Archive | February 2012
Briars and Vinegar: Bitter and Sharp, a story of fae-apoc post apoc for the Giraffe Call
For Rix_scaedu‘s prompt.
Part 4 of 4.
Fae Apoc has a landing page here.
Part 1: Briars and Vinegar (LJ)
Part 2: Briars and Vinegar: Blood on the Snow (LJ)
Briars and Vinegar: For 100 Years (LJ)
The girl’s braid was nearly twice as long as she was tall, and it was loose around the top. She sighed at it, and tied it in a knot to take up some of the slack.
“Be welcome in my home,” she murmured formally. Her rose hedge parted before her, and she stepped out to greet them, offering Jeri her hand. “I’m Vin.”
“Vin?” Jeri shook the girl’s hand.
“Vinegar. My sister, my twin, she was Wine.” She makes a tired, irritated gesture. “She died a long time ago. She got all the power, you see.”
“I…” Jeri shook her head, looking at her friends. Clarence shrugged; he didn’t get it either.
“There should be food in the kitchen, and wood in the woodshed.” Vin brushed past them. “I generally wