitled to be there at all. (Not least because, sooner or later, bad things tend to happen to those who aren't.)

So in illustrations the Throne ought to look like a good solid artifact that's been around for a while and has picked up some patina. But it should also look like it's been well cared for, and have something of an air of venerability. (sigh) Still working on that. —Anyway, the current textures have always been temporary measures, unsatisfactory to a greater or lesser degree. I look forward to creating ones that better reflect what I see in my head... though that's a matter for a different and more technical post.

As to those questions:

@megatraven Is that fucking blender?

No, it's Daz Studio. I have to deal with Blender more than I like to at the moment (for example, I need to create new steps for that set in Blender shortly), and it drives me around the bend. But I've been working with Daz long enough now to have acquired at least some expertise, even though sometimes I have less idea about why things are working (or not) than I'd like.

@fyeahnix #tumblr brain rot is so strong I thought this was some AU take of that Jack Frost twink from Guardians

Oh. No, nothing to do with him. This character is the one around whom most of the drama of my first fantasy series has crystalllzed out. Freelorn started out more than forty years ago as kind of a romantically-inclined jerk with a love of lost causes and a recurring sporadic inability to think practicalities through. But he's been improving. :)

Anyway, thanks again to everybody who commented kindly about the good look of the images. The light: it's all about the Light. :)

*Lorn's probably about 5'9". Dusty's around 6'2" or a bit taller. (In that second image, definitely taller, as the boots that go with that outfit are riding boots and have significant heels.)

**And also the tapestries directly behind the Throne.

[dduane]

Meanwhile, at the digital art end of things...

Here's another shot of that Magic Room set that I'm about to kitbash/rebuild into a bedchamber.

I'll be stripping all the contents out before I get started. But let me add a couple of human figures first for scale...

...as they're going to be the ones using this bedroom most. —Yes, other members of their marriage will be there often enough. But this is a working family, and the other spouses frequently have other places they need to be.

The initial problem becomes immediately apparent: this space is way too big for a bedroom, even for a king. And with ceilings that high, it'd be hell to heat with just one fireplace. Sure, there'll routinely be at least one magic-worker in the bed at any given time, but why should they have to constantly be spending useful lifeforce on room heating? (Or wasting power on anything besides the things one goes to bed to do.*)

So: time to throw everything out and deal with the scale issues of the main structure.

From the outside, here's what the room structure looks like.

If there's a problem with this, it's that the maker has built it all in one piece. You can't pull annoying chunks off it and get rid of them, or substitute others in their place. But (the flip side of this coin) it is possible to rescale the structure as a whole.

So what I propose to do is squash the room flatter, thereby shifting the shape of those arches somewhat, but also lowering the ceiling. I can also decrease the length of the room somewhat. The combined reductions along the X and Y axes should render the room's proportions a bit more snug and liveable: roomy enough for a Middle Kingdoms family bedchamber, but not a great hollow echoing space that can't be comfortably filled except by sending out to USC or someplace similar for a marching band.

So let's throw all the extraneous furniture out. And (after this shot) the chandeliers. No need for them: this isn't a public space, and the intended resizing would screw up their proportions anyway.

Now we start squeezing the structure into better dimensions. Reducing the room on the X axis (to about 80% of its original length)...

... then on the Y axis, making the ceiling about 30% lower...

... and then widening the Z axis out to 20% or so wider than previously.

So that's a start.

Now about twenty different things have to happen to this space, including fixing the lighting (which got knocked out of kilter by the various resizings, as you can see), hiding unwanted objects like that staircase, changing various materials—such as the floor, which before has always been European-medieval style encaustic tile, so that's what it'll be again—reshaping the head of the bed into something more neo-Gothic (probably in Blender) to reflect the arches, installation of the necessary fireplace, and loading in much old furniture from other renders. (As it happens, this detail's canonical. The other main characters have started teasing Freelorn about Kynall castle's endlessly recycled furniture—especially those beds still equipped with mattresses so old that Héalhra Whitemane himself might have slept on them.)

Anyway, not going to bore anyone still reading this with any further process, except to say that the reworked room features the pale-colored marbles quarried all over that part of Arlen, as well as whitestave wood, used extensively in the Castle and nearby official buildings for its durability and its ancient associations with the Lion and Arlene royalty.

So this is what's in place at the moment, at least down at the bed end. Yet to come: more hangings, more furniture, better bed linens, clothes-presses and bookshelves, clothes thrown over chairs, etc etc...

And at the fireplace end:

More texture and detail work to do down at this end as well; as well as tuning the firelight (always a nuisance). ...A job for another day.

Meanwhile, turned around the bed-facing camera just in front of the fireplace, and found myself regarding a not-too-bad reverse angle.

(eyeroll) These two idiots. :)

*Like sleep. ...Or, yeah, okay, other things. (shrug/grin)

[dduane]

Today's Marital Challenge (Differentiated Type*)

...@petermorwood comes to bed late, just as I'm waking up.

DD: ...Did I miss something? Did you get any sleep last night?

PM: No. Having a shower now.

PM: (has shower) (returns) (gets into bed)

DD: ...So what was that about?

PM: Heraldry.

DD: ???

PM: Fimbriation. You didn't fimbriate the jewel on that sword. You can't just do that. It's tincture on tincture. It's illegal.

DD: (thinking: I haven't even had my tea yet, I cannot have a conversation about this right now. And also it was 1 AM when I stopped work and I said there were things that still needed to be handled about that pic. Eyes. Claws. The issue of whether to declare how "armed" the Lion is, meaning not just his claws but the issue of the demigod's weenie**: to tincture or not? A design decision, and the jury's still out, and anyway some of us actually need to sleep sometimes...!) (...and nonetheless:)

DD: Middle Kingdoms heraldry is more in the European mode than the British. You know that violations like that are a commonplace.

PM: Then why did you blazon it in British [heraldic grammar]? And you named a color twice. That's not on. It should have been "of the first" or whatever.

DD: (did I sign up for this? I don't recall signing up for this. Must have been in the small print..)

PM: I wrote a long post. It'll go up tomorrow. Not today, it's Caturday.

DD: (And you're going to correct my grammar, I bet. In a very caring sort of way. Á la Captain Amelia.)

PM: (turns on TV, starts watching a YouTube trailer about Irish Spitfire pilots: starts falling asleep)

DD: Time to get up and write up the Goddess's recipe for deviled eggs. Have a nice sleep. (But first...)

"FIMBRIATION: the placement of small stripes of contrasting colour around common charges or ordinaries, usually in order for them to stand out from the background, but often simply due to the designer's subjective aesthetic preferences, or for a more technical reason (in heraldry only) to avoid what would otherwise be a violation of the rule of tincture.[1][2]

...

FREELORN OF ARLEN: ...You re-rendered me for this??

DD: (glancing to see where in the MK Instagram timeline the character is at the moment) (wanders off snickering) When you're married you'll understand.

*...Or maybe just "differenced." :)

** (jots down title: "The Adventure of the Demigod's Weenie." [Please note, in a related development, that the heraldically-based "War of the Bear's Pizzle" turns out not to have actually happened. ...Dammit.])

[dduane]

Parsnips and turnips...and meat

Bearing in mind the season that's in it, I'm happy to tag this post as containing food, and indeed foods (like pork) some of my followers may not care to see. So: done. (Because sometimes, courtesy's best embodied in caution: and v.v. If someone knows a better way to tag for these purposes, do let me know in the comments.)

...And that said: we had a reshoot scheduled for the roasted root vegetables recipe over at the Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms site. So that was getting ready to go forward today, and I thought, "But why not look at the recipe list and see if there's anything else in the freezer we can thaw out and cook / plate up with them? Because veggies tend to look a little lonely by themselves."

So: here's a dry run for the black vinegar-braised bacon chops recipe that's been lurking in the wings for a while. (See the "in prep" tab at the master recipes listing.)

...For those interested: this recipe is unquestionably a Ladhain invention. It seems pigs were not present "south of the Wall" before the King asked the Dragons to break a new pass through the Bluepeaks onto Arlen's soil, through which Ladhain (formerly "Reaver") people could migrate into Arlene lands should they wish. And apparently the Ladhain are now seriously into pork. Per this (in the upcoming Tales of the Five 3: The LIbrarian) from the new young Chief of all Chieftains of the Ladha—a.k.a. the guy who kllled Freelorn* in The Door Into Shadow:

“We were bred to be enemies to one another,” Sem said very low, “like the bear and the corkindrill. But we've denied that breeding, and sought another way. What luck was it that we survived that denial, my brother?”

Freelorn shook his head. “Not luck,” he said. “Someone else had a hand in what came after.”

Sem nodded. After a few moments that they both spent looking into the fire, he said, “While I was at your wedding…”

Freelorn couldn’t help but laugh under his breath. Over a number of visits he'd heard a fair number of stories that began with those words and ended with tales of Sem trying to deal with his people’s seriously varied reactions to Arlene hospitality. “It’s another story about the wine, isn’t it,” Lorn said.

“Not as such,” Sem said. And then he too laughed: that small breathy laugh that came so rarely from him. “…Well, yes. I had… perhaps more wine than was wise? My head began to ache me, for everyone who saw me desired to let me know I was welcome by giving me more of it. So I went to sit a while and have some of the roast pork.”

Freelorn turned his head to reach for the jug and somewhat hide his smile. Pigs seemed not to have made it past the Wall in the millennia before it was broken, and if there was one request that always came up when dinner for visiting Ladha was planned, it was pork. When it came to pork crackling, the Chief of all Chieftains of his people had a soft spot a league wide—so that one of the few aspects of a royal dinner in Arlen that could make Herewiss and Sem laugh at each other across a platter was when they each strove to confiscate the best piece from any given roast before the other one got it. “Aha,” Lorn said, “now I understand. You got cozy with one of the spit-turners and got them to put aside the best bit for you.”

“That was my intent,” Sem said. “But I never had a chance. For along came a woman who reminded me a great deal of [Sem's wife] Litiv: dark hair and deep eyes. That lady fetched me a great piece of that crackling, and a mighty goblet of barley beer; and she kissed me kindly and told me I was welcome, and went her way. …And as she went, I was able to glimpse what lay only half-seen in the darkness of Her cloak.”

Freelorn took a long breath, let it out. “Ah.”

“So then I finally understood fully what I was being told,” Sem said.. “…That I had come to the right place, at the right time—and must now pay attention to everything I saw and heard.”

Lorn nodded, and poured Sem's cup full again.

Anyway: the pics. Roasted parsnips and turnips first. (The spoon is horn. So is the bowl. It's rare to find such a big piece of horn tableware.)

The recipe for the pork will be a week or two coming, as we need to run it once more (with more attention to the baking part of the process: we may need more garlic) and other tweaks. The veg recipe remains fine, and we'll be slotting in the new images over the next couple/few days (I like to take the time to view them on as many possible platforms/devices as possible. Is it just me, or are all Apple-based images natively redder? ..Yet the iPad's image editor seems to me to have the best and most sensitive tweaking options.) (shrug)

*[python]"It got better."[/python]

[dduane]

In the digital art dep't...

Doing some work comparing renders in Daz Studio's (newer) version 4.21 to the older 4.15, which is where most of my rendering work has happened for the last couple/few years.

But also something else: starting to experiment with skin tone work on the main Middle Kingdoms characters... which I've been putting off because it's been incredibly complex and fiddly (and easy to screw up.). Then I ran across a new Daz-based tool which speeds this business up considerably.

(Adding a cut here because this goes on a little about subjects most people won't need cluttering up their dashes. Warning: contains volumetric- and non-volumetric-handling versions of Daz, character skin color work, complex (and complexion) lighting issues, image comparisons, and the local iteration of the These Two Idiots trope seen up close.

My attention right now is on the main characters, who come in a wide range of shades only casually referred to in the main-sequence books and the interstitial works. And among the core group—the human-born ones, anyway—there's significant variation. Herewiss, being northeast Darthene, is palest. Freelorn, being midlands Arlene with some Steldene ancestry, is darker. Segnbora, coming of people from the southeastern Darthene region along the Steldene border, is darkest of the human three of the Five.

