#chenelo drazharan

[fernacular]

[astastories]

There is something so tragic about Maias childhood and his mom life, and I love that she seems so kind and that she had so much love in her heart for her son - especially when his dad couldn’t, or wouldn’t love him

[coldtofu]

“I love thee still.”

[muppetebbtide]

setheris and chenelo had an extremely similar thing happen to them both (bundled off to fuck-off nowhere with almost no hope of seeing your family again, responsible for a child who is emblematic of your suffering and ruined life at varenechibel's hands) but the middle aged lawyer, given a perfectly well behaved child of eight to tutor, comes off as a massive weakshit baby about it compared to the post-partum teenage girl that was handling a newborn alone. we know maia was pliant and polite as a kid because osmerrem danivaran said so, so it's not even as if setheris was given anything very hard to do. because chenelo had already done all the actual totally unforgiving hard work, and still died so beloved by her son that 80% of maia's decision making was still influenced by her ten years later. setheris would have had the easiest job in the world to get maia to like him or at least tolerate him, but, what, he instantly started abusing him coz he was the only tangible and close at hand bit of varenechibel he could ever get any sort of revenge on? selfish twat and utterly lacking any kind of fortitude or perspective. chenelo should smash him with hammers

[bensiskos]

(ID in alt)

They could never make me hate her <///3

[dr-dendritic-trees]

46 pages in and I'm ready to make things weird.

Here is Maia's description of the end of his mother's life:

She had been ill for as long as he could remember, his gray, stick-thin, beloved mother. Even to a child, it had become clear that winter that she was dying, as her eyes seemed to take up more and more of her face and she became so thin that even a badly judged touch could bruise her.

This is not a lot of detail and I am fully aware I am currently speculating like mad on the basis of very little information. But I am consumed by the question of what killed Chenelo Drazharan?

Acute wasting is a feature of the end stages of a lot of terminal illnesses. The technical term for this is cachexia. But in terms of popular lay-person descriptions this sort of wasting-away is very strongly associated with two illnesses: tuberculosis and leukemia (and less relevantly, with AIDS).

And in one sense it doesn't actually matter what Chenelo died of, because the most important fact is that she died, and also, there's nothing in the text to confirm or deny any of my wild speculation. But in another it alters the whole reading of the story.

TB (relevantly called consumption for this reason) is, to a certain extent, a disease of neglect. Many people can either shake off a TB exposure, or maintain the disease in a latent (non-dangerous, non-contagious) form. Poverty, malnutrition, other illness or immune dysfunction all drastically increase a person's likelihood of converting to active tuberculosis. This is described at length in John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis so I'm not going to pull page-specific references.

So if that's what killed Chenelo then it is likely that being shipped to a hostile foreign country, a teenage pregnancy then being banished to an isolated manor and ignored by her family was almost certainly a contributing factor and Maia is absolutely correct when he blames his father for this.

But if it was cancer (and bruising is a leukemia symptom), then she probably couldn't be saved. I don't think anyone in this setting has committed enough war crimes to have developed chemotherapy yet and she would have died exactly the same in the Untheileneise court or at home in Barizhan. And if that's the case then Maia is wrong, he could never have grown up with a living mother.

[skygemspeaks]

every time i remember that chenelo was just 16 when she got married to varenechibel iv and conceived maia, it makes me want to cry.

Forget about the club, she should have been going out to get ice cream with her friends after school!!!!

[searchingforserendipity25]

there had been, of course, no wedding portrait.

verenechibel would have had it burned or otherwise stowed away, in any case. what few portraits of chenelo zhasan had been sent before her wedding, as part of negotiations with the great avar, had surely found the same end.

there had been other images, maia remembered. his hand had been childish on the graphite stick, and with the paints chenelo contrived for him.

when he had been little, he had made up little stories, cloud-fancies with much of the wonder tales she told him, and those, he thought, had been chenelo's favorites. what happened then, after we fled the giant? why, who is that brave michen in maza robes? the maza robes had used up the last of her blue ink, if he was not very mistaken.

he always ended up with another layer of grey over his skin, in his fingers and cheeks. half on purpose, truthfully, so chenelo could make soft noises, and wipe them with her handkerchief, and kiss him very much.

