[Jhonas]

Immanis 5, Winter, Era XIII

The chill had penetrated deep into Jhonas's bones as he sat in the back of the carters wagon, his buttocks only partly cushioned by the load of turnips. He thrust his hands deeper into his armpits and drew his legs up tighter against him, as he watched the wilderness slowly go by. Eventually the landscape became slightly more familiar though he had only been here a few times in the past.

Long lazy summers spent on his uncles smallholding, dabbling his feet in the brook that ran beside the property hadn't prepared him for the realities of that property in the grip of winter. He realised that he'd allowed those memories to distort his judgement and perhaps he had jumped at the opportunity of taking over the property when his uncle had been taken ill and moved to the family near Mystique where the druids could help to heal him.

All to soon the landscape flowed into the sillouhettes that were etched in his memory and he jerked out of his reverie. "Down by those trees will be prefect and thanks again for the ride." He stretched his legs out, knees cracking and feeling the stiffness in the muscles. Rolling over, he rubbed at his bruised buttocks and dropped off the side of the wagon as it slowed to a halt. He grabbed the bags that he'd brought and dropped them off to the side, thanking and shaking hands with the carter.

The path, barely more than a goat trail up from the rutted track stretched off into the distance and he sighed, picking up the bags and then staggered and slipped up the hill and towards the tree line that hid the house. It was quite some time later that he made the final turn that revealed the cabin and he paused only briefly to regard it before trudging on and dropping the bags under the overhang of the thatched roof.

One of the neighbours had been keeping an eye on the place, he knew but even so when he pulled the wooden door open on its leather hinges, the farmyard smell that wafted out told him that his visits hadn't allowed much time to muck out the stall in which his uncles, no his, he corrected himself, cow stood. It regarded him from over the top of the partition that seperated the two halves of the cabin and lowed softly at him. A glance around the room confirmed something that he'd noticed on the way in, and that was that his uncles illness hadn't been the sudden onset that he'd been led to beleive. An air of neglect hung over the place and repairs that ought to have been done months if not seasons ago were clearly still waiting to be done. Out in the yard, the pen that had once held the cow during previous summers now stood in ruin with half the hurdles collapsed into the light snow that covered the ground.

Shaking his head, he walked past the cow and climbed the ladder into the loft space, sucking his breath at the revealed fodder, not enough to last this winter if he could judge and he forked down some into the waiting rack with the wooden hayfork. He watched the cow munch, knowing that he'd need to move it outside soon so that he could muck out the stall and got on with shifting the bags in. Reality was proving a great contrast to those memories of this place where his uncle had done most of the work allowing the boy to enjoy the country life, free of care, but it was his lot and a path that he'd chosed willingly.