Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Chapter I: In the Valley of Roses
We'd lingered two nights in the village of the valley of roses. So deep in the mountains we were now, that it didn't seem likely that we'd be coming across anywhere more substantial to spend the night for a while after this. Stocking up on food from the little shop there turned out to be harder than we would have wanted, with much the scant foodstuffs they did have in stock being completely unrecognisable to me nor my party. It'd been something I'd noticed as our journey had gone on; with every new valley and every new village the food they would have on sale would be ever so slightly different from the last. The grocers' vegetables, the butchers' meat, even the berries we'd find growing on the wayside. At first the differences were so minor they were manageable: a abnormally large type of blackberry here or an oddly reddish turnip there. But now, after so many slight alterations, we'd often find ourselves completely unable to categorise the food we encountered whatsoever. But such things are not worth worrying about, so nevertheless we picked up enough spherical root-vegetables, fillets of streaky grey-black fish, and blocks of what can only be described as "fuzzy cheese" that we reckoned would last us the week-ish it probably was going to be until the next village. The morning was bright and warm, and with our energy restored and our feet somewhat rested, we took the south-easterly path out of the village square across the cattle meadows (or at least "cattle" is my best categorisation) towards our first climb of the day, the misty peaks rising up to greet us.
As we slowly trudged up the dusty footpath, we gained altitude with that surprising rapidity you often achieve when your legs are fresh. Turning about to rest some half an hour in, we got for the first time a bird's-eye view of the erstwhile "Valley of Roses". We been delayed on the day we arrived, and so the darkness of night mixed with the exhaustion of a longer-than-expected day's walk had combined to make view-appreciation a low priority. But today we had nowhere in particular to get to, and the weather was treating us well. Sitting on a lump of granite I surveyed my surroundings, jotting down a few of the broad topographical details in my logbook. From where we were perched the valley sat to our north, lying on an east-west axis between two mountainous ridges. The mist of the morning dew was still rolling her way down the hillsides on both slopes, and although the sun had whisked it away from our area, it still lingered like smoke among the creases and folds of the valley below. The tops of the mountains were obscured in dense cloud, with only the occasional glimpse of their barren rocky terrain. Below that a forest wrapped around them like a damp blanket, thick and impenetrable with a climate of perpetual moistness and the faint scent of rot. While beautiful it had been a nightmare to traverse with its stinging foliage and inquisitive insects. It was only in the lowest reaches of the woods that the cottagers had managed to clear away enough nature to eke their civilisation. The little village of maybe two-dozen houses looked now like a toyset, the treeline unfortunately obscuring any sight of villager-activity. By the toy-town flowed the river, from where our black-fishes presumedly come, running quickly and quietly under the trees and out of sight. Extending in both directions longitudinally from the village were fields set in square patches; some of corn, some of pasture for their rather unique breed of cattle (four horns!), but the majority for the eponymous roses by which this valley is known. The harvesting season for roses is apparently a little later in the year so none were yet in full bloom, but you could see the faint glow of red rosebuds occasionally catching your eye as you scanned across the view. Standing large in one of these fields sat a great windmill, black in the shadow of the mountain and looming with a strangely sinister demeanour. Its sails sat stock still, and had for our whole visit: not a breath of wind had reached us so far this side of the ridgeline, and the static clouds that hung like paintings in the sky, illuminated by that slowly intensifying Sun off our righthand shoulders indicated this trend was to continue for the foreseeable. But we had a long way to go whatever the dear Sun might say, so I deigned it time to get on.
I enjoy the days which start with a healthy ascent, although I know this preference doesn't extend to my friends. I like that you are pulled so quickly away from society into the quiet of the hills, I like that you are able to quickly appreciate the lay of the land to better plan your day, and I also like that tense feeling which builds up in the muscles of your legs as they winnow back into motion. The four of us trudged onwards in anaerobic silence, our gaits in lockstep as boots met dirt with that primordial marching drumbeat. The woods on this side of the valley were less dense and wet, so rather than the thick forests of the south-face, a rather more tame collection of birches became our colonnade, the dappled light of the now-heavy sun easily finding its way through the canopy and illuminating our nether-world in a lime-tinted hue. My mind rolled over on the upcoming route for this upcoming leg, albeit scarce on real information. We were to follow the ridgeway east once we reached it, following it for some fifteen leagues until we saw the "Great White Lake" in the land off East which was our next waypoint. Three, four, five days travel? It was hard to hazard a guess without knowing the terrain that lay ahead, and such things were becoming harder and harder to predict. The further we got into the hinterlands the less my knowledge of the natural world seemed to apply. The deeper we got the more strange sights became the norm, and like a frog brought to the boil these little oddities had compounded so gradually that I came to just accept the weird world we had entered to be reasonable enough. But unfortunately we weren't really in a land of reason any longer, and we would soon be made to confront this fact face-on.
