Ris makes a sound
Ris pushed the door closed with his back. A last gust of winter whirled in behind him and fluttered the flames of the lamps, but the haze that filled the room stopped the delicate scent of wet pines outside.
He knew better than to prop open the door. The damp draft would only serve to seep stale odors of smoke and vomit out of every curtain, every skin, every scrap of fabric in the house.
His father lifted his head off the rug and squinted up at him. “Well?”
“She can stay.”
His father grunted. His head wavered like a reflection in an unsteady basin, but he did not lay it down.
Ris took a step towards his bedchamber.
“Wait!”
Ris stopped. He pretended to straighten his glove.
“Sit.”
“I was simply going to tell her – ”
“Sit.”
Ris stepped onto the rug and began to crouch, but his father snapped his fingers behind his head. Ris sighed and padded around the bearskin to the pipe.
His father tried to pull himself up by one knee, flailing the other arm through the air as if he thought he were underwater and could push himself along.
Ris snorted. The air was so opaque it was almost conceivable. He delivered a helpful shove to his father’s shoulder as he went by. In his imagination he added just enough force to tip him all the way over and launch him face-first into the fire.
Ris folded his legs and settled on the edge of the rug. The pipe’s wide platter presented an excuse for him to avoid sitting at his father’s side.
“The elf Sorin greets you, my father.”
His father hacked to clear his throat and spat into a cup. “I don’t care what he said to me. I want to know what he said to you.”
“Naturally. I – ”
“Pass me the pipe.”
His father’s arm swung out to the side and stopped, wavering, before Ris’s face. The chubby hand was buffed, oiled, and manicured to a newborn softness, but it jittered with tremors from a lifetime of breathing poison.
“Haven’t you had enough?”
His father’s hand clenched into a fat fist. Ris held his breath and waited – cross-eyed, petrified – for it to crash into his face.
His father said, “One of us clearly hasn’t. You first.”
The arm flapped harmlessly back across his father’s knee. Ris exhaled.
“That’s Sorin’s hospitality,” his father grumbled. “How many times did he forget you were standing there?”
Ris rocked onto his knee to peer down through the column of smoke into the bowl of the pipe. A puff of air sufficed to redden the smoldering coals, and the clumsy twist of honeyed thatch had not yet collapsed into ash around them. His father had lit another pipe in the hour he had been out.
“He wasn’t bad tonight.”
Sorin had been too shaken up by the previous night’s events to escape into poetic fugues, but Ris thought it unwise to say so to his father.
“Well? What did he say?”
“He said she could stay. He isn’t going to tell the elf Saralla. He means to forget it ever happened.”
Ris held the mouthpiece of the pipe out to his father, hoping he had already forgotten his command.
His father shoved it back at him. “You’re going to need that more than I.”
Ris clasped the pipe against his breastbone. He realized he had not heard so much as a rustle from his bedchamber since he had come in. Aside from the hissing lamps and the labored breathing of his father, there was not a sound to be heard in all the house. For an hour his father and his wife had been left alone. A chill dread trickled down his spine.
Ris pressed the pipe to his lips and sucked in all the smoke he could hold. The acrid air smothered the icy-sweet breaths of pine needles and ferns he had been saving in the depths of his lungs, but he needed the smoke more.
The first image that bloomed into his mind was the blue-lipped, bloodless face of his wife. He exhaled in a gasp. If his father ever laid so much as a finger on her…
His father muttered, “He probably already has.”
Ris choked in surprise and coughed on the torrid smoke that billowed from his own lungs. He held the hose away from his body like a snake that might strike a second time.
His father plucked it from his fingers and waved his hand past Ris’s face to waft the worst of the smoke away.
“Already forgotten it ever happened, I mean.”
His father took a slow pull on the pipe, scarcely rumbling the water in its base. Ris’s drifting senses told him the faint gurgling came from his own stomach, and his chronic nausea woke to hurl itself against the walls of his gut. He swallowed, but bile burned like fire coals in the back of his throat. He sat forward and clamped an arm across his belly, dreaming miserably of his bed – and of a warm, living wife who was so silent simply because she awaited him in it.
His father tipped back his head and blew a stem of smoke into the air. “What I want to know,” he whispered, breaking the pillar into clouds with his turbulent breath, “is how the elf Sorin learned of it in the first place. Did he tell you?”
“It was the unnamed elf himself, my father.”
His father’s hand fell, and Ris jolted upright. The hose flopped to the floor and writhed.
“Do you tell me that ass-licking dog had the insolence to go first to the Khor?”
“No, he… went afterwards.” Ris’s gaze darted between his father’s knotted profile and the twitching hose. “He went to demand punishment for his crime.”
Ris could taste the menace his father exhaled: his quickening breath beat stale air out of dark corners of his lungs.
“And he was allowed to live?”
“He was blinded again, my father. He was damned.”
His father lifted his arm back onto his knee and puffed quietly at the pipe. The tamed hose swung in a slow arc.
Ris risked a glance back at the door. Why, why so silent? Madra paced when she was distressed. She sometimes tore her own gowns with her anxious twisting and tugging at her sleeves.
His father muttered, “To think I believed it was the elf Tashnu who told him.”
Ris wrinkled his nose. “Why would Nush do something like that?”
His father inhaled deeply from the pipe and held his breath. His thick neck slackened and his head sank, until he appeared asleep and even – for an electrifying instant – dead.
Then he exhaled a cloud of smoke over his shoulder at Ris. “Having tired of insulting your blessed sister, he goes on to disgrace your wife and rob you of your honor.”
Ris held his breath until the air had cleared enough to let him see through to his father’s head: wavering and twitching again, very much alive.
“On the contrary, my father, I believe Nush was only trying to prevent the thing from getting out. The unnamed elf probably would have run up and down the court banging the gongs if Nush hadn’t been there. ‘Look at me! Aren’t I infamous!’”
Ris chuckled, but his father’s breathing remained steady and deep, and no hint of a smile softened his voice when he spoke.
“A pity I wasn’t here last night. I would have given the dog his punishment. Kicked him down the stairs carrying his eyes folded up in a bloody rag.”
His father tossed down the pipe, and the mouthpiece clattered onto the tray. Ris heard a hissing intake of breath from his bedchamber. He closed his eyes and let his tense shoulders sink in relief.
Then his father’s hand clamped down on one of them, jolting him stiff with fear.
“But there will be other nights. Help me up, Ris.”
Ris scrambled to rise, dragging his father’s floundering body up with him.
