Avug's saga, chapter 2

Two minutes under the forbidden table: Avug sits under the table, watching gears she does not understand turn slowly in the shadows, and a pendulum trace its patient arc.

She is not allowed to be there — not with her skin, nor her place — yet something in the quiet machinery draws her in.

Chapter two of four, where she, in the rhythm of metal and silence, feels the weight of a world built on division — and the pull of a future she is never meant to touch.

Transcript

Presenter 0:02

You are listening to stories from Väruld. In this episode, Avug Saga, Chapter 2.

Narrator 0:16

One of Avug's first memories was of the table with the machinery. Then she was still too short to see what was on the tabletop. As she got older, the tabletop too was fascinating and the handiwork impressive. But it was the mechanics underneath that kept her attention. So many cogwheels. One of the cogwheels made a lap with the speed of ten slow breaths. That was the fastest of them. The others were slower, and most of them did not seem to move at all, though they were all connected to each other. Avug never dared to touch anything, least of all the pendulum swinging back and forth. She just watched and tried to figure out how it worked. She was not allowed to be there under the table. She was a groon. The secrets the table held was not for her and her kind. A groon was expected to clean the floors and take care of the garbage while the others, the educated brunies, were asleep. Avug did the job assigned to her every night. She just could not stay away from watching those cogwheels when she got a chance. It does not take long, she told herself. Most nights she had to rush to get the floor reasonably clean before dawn and got caught doing a sloppy job. Since she did things she was not supposed to, she never told anyone about the table. Her mother rarely found out about her often sour buttocks, so many questions she feared to get were never asked. It was not only the table that she kept secret. Her grandfather was also kept out of every story. But it was not until that very day when she lay on her back trying to sleep that she understood that he was her grandfather. When she had just been told that her mother's father had been a brunie.

Presenter 2:31

Thank you for listening to Stories from Väruld. In the next episode, the Final Test.