Picture Pong with Semiurge #3

 Semiurge (which is the name of a blogger, not just the feeling you get when your cousin eats a banana) has sent me this picture, in order that I might explain it to him. 

Scantly and meagre are provisions on the stilt-houses of the lake Pelimer, and little better is the provender found in the forests of the Freeborn Men. But the fruitful border between, for the border between two ecologies always exceeds either exclusively, must always remain undeveloped. For it is a liminal space upon a liminal space. It is where the lake meets the forest meets the mountains meets some otherwhere.

Pantry fare is a serious business, and outsiders may well notice that the floors of the pantries, kitchens, and fanes of both the stilt-houses and the Freesteads are of a different grain from the rest of the communities, which are liable to be cut from the standard oak of the forests, at least half an acre away from the lake. If you ask why, most will offer some hollow excuse, but children will offer their guesses and thereby the truth. It is because the border trees respect each other's domain, and will not harm each other, even when one is turned into boards. So by using the wood of border trees to protect food for the living and the dead, they can avoid the fate that befell the Pelimer bog wizards.

Chantry business is beyond the concern of most, and the esoteric reasons that the Wizarding Circle of St. Bheumes to locate itself in a marsh were never shared with the layfolk. In that bog, where border trees mingle near-indistinguishable from dead wood, the litany of prayers were constant, begging the Adversary to relinquish the immortal soul of Bheumes from his imprisonment. Looking into the burst and overgrown chantry-hall and the submerged chambers beneath, one wonders if the wizards should have spared a prayer for themselves.

Gantry-builders bustle in from the capital with each dry season and with each monarch's accession. In each case, the aim is to make a vantage point from which to spot forest fires. It is said the border trees don't grow from the ground but merely slide further out, like a worm from the mud. They lay themselves in whatever pattern may serve their caprices, and the histories of Very Serious Statesmen claim that the trees have extended as far as the capital to fight for claimants and cessionaries.

Polyandry, it is believed, was practiced by the Kodyad trees who granted their branches as wands to the first alewives and their fruits to the spawn of gods. The men they took as husbands offered their own flesh and blood as dowry, and became border trees. Since the Kodyads were cut down to burn witches by the churches, folk have said the miserable loneliness of their widowers has caused the animosity between these border trees and common folk. To this, abbots ask how this can be, when new border trees are sometimes formed along the lake? Surely they cannot have married a Kodyad after they were all exterminated? In any case, these impious tales will have their end when the Circle of St. Derugwhen finally perfects their breeding of the Gemabore Moth to kill those freak trees without getting too close to them.

Your turn, Semiurge. This is your assignment. Let's see if you can churn out another miracle from this: