Willow Do Follow When You Walk Out Late

Brand and cup, borne about the farm's borders in the deep midwinter night, and frank greeting to the Things beyond...

Most of this passage will have to go, but it does some important things before it gets me home to door and hearth - character work, which I was planning, and an unplanned reminder of just how scary it is to make a daily living in the elvish marches, and what kind of people must do it.  That sort of slipped out of the detail along the way, and it's what exploratory drafts are for.  Indeed, what are these four rough chapters but going around the borders of my whole havens with a torch, greeting and warning all the strange soul-mongering things I find there?

850 words.  Drawing to a close now.  Fire and meat and dance to come, and then the news that ends the Wassail arc and sets everything cascading towards the climax.  I want this chapter done by the start of my long summer break, which leaves me a week to do it.  It's doable.  Then a  month, no more, to re-read, re-envision, revise, and plot out the course of the Revolution.  Ideally, with new writing in parallel too; but we'll see about that.  I need firm earth under my feet, first.

I know more about wisp-lights than I did yesterday, and will take this as plainest warning not to stray after them.