“What are you going to do, my father? It’s late – ”
His father shoved him against the door. “I’m going to bed! Because it’s late! By my mother.”
He took a staggering step on his own. For a moment it looked as if he would fall face-first onto the tiles, but Ris would have no such luck.
He shuffled his feet the rest of the way, never lifting them from the floor. His slippers hissed across the aged ceramic until he stopped at the foot of the stairs.
“Ris.”
“My father?”
His father switched to the guttural cant that few elves understood – none of them ladies.
“Punish her. If you don’t, I will.”
Ris’s mouth swilled with acrid saliva. He swallowed, trying to sluice out the fire in the back of his throat. It burned all the way down into his belly.
“Yes, my father.”
His father snorted and shook his head in disgust.
Ris watched him lumber up the stairs until his fat feet had disappeared into the darkness above. Then, at last, he opened the door.
Madra stood just beyond it, scarcely out of the quarter circle of its swing. His gaze ran her up and down, but he saw no bruises, no rips, no spots of blood. The cold dignity of her face told him nothing, but the light flashing on her iridescent laces betrayed her shallow panting. And if she still wore her riding gown, it meant she feared she would have to fly.
Ris pushed the door closed behind him and waited for its click.
He whispered, “All is forgiven. You have nothing to fear.”
She only blinked at him, but the crystals on her pendant began to tremble against her forehead. Their tiny facets twinkled like stars.
Ris took a step closer. He straightened his shoulders and thrust out his chest, hoping to remind her of his strength – of how much she owed to it, how much she needed it.
It would be tonight, he told himself. She could not refuse him tonight. He lifted the trailing end of her lace…
Madra turned away. Ris felt the ribbon slide through its bow, but at the first hint of tension it slipped out of his gloved fingers.
He chuckled and followed her. “Madra! You don’t have to go anywhere tonight. Let’s get undressed and go to bed. I just spent the evening matching the elf Sorin rhyme for rhyme. You have no idea how exhausting that is.”
“Good night, Ris.”
“My darling!” Ris laughed again. “Do you know how many ways there are to say: ‘My wife is an angel who redeems us with her crimes and blesses us beyond our worth with her virtuous deeds?’ Come to bed and I shall try to remember a few of them for you.”
He laid his hand on the narrowest point of her waist and stroked it down her hip.
Madra sank her fingernails into his glove and yanked his hand down. “Don’t touch me.”
“Madra!”
She stepped away, but not quite beyond the quarter circle of his swinging fist. She could not have more precisely turned her back to him. She pretended to fear him, but he did not believe she did. She knew he would never hurt her, or she would not take so many risks.
He stepped up behind her – near enough to hook his arm around her neck and break it – and she did not flinch.
He whispered, “After what I did for you tonight.”
She tossed her head. “And where were you last night?”
“It doesn’t matter where I was – where I wanted to be was here. And so I would have been if you had spared me so much as half a smile yesterday.”
She snorted and shook her head in disgust.
“Madra, everyone expects us to have a baby in the autumn. What are we going to tell them?”
She folded her arms and flopped against the pillar. “Tell them you couldn’t get it up, Ris. Everyone is likely to believe that.”
Ris sucked in a breath, and a second, and a third. Like an icy stream, the air was too cold, too clean to be borne for more than a moment. He nearly went out into the sitting room to finish the pipe. He nearly went out into the night.
Then he heard his father’s hacking cough racketing through the apartment upstairs, and he remembered his threat. He could not leave his wife alone.
He lowered his head nearer to hers and whispered, “Madra, please – ”
She jerked her face to the side and waved her hand between them, wafting his breath away.
“Forgive me, my darling – I scarcely touched it. My father wanted to talk. Madra – ”
She arched herself away from him. Ris paused and thought of soft things – warm taffy, baby rabbits, the velvety dust in which songbirds bathed and fluffed – and tried to infuse such softness into his words.
“Wouldn’t you like to have a little baby in the house again, dear? Don’t you miss those days? And won’t the girls have fun, dressing her up and playing games with her? And teaching her how to giggle and act perfectly innocent when Daddy comes home and finds his bathtub full of tadpoles? Remember that? ‘I guess you can take your bath in the pond, Daddy!’”
Madra relaxed against the pillar. She did not lift her face to him, but she opened her lips and breathed, warming and sweetening the air between them. She was more intoxicating than any drug Ris had ever found.
“Don’t you want to know her?” he whispered. “This new little elf? She won’t be exactly like Ria, of course. She’ll be her own sweet self. She could be anything…”
Nevertheless Ris believed he already saw her nature in his dreams: his little baby Sunshine, who would bring warmth and light to their home again. He imagined her heedlessly flinging open doors and clearing away decades of smoke and misery with her beloved summer breezes. He even saw her sneaking into her mother’s room to light a fire amidst the ashes.
“She could be a boy.” Madra’s voice was husky, though he had not seen her shed a tear.
“A girl!” he whispered. “A girl!”
He laid a hand on her belly – hesitant, at first, but once she had flattened her back against the pillar and could go no further, he held her still. He longed to feel her soft belly swelling and hardening again with his child. It was the closest he had ever come to sharing a body with her.
“Sometimes it doesn’t work,” she muttered. “It could be a boy.”
“It will be a girl, my darling – ”
“And I cannot do that again. It would kill me. Bear a son, and raise him, and love him, and watch him turn into you.”
She put such venom in the last word that Ris pulled his hand away on his own.
“Better I should strangle him at birth. And that would kill me, too.”
Ris swallowed, trying to ease his burning throat. He mouthed, “A girl…”
His father hacked and coughed upstairs. Clearer than any hallucination – clearer than any sunmote dream of unborn daughters – Ris saw his father’s porcine body rolling around half-dressed on the bed, choking, his hair stuck to his sweaty back, his face red and his eyes bulging from lack of air. Ever since Pol’s death, the old elf had been killing himself at double speed, but it was not quite fast enough. If he did not die during the night, Ris would have to convince him he had punished his wife.
In their youth, he and she had used to break the law together. They had drunk animal milk, ridden donkeys, ventured out onto the water in little boats: they had watched the men and tried every forbidden thing they saw.
And in those days when he went out at night it was with her: to learn how to mate as the men did. They had giggled at first – collapsed with laughter every time she attempted a womanly moan or a shriek – but they had soon learned the transcendent truth of the passion they mimed. In the unlit corners of the men’s world they had strained together in strange positions, and forgotten for a few moments the sordid misery of their life among the elves.
They had even dared bring the knowledge back with them for impromptu fugues. Miria had been conceived in her parents’ bed, but her mother had been propped up on elbows and knees like a beast, her hair twined about Ris’s hand, and her back arched until his cock speared her belly at such a sublime angle that her moans had made his father fear he had murdered her.
Before Lor’s death, Ris’s father had believed he regularly beat his wife. They could fool him again. She only had to let him. She only had to let herself.
He whispered, “Madra, my love – ”
She shoved him off and stepped back. “No.”
“Madra!”
Her pendant sparkled and her ribbons flashed. The harsh shadows of the smokeless air deepened every line on her face.
“No. I cannot. I cannot carry a child nine moons in my womb, not knowing whether it’s a girl or a monster.”
In his desire for her, Ris had almost forgotten their duty to have a daughter. That could wait for another night – another season. Perhaps he could remind her of some of the other tricks they had learned from the men…
“The one thing I will never forgive your poor mother is her nursing you at her breast. I doubt she ever forgave herself.”
“No.” Ris’s gloves strained across his knuckles and squashed his fingertips, wakening a throbbing pain in nails chewed down to the bloody quick. “You ought to know – you loved our son.”
“Our son died before I learned to loathe him!”
Ris clapped his hands over his ears. “No! No!”
If not for him, his mother would have died dozens of times – and she had known it. Dozens of times he had pulled his raging father off her, and when his father would turn on him, his mother would step back into the fray. By dividing the beatings between the two of them they had survived.
He was the one who always took the blame, always served as bait, always acted as a distraction – and his mother had known it.
He was the one who slept in his sister’s bed when his father came home early, his lust unsated. He was the one who had helped Perala flee into a precocious marriage and taken the beating when their father had learned.
He was the one who had loved his wife so hard that his father had considered her sufficiently punished for all her petty crimes and never touched her.
He was the one who had found the idea of the girls’ tower room, and invented the princess story that made the delicate rope bridge seem part of a game to them, and defended them from lumbering monsters too heavy for its span.
He was the one who had prevented his father from initiating Lor into his world. He had kept the boy so tragically innocent that he had been tricked by a kisór dog, but at least he had died before he could sin. It was Madra’s abominable nephew who was the monster, and he wondered how many bloody messes Sorin would have to ritually punish before the old kook figured it out – but there had been nothing wrong with Lor.
He had protected them all. He had saved everyone but himself. And his mother had known it.
“She loved me. She always told me so.”
“She cursed the day you were born!”
“She cursed the day, but not the son! Not the daughter! She cursed the days on which she bore us because without those days she could have let herself die! But she loved us! Enough to live!”
“Then your mother was a fool. Why should a dear elf such as she want to die when monsters are allowed to survive?”
She turned her back to him again, stepped closer to the bed. He could have bowled her over onto the mattress with one swing of his arm.
“I don’t want to die, Ris.” She smoothed her gown over the curves of her waist. “Some days I do wish I could kill.”
Ris’s breath came faster, seeping smoke out of dark corners of his lungs. It was not yet stale. Entire constellations of stars burst and fizzled in the periphery of his mind.
“Do it, then. Kill me. See how long you would last without me.”
“Hmm!” She twined a curl of hair around her finger and cocked her hip. “I think you would like that. But it’s worth a try. You might get it up after all, one last time.”
He grabbed her arm and spun her around. She had so failed to anticipate his move that a shout of surprise escaped her. Ris realized he might fool his father simply by scaring her. He grasped her other arm and shook her.
“Look at me when you say shit like that! Look me in the eyes!”
Madra looked him in the eyes, but she only gaped at him. In his mouth the taste of smoke mingled with her sweet breath.
“You don’t dare, do you? You don’t dare! When I have always satisfied your every desire! Given you everything I am, body and soul! And because once, in my grief, I could not get it up, you think you have the right…”
He bent her back, he squeezed her arms, but she made no further sound. Ris was already running out of ideas.
His father had gone quiet upstairs. He must have been holding back his coughs, straining to hear. It was too much to hope that he was simply dead.
“No, my wife. You do not have the right.”
Ris grabbed her shoulders and flung the two of them down on the bed, careful not to let his weight fall on her body.
He knocked the breath out of her when she landed, but she did not cry out.
“Let’s see whether I can get it up, shall we?”
He freed one hand and slid it down onto her breast. It had slipped out of the stiff cup of her riding dress, and it rolled soft and loose beneath his hand, just as he remembered it. Even through layers of gown and his leather glove, his thumb found her nipple: stiff with cold or arousal or fear. He scarcely knew which he wanted it to be.
“Since it seems to worry you so much, hmm?”
He reached farther down and yanked on the nearest handful of fabric, trying to pull her gown up around her legs. He was kneeling on it, and she was lying on it, and it went nowhere. She twisted her hips between his legs and panted past his ear, but she did not make a sound. Neither did his father.
Ris propped himself up on his elbow and unbuckled his belt. She squirmed her hands beneath his shoulders and tried to shove him away, giving him something to strain against. He bent low, crushing her breasts beneath her forearms, and kissed his way up her neck with his tongue. She clamped her lips together and did not scream.
He lifted his head and snarled at her. “Come on!”
She had only to make a sound. One shriek and he would stop. He yanked at his belt, trying to pull it off. The jerks on his pants were maddening: he was already ferociously hard. She had only to turn her face to him and kiss him, and surrender to him, and he would make her wail like a cat, as she had in the hay-filled lofts of the men’s barns.
His belt slipped free, and he swung it out and whipped the mattress. He wanted his father to think he was whipping her. He wanted her to think he would. But she only turned her face left and right and grunted through her teeth in her struggles.
“Come on!”
He tossed the belt against the wall to make his father hear the crack of the buckle. He fell onto his elbows and twisted her fingers up in his. He bore down with his weight until he crushed her breasts against his chest. She had only to plead with him! One shout of his name! Even a simple “No!” or a “Stop!”
“Come on!”
He was down to his last idea. He pressed his cheek against hers and opened his mouth to breathe. She stiffened and arched her back, driving her head into the mattress to escape him.
She knew what he was after. He knew what she feared: not what he would do to her, but what he was. He would make her scream as he had on their wedding night, when she had had her sole glimpse into the mind he had to peer through every fucking day.
“Come on, Madra,” he whispered. “Come to me. You can’t hold your breath forever.”