All thee were details that had to go incorrectly depicted until now... because though I had the characters' faces and bodies pretty much sorted out, the skins were all, well, too damn unrelievedly white. And attempting to tweak that without sufficiently sophisticated tools (or enough understanding...) can cause real problems and a lot of lost time.

Now, though, with better tools I can start putting that situation right. Early attempts are inevitably going to be a bit spotty (I only got this tool over the weekend...). But the first few renders have been promising.

Compare this initial render of the Pride Month package "cover..."

to this one (after initial skinwork), which more closely mirrors the reality I see in my head:

(Over on the left, Tom's a bit pale in that run... but never mind. I'll sort him out shortly with the rest of the Young Wizards characters. Sunspark's human skin tone, meanwhile, can be expected to change without notice... especially when they've just seen a look they liked and want to try on.)

The difficulty with the above image is that for various reasons (like hiding the incomplete nature of the city behind them...) the lighting's from either a spring or autumn sunset, and therefore too warm for good clear comparisons. So as another early-stages test I took the version of Freelorn from the above image and repositioned him in one where the lighting was a lot better... at least when rendering in DSv4.15. Here's the "Short King" image from a year or two ago, before the skinchange...

...for comparison to the one I did this afternoon. (Since I was importing it from the laptop to the desktop machine running 4.21, there are some slight changes in camera position and lighting. Oh, and a different set of clothes for Herewiss.)

If the difference looks really subtle at the moment, that's okay. Lorn should be darker than this: Dusty's correctly a bit paler than last time. But it's a start. Further passes will get closer to what I'm after.

...So re-rendered versions of images on the MK website and elsewhere will start turning up with skin tones properly represented. (All this being secondary to cleaning out some of the 30K+ render files that have built up in the machine over the last ten years, and building a new tagging and indexing system for the ones that get kept. Whoopee. But it's gotta be done.)

Meanwhile, back to work on actual writing...

ETA: Meanwhile, no point in getting so caught up in image quality that you forget to move the camera around. Just look at these two idiots. :)

[dduane]

Just before turning in: a first-light test on the Daz figure* that'll be standing in for Lalen d'Ramien, Freelorn's old flame from the more-or-less-before-Herewiss days, when Lorn (as is normal for royal children) was being fostered out with a farm-village family in the Arlene midlands. We first run into her in The Door Into Sunset, where Lalen's and Freelorn's not-entirely-chance meeting—while he's in disguise—has significant consequences.

After the War ends and the dust has settled a little, Lalen (as is mentioned in Tales of the Five: The Landlady) moves into Kynall Castle in Prydon with the core of the Arlene royal family to... probably the best word for it is "manage them". (And since the lot of them can seriously use some managing, this is unquestionably a good thing.)

*Aubrey 8

[dduane]

While preparing the background for the “Food And Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms” recipe for Honey Roasted Apples

I... genuinely wasn’t expecting prose. 

***

“It may sound very romantic in the poems,” says Freelorn of Arlen, turning his glass around a couple of times on the table. “Seven years an outlaw, always on the run with his little band of loyal followers, living off the bounty of empty lands…” He shakes his head, glancing up. “But when you get right down to the logistics of it…? It's not much fun at all.”

We ran into the King at one of his preferred locals, the southernmost of the dozen or more public pleasances built around Prydon city—this one looking down from the southeastern city walls where the Bluff starts to slope down toward the wooded Menaskh and Talsasmë townlands. The view from here across the river Arlid toward Darthen is quite beautiful, even on a somewhat misty day, and it’s understandably a popular spot. When we arrived, the place was already full of City and “outwall" people who didn't mind the climb up to a park and dining space famous for its Arlene country-style food.

Predictably, King Freelorn declined to tell us whether this particular local was his favorite. It's well known in the City that he's got several favored taverns and eating- or drinking-spots scattered around Prydon, but there’s no way under the Goddess’s sky that you’ll get him to admit which one he most prefers. “Does it really matter?” he says when you press him. “The whole point—besides wanting to get out somewhere different for nunch—is to be someplace where people can just walk up to you as if you were anybody else out for a bite or a sup of an afternoon. They’ve got a right to know that I take my responsibilities seriously: and my work… which is being here for them.” He chuckles softly. "And making sure they know that I'm not afraid to be alone with them."

