Ari stepped out of the chapel after leaving her offering to the Winter Crone, and was surprised to see Sabine there waiting for her.
"I didn't really know where else to find you, so I thought maybe I could find you here," Sabine said.
"Oh," Ari said, surprised that Sabine had sought her out at all. "How can I help you?"
"I need a friend," Sabine said.
Ari laughed. "You're a Springborn, your novice cohort has like 50 others you could be friends with." It came across more harshly than she intended, and she immediately regretted it when she saw Sabine flinch. Then was puzzled by her instinctive need to protect this complete stranger.
"I..." Sabine hesitated. "I'm not really all that interested in the sort of things most of them seem to be interested in," she said. "They're all focused on connecting to plants for healing, and I have..." Sabine paused for a brief moment, "other interests."
Ari laughed. "I get it. I wasn't really expected to even become a novice at all, let alone join this particular Abbey. I'm heading for lunch myself, would you like to join me?"
Sabine nodded her head vigorously. "I'd love to," she said.
Life at the Abbey was only loosely structured, and only certain parts of that structure were mandatory. Breakfast was one of those, but lunch was a have it when you have it sort of thing. Whoever was on kitchen duty for the day would be happy to serve whoever came in through the lunch period.
"Lunch is usually leftovers from last night's dinner," Ari chattered as they began walking towards the building where meals where held. "But it's always still really good. I'm a terrible cook so I never sign up for kitchen duty, but Lira is an Autumnborn and she is brilliant at hearth magic, so her lunches are divine. She's on the roster today, so it'll be delicious."
---
Ari shook her head and pulled herself back from the memory. She did miss Lira's cooking, but she couldn't risk hovering too close to those memories. She couldn't risk accidentally walking into herself and changing those bits of her reality.
The work bell chimed, ringing out over the entire grounds of the War Abbey, so she stood up, adjusted her robe, and headed to the alchemy lab where she was on the roster for production work. She'd applied for a research position, but didn't have the experience needed for that. Production shifts, though boring and repetitive, would give her more experience so she could try again for a research position the following year.
In the meantime, she readied herself for another afternoon of making potions and salves to supply the armies and intelligence agencies who were actively defending the land from invasion.
---
Ari wove a thread from the main design of the tapestry to the new bit she'd started working on. It would be easier if she'd used a mechanical loom, shuttle moving between the warp threads, but doing so would limit what patterns she could weave into her Great Work, so she worked in the ancient way, with the warp threads strung on a frame, and the weft threads woven by hand, bit by bit, moving to various parts of the tapestry as she decided what to fill the holes with.
This was not her first tapestry. She'd made many others. Not well, at first. But she'd mastered her craft years ago, and this piece she'd been working on for so long that she couldn't remember exactly how long it had been.
She began to fill in the background design around a motif she'd recently finished and let her thoughts drift once again through the memories of her long life.
