Listen to this episode here.
City of Winter at Heart of the Deernicorn
Music by Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/
Transcript
I have a box full of memories. It lives in my closet. A pair of drumsticks, a half-smoked cigar, an empty altoids container wrapped up like a gift but never opened, a thimbleful of sand from a beach I’ve never been to, an ugly bucket hat. If I passed away and you were cleaning out my closet, you would look in this box and you would know it was important, but you would not know why. You wouldn’t know whose funeral I played at with those drumsticks, or on which rooftop in my hometown I smoked that half a cigar, but you would feel their weight all the same.
There is the unmistakable feeling of meaning, of density around these objects, packed as they in a small but bulging cardboard box that struggles to contain them. You would speculate on them, you might be speculating even now, but especially so if and when you held them in your hands. Feeling the texture of each one between your fingers, you would speculate on them, and at times you would be right. And in that way, a part of how I see the world would live on through you.
City of winter comes in a box like this. Inside are a long and slender rule book, oddly shaped to fit inside the long and slender box. A small wicker bag itchy to the touch. Five heavy coins, each laden with symbols. 224 cards in nine decks and four colors. And of course, a five foot long hand printed scroll with a map on it, like something out of a storybook. It almost feels like the fingerprints of whoever printed this scroll could be there if you looked hard enough, if you knew where to put your own fingertips.
When I was with my friends and ready to play, we sat down and we opened the box ready to speculate on everything it held inside.
===
Play in City of Winter is not complicated. You play as members of a family destined to become immigrants. Your character has just a name, a couple relations, and a number of dots representing their age. You exist as a coin on the map, a speck in this world much larger than yourself, placed at one location out of many.
And you carry in your hand a number of traditions, one for each dot of age, each a small playing card with that tradition’s name: perhaps “Who eats first.” “Why we braid our hair.” “With a lion’s roar.”
On your turn, you look at the location your family is in: the Cloud Citadel is where we started, where the people are symbolized by a lion. That location has a few prompts around it, like “in the kitchen,” “heart of the citadel,” and “singing chamber.” You go to one of those prompts, then you encounter a tradition. Either you play a tradition card from your hand, describe how you share it with another character, and pass the card to them. Or you witness a tradition: you describe yourself in the world, and you ask another player to draw a new tradition card and incorporate it into your description.
===
My name was Harmony, newly a proper adult but unsure if I was really ready for the mantle. Born to the Cloud Citadel and its people, I sometimes wondered if there’d been a mistake. Our people were brave, we were loud, we were steadfast and certain.
But I was not certain. I would go to the hall of bones and look at the towering arches above me, every inch inlaid with a choice bone from some long-passed ancestor, and I would feel lost. I knew what it meant to save a person’s tenth rib instead of their femur, but none of those bones felt like me. The echoes of monks singing hymns in the depths below only made things worse - another thing I felt left out of.
My father, Glory, was a kind but distant man. He’d met my mother during the war, and then she’d passed, and he had little to say about any of it. He had little to say about anything. He felt safe, but beyond that, what life I had put together for myself I had mostly constructed for myself.
I was nearly seventeen, but I still went to school, still played in the yard with kids half my age, who all felt more worthy than I did. We would play Lion’s Roar, a game where one child - the lion - puts on the lion’s mask and chases after others until they’re all caught. I was twice the size of these children and still I was afraid of that lion coming towards me, the face of the mask just lifelike enough to invoke some buried prey instinct but just false enough to be uncanny. It was only reeds and cloth, I told myself, but it wasn’t. It was the lion, this beast, this mass of teeth, this unstoppable force right on my heels that I dared not turn and face.
I always let them catch me before the end. I didn’t want to be last, to be forced to become the lion myself in the next roun, to have to take up the mask myself.
But one day, I remember the day, I lost track of myself, I was the last person standing, and the lion came to me. They put the mask in my hands, and I felt the itchy fibers of its skin in my hands, the fingerprints left by whoever had woven it into being.
As I placed it upon my face, the world went dark for a moment as my eyes tried to find the lion’s eyes, and in that moment I fell into a hole inside myself.
I could hear my breathing, labored through the decoration of the mane. The schoolyard giggling around me, muffled through covered ears.
Down here is where the lion lived. That labored breathing, it’s breathing. The darkness, it’s darkness. I was in its den. I cowered before it.
But... it did not move. And I could tell it was waiting. Waiting... for me.
