Checking In, and a Snippet

anisosynchronic points out that I haven't posted in awhile.  True.  The writing was going well and then it stopped, but that happens all the time.  In this case, I have an upcoming chapter that seems to want to be told rather than shown, and that always makes me nervous.  I'm much more at ease with scenes than exposition.  So I've got to work around that somehow.

And in two weeks I'm off to the world SF con Sasqaun in Spokane WA.  It's going to be mostly a road trip.  Melinda is flying from Portland OR with the twins to Minneapolis where she will turn them over to their grandmother.  Then she and I will drive back out west, twinless, reversing on the return.  I have a panel, a reading, an autographing, a kaffeeklatch, and a writers' workshop.  Is anyone else going?

In the meantime, here's a rather long snippet about which I have some doubts.  You will notice that I'm filling in backstory again to bring the current plot into focus.  It would be better if I'd thought of some of this before but oh well:  this whole series has been in part a game of catch-up.

Down the darkening shore, a small bonfire leaped in the growing shadows.  Approaching it, Jame first saw Jorin stretched out on the sand, apparently intent on the blaze.  Then she saw that someone was turning a spitted mouse over it.  Skinny arms, legs like sticks of kindling under the tattered folds of a skirt, a half veiled face…. 
Eyes rose aglow with reflected flames.  Ragged teeth grinned at her.
“Took your time, didn’t you, girl?”
“I didn’t know that you were expecting me.  What if I had gone through a different gate?”
“Then I would have been waiting for you there.”
Jame lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the sand.  “Granny, this is Brier Iron-thorn.  Brier, meet Granny Sit-by-the-Fire, also known as the Story-teller.”
The Kendar nodded and sank to her heels, a wary poise.
“Well,” said Jame, “now that I’m here, what do you want with me?”
The half-veiled grin turned almost carnivorous.  “Why, to tell you a story, of course, and to ask a question.”  She cleared her throat and spat into the fire, almost hitting her dinner.  “D’you remember the desert gods?”
“Some.  Stone, that tells truths hard to bear.  Dune, that reveals with one hand and covers with the other. Mirage, that always lies and lies without purpose.  And Salt the Soulless.”
“Very good!  There are also gods of the mountains, the plains, and the oceans, of course, or were in the old days.  Some have since lost their voices; others, themselves.  Man came, you see, and big truths like Stone and Dune and especially Salt – they frighten him.  He has to recast everything in his own image, so he took what he found and made it look more like himself.  A new pantheon arose.  You call it ‘old’ now, given what followed.”
“Is this making any sense to you?” Brier asked Jame.
“Yes.  Granny is saying that the Old Pantheon brought divinity down a peg by adding the human element.  Remember the healer Vedia, sometimes woman, sometimes statue, and all of those snakes?  In Kothifir, her kind were banished to the Undercliff.  I hope Kroaky has kept his word and let them out.  Gods in the basement are never a good idea.”
“Heh, heh, heh.  So they aren’t, pretty-pretty, as you well know.  But the story I have to tell starts in the days when the so-called Old Pantheon reigned.  Before the tribes of the middle plains built their cities and then their empires –“
“Bashti and Hathor?”
“Yes, yes.  Don’t interrupt.  Before them, I say, a clever people lived in the land.  Did you never wonder where the ruins in the Riverland came from?  Perhaps they were the distant ancestors of the hill-tribes, but oh, they were so much more cunning.  Among many other things, these folk discovered the use of stepping stones, and that allowed them to settle wherever they pleased, with their fields and gardens half a world away – always depending on the presence of the right stones, of course, and they tend to show up where this world is most itself.  But nothing lasts forever.  In time, their wisdom faded.  Maybe it was war, or sickness, or religion, or stupidity, but one by one they wandered off and their keeps fell into ruin.
“But that’s not the story I meant to tell either.”
Brier snorted.  “Does she ever get to the point?”
Granny pointed her skewered mouse at the Kendar and shook it with a stink of burning fur, its whiskers and tufted tail alight.  Jame saw that she had neither skinned nor boned it. 
“Silly girl.  What do you know?  Your mother swims under the sand and your grandfather tortures cranberries.” 
Brier stiffened, but Jame put a calming hand on her knee. 
“After all,” she said, “Granny is right.”
“Hah’rum!  In the days after those of which I speak, not long before the wheel of gods turned yet again, a strange folk came to us.  They were no bigger than children and their skin was gray, laced with blue veins, but oh, they were smart.  Your home, Tagmeth, was one of the last keeps with a nearly intact step-forward ring.  They learned from it, and used it, and built one of their own in their new city.  Heh, but one not quite as good as ours.  These were native stones, y’see, and they were as alien as … as you yourself are, and the rest of your kind.  They may not have meant harm, but they caused it.  Mother Rathillien had her revenge on them for their arrogance, oh, yes she did.”
Granny slid the mouse off the skewer.  Holding it by its tail, she ate it as a snake might, head first, whole.  More disappeared down her skinny throat with each swallow.
Glup, glup ….
She nipped off its tail with her snaggle teeth and threw it to Jorin, who snatched it out of mid-air.
“Ah ….” 
With that, she fixed her fire-lit glare on Jame.
“You know what I’m talking about, girl, don’t you?  Mother Rathillien is patient, but nothing lasts forever.  You and your temples and your god – as if three faces could out-face many.”
“Then you disown the New Pantheon and the Four?”
Granny grimaced.  “Your lot changed much, but not everything.  As I am the daughter of Stone and Wind, so Mother Ragga is my grand-daughter.  This is her time, hers and those other three.  I only watch, and warn, and tell my tales.  For now, farewell.”
The fire leaped sideways.  In a moment, she was wrapped in flames, then ash, then gone.
Brier had jumped to her feet, aghast.
“Don’t worry,” said Jame, also rising.  “She often leaves that way.”