Her body shook with the strain. He ground his cock against her pelvis, trying to ease the ache of his desire – as he had been grinding himself against her for twenty years, driving himself deep inside of her, since he could not have her inside of him.
“Come on…”
She twisted her neck back almost to breaking and tried to steal a gasp of air. Ris had been waiting for it. He twisted her breath up like a fistful of hair and dragged her into his lungs.
As she passed through him, he felt a crushing grief such as he had never known: a mother’s for her son. He was heartbroken and humbled. He saw tears fall onto her lovely cheek from on high.
Then he saw himself.
He was out of his own control. The beasts that prowled the abandoned courts of his mind raced towards her intrusion. They howled and hurled their bodies at the gates, chomped their jaws on the air, scrabbled up the walls with their claws. She was tender and sweet and full of love – an angel in more ways than he could ever tell – and she believed she could tame them. After twenty years she still secretly believed she could tame him.
She was about to be savaged.
He screamed as he had on their wedding night – screamed with her own voice until she heard his warning and fled. He let her go.
He arched his body away from hers and sobbed harmlessly into her hair, but she kept on screaming.
He panted, “Madra!”
She screamed and screamed again – piercing whistles alongside his ear that must have sounded clear up into his father’s bed.
Ris imagined the old monster holding his breath to better hear… slipping his chubby hand beneath the sheets to stroke himself while he listened…
Ris clapped his hand over her mouth and whispered, “Stop, stop!”
She twisted and moaned.
“Stop, stop! I wouldn’t do it! I didn’t mean it!”
She heaved herself up beneath his body, and he rolled off her.
“No! No!” She yanked at her skirts and staggered around the foot of the bed.
Ris rolled himself up against the headboard: as far from her as he could go, as small as he could make himself.
“Animal! How dare you? How dare you?”
“Forgive me, my darling. Please forgive me. I don’t know what came over me… I miss you so much…”
“No! You shall not make this my fault! And you wonder why I don’t want you to touch me! And you wonder why I don’t want to make any more elves like you!”
Ris buried his face in his gloves. He rubbed his cheeks, straining his flesh over his skull, straining the leather over his bleeding fingers. His father coughed. His beasts growled and huffed and trotted along the walls, snuffling for cracks.
He listened to Madra’s shivering, hiccuping breath as she sought to calm herself with her pacing. He heard a prickle of snapping threads. She must have torn a seam.
“I wish the elf Sorin had banished me! By my mother! I would call it a reward!”
Ris sniffed wryly into his hands. He wondered whether she realized the thought had come from his own mind. Secretly he had hoped the old kook would stand firm. If Sorin had banished Madra, he and Miria might have escaped too.
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"He realized had not heard so much as a rustle from his bedchamber since he had come in"
I think you meant to put "he" in there.
On to the chapter...
WOW. Ris is one messed-up dude, huh? That was super-intense. At least he didn't go through with it, but I don't think it would take much for him to another time.
What a seriously messed up household! I actually felt really bad for Ris when he was thinking about how he had to protect everyone in the household from his father--I think that's the first glimpse of humanity (elvenity?) we've seen from him, if I remember correctly--but he still needs some serious therapy, with the way he was attacking Madra there (not to mention the whole raping six-year-old girls thing
)
You know... after reading this chapter, I'm starting to think that Lar has more of an attachment to Dru than Ris does. I mean, Lar went to Aelfden to prevent Hel from killing Dru. I'm thinking Ris would have probably been all "Good, saves me the trouble of doing it myself." Maybe that's just because Ris knows Dru much better than Lar would, but still, with all of the buildup of Lar's daddy issues, it's ironic (for lack of a better term) to see that his half-brother is even more damaged from that.
Poor Madra should just run away and move in with Osh and Flann (or Rua and Magog?). Also... is it really just the boys who've been getting the violent genes? I mean, they're the ones getting the rapey genes, but something seemed a little off about Miria too ("She could have an accident...").
Wonder what's going on it that banner there...
She stepped away, but not quite beyond (of)the quarter circle of his swinging fist.
What a way to turn around the general opinion on a character!
Seriously, after this, it's hard not to feel sorry for Rís. I can't wait until his father dies.
So Paul's curse didn't "come back" magically; he was blinded again. I'm surprised the Khór received him. Hopefully Vash will explain?
And I agree with Van, Miria was definitely another basketcase. But what happened to her? Her profile says she's still alive, but if I'm not mistaken she died. (I don't remember when though...)
Is that Egelric and Finn up there?
Just wow.
I'm not quite sure what exactly happened here, I kinda got confused with the action once Ris pinned Madra down and started doing the creepy breath stuff. What happened here?
Miria died?
I think the "creepy breath stuff" is some extreme version of what Osh did to Flann. The "elf kiss" thing or whatever, that Osh said any elven lady wouldn't let happen before they were married.
Thanks, Alicia.
I thought about that, but it seemed so...awkward. How was he screaming with her voice?
Thanks, mistake finders! At just shy of 5000 words, I was bound to have a few.
Nobody caught "procine" though. I took that word out, and misspelled it when I hastily put it back. Not 100% sure I like it still, but anyway.
If you would like a different perspective on what happened here I invite you to read "Liadan wins". The different perspective may even go both ways. Flann was making sounds with somebody else's mouth and looking into her own eyes as well.
For what it's worth, there's no proof Ris ever raped anybody. I left the question open in "Hila sees the most high". I doubt what he did was NICE or anything... it made his buddy uncomfortable, and this was coming from a guy who had just shot a 12-year-old boy in the face. But it wasn't necessarily sex.
Miria is alive and well. She and Ris's half-sisters are underground with the rest of the ladies and won't be home for a few more days. Otherwise Madra and Dru wouldn't have been left alone.
What can I say about Lar? He thinks he wishes he had a dad. Ris just wishes their dad would hurry up and die. But then again, Lar only got raped once.
maruutsu, Paul was able to see Sorin because Tashnu took him under his wing and got him in there. Vash and Shus were not at home. I was hoping that fact would come up, but it never did. Still, I hope it's kind of obvious that if Vash and/or Shus had been there, worry-wart Nush wouldn't have volunteered for the Paul-wrangling job. His nerves are probably shot. Much like mine after writing this chapter.
That's Egelric and Finnie-boy in the banner. More angst in sight.
Do I get a Karma Coin? If so, I immediately put it toward happiness for Rua and Malcolm.
That, plus the automatic first-comment karma.
