(Rose)
We sailed for a long ti, following the holy coastline in the horizon. We’re heading north.
Sotis the wind is cold when it cos from the north. We’re in winter after all. I wonder if Anatolian’s winter is very cold.
Occasionally during the night, more lights appear below us, from the sea more than the moon.
The moon itself looks a little smaller than I recall in my childhood. Probably just my imagination.
Bleue is very happy, every day and night. Even when we’re hungry and trying to catch elusive fishes to eat.
We end up dragging a large net found in a port along the coast, so we can grab whatever would be caught as we sail.
We still don’t catch much.
Two boats doing so would probably work better.
The shore, the cities along the coast, are covered with a heavy and toxic cloud. Like London but much much worse.
Our eyes began to sting maybe two kilotres away from the coast.
So we keep going from one port clear from the cloud to the next.
The cloud is a small teorological climate by itself. It changes. It’s not coloured much, maybe just slightly grey, but it really attacks our eyes and lungs when we reach it.
With improvised masks, we scavenge a little still. We have to.
And we keep bouncing along the coastline and along the sea. For days and days.
Until a chain of mountains covers the full northern horizon.
The end of this sea. The first marches of an old empire, that ans a lot to us, even though we never ca here before.
Our other selves, maybe?
We could keep going with our boat along the coast for a few more weeks until we reach the black sea. We chose to walk across instead. We’ve had quite enough of sea for a while now. We want to walk. In this land furthermore.
Even if it takes us a year to cross the Anatolian lands and reach the black sea... Where would be the harm? There’s no hurry.
Along the sharp cliffs, which seem very young, we find wrecks. We sail a little further until we find an old port still in good shape mostly. We bring our boat inside a boat house still standing and sturdy looking.
We unload our luggage. Most of them will be carried by our small floating tree with its hanging pot of earth.
Usually, plants stand over their pots. This one is carrying its own, pulling it along so of our luggage. It’s a strong little plant.
Like she did with Grape’s seeds, Bleue brought so fruits and seeds of the flying trees along, to spread and sow across the lands we’ll walk through.
R - You like playing the role of those squirrels and insects that carry pollens around, don’t you?
B - I guess you’re right! Wouldn’t you like to see landscapes with flying trees?
R - I... I guess I would... I wonder how the landscape will look like in a few hundreds of years.
Bleue tries to think about it. We’re probably too young in this world to be able to forecast its future.
More flying trees doesn’t seem like a bad idea.
We’re set and ready to go after a day in the port town. We head to the path roughly climbing the cliffs and mountains there.
We still carry heavy clothes as the weather has gotten quite cold since we arrived. And slowly, we’re climbing the mountainous shores, leaving the diterranean sea behind.
Half the horizon is the glittering sea.
Bleue spots a wild goat a little further. We don’t have ti to hunt it, as it vanishes right after spotting us.
All we eat are dead lizards, roots, and the little things found in the abandoned port. The lizards are juicy though.
The wind swiping the top of the mountain is freezing us, though there is no snow.
We reach an old bituminous road. The top of the mountain we saw from below is actually the edge of a plateau, with a road following the coastline from above.
Beyond that edge and aside that dusty road, we discover what suddenly feels like a new continent to us.
Infinite variety of valleys and hills. Chains of mountains surrounding it all. Strong colourful landscapes. A new land to explore. The mountains in the foggy horizon look bluish, almost purple. The small arnian plains ahead are grey, ochre, orange, green, black, white, brown. The clouds hovering above them are filtering the sunlight and bring even more contrast to the splendid scenery.
Not a sound but the wind. Ruins of cities in the distance, already lted into dry swamps.
We see cultures, drought, rivers here and there probably also, in the distance.
A landscape much richer to the eyes than anything we’ve seen in our holand yet.
Probably the richest in colours I’ve seen yet.
We sat there for a while, just gazing at this abandoned world of magnificent colours and brushstrokes.
For our history, our family, this land is the land of origin...
B - What are you mumbling about?
R - In retrospective... Maybe this is where it all began... The blue rose, Gülnihal, and father eting it... A part of us was born here, well, sowhere around here. I was thinking that in more ways than one, this here is for us the land of origin.
Where the furthest string of events that led to us began, as far as I can tell.
Bleue looked at silently, listening carefully to my voice and thinking about the words cautiously.
The origin of things that one step at a ti, led to us being there today.
The origin of us.
To so romantic extent at least.
B - Our family began because this odd man our father was, found an old doll in this country. Rose would have been born either way, but not I, if Gülnihal had not t dad. This makes feel nostalgic as if it had been a place I’ve been to before, but had forgotten all about it...
R - A feeling like that yes. It’s history. Ours.
The strings of fate began an infinity away in the flow of ti and space.
But we know that for us, a particular one began sowhere in this land, a long, long ti ago.
The shade of this daiûa, and the impact it had on our family, they still linger in our mories...
Gülnihal was born in this land, back when it was the Ottoman empire.
Now, it has no na, aside the one we read on our map.
We rediscover this land heavy with history, from the world and our own family.
The sunset over this land we discover for the first ti really is... One we’ll rember for our entire life.
The wind is freezing us still.
So we resu walking, toward the buildings beside the first hills we see; along the roads spreading into this new land. New for us, but as old as history really.
We hold hands as we recall what our parents used to tell us.
In a way, this is where we were born, a very long ti ago. Before the blue rose even existed.
Long before all that.
Once upon a distant ti...
Sowhen in the 19th century.
When a craftsman of the Nilüfer valley made a doll for soone long lost and forgotten.
And blessed the little thing, with the nickna of Gülnihal.
Our genealogy has never existed.
Mother was an illegitimate daughter.
Father was a mongrel.
They never really told us where they ca from. I had to piece the clues together after they passed away.
Why am I tearing up thinking about it right now.
The only ancestry we have...
The only thing we know we’re coming from in the flow of ti.
It was Gülnihal.
~
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