When I did move, it moved. When I breathed, it breathed.
The lion was my reflection. It was a part of me.
And I opened my eyes to the schoolyard around me, and I chased the absolute hell out of those kids. I was a most ferocious lion. And for once, I felt at home here with my friends.
===
One reason I play roleplaying games is that, when they’re at their best, a whole scene like that, Harmony and the Lion’s Roar, will just pop into my head fully formed, all at once. It’s like a magic trick, or divination, like those of us around the table have worked some spell to open an invisible portal to another world, as real as our own, and I’m looking in as clearly as I might look into a mirror.
Like any good magic trick, this is built on excellent craftsmanship. Harmony and the Lion’s Roar did not appear in my head out of nothing. The scene came from a dozen threads laid out by the game: the hand-printed drawing of the cloud citadel on the game’s scroll. The symbolic lion of our people. The name Harmony and what someone with that name might be like. The coin I was using to represent her. The tradition card itself, the Lion’s Roar.
It also came from a dozen threads of my real life. A time when I threw a tantrum and raged against my bedroom door as my parents held it shut. A time when I struck my high school teacher in the head with a bullet-stopping army helmet. Later, when I sat, realizing how afraid I was of that part of myself, my anger, and the promise I made to never get so angry again.
A dozen details, braided together, all building to that moment when the portal opened in my mind and I could see her there holding the mask, feeling its fibers in her hands.
I could almost feel it too.
===
It was not long after that when the Umbra began to grow. We’d kept it buried for centuries deep in the earth beneath the citadel. Our singers would placate it with old hymns, and the oily black tar of it would keep to the bottom of its ancient well, soothed into domesticity. We fell asleep to those songs as they echoed through the halls, almost bone shaking in their gravity.
One day the songs gave out. The Umbra started rising, with no regard for its part in our long-standing agreement. It rose and it rose, slowly, over weeks and months.
Some wanted to stay, defend our home. But in the end there was no staying. We escaped by airship, into the skies.
I remember my father as he ushered me onto our ship, the last one. It was crowded, and behind me he pushed aboard some other child, Able, the son of a distant friend or relation. Able’s mother had insisted on staying, and my father had... had he rescued Abled? Or taken his mother from him? Was that his choice to make? And what kind of man thought he was allowed to make it?
===
We lived on skyships for a few years. There were people who had always done this, and I grew close to one in particular: Awkaw, a raucous young man who wanted to see the whole world, not just his family’s local sailing route. He wanted to be far from his home, and while our reasons were different, so did I. I saw in him a way to find joy in the act of travel. I needed that.
I went to my father, the only adult I trusted to know, and I asked him to show me how to braid my hair in the way that would show I was in love. We sat on his bed together, silent but comfortable, while he walked me through it.
Able took to Awkaw, too. Awkaw showed him a little boat magic, a family secret, up in the crow’s nest of our ship: a way to hold your hands in the wind that would turn it into light, a way to summon a little aurora between your fingers, like fireflies dancing in your wake, like you were driving down some Los Angeles highway with the windows down, bobbing your hand in and out of the wind behind the rear view mirror.
Able loved it. It was beautiful.
Maybe in this beauty was a life we could settle into.
===
Time passed. Harmony and her family traveled, searching for some new home. But on our heels: the umbra, always coming.
In our real lives, time passed just the same. We added a new player to our group, a new year turned over. My grandfather fell and broke his hip and left his home of 60 years for the last time.
===
We settled for some years in a forest full of towers. My father settled down with a girlfriend. Able found work as a barkeep and a cook. Awkaw and I had a child. And my grandfather, my father’s father, became a hermit.
My grandfather hated himself. He felt useless, no longer able to sing the old hymns to keep the umbra at bay. He felt betrayed by his son, who he knew to be a war criminal. Repentant or not, he had fathered a man without honor. And he saw the devil in Able, by now his proxy grandson, who represented some change in the world he didn’t understand and could not tolerate.
He scared Able. He hurt my father. He angered me.
I tried to get my father to talk to him, to resolve things between them while there was still time, but that wasn’t my father’s way. He let it be, he always let it be, always sat in the fog of the past and left me to search for him.
And then, suddenly, he passed away.
It wasn’t dramatic, just gone in the night, likely the result of some old war wound. Gone, along with all the traditions he still held that he hadn’t found time to share. I looked at a card in my hand, “how we braid our hair.” That was all I had left. I wanted more, even as I knew that I didn’t have space, even as I knew it would’ve meant discarding “with a lion’s roar” and every other card that meant something to me.
