Original

since the gävlebocken didn't survive (bad luck) or get burned (good luck), i'm taking 'eaten by jackdaws' to mean 'secret third thing'

"Toby!" I called out to the celestial minister.

He visibly sighed. "Yes, my king?" I knew he was just tired.

I beamed at him. "I would like for you to follow me."

"Why?"

I slung my arm around his neck. "I have something for you."

He looked at me as he reminded me, "The last time you wanted to do that, you had a constellation there in the flesh and not where it belonged in the sky!"

I rolled my eyes at the memory. "You know that my brother and I see you as family, right?"

"Yeah..." he trailed off.

"I know that you worry about us, too. So," I pulled a small, plain box out of my cloak and handed it to him, "I want to give you peace of mind."

He gingerly opened the box. He pulled out the pin I'd asked an apprentice metal worker to make. It was divided in half, one side a warm yellow and the other a gentle white, and some silver going down between the two.

"What-?"

"If either of us are in trouble, the respective sides will light up. Yellow for my brother and white for me," I explained.

"But... Why?" He looked up at me. "I-I mean, I appreciate the gift but why did you give me a gift?"

"Tommorow is your birthday."

"You aren't planning to do anything stupid, are you?"

I smiled, "I don't want my brothers to worry. So, no, I will stay here."

"How did you find me?" I slurred, the cold freezing me from the inside out.

"I followed the trail you left," he answered before he gestured somewhere behind him. "Come here," he groaned as he picked me up.

I clung to him like burs on bark animals and other people wear. He wasn't much warmer than the elements we were stranded in but he was an improvement.

"Did you know that you are bleeding?" my stranger asked me, taking me somewhere.

My mind was too fuzzy to completely understand what he was talking about.

"But you're not bleeding," I blended my words together, after I have him a quick once over as best as I could. Why would he ask if I knew he was bleeding?

"Well, hypothetically if I was a mage like you, I thought you would know how to slow the blood loss down?"

My upper canopy hurt. Why was he asking such difficult questions?

"You would need something to slow it down," I mumbled as I tried to clear my thoughts. "Before that, clean the wound."

He settled me down on a fallen log and then started rummaging through his bag. When he faced me again, he had some white strips and a dirt colored bottle.

"Try not to scream, okay?" He looked back up at me with his cyan colored eyes. His scar on the lower part of his face were sharply contrasting from the fire's light.

Wait. Why was there a fire? Where was the fire?

The sharp jolt that assaulted my left limb was enough to make me cry out in surprise. He didn't let up, if anything, he pressed harder. The cloth he was using was starting to turn green, the color of my sap, at the edges.

I stayed quiet like he asked but when he was done, he pulled a mat made out of pine branches, covered it with some furs, placed me on the mat, and then covered me with the remaining furs.

"Don't worry, I'll keep watch. You rest," he answered when he saw me looking at him.

The last thing I felt was my stranger running his branches through my hair before I fell asleep.

Author's Note- I have never experienced either but I am trying to write a character who is suffering from at least enough hypothermia for the mental fog but not bad enough for a doctor and blood loss. But then again it might be mild hypothermia and the added blood loss might create the mental fog.

Found this far funnier than I should have

so wholesome

We were at the base of a stone tree made by men. The tree had stiff branches all the way at the top. But what held the attention of the man beside me was a stone in the tree. There were markings but I couldn't understand them.

"What do they say?" I asked before I reached out.

He took my hand as gentle as he could.

"It says, 'Bitter are the wars between brothers.' It is a proverb from ages past."

"But why is it here?" There was an unspeakable pain in his eyes. Why was he hurt? Was it because of the proverb?

"The king put this here as a reminder of what happened, I imagine," he answered, leading me away after taking one last good look at the stone.

Hey! Are there blacksmiths in your story? I'm a hobbyist blacksmith and I'm here to help!

Blacksmithing is one of those things that a lot of people get wrong because they don't realize it stuck around past the advent of the assembly line. Here's a list of some common misconceptions I see and what to do instead!

Not all blacksmiths are gigantic terrifying muscly guys with beards and deep voices. I am 5'8, skinny as a twig, have the muscle mass of wet bread, and exist on Tumblr. Anybody who is strong enough to pick up a hammer and understands fire safety can be a blacksmith.

You can make more than just swords with blacksmithing. Though swords are undeniably practical, they're not the only things that can be made. I've made candle holders, wall hooks, kebab skewers, fire pokers, and more. Look up things other people have made, it's really amazing what can be done.