“So you don’t visit with a retinue, then.”

He looks shocked. “Absolutely not! If I'm a good king, it's my people’s business to keep an eye out so that no one makes off with my life without them having a say. And it’s my business to trust them to do that. If I'm a bad king—” He shakes his head. “Well, we have legal remedies for that, if the Goddess or the Lion don’t step in themselves to handle it. Either way, it can get pretty gory before matters are settled. But fortunately that doesn’t seem to be a problem for me at the moment.” The smile is both relieved and wry—the expression of a man who knows from experience how quickly things in politics, or kingship, can change.

The King has a drink of his wine. "But that's not what you were really interested in talking about, was it. Eating on the road…?”

He rubs his brow, then shakes his head with a rueful look on his face. “At first it was interesting, even exciting,” he says, “when the bloom was still on it. When we all thought that the people who’d exiled me would see sense, in weeks or months, and there’d be a recall. But weeks got to be months, and months leaned toward a year… Soon enough we came to realize that being the romantic sort of outlaw that turns up in the old songs—dodging into town and out again for necessities, slipping into taverns in disguise—wasn’t an option that was real, these days. If it ever had been.” His expression is that of a man who can’t believe what an idiot he was. “Once you’ve tried it once or twice and felt the tension—trying to eat like a normal person while you can’t help listening to every voice around you for an accent or a dialect that means they might have reason to be a little too interested in you—” He rolls his eyes. “In the songs, the common people are always on your side. But in my case? When times have been getting hard, and the price on your head's more than most people would need to live on for five years at a time...?”

A laugh of pure amusement at his own witlessness. “So. There we were, just the five or six or seven of us… running for our lives. Or—let’s be truthful—mostly running for mine.” And the smile he’s been wearing goes very dry indeed. “So we were always traveling very light, because packhorses have to be fed, not to mention stabled if you’re anywhere near people… which we learned not to be, pretty quickly. Ducking casually into some town’s market? Not when you might be recognized, and never in a group. Even one person alone had to be careful, because… Well, if you’re a townsman, and somebody you’ve never seen before comes into the local half-month market and buys as much food as one rider can carry, and then rushes off with it? Country people get curious… and suspicious. Who wants outlaws in their neighborhood, after all?” He shakes his head. “That kind of behavior gets that lone rider followed, and then…”

He heaves a long sigh that seems to boil down to meaning “serious unspecified trouble.” “...So that’s something you learn not to do. Especially when, even if you could afford a market run, money’s still always an issue. You’re thinking ‘If we spend it now, what about next month?’ ...And even when you can afford it, it’s not smart to be carrying a lot of food when at any moment—in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the night—you have to throw everything onto the horses and just go, because some local opportunist whose lands you’ve recently ridden over has put it all together and figured out who you are. Or made an educated guess.” He shakes his head, laughs at himself again.

“So all that comes to mean that you resign yourself pretty quickly to living off the land—the unpeopled land—as much as you can. And you learn a lot of things in a hurry… and some more slowly.” He has a drink of his wine, looking thoughtful. “You learn to harvest wild grain, if it’s ready; and how to fire it so you can eat it green, if it’s not. You learn to bake flat bread in a pot over the fire, and get over it bringing up memories of town-bakery bread you've loved and won’t get to eat again any time soon. You get really good at killing game, and learning how to dry meat over the fire for another day, another week. You learn that if you try to live too long on just rabbit, you’ll get very ill indeed. You learn that you’d better have at least some vegetables with all that game, or your insides rebel against you and make it really hard to ride. You learn to forage, and to be smart about it—for example, not to pick all the viol-head fern you find, no matter how much you want to, because you might wipe out a supply you'll need again, some day. You learn that fruit helps keep you from getting sick, and you learn how to deal with drying that too, when you can.” He sighs. "All the while, you learn never to assume you're going to find enough to eat. And how to distract yourself from an empty stomach."

He sips his wine, puts it down, gazes into it. “But sometimes conditions are kind,” the King says. “We spent a lot of time in Steldin. Funny, you might think, when the Steldenes were the ones who were hottest to collect the bounty on my head! But between the climate and the terrain, the far south of Steldin near the Peaks is some of the loneliest country in all the Realms. And because of the weather up there, in the summers there’s a lot of good fruit scattered around, free for the taking. Apples, especially: not something you can get every day… especially not down north. Moris came up out of nothing with this dish, one time…and after that, sometimes we all practically lived on it, because it was nearly all there was, and we didn’t even mind. Apples pot-roasted in honey, with belly pork roasted in with it if you’ve got some.” He shakes his head and grins, apparently at himself. “Goddess, it’s ridiculous, we must’ve lived on that for days at a time, over the years, and it’s still making my mouth water—!”

The pleasance’s taverner is passing by, and the King catches her eye, picks up the empty pitcher sitting on the table, waggles it at her. She rolls her eyes at him, nods, and moves on. “And Stelet,” he calls after her, “wait a breath! Are the roast turnips on today?"

The taverner looks back at him, her eyes crinkling in amusement. “Small or large, King?”

“Large, please.”

The taverner nods again and walks on into the pleasance-house to see about his refill. “I missed breakfast...” says the King. "Anyway, we all got to be pretty good cooks as regarded simple things. Probably Moris was the best cook of us all. But then he worked in the kitchen at the Black Palace for a while, did you know? The Queen’s always teasing him about it. After him, Lang would probably have come in a close second—a natural talent. He even wound up teaching Segnbora how to cook. Until he got to work on her, she was no good at that at all.” His eyes went a little distant. “Of course, the two of them were getting quite close at that point." A sidewise look out of hazel eyes. "I expect you know about that, though. I know a chronicler when I see one."

“Oh. I’m sorry, I’ll—”

His eyebrows go up: an amused expression. “What? No, just sit down, for Goddess’s sake. This happens oftener than you might think. It's not as if the biggest library and document repository in the Kingdoms isn't just up the hill...”

After that for a few moments the King says nothing, just turns his glass around and around a few times on the table’s polished stone. 

“…Seven years of it, though,” he says eventually. “Of never being sure of where your next meal, and your friends', is coming from. And of not knowing whether getting it is going to somehow get you killed... or one of those friends. Don't get me started on the wild pig stories.”

“Ah. Well. I'll make a note to avoid those.”

He laughs. “Do. But what a life like that does for you, again and again, is show you how hard the people you rule may be having it—not just sometimes, but a lot of the time. What you're doing, they too must often do if the weather's been bad for the crops. So when you finally take up the job to which you were born and bred, you do whatever you must to make sure there's always grain in your people's storage bins to grind, and that their markets, and the movement of food from region to region, are protected. And subsidized, when they need to be. Because that's what the Queen of the World gave you this job for: making sure your people are fed. Ideally, you do that with your brains, and your realm's money. But if that's not working out, then you do it with your heart's blood ploughed into the ground to make the fields bear.” His expression, as he says this, is strangely gentle.

“...Surely that doesn't happen very often, these days."

“These days? No. Normally if the land doesn't bear for a couple of seasons running, the Four Hundred press whoever's sitting in the Throne to step aside in favor of someone else in the royal line better suited. And they do. Because if you're on the Throne at present, the price of your rulership is being ready to do what the Realm needs...even if it kills you.”  

Freelorn stretches briefly, then settles again on the bench. “Meanwhile, if these days the King has a bit of a reputation for enjoying his food,” he says, “I'd say that’s just fine. Because it means that every time he sits down to a meal where he doesn’t have to be looking over his shoulder to see if someone sitting a few tables over is trying to work out whether his head’ll fit in the bucket of brine they brought with them…” He shrugs. “Then it means that, every time, he’s got leisure to think of the friends who made sure he got this far—and to thank Herself for them.” And he leans back, tilting his glass, and twists it just enough to let a drop's worth of libation fall on the paving: then drinks.