Wait first comment gets karma too? Cool.
oh and when Ris was thinking of warm, soft things and mentioned baby rabbits, I thought of this guy 
(he's just so darn cute!)
What incredibly screwed-up people.
Like, where I don't see anyone here suffering less unless they get away from one another. Ugh ugh ugh.
So Paul demanded his punishment? How melodramatic of him. Not that I'm surprised. Poor Nush, having to do the Paul-wrangling. Not something I would recommend to anyone. At least Shus is chill, as is Vash to a lesser degree.
Lar was raped?? When did that happen?
I bet Paul will regret it later too.
I don't think its ever been explicitly said that Lar was raped, but there were some good clues back when Dre was taunting him about it.
Oh holy crap. These people are like a public service announcement against inbreeding. I believe Ris might have actually ripped out Paul's eyes. And what's worse- I actually felt a little sorry for him when he was imagining his daughter like a burst of sunshine ripping through the house and clearing away the cobwebs.
I also feel a little bad for Sorin. He is really not cut out for that job.
Another chapter where the all I can say at first is Wow!
We learned a lot here. I understand why Madra don't want Ris to touch her, but when did it change? Apparently she used to be in love with him. With a little therapy from the beginning maybe they could have been OK?
Cassie, I suppose the rape of Lar is not 100% canon either but it was definitely implied in "Lar keeps his secret":
It may have been hinted at still more subtly in other chapters, I don't remember. It's not something Lar himself dwells on. He has never told anyone -- not even Dasi or his wife. Dre wasn't able to figure it out... he just knows that Lar is extra-touchy about male invasions of his personal space, and so he works that angle. But Dante may just figure Lar's your run-of-the-mill closet homosexual / homophobe.
Pen I just wanted to point out that it's not Ris who threatened to rip out Paul's eyes. It was Dru. Was that a typo on your part or was that a place where I really did need a dialog tag?
Ris was trying to joke about gong-ringing Paul and diffuse the situation but Dru was having none of it.
Sofie, Ris and Madra used to be very close. I guess they kept each other sane at the beginning. Everything changed when Lor was killed. Madra believes he was killed because he had "turned into Ris," so she blames Ris for being what he is, and for not preventing this, and for a lot of other not-quite-fair reasons that are nevertheless normal in someone who is dealing with such grief all alone.
In "Madra asks a question" Ris mentions how Madra never wore her hair braided since Lor died, and how she never wanted to have a fire in her room again, etc. And in this chapter I wrote:
So there is the implication that before Lor's death they were still having such riotous sex in there that Dru assumed Ris was beating the stuffing out of her. (Apparently elf sex is ordinarily rather staid, and we know it's quiet.)
I do think it likely that their marriage had deteriorated even before Lor's death. They've been married 20 years, and every day of that living with a monster. Ris does his best, but Perala's death made everything worse. Then his mother's death made everything worse. Then Paul's banishment (he was Miria's betrothed, remember) made everything worse. Then Lor's death exploded everything. So they had to have been feeling the strain even before then.
Writing this chapter proved to be full of revelations for me, which is normal I guess since I wanted to be full of revelations for you. It's going to take me a few days to digest them all. A few of my planned storylines will have to change now.
I've been hinting for some time that there are some genetic (or otherwise transmissible) issues among the elves, and this chapter really proved that once and for all.
I knew that there were two sides to Ris, but I didn't know just how deep the second side went. Nor just how monstrous Dru really is. Finally we have a truly evil non-immortal character around here. If Ris had to swap beds with his baby sister to keep their dad away from her, and put his daughter and half-sisters in a room the old elf couldn't reach...
And meanwhile Ris keeps trying to have a normal life in there, with fuzzy bunnies and tadpoles and giggling little girls, like some kind of seriously fucked up Pollyanna.
I also didn't realize that Madra had ever loved him, which changes a lot of things for me. I had imagined Madra being dragged kicking and screaming into that marriage, and resisting him every way she could for twenty years. It makes me a little wary about some things Osh has said, to tell the truth. As usual, I don't think Osh is telling us everything he knows, or even that what he tells us is the plain truth.
And finally, I hinted plenty in "Madra asks a question" that Ris was not bound to Madra -- or rather that he was bound to her but not she to him, just as Vash and Iylaine are now. "If there was one elf who could understand Vash’s suffering, it was he."
But for years now I had believed that it was because Madra had refused to do it -- that he had somehow taken that step on their wedding night, and she had not reciprocated, and he had spent the rest of his life broken and aching and incomplete like modern-day Vash. And angry at her for denying him his right.
And instead -- literally while I was writing the body-swapping scene -- I realized that Ris was the one who had shut her out of himself to protect her. Suddenly this delightfully ambiguous line from a few paragraphs back --
-- took on a totally different meaning. Ris was the one who had "made her scream" -- not by scaring her, but by screaming with her own voice to warn her to get the hell out of him. Even today, Madra still wants in.
That is profound. Not just because Ris would do that for her, in spite of the pain it has caused him for the past twenty years, but because of the potential for damage it implies. What exactly does he mean by "about to be savaged"? It's one thing to personify his monstrosity as vaguely doglike "beasts" who are literally chasing her, but what does it really mean?
Suddenly I see all this potential for damage to the other's psyche. It makes me wonder what Ris really did to Kia. It makes me wonder what Flann really saw in Osh's head. It makes me wonder what Osh was trying to do to her, and why, and what Liadan knew about it.
So I will have to do some thinking about that.
And what does it mean for Lar, Dru's only other living son?
Also... what is up with Paul, then? If the true monster is "Madra's abominable nephew"? It takes one to know one...
So what did Pol see in this Dru guy? Or was he just doing the same kind of thing Ris was doing, keeping him away from everyone else?
I wonder!
But Dru apparently considered Pol his friend, since (1) his heart broke when he saw him die, and (2) he started "killing himself" twice as fast after he was gone. I don't think Ris means that Pol always managed to keep Dru from overdoing the drugs and stuff.... more like Dru is devastated and is trying to smoke away the pain.
It's creepy to think that he must have spent time around Finn though. Somewhere, I believe Finn even thought about lying in bed at night, listening to Pol and Dru talking in another room, and thinking of the sound as being "comforting". *shudders*
There are obviously at least a few of the younger elves who are in the dark about all this. Finn doesn't know. Paul didn't know. Apparently Rua didn't until Osh told her not to mourn Lor since he was a freak anyway.
I guess Vash and Shus do know since (after some hemming and hawing) they warned Iylaine to stay away from Dru.
I think it was more or less a false memory on my part.
