Archive | June 29, 2011

30Days: Falling Falling Falling Down

Day 21 of 30 days of Fiction:”23) Prompt: falling”

Another snippet of Facets of Dusk. 🙂

It was Xenia’s turn to hold Alexa’s hand, although they arranged such things without ever speaking about it. The world they were leaving was too unpleasant, too cold, for Josie to be any use at all, so she came in near the end, buffering Aerich and Alexa, focusing on his turmoil to avoid thinking too hard about her own.

Cole stepped through the mist, so comforting and incongruous inside the steel doorway, vanished into its embrace one limb at a time, until his hand jerked out of her grasp. Unbalanced (some would say she always was, but what did they know?), Josie tumbled after him, Aerich nearly atop her.

And they fell, nothing around them but grey storm clouds and one perplexed bird. There had to be a door; that was how the whole system worked. A door in the middle of thin air? She twisted to look up, trusting her teammates to manage the problem of landing.

Through the clouds, she could barely make out the darker grey of stone. A balcony? She moved the wind, carefully, not wanting to impact the climate more than she had to.

Next to her, still holding her wrist in his dry, firm grip, Aerich chanted, drawing glyphs in the air with his free hand. Below her, Cole swore, the sort of calm, rhythmic swearing that meant he had a plan and was working on it.

And stretching up above them all, taller, it seemed, than the skyscraper they’d stepped out of, was the ruin of an ancient tower, grey stone spiraling into the clouds.

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30daysmeme: Identity, Rin/Girey @inventrix

Day 21 of 30 days of Fiction:” 22) Write a scene with children,” yes I’m doing Day 21 twice.

Reiassan/Rin & Girey, after Bridged (a Green Man story, sponsor for $20), which is after Crossing Into Lannamer

Reiassan has a landing page here (LJ Link)

He wanted to stare at the city.

Lannamer was one of the oldest cities on the continent, old as Ouyknan, and as big (some small part of him, still loyal to his home, refused to acknowledge that it was, in actuality, bigger). As brightly painted as Ossulund, it should have seemed garish, but the colors seemed to flow together when he glanced up.

Only glanced up, because he was staring at the plaque bracelet around his wrist, at his other wrist, smoothly un-shackled for the first time since the battlefield, for the first time since he’d met Rin.

Rin. She sat arrow-straight in her saddle, riding beside him, turning to smile at him reassuringly. Would he finally learn who she was? She couldn’t keep on being Rin the Healer, Just Rin, here in her home city, could she?

He turned to ask her, to demand one last time to know who she was, before someone called out her name, before he learned from a stranger. But the sound of small children drowned out his question unasked.

“Lady, lady!” They rushed toward her eagerly, the way they had in every town and city. “Lady! Lord!”

Lord threw him, shook him, reminded him who he was (who he was pretending to be, who he had been; what he would be was still up to her, still in the air). He sat up straighter, and raised his chin. Damnit, prisoner or no, false Duke’s son or no, he was a Prince. He ought to act the part.

“There you are,” Rin murmured to him. He had no chance to figure that one out, however, before the children clamoured again.

“Lady! Lord! Are you here for the wedding?”



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