So we mourned, we took our time. The game gave us plenty - years, even.
It was still a shock. Death is shocking.
It broke my grandfather. Or maybe that was the return of the umbra. It was me and Able who found it, down by the river, an infected corpse frozen in the ice, head and torso rising out of the water like a mushroom ready to be plucked, black tar dripping from its eyes.
When we told everyone what we’d found, my grandfather blamed the locals, the people of this forest and its towers who had welcomed us into their home. He called them devils, and some agreed with him.
Able knew he needed to say something, to stand up, but he was still so young, just coming into his own. So I made him a lion mask. I reminded him of our childhood games of Lion’s Roar. I shared that tradition with him, I handed him its card, offered up that piece of myself, and in it he found the same courage I had found.
It was hard for me. I had hung on to that card for years in fiction, months in real life. It was meaningful, not just to Harmony, but to me. To Sam. Sometimes I needed to know I was still holding onto that courage. I needed to feel it, hold it close.
But I knew someone else needed it, too. I knew how much getting a card from my dad had meant to me.
So Harmony shared it with Able, and with her courage, he stood up to the old man, cast him out, marked him a traitor. And my grandfather took his people, walked into the snow, and was never seen from again.
Just like my father, he took his traditions with him to the grave. But this time I was happy to see them forgotten.
===
The tradition of a lion’s roar is a magic trick, built on excellent craftsmanship, a dozen threads laid out by the game. But also, a dozen threads from my real life. A time when I threw a tantrum and raged against my bedroom door as my parents held it shut. A time when I struck my high school teacher in the head with an army helmet. Later, when I sat, realizing how afraid I was of that part of myself, my anger, and the promise I made to never get so angry again.
It had taken my grandpa 60 years to get that temper under control. It only took my dad 30. I was okay by the time I left for college, but I still feel it in me, waiting for me to call on it.
I missed a session to go home and visit family while my real life grandfather was moving into a long term care facility, and my real life dad was figuring out how to feel about it.
I stood at the kitchen island in my parents’ house as I listened to my dad talk on the phone with someone at a hospital. I watched him brace himself against the counter as he spoke, hands pressed against the corners of the counter, deep in concentration.
I looked down at my own hands, pressed against the concerns of the counter just the same.
When I returned to City of Winter, my real life friend, who had been playing my father, was now playing as my son.
And the friend who had been playing my grandfather took up my newly born daughter.
And suddenly I was the oldest member of this family, with Able just finally finding his own.
===
Once again we left our home behind, this time finding our way to a wandering village built on the back of mechanical legs. We traveled with it for a while - big, loud, like nothing we’d seen since we’d left the citadel.
By the time I’d found us beds to sleep in here, my son Maow, nearly 12 years old, had been inside half the walls in the village. He would climb through the machinery of this place like a monkey, making friends with traders and enemies of older kids, jealous of his independence.
I tried to keep Maow safe. Hell, I tried just to get him to come home from dinner. But he went where he wanted, and that was anywhere but home.
His father didn’t help. Awkaw was out more often than not, up in the skies, traveling, ostensibly trading. Father and son both restless, neither interested in building a proper home, neither interested in learning about the citadel, about Who Eats First or How We Braid Our Hair.
I wanted to be understood, but I accepted it might never happen. I would’ve settled just for someone to carry on the traditions most meaningful to me, my own, and my father’s. There would have been understanding enough in that.
One day Maow was in a fight. Not unusual, he was a scrappy kid, but always up against kids twice his age. It didn’t go well for him. He was hurt, and he was mad, and he was scared.
And I tried to comfort him. I tried to care for him, to teach him something, to say anything - but who cares what your stupid mom has to say?
It was Able who took him out to the highest tower in the village, looking out over the lands below, and made him a lion mask. With A Lion’s Roar. Able taught him how to take all those messy feelings and to face them, to feel them, to make peace with them by holding the mask in your hands, to do the same just by imagining the feel of it even when the mask is far away. And Maow listened
And in this way, my tradition had passed to him. He might not have ever been interested in me, but the tradition card most important to me had still made it to him, just with Able in between.
===
Years later, or months for us in the real world, we made it, at long last, to the City of Winter. We rolled up the traveling scroll, a map of all the lands outside the city, and we unfurled the City map: an enormous thing full of colors and transit lines and twice as many locations all in one place as we’d seen in total thus far.
I was completely overwhelmed. Maow loved it immediately.
We lived in all kinds of places those first few months: in Glowtown at a boarding house run by an onerous landlady and her absent husband. Then the Holy Well, a simpler place inside this staggering city. Maow moved out when he found work in Undertown and my increasingly ex-husband spent all his time in the Drift.
I met Maow in Glowtown for the spring festival, a celebration of when the glow changes. We sat on the lip of the strip mine there, I’d brought a picnic blanket home, and watch the colors of the glowing rocks below as they shifted from their wintery greens and blues to the orange and pinks of summer.
It was the first time I’d seen him in weeks. He was barely 16 and already he never came home anymore. He was growing up so fast. I wanted him to know why I was braiding my hair differently, that I’d changed it from a braid for a married woman to that of someone single but not looking. Still, I knew being too forward would just drive him away.
I didn’t know what to say, and laying there, watching the glow shift, I just braided my son’s hair instead. And as I did, I passed his player the card: how we braid our hair, the same card he’d give to me back when he was my father.
The same card, but changed. My father taught me how we had braided our hair for hundreds of years. My son didn’t keep up his hair at all, just tolerated me playing with it and begrudgingly accepted that he liked the result. The tradition changed, but the card stayed the same.
===
Sometimes I think about how I’ll die. I assume the Crohn’s disease will take me eventually, just hopefully not for another 40 years. I imagine myself surrounded by... who? My partner, who I assume will outlive me. But if we don’t have kids, will my sister be there? Will her children care enough about me to visit? Will my friends still be alive enough to come?
Will I be alone?
What am I leaving to this world? And to whom?
I’m almost grateful to be chronically ill. Makes me more likely to go first, when it’s still something new for those closest to me, when I’ll still have people left who know and understand me.
===
We went to a holiday festival at the five temples: great big markets, people bustling, children running around, a hodgepodge of faiths and cultures mixed together into different colors and flags blowing in the wind.
We had ice cream. Saw a puppet show. Then grew silent for an interpretive dance.
The dancer was from Rivertown, and in her way she told the story of her life: arrival in this city after flight from the umbra and a home torn up by war.
But Able, a little drunk from the festivities, recognized something in it that I did not: stories from my grandfather about my father. The people he’d killed during a war against this dancer’s home.
And while I couldn’t get it all out of him, I understood enough. There was a portrait here of my father from another angle. A man I loved who’d done terrible things that I couldn’t reconcile with the picture of him in my head.
On the way home, I thought about the ways Maow was better off not knowing about everything I’d gone through.
===
I remember when I was a kid, we went up to visit my dad’s sister in Duluth, Minnesota. My grandfather, my father, myself, and the rest of the family spent the weekend making small talk and watching movies, like we always did.
At the end of the weekend we went to a diner, we sat down, and we were chatting about romcoms when all of a sudden someone was crying, my dad was yelling at my grandfather, and we were leaving before we’d even ordered.
Ten minutes later, we were on the road, on the hill overlooking Duluth, overlooking Lake Superior as the fog rolled in, and my dad was crying. I didn’t understand what had happened.
Today, I have some idea. I better understand the ways my grandfather was and remains an asshole. I see how much of my own struggles with anger and dismissiveness were fighting against a nature I’d inherited from him, one he never cared to push back against.
But I know his childhood was a world away from mine. I half-remember a story about he and his mother and brother living in a cardboard box. I’m pretty sure that’s not true. Pretty sure.
I looked down at Lake Superior, and the fog was just so beautiful, I couldn’t help but say: “this might be a bad time for it, but the lake is very beautiful.”
My parents informed me that it was, in fact, a bad time for it. And home we drove silence.
===
More years. My ex-husband passed. Able followed. Too young, as we all are.
Maow moved me to Spiral Alley, his new home, so he could keep an eye on me. It was homier than the monastery I’d been living at, a friendlier neighborhood full of people I might even know from the citadel, from the towers in the forest. Still, I fought it every step of the way. I was so tired of moving. I had spent my whole life looking for a single place I could call home, a place I could sink into and love with my whole heart, a place that didn’t feel at all times like it was about to slip away into nothing.
I didn’t know how to navigate the city. I’d lived here for years but had never gotten comfortable, never understood how the little tickets worked to get on the train. And so one night I arrived at Maow’s door and asked him to see me to the Drift, the sky-docks, the place where my husband had flown to so often while we were living outside this city, the place he had spent so much of his time after we’d landed here, and the place he’d eventually remarried.
I made Maow walk me to the top of the docks up there, to a skyship wreckage, buried into the side of a hill, crow’s nest sticking up over the rest of the city like it was reaching up to touch the sky.
And up there, I remembered Able, I remembered Awkaw, and I stuck out my hand, wiggled my fingers through the air like they had used to, trying to summon some spark of aurora.
None came.
We sat there for hours, silent. I don’t know what Maow made of it. I asked him finally: did your father ever teach you how to do this? The thing with the lights in the sky?
Maow said: yeah, maybe one time, I don’t really remember. That guy was an asshole.
I nodded. But I couldn’t help it. I felt like I had missed out. There was magic in this world, there was a tradition card that had never passed through my hands, there was something that Awkaw and Able knew and understood but now they were gone and all I had to remember of them was a hazy memory of dancing lights I would never be able to touch myself.
I thought about With A Lion’s Roar, and the mask, and the way the player behind Maow had discarded that card some turns ago. It was gone, and Harmony was so old, and the game was almost over, and we would never see that card again.
Maow walked me home. I slept on his couch, because sometimes you need to feel young.
And in the morning, Maow put the kettle on, and I shuffled around, moving quickly to get out of his hair.
And then, as he handed my morning tea, Maow asked me: “hey what was it like back then? When you left your home, flying around with Awkaw and Able when you were my age.”
And I was... I was overcome. For months of play, or for decades, for Harmony’s whole life, this was all she and I had ever wanted.
I described to Maow’s player how Harmony broke down in tears, and even he as a player startled, taken aback - this had just been an idle curiosity for Maow. And now... had he done something to upset Harmony?
No no, of course not, I said to him. It’s just that all I’ve ever wanted is for you to be curious about me, to share myself with you, and for you to learn from me and flourish.
He understood, he listened, he stayed. Later, his player would describe the wave of emotion he was hit with. I thought about my dad. I thought about a lyric from some Lorde song: “spend as much time as you can with the people who raised you” she sings, softly and with regret.
And so we spent the whole day in Maow’s apartment, Harmony just telling stories. When Maow’s boyfriend came calling to drag Maow out for some fun, Maow quietly told him he, uh, he had a thing. He was busy. He shut the door, and off the boyfriend went.
We made masks together. Lion masks. The card for With A Lion’s Roar was gone, out of my hands, but I still remembered it. I still had the tradition to share, cards be damned.
It was a moment built from a dozen threads laid out in advance: the hand-printed drawing of the City of Winter. The name Maow, a name that might have come from the sturdy lion of his mother or the flighty crow of his father. The months of play building up to this. And of course, the long-gone tradition card itself.
A dozen details, entwined with my own life and experience, my feelings about my nieces and nephews, about my grandfather recovering from a second hip surgery and my other grandfather, who I’d never know.
All building to that moment when a portal opened our minds around this table, above this hand-printed map, and I could see Harmony there with her son, weaving a mask, feeling its fibers in her hands. A little magic between her fingers.
A magic trick, built on excellent craftsmanship, not drawn from the ether but from people: Ross Cowman, the game’s designer. From Doug Keith, the illustrator. From the unknown hands and fingerprints of the person who had printed these scrolls, from what they had offered us with their game and from what we had taken from it and made our own.
And now, from me to you. I still haven’t told you about Harmony’s daughter and the plays I hope she gets to perform in. I haven’t told you about the man Able killed in a duel, or the delicious ash cakes he perfected before he passed on the opening night of his restaurant. Or how I’d rewritten the Citadel’s old hymns, turned them into traveling songs, and then arrived at the City of Winter to find our countrymen who’d gotten here before us had already made versions of their own.
There isn’t time for all of that, there is never enough time, and my memory is already going - there are things that I have told you here today that I am guessing at, half-remembering, hoping are true, as I try to hold onto them, press them into your ears, hoping you will learn from them, remember all this, and flourish.
Just as I press them into that little copper coin, a bell on either side of it, and place it in the cardboard box full of memories that lives in my closet.
===
This was Dice Exploder afterimage number two.
A week ago I privately released it on the Dice Exploder Patreon. Four days later, this past Saturday, I got a call from my dad. He let me know that my grandpa, his dad, had died.
It sounded on the phone like my dad was taking it pretty well.
It was, as always, nice to hear his voice.