I read this chapter last night and passed out. But by the context clues, it's obvious that that was Dru speaking. I need to go over this chapter again later.
Yeah I just don't want anyone to come away with the impression that Ris is a callous eye-gouger. He's a lot of unpleasant things, but not that.
It also occurs to me that he's a rather awkward rapist in the sexual sense, what with the whole kneeling-on-the-skirt and fumbling-with-the-belt and "what the hell am I going to do now?" shtick. But as soon as Madra took a teeny breath, he snatched her right up and pulled her in. *ponders*
So maybe Madra is hurt that Ris never allowed her to go inside his mind? Sure, she thinks he's a monster and everything, but it must be painful to be in love with someone and not be allowed to know him as every elven wife knows her husband.
I had suspected Lar was raped, but this makes him even more weird. His father raped him and yet he still wants him? How is that not creepy?
If Paul is a monster, it's more than likely that he got it from Osh.
It gives all the chapters where he talked to Kraaia about understanding her anger a whole new meaning.
I wouldn't say Lar wants his father. It's not that straightforward. I doubt it's even conscious at all.
You can look to Hila in "Hila sees the most high" as a parallel for Lar. Hila was saying how the kids teased her for being a "gawky half-breed", when in fact, like Lar, she will probably grow up tall and beautiful -- too tall, too beautiful. Hila has secret fantasies that "her people" will spot her one day, and know her for what she is, and take her home with them.
As for Lar, I think I mentioned somewhere that the kids used to tease him because he didn't know who his father was. To this day he still hears people whispering "He's not one of us" -- probably more often than they're really whispering it, because he's paranoid that way. But still.
So we can guess that, as a boy, Larl probably had similar fantasies of being embraced by his father and welcomed back among the khírrón. And like Hila witnessing these "beautiful elves" murder two boys and do something terrible to her friend, Lar had his moment of dream-shattering disillusionment where -- in his case as a young teen -- he finally met his father and said "I am your son," and his father bent him over a log and raped him. Or something.
But I don't think even an experience like that is going to "cure him" of his desire to know and be a part of his own race, and to be acknowledged by his father, and get his identity affirmed and his self-worth topped up and so on. Any more than Hila is going to truly be able to stop feeling different and stop craving a sense of belonging, no matter how much she fears and loathes "her people".
I think Lar's combat against the khírrón has a very personal element to it. They won't let him in, so he's going to burn the place down. And definitely his utterly unorthodox pleas that "we're all elves" are an attempt to flatten the hierarchy he can't climb and erase the boundaries that he can't cross. I would date the rise of Lar's spirit of rebellion to his early teens as well, so his meeting with his father was perhaps the precipitating event.
It does raise the interesting question of what would happen if Lar DID get welcomed back among the nobles. What if Dru died, and Ris found out he has this half-brother out there, and gets all fraternal and invites him "home"? Do you think Lar would stay true to his combat or would he pack his bags and scamper off to lie on velvet cushions and nibble on petits fours while topless slave-maidens give him manicures? I believe Imin suspects the latter.
As for him saving his father... that was an impulsive action. He wasn't going to do it... and then suddenly he did. The psychology of that is profound. If Dru dies, then Lar loses all chance of ever hearing him say "You are my son." I don't think it's creepy of him so much as painfully sad.
How could Dru rape his own son? So he basically would do anyhting that walks. Its so strange Lar, Lena, and Gils are all related to this pervert. And Lar is sometimes like his father. They have killing their son's mothers in common.
There are some very complicated things going on there in terms of Larl's self-image. It is pretty clear to me just from your comment that his "we are all elves" aphorism is bull. He evidently suffers from the psychological impact of being a repressed minority and will always feel that the khirron are better. Whether or not he would jump into a cab and go home with Ris, I don't know but I don't really think that's what Lar is after. All he really seems to want is the affirmation that he too is better. But with that kind of mentality, can he really claim to love his people?
For me, seeing Lar through Imin's eyes has chased a lot of his uglier motivations out of the shadows. Imin has a lot of whacked out ideas of his own, but Lar's whole conversation with Imin at the end of "Lar becomes the nameless thing" was quite telling. I don't think there's anyone left alive who knows Lar better than Imin.
I'm not done with Lar though. He hasn't yet reached his full potential. But he's not ever going to reach it, if he keeps going the way he is. It's going to take an Egelric-like heaven-and-earth shakeup for him.
Oh my. Those commentaries have given ME a lot to think about.
Madra and Ris. Ris and Dru. Dru and Lar. Wow.
This chapter was such an interesting insight. I feel rather sorry for Ris again after it. It seems like he really can't help what he is for some reason and is fighting it to the best of his ability. I was surprised also to discover that Madra had actually loved him.
What a terrible household to live in. Dru should be put down. I can't believe he raped Lar. It does go to explaining some of his behaviour. That is just disgustingly wrong. Poor Lar.
And with regard to Osh and his attempt to bind with Flann... or at least test the waters, this line becomes a little more worrying:
"a nightmare of chained beasts she could not have imagined at all."
What does it mean? Could Osh somehow have something like this inside him too? How many elves do? Is that why Paul is totally losing it over and over. Maybe he has the beasts to but simply cannot control himself. Crazy stuff.
And Paul... what a selfish bastard. Honestly, yes he did a really bad thing by hurting Rua. But asking to be blinded again. He is so selfish. He doesn't just have himself to think about but also how it will affect his wife and his unborn child. What an idiot.
ps. I don't think Ris raped Kia... but he did violate her in some horrible way. I think I said this before but I still think he used his elf magic on her and now it seems like maybe he showed her the inside of his head or something weird like that... or worse... somehow "fed" her to the beasts in his mind. Ugh. I wonder what sort of condition she is in now.
Lothere, what skin is Ris using? It's pretty ghastly.
This was so tragic. I did like it in that it showed us a different side of Ris. I feel so bad for him, I can't imagine what it would be like to have a father like that and have to do all of those awful things to protect your family. I think Ris is well on his way to being one of my favorite characters....I like the tragic, doomed types. Then again, I am very fickle...
Sorry, Pen, forgot about your question. I had to check in SimPE. Ris is using Enayla's Alabaster skin. Not a skin I ordinarily use on humans. Maybe it's within the normal range for elves. Or maybe he's just anemic from his ulcers.
OMG that's Alwy and baby Bertie in the bannar!
I'm not sure I can see Ris with a healthier-looking skin. It suits him for some reason. Maybe in my crazy mind, it represents his sickly soul or some crap like that.
...okay, I'm going to sound like a total idiot, because I know this is borderline impossible considering she's sharing the banner with Alwy and Bertie, and I doubt she was smiling when she and Sigefrith first met, but is that woman Maud? My logic centers would say that given the context of the picture, it must be Gunnilda, but that woman is waaaaaaaaaaaay too pale to be Gunnilda.
I agree she is too fair to be Gunnilda. It can't be Maud since they met in a garden and she was wearing a green dress. I'm anxiously waiting for the Maud and Elfleda's chapters. Its going to be great seeing my girls again.
The deathly color of Ris's face may have subconsciously affected his character development, I won't deny.
That's Gunnilda. I think you're just not used to seeing my Sims by the light of a summer sun any longer. Compare her to Alwy and Bertie -- they're supposed to be about the same shade, and to me they look to be.
I did change her skin (to Enayla's Pixie Breeze), but it looked to be about the same shade as her current skin. *shrugs* Keep in mind that for a while (starting around the time Wynna's pregnancy came out) she was darker than she was supposed to be because the tan shade for my default replacements was the darker Louis tan. Which I wasn't happy about. I fixed that recently to a lighter shade of tan, but I don't know if we've seen Gunnilda since then.
She is supposed to be a bit brown, since she was self-conscious about it at one time. I'll have to see how I like her new skin on her. Maybe she just has that flawless 18-year-old skin. Or maybe this is just her end-of-winter lack-of-tan.
Really? I seem to remember Gunnilda as being darker than Alwy or Bertie. *shrug* Maybe it's just been so long since I've seen the three of them together.
*squints* I don't know... to me, she looks rather lighter than Alwy and Bertie in the banner. I'll go with the lack-of-tan theory and just excuse Alwy's relative darkness with the fact that he probably had to go outside in the winter anyway and got a bit of a tan from the weak sunlight. Still... maybe it's just the light in the room I'm sitting in, but she looks even paler than Sigefrith to me. When the chapter comes out, I'll probably have to stare at the pictures for a solid few hours just to wrap my head around the change of skin.
Squeee for the next chapter! I can't wait to see Alwy again
Alwy and Gunnilda both started life with the Default Tan skin. I later gave him a skin with body hair that was nothing more than the default tan skin with body hair pasted on. Alwy died before I got the default replacement Louis skin, so he and Gunnilda (and all their children) only ever had the same skin color while he lived.
After that, as I said, the first Louis default replacement tan I had was the darker version of the Louis tan. So Gunnilda and her kids were really, really brown for a while. Like woah, Pocahontas!
Then I got a lighter default tan. That's what Alwy's wearing in the banner. As a point of comparison, Sigefrith is wearing default medium, so you can see just how similar they are in that lighting. I mean, this is the north of England after all -- not the Mediterranean coast. "Tan" is a relative term.
If it freaks people out, I can always change it back. I didn't expect I would cause a riot. I am just not happy with the Louis skins right now (especially that damn ghostly second eyebrow that makes me scream every time I see Alred's face) and I wanted her to have a doll-like complexion to go with her doll-like face. It seemed like a good time to change her since we haven't seen her or her kids in forever. Maybe I should have gone with Pixie Golden.
Gunnie definitely looks REALLY pale to me. I agree with Van, she looks even paler than Sigefrith.
I agree. At first I thought she was Rua! But well, we're seeing her in profile and all...
Is the next chapter going to be the one in this banner or the one in the previous banner? I wanted to see Finn and Egelric.
I may be alone here, but I'd rather have new chapters than prologue ones... They just feel a little pointless. *dodges flames*
Worth a poll!
No matter what I do, I can't please everyone. Last time I did a prologue chapter someone commented that she was about to stop reading since she missed the focus on the founding characters. And every time I do one there is much squeeing. So...
To be honest I only swapped out the upcoming Egelric chapter with the promised Alwy/Gunnilda prologue chapter because tomorrow is the 4th anniversary of this story, and I thought it would be a nice way to celebrate. But I don't know if I'll have it done by then anyway. Currently I am just biting my nails and staring at my pictures, wondering if I should switch Gunnilda's skin back and go reshoot all the pictures.
Or maybe I will just go scrub the bathtub.
I feel guilty now.
I did love the first two prologue chapters (particularly the second
), since they do contribute to the story and to the characters. I wouldn't mind a Maud prologue, say, or an Elfleda one, but Alwy/Gunnie? They're hardly involved in the current storylines; so maybe that's why I feel that a prologue featuring them would be a bit pointless. Sorry, Alwy/Gunnie fans. 
I am so excited for some Alwy and Gunnilda!!! Please, don't be put off by the naysayers! They were in a lot of the early chapters, anyway, so it's NOT pointless! I think it would make a nice break from all the heavy, serious stuff that's been happening in the story lately, too. 8)
By the way, I am completely content with Gunnie's skintone, I can see the difference though it is much slighter now than it was in the Pocahontas period. But that's ok! I would rather not have you spend time retaking pictures, unless you feel inspired to do so.
I second Nimue.
You could always add it in the story, as well, by writing that she was looking paler than usual or something.
Teehee! You're brilliant maruutsu. Poor Gunnie, just recovering from a long, sweaty fever!
There's a good explanation
Yeah, don't go reshoot the pictures just because of reader nitpickiness. That's unnecessary work, even if maruutsu hadn't suggested the sickness idea. But yeah, I don't think I'd keep that skin on Gunnie if I were you (though I would probably have to see it in different lights, and in the end, it's obviously your call).
I kind of have to disagree with you about the Louis skins, though, but mainly on the grounds of my not having the body hair overlay mod. I hate the second eyebrow too, but I find most brows cover it. But for the most part, they strike me as being more realistic than the Enayla skins. The Enayla skins are pretty, but I find that nine out of ten times I use them, they're too pretty, which is why I don't use them very often, and when I do, only on females (unless a male happens to be born with one). Plus I think the Enayla files are larger than the Louis files, and many Enayla skins can only be found at MTS2, which hates Firefox. But that is just me *dodges various flying objects from all directions*
Poor sickly Gunnie. Didn't she give birth to Wynna recently?
Argh, don't even get me started on skintones. I want hairy skintones but I can't find them anywhere, and I believe the body hair overlay mod is for Seasons only.
Van, have you tried Google Chrome? It's a great browser. Works excellently with MTS, too.