“...But enough about me,” he says, as the new pitcher of wine arrives and he puts his glass down again. Those hazel eyes glance up from it and without warning become very sharp, very focused indeed, as he pushes the spare glass over and pours it half full. "With an accent like that,” says the King of Arlen, “you're not exactly from around here, are you? Let's talk about you.”

[dduane]

Cabbages. Kings. They go together, yeah? :)  A quiet morning in Prydon, and Freelorn of Arlen stops in to check the produce and see how the market traders are getting on....

...Otherwise: a first-light test on a set of “medieval roadside merchant stalls”. First impression: not bad at all. The stall materials proper could use some improvement, and I’m not sure about the cobblestones. ...But the veg looks good.

[dduane]

A lighting-testing run on a shot of Freelorn's old loved Lalen d'Ramien in her farmhouse kitchen in the Arlene midlands. (This will be appearing under a "backstory" tab on the page of the recipe Lalen's associated with, along the lines of what happens on this page.)

...A lot of work to do in here yet. Many of the original digital materials are some years old, and need to be replaced by higher-definition ones where possible. Also, a lot more set-dressing's needed. That usually gets done over a number of days, adding a few things each day as a break from other work.

[dduane]

Okay, one last image for the day, in the “Short King (In A Suit)” dep’t... then back to work.

...Honestly, they don’t look too bad in these. Can it be that some of Daz’s clothing makers have finally started getting their heads wrapped around the concept that the male characters need decent suits?

...One can only hope. Meanwhile, if I could just find the “Press pants” slider for Dusty...

(per @ladylilithprime​: “Freelorn looks like he raided Loki's closet, and Herewise looks like he's about to sell Free a car. 😂 (Those are some nicely rendered suits, though!”)

Re the second part of that: this new resource isn’t at all bad, and certainly far better than some that have been floating around Daz for a while. Like any other digital clothing resource, they’re naturally going to take some practice and some work to find our where their strong and weak points lie. These at least are better managed than usual in terms of their texture regions. But their dForce behavior is, well, a little uneven. It’ll take a while to get the hang of it.

Meanwhile, as for the raiding of closets: Freelorn has been wearing black and white/silver (as the livery of the royal house of Arlen) since the late 1970s, so Loki’s as likely to have been in his closet as the other way around. :) ...But (at the point in time where we can assume this image was taken) Lorn is only back in his own kingdom for a few years, and had to spend a long time on the road wearing other colors to keep from being recognized, caught and decapitated... so it’s been proving most difficult to keep him out of his home livery any time he has a choice in the matter. (He and Bruce Wayne would bond more or less instantly over the question “…Does it come in black?”)

As regards Herewiss’s suit, this too is playing on personal preferences. The Phoenix-in-Flames arms of the Brightwood are gold and red on white; but otherwise that suit’s color -- a nod toward the browns the Prince-elect prefers when wearing the Wood’s vernacular leather gear -- was just what the digital designer happened to have on the rack. I had a better range of worsted colors in the shot locker, and have substituted one of them as closer to what Dusty’s preferences would be.

[dduane]

Hergótha anon here. I’m proud to say I knew how to spell it off the top of my head. I’ve read the Middle Kingdoms books that many times, and maybe a few more, and I would never misspell the name of a sword of such importance 😊 the scene where Freelorn is sitting on Hasai’s head in The Landlady lives rent free in my head at all times, and I can’t wait to see what my favourite short king gets up to in The Librarian!

...Trouble, as usual. (Though sometimes he’s slightly on the receiving end of it. Like the one night when Herewiss brings home takeaway...)

“Lorn,” Herewiss said, and without warning those blue eyes had gone quite direct in the candlelight, “if you don’t actually put some dinner in your mouth at some point or another, I’m going to feel like I’ve wasted a lot of effort to no purpose.”

