Claw and Paige recap

[Lying Foo]

(Reading that out in my head, it occurred to me that I'm probably the second-most prominent forumite to employ the intrusive R, and the first is the author.  This is completely irrelevant to my lack of a point.)

The last two montages have reminded me, it's been a while since we've gotten any focus on those two, hasn't it?  Poor Claw literally got her throat cut for her.

(Also, I'm going to try to be as conscientious about gender as possible in the next few paragraphs, but I am a cisgender man, and at the end of the day, we are talking about an alien world, so I hope no one takes anything I say as belittling their identity - it will not have been my intention.)

I think, all of Rei still thinks "Phoenix" is literally Phoenix, and male, as per tradition (I sort of accidentally corrected Merlin on this one), whereas the honor guard in Gardenia have been told that Phoenix has taken on a female avatar for Paige's sake.  I half-joked at the time that Paige had been out since puberty; the 2021 pride zine suggests that at least she would never have been satisfied with a husband.

So then we have Wrath.  (Hope will be a goth, Faith will have a shelf of Hitchens, and Wrath will be a bubbly goof.)  As I've said, an archetypal small-t trickster.  I feel like he almost certainly knows everything - maybe more than we do.  The current story he tells the honor guard is that Phoenix had taken on a female avatar - I've said many times, I genuinely wonder if he might be right; as I just said, I certainly feel he knows something we don't.

Speaking of small-t tricksters, we know that a big-T Trickster - a "cursed" Trickster - helped the two of them out of jail.  That makes me think Jake's taken a personal interest in this.  Why?  I guess it's important to Phoenix that Claw and Paige make it to the altar, and Jake's still got a soft spot for the guy.  But if that's the case, where the hell is he?

On another, less dangerous note, severed jugulars.  What's going to happen to Claw's scar over her reincarnations?  Will it fade after a few decades?  Will it just stay there, maybe fading, but never disappearing over time?  (Will Paige come to miss it?  If and when she does, will she...?)

How do Clanners age again?  Will they grow old together, assuming Claw isn't killed again during Paige's lifetime, or will there come a day, assuming there isn't another coup, when Paige is barely alive and her consort is twenty?

[Merlin]

ah, I do love those two, I should try to fit in at least a lil story with them in the coming year aaaa