Aside from the ghostly eyebrow problem, I find the Louis skins too flat-toned in the face. Real skin has a lot more variation in color across the face, especially beneath the eyes, but also around the nostrils and on the cheekbones. Sheer shades of blue and yellow and pink. The Louis skins and most other skinsets I've seen have a very flat color and are as luminous as mud. You can't just take a flat color and add shadows and highlights and call it skin. (Unless a doll-like skin is the look you're going for.) Enayla skins tend to have much more color variation and glow. She's a talented artist and has a great sense of color and talent for evoking skin in her paintings, which she translates nicely into skintones when she makes those.
Sometimes she does go overboard... some of her skins are quite "shiny" (I would prefer to call them "glowing" though) and fantasylike (such as Ris's unearthly Alabaster), and others have slightly inhuman hues where you suspect she was going for a real skin color. (But on the other hand, for a character like old Colin's rheumy, jaundiced, alcoholic self, or melancholy Cathal's excess of spleen, they're just brilliant.)
To combat the dewy-skinned glow and other unlikely perfections for characters who are not supposed to be ethereally beautiful (Hetty, for instance, is full-on ethereal), I have tons of CC for that. My Sims are totally tarted up with layers and layers of makeup. The uglier they are, the thicker it's applied. Wrinkles and shadows and dark pores and patches of rough skin on their cheeks, etc.
Anyway, the bigger barrier to Sim ugliness is a Sim's total 100% symmetry of the face, which we biologically perceive as beautiful. If we could give a Sim a slightly crooked mouth or nose, or make one eye almost-imperceptibly smaller than the other, we would have a much easier time making "normal"-looking Sims.
But anyway, skintones definitely seem to be a question of taste among Simmers. I think it's also a case of what you look at all the time becoming "normal" to you. I try to make the most realistic-looking Sims I can, but I imagine plenty of people think my Sims look quite weird. I swear they look perfectly human to me.
I know! It would be great to have some facial asymetry. No one is 100% symmetrical.
Most skins look like the Sim is a super-model who has just left the spa and the plastic surgeon. Other skins are waaay too wrinkled and old-looking (Corvidophile, I'm looking at you), which makes for some troublesome story-telling.
And I agree that Enayla's skins are absolutely beatiful. Her Pixie collection is my favorite. Trouble is, they're so glowing, as you say, that I've chosen to apply them to Mystical Sims. Hehe. Mystical Sims.
I've always found your Sims very realistic, and yours as well, Van. The only Sims I have trouble believing they're people are the ones who are Maxis-like and look like plastic dolls.
Quick question -- is there any way to "clone" a pet and use it in a different neighbourhood? If not, I'll have to kill a certain wolf...
I love the pictures of this chapter, the smokey air and the green light ...
One little thing to mention: " I cannot carry a child nine moons in my womb, ..." If they measure in moons, then it has to be ten moons (40 weeks), or it would be nine months. A human pregnancy lasts this long, maybe it's different with elves?
maruutsu, I've never tried to clone a pet, but in my experience a lot of things you can do with Sims (by way of InSiminator or SimPE) don't work with pets. I don't even try to do fancy stuff anymore.
I made a grown-up Yappy in CAS and then I found out I couldn't age him back down into a puppy.
Thanks, Ravenfeather.
And very astute of you! I actually counted this while I was writing the chapter, because I thought the same thing myself, and I wanted to be sure! Elven pregnancies are about 274 days long, or 3/4 of a year. This is slightly less than for a human (who average about 280 days). So an elven pregnancy would last about 9 full phase changes of the moon, plus 1 week.
Also, the elves fix their dates quite strictly to the lunar calendar. "One moon" is not 29.5 days -- it's the space of time between a given event (or "now") and the next new moon, which may be as short as one day. (For some religious rituals, such as a period of mourning, it can be from full moon to full moon.) So if Madra got pregnant today, she would say she has been pregnant for "one moon" on the new moon on Jan. 7, only 5 days from now. After that she would count from moon to moon as you would expect. She would have been "nine moons" pregnant on Aug. 30, and she would have had her baby a few days before the "ten moon" mark on Sep. 29. So she would only have been pregnant for nine moons according to the elven reckoning.
I would have to think about it some more to determine whether an 8-moon or 10-moon pregnancy is technically possible according to their reckoning, depending on how you shift the dates. But it seems likely that 9 moons is so common that she would assume it would be 9 moons without needing to check her calendar.
(Anyway, the odds of her getting pregnant this late in the season are practically zero anyway. She and Ris waited too long. I doubt that Ris is savvy enough about elven reproductive cycles to realize this is the case, however. Madra certainly isn't. She just knows they lock the ladies up until they start to bleed.)
...
All I got from that was that the extent of elven mind-wreckage goes as far as to the way they measure time.
As for the pets, I give up then. Dead wolf it is.
Are pregnant kisor elves also locked in their houses or huts like the khirron?
In the forest they're all women, so why would it matter?
If you're talking about the servants, then I doubt they're locked up either. Among the khírrón it's a prudish custom intended to fend off any sly "I know what you two have been doing!" comments by the Old Men of elven society. Nobody bats an eye if one of the slave girls gets knocked up, however, any more than if one of the dogs strolling around the courts of Nothelm Keep has puppies.
When the khirron come to the villages.. I assume they wouldn't want to see pregnant lady elves.
I would think everybody hides when they come to the villages.
I have a question about the colored lighting that pops up in the khirron compound--
Is there some kind of elven aesthetic philosophy behind the usage of lighting in a particular room? Does their emphasis on the elements and on balance extend to the way they light a room?
Well, if there is any grand logic to it, it would be retroactive, since I haven't given it much thought yet.
However, I'm sure there's something behind it, given that such concerns even extend to their cuisine. But it couldn't be as simple as what are the natures of the elves living in the rooms, since multiple generations live in the same house. And it can't even be function-based, since Dru's and Tashnu's "sitting rooms" are warmly-lit, while Saralla's is cool. And Ris's (and now Osh's) bedroom is green/blue, while Vash's is yellow.
It's probably something a little more "feng shui".... north-facing rooms are red or something, there has to be a balance in the house overall, etc.
I should probably think up an explanation soon, before I show enough elven rooms to paint myself into a logical corner. We need Osh to give Kraaia a lecture on elven color theory.
Oh yeah, I was definitely thinking about the food when I asked that. But also the blue lights that came out of the pebble that the Old Man delivered to Cat. Maybe everything has a color inherently associated with it that might not be the color of the actual object?
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