“Oh. No. Sorry!” Freelorn said, and ate the spoonful of stew… then moaned softly with pleasure as it went in and down. Perfectly-hung venison, tender enough to come apart with the mere press of a tongue; red wine, galangale, berry-pepper, juniper, all beautifully combined— For a moment Lorn’s eyes fell shut in sheer pleasure at the depth and richness of the flavor. “Oh what a crying shame it is these people can’t come work in our kitchen! Though if this is anything to go by it could almost be worth the—” And his eyes flew open in shock as he became aware his mouth was catching fire. “Sweet swiving Goddess what the—”

A second later Lorn was no longer sure where his tongue was, or whether indeed he still had one. Speech deserted him. The inside of his mouth was feeling as if he’d just kissed Sunspark without their taking the usual precautions. (“Did I ever tell you about that time I helped relight a dark star?” they—actually “she” at the time—had been saying. “The first thing you do is, you—”)

The memory was mercilessly jostled aside by raw sensation, as Lorn’s mouth presently felt like the “first thing” might well be in progress in there. He dropped the spoon on the table and sagged back in his seat, gasping. Herewiss meanwhile sat there regarding him with the smug expression specific to one involved in exceeding the spice-heat tolerance of another who’s constantly bragging about it.

“It really does taste excellent,” Dusty said, “once one’s used the Fire to show one’s mouth how not to pay undue attention to the element of whitefruit elixir that’s actually in charge of how spicy it is.” He grinned. “They were most impressed, down in the cookshop! Apparently it takes a very special kind of Arlene to be able to handle it the way they spice it for themselves…” And he pushed a bowl of cold thick cream across to Lorn, and handed him a spoon.

Dear Lady I can hardly hear, Lorn said silently, blinking the tears out of his eyes: or trying to. More kept coming. He hastily swallowed a spoonful of the cream, then another, feeling only the slightest relief. My ears are ringing! You utter monster! He glared at Dusty, torn between fury and delight, pausing between spoonfuls only to rub more tears away. Sooner or later I’ll get you for this!

Herewiss chuckled, a most unconcerned sound. “Talk’s worth but a scruple, loved; deeds pay the scot! Better do what you can with the cream. There’s plenty more.” He turned his own attention back to his bowl and went on eating with insufferable cheer. “I could use the Fire on you, of course, but right now you might find that redundant.” He snickered...

(ETA: per @amastadonofconflict‘s query: “... Did @petermorwood do that to you? :)” …He’d know better, as not even being a magic-user would save him from the consequences. :) —Normally, though, when he’s cooking spicy he’ll make a median-heat version that we can both handle. Then he spikes his own serving to his own preference. Which is pretty damn hot.) 

[dduane]

In the Unexpected Discoveries dep’t, digital art division...

So I was testing out some items I picked up from a Daz 3D digital prop set called “Dirty Dishes Food and Drink Expansion”. Some drinks are included, and I was tickled to see some fancy (and goofy) cocktails in there. So I stuffed their take on a Mai Tai into the most recently completed rendering set to see how it would look in sunlight. Not bad, as you can see above.

I then fell into an old familiar habit—bitching about the lack of good medieval shirts for the male Middle Kingdoms characters—and went rummaging to see what I might have picked up recently that hadn’t been tested yet. Shortly I came across one called “Gothic Prince Outfit”, which I’d grabbed on a whim some months back when it was on sale. Haven’t tried this on anybody, I thought. It’s not medieval by any stretch of the imagination, but let’s just take a moment to stick it on Freelorn and see how the thing’s basic geometry looks. The surface textures can always be subverted later. And anyway, it’s impossible to get him out of black ... (The Arlene royal livery is black and white [like the national arms], and while on the road even just wearing black could have endangered Lorn’s friends, so he didn’t often indulge the urge to wear it.)

Anyway, no sooner said than done.

....Not too bad for something that hasn’t even been adjusted to fit him properly. But then I noticed something a little... unusual about the fastenings.

WTF? I thought, and pulled Lorn into that seaside set with the directors’ chairs, as the lighting’s very good in there, and I wanted to make sure of what I was seeing. And WTF...! I thought again...

...Because those are unquestionably wizards’ knots.

...Can’t believe I missed that earlier! I must have really been in a hurry.

(And also, a thought on the only way this can easily be rationalized: Oh great. Has Carmela been taking him shopping at the Crossings?)

(headclutch)

[dduane]

“Short King.” :)