Dragon
What can I say about Eden’s wedding present to Leila? I’ll just take the role of griot once more, appropriate given the Earth ties, and tell a story about my favorite Alnese residence.
On Earth, in an old Swiss city named Zurich, once stood a beautiful fin-de-siècle villa in a garden a stone’s throw from the lake. At one end an old carriage house hid a new garage; in the back a greenhouse stood near an artificial pond and brook designed to look natural; paths to the house snaked through an odd selection of trees, through carefully overgrown shrubs, across a perfect lawn to a terrace; flowering vines and rose bushes crept up the sides of the glass terrace doors, turned the walls white, pink and yellow at the height of summer.
Perhaps Eden saw an old photograph when he visited Zurich during his journey to Earth, and the vision of fin-de-siècle leisure appealed to him. He visited Earth with his young bride right after he had joined the House of Pallas, and they spent several months in Europe. Upon his return home, to Alnos, he studied our reports about Alnos’ climate shift and the ways it was remaking the planet. He already knew his home planet was emerging from its latest deep ice age into a more clement climate, still an ice age by our standards, but milder. He wanted to know how the milder climate would reshape the tropical highlands of his childhood, particularly the eight lakes carved by vanishing glaciers at the foothills of Alnos’ tropical mountain range where he was born.
Next, Eden negotiated for some lakeshore land on the eastern shore of the growing lake he’d sailed from his clan’s Thor estates at the southern end to the marshy northern tip to visit neighbors and friends. The land overlooked the lake, with a view towards the mountains towering into the southern sky above Thor House. Across the lake on the western shore, his father’s Nambo clan was busy building another settlement using traditional Alnese architecture, but Eden adopted the Earth villa’s design, complete with carriage house. Only the greenhouses winding up the shore from the lake followed Alnese specs. The villa compound was completed just in time for Eden and Leila to celebrate the birth of their daughter and the successful consummation of their alliance there, amidst hundreds of guests from all the Houses in question: Thor, Nambo, and on Leila’s side, Pallas and Xhania. Griots from each House proclaimed the day blessed and predicted that all would live happily ever after.
Leila asked her new husband if he intended to name the new compound Zurich, and in his usual tone, bland yet slightly sarcastic, he asked her in return, “Why not name it after its founder, my dear?” And so it came to pass that the Pallas clan’s new summer compound in the Alnese tropics came to be called Eden Hamlet. This is one pronouncement Eden regrets occasionally.
