The mud has long since dried, and yet the memories of Age of Chivalry still cling to us like the scent of woodsmoke in our cloaks. It wasn’t just another faire this year — it was a tempest, a trial, and a triumph all wrapped in one glorious, rain-soaked weekend. KOORL stood strong through the Great Flood of 2025, and by the end, we felt invincible.

That’s why the silence afterward hit so hard.

When you live through something that raw — laughter and lightning side by side — the return to the mundane world feels like stepping out of a dream and straight into static. Faire life, for all its revelry, is a quiet kind of thunder. You hear the wind in the pennants, the crackle of the fire, the easy rhythm of voices telling stories. It’s peace wrapped in pageantry, the kind of noise that fills your heart instead of drowning it.

But the real world? Saints preserve us, it’s loud. The hum of traffic, the buzz of screens, the endless ping of things demanding your attention. It roars so fiercely that it becomes nothing but white noise — a clamor without meaning. You long for the laughter that came from somewhere true. You long for the stillness that sang.

Each day away from faire feels flatter, duller, as if someone turned down the saturation of the world. The reds, blues, and golds have faded to gray, and every hour spent in the mundane tugs harder at the threads of memory. The spirit of the Kingdom of Ourrenland does not fade easily, though. Even here, surrounded by concrete and chaos, we feel the pull — that bright echo calling us back to the village, back to the song.

So we do what we always do: we make.

This weekend, we found our rhythm again. Garb washed and folded, leather restocked, tools sharpened. The workshop hums with the quiet thunder of craft. Each stitch, each strike, each bit of polish is a whisper of the world we left behind — and the one we’re building toward.

Two Rivers awaits on the horizon, and though the world around us drones in black and white, we are already painting our way back to color. The faire lives in us — in our hands, our hearts, and every echo of laughter that refuses to fade.