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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 3179652" data-attributes="member: 3448">Kit looked with curiosity at the fan.  The fan was made entirely of crystal, and it hummed gently in Kit’s hand as she picked it up.  She snapped it open and saw the graceful script of the elves written across it.  “What does it say?  I can’t read elven.”Alistair looked at it and paused for a moment.  “It’s not in elven, or not exactly.  That’s Eldar.  Let’s see… it’s addressed to my, hmm, twelve great-grandfather, ‘for your service.’  And then that last word is a name- the name of the Queen of Singing Leaves.  It’s likely a powerful artifact if it was given as a major gift directly from the Queen to an Archduke.”“I think I’ll keep this, then.  It could be useful.”“In the service of the Archduchy,” said Dame Brionna, a little scandalized.  “A great object like that must remain in the Archduchy’s collection.”“But we ought to use it for the Archduchy, not just hoard it,” said Kit, a little annoyed.  “I’m not going to sell it.  None of us would sell a great asset of the Archduchy.  Except maybe Mahler.”Even Mahler laughed at that.The guards who had been entangled in the shawl also managed to finally untangle themselves.  They looked horribly embarrassed by the experience-- taken down by a piece of cloth?  But as they brushed themselves off, tried to regain their dignity, and resumed their stations, the spiga-silk shawl rolled, slid, and crawled away from them.  The shawl made its way up onto the dais, where it crawled over to Kit and slumped up against her.“Just what I always wanted,” she said.  “My own pet shawl.”  But while her voice held amusement, she was legitimately excited.  The shawl’s magic seemed powerful indeed.The rest of the funeral went much more smoothly.  A steady stream of high-ranking mourners wearing black armbands through themselves onto the pyre.  Knowing that they would only suicide later and that stopping them would risk a terrible disruption of the ceremony, the guards simply watched them going about their last duty.  The handful of commoners, however, who attempted to emulate their example were quickly stopped by solid walls of guards and by Sleep spells.</blockquote>

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