she had remained ever so attentive, regardless. he could feel still the sharp tilt of her chin pressed to his head, as he explained this was the house, this the garden, that the cook - those two all in grey over there were she and him with hands clasped lighting a candle to csetheio, or reading, or playing. he could not recall when exactly he had come to understand what relegation was, but he knew that had been when he stopped drawing far away places

sometimes she sat down with him, and drew him, too; though she would not do so often, as her hands grew weaker. he had liked very much to see her draw the designs for her embroideries.

once, he had asked her what the sea looked like, and she had burned a thin willow bough on the fire inside a lidless case, and ground it, and tried to mix it with crushed blue hyacinth petals. then, when that did not work, she tried green mint tea - so that for many years, maia had thought of the sea as a green-grey blotted thing.

chenelo had put ships in it, as many as she could recall in the great avar's navy she had been very still after finishing it, though. the work made her, it had seemed to him, smaller in her skin, her eyes duller. maia had put the drawing in a cabinet, and not looked at it often.

as she grew ill, chenelo would find little quests for him. to go to the gardens and paint her the bean stalks, make her a sketch of the bluebirds and wooden peckers.

go on, maia, go. needst take a nap now, and dream that my michen brings me a little drawing when i wake, she would say. and off went maia to trample carefully on the grass by the narrow creek, and sketch her a too-round, too-squat frog, and the rushes, and the waterflies.

even then, he had known it was a ploy to have him out in the sun enjoying himself, and not merely waiting for her to wake, hovering to fluff her pillows and read to her and bring her water and worry, worry.

they had been ugly, of course. childish scrawl, how could they not? chenelo had taught him the principles of art in the barizheise style, and he had loved it, the way the world expanded and compressed to the task. he supposed some of the doodles might have been a little charming. but the portraits had been ugly, those most of all, nothing like his mother in truth.

all the same, chenelo had kept them in between the pages of her prayer books, safe and well-loved. later on, they had decorated her bedside table, along with the flowers maia would run to fetch in the morning.

they had not let them keep them. they had not let him keep any ulishenathaän, no sweet memory to keep with himself.

maia had done what he could, in edonomee. as he grew less of a child, he had tried to make her face just right, with some anguish, a he came to forget it. he had been young enough to think her goblin looks the most beautiful in the land. still in his heart he had thought so, all the years in edonomee, even as for himself he took setheris' words as a lash that could not but scar.

setheris had burned the papers, and struck him for good measure. he did not draw again for a long time.

there was, of course, no wedding portrait. verenechibel had been harsh against newspapers, and maia was not much inclined to look at what caricatures might have been made and shared and pasted on inn doors. of his mother, a young and frightened bride; chenelo, all in white and made grotesque with cheap crosshatching. if he wrote to his grandfather, perhaps an old childhood sketch might have been sent to cetho.

maia did not ask; he was not of a mind to ask the great avar much, even after his visit, and what little amends had come of it. the features etched on chenelo's sarcophagus bore no resemblance. for all his likeness to chenelo, his face in the mirror, he thought uneasily at times, became too like verenechibel's when he wore white and jewelries; which was always, nearly.

it would be ridiculous and wasteful for the emperor spend an hour a week over the easel, graphite stick in hand. csethiro mostly drew diagrams for sword forms or armor, based on old paintings or lithographs or legends, and was so scientific about it.

sometimes ino and mireän made little gifts of the work they made at their drawing lessons, which even at their own age were disconcertingly like himself, or idra, or csethiro, or, once and memorably, of beshelar scowling over maia's shoulder at something a prince had said.

when csethiro grew heavy and impatient with child, maia's hands seemed to ache all the more inside their rings. at night he stared at the canopy, made a fretful study of csethiro's snoring or mumbled complaints.

he was under militant orders not to worry too much or fluff too many pillows. his dreams were nearly as fitful as hers. in them he heard his mother's voice, the voice he did not truly recall. go on, maia, go, needst take a nap now, and dream that my michen brings me a little drawing when i wake.

his mad aunt thever sent the miniature three weeks before his son was born. chenelo's namesake had her chin and her mouth, and the sweet red eyes that looked from the small palm-sized painting were just like his.