"Red-hot" is actually not that hot by blacksmith terms. when heated up, the metal goes from black, to red, to orange, to yellow, to white. (for temperature reference, I got a second degree burn from picking up a piece of metal on black heat) The ideal color to work with the metal is yellow. White is not ideal at all, because the metal starts sparking and gets all weird and lumpy when it cools. (At no point in this process does the metal get even close to melting. It gets soft enough to work with, but I have never once seen metal become a liquid.)

Blacksmithing takes fucking forever. Not even taking into account starting the forge, selecting and preparing metal, etc. etc. it takes me around an hour to make one (1) fancy skewer. The metals blacksmiths work with heat up and cool down incredibly fast. When the forge is going good, it only takes like 20 seconds to get your metal hot enough to work with, but it takes about the same time for it to cool down, sometimes even less.

As long as you are careful, it is actually stupidly easy to not get hurt while blacksmithing. When I picked up this hobby I was like "okay, cool! I'm gonna make stuff, and I'm gonna end up in the hospital at some point!" Thus far, the latter has yet to occur. I've been doing this for nearly a year. I have earned myself a new scar from the aforementioned second degree burn, and one singe mark on my jeans. I don't even wear gloves half the time. Literally just eye protection, common sense, and fast reflexes and you'll probably be fine. (Accidents still happen of course, but I have found adequate safety weirdly easy to achieve with this hobby)

A forge is not a fire. The forge is the thing blacksmiths put their metal in to heat it up. It starts as a small fire, usually with newspaper or something else that's relatively small and burns easily, which we then put in the forge itself, which is sort of a fireplace-esque thing (there's a lot of different types of forge, look into it and try to figure out what sort of forge would make the most sense for the context you're writing about) and we cover it with coal, which then catches fire and heats up. The forge gets really hot, and sometimes really bright. Sometimes when I stare at the forge for too long it's like staring into the sun. The forge is also not a waterfall of lava, Steven Universe. It doesn't work like that, Steven Universe.

Welding and blacksmithing are not the same thing. They often go hand-in-hand, but you cannot connected two pieces of metal with traditional blacksmithing alone. There is something called forge welding, where you heat your metal, sprinkle borax (or the in-universe equivalent) on it to prevent the metal from oxidizing/being non-weldable, and hammer the pieces together very quickly. Forge welding also sends sparks flying everywhere, and if you're working in a small space with other blacksmiths, you usually want to announce that you're welding before you do, so that everyone in a five-foot radius can get out of that five-foot radius. You also cannot just stuck some random pebbles into the forge and get a decent piece of metal that you can actually make something with, Steven Universe. It doesn't work like that, Steven Universe.

Anvils are really fucking heavy. Nothing else to add here.

Making jewelry is not a blacksmithing thing unless you want jewelry made of steel. And it will be very ugly if you try. Blacksmithing wasn't invented to make small things.

If there's anything here I didn't mention, just ask and I'll do my best to answer.

I think it's so adorable that early humans took wild gourds - a tiny fruit that hollows out as it dries, making it float - and decided to make something out of it

they thought the tiny fruit was so good that they bred it for thousands of years, making it larger to form into bowls and cups, and different shapes to become bottles and spoons

and musical instruments

And then, people took the hollow gourds they farmed, and they turned them into houses for birds. We adapted them into the perfect houses for birds, and now there are specific breeds of birdhouse gourd just for making into birdhouses

And humans dedicated gardening space and time and thousands of years of breeding to make the gourds so absolutely perfect for birds, that there is a species of bird that lives almost exclusively in them

"Hey, pretty girl," I murmured to the Púca I adopted when she was a small filly.

She grunted a quiet greeting before she came up to me. She grabbed a bit of the fabric on my shoulder and gave it a gentle tug.

"How long has it been since I last saw you?"

She whinnied but let go of my shoulder.

"Since yesterday?" I gave a fake frustrated sigh, "That's too long!" I hugged her around her neck. Her fur was coarser than that of other horses and ponies I've met but I wouldn't change anything about her. The other ones are nice but they aren't her.

She nudged me enough to take a small step back, reminding me why I originally came down to visit her.

"Do you want a snack?" I asked her. "Snack?"

She nuzzled me a bit harder.

"Which hand is the snack in?" She was always a smart girl.

She stood there for a moment before nudging my right shoulder. I rolled the apple to my right hand and held it out to her.

"Smart girl," I murmured as she ate the apple. I rubbed her ears just the way she likes it. "I'm going to talk to my big, fat, mean brother to see if I can't bring you into the court so I can give you all the love and rubs you want." I couldn't stop a soft chuckle. "He isn't big, fat, or mean."

The Púca I've known since she was a filly nickered in agreement. She's met my brother and likes him well enough but still doesn't like how he keeps her from me.

"You be nice to him the next time you see him, okay?" I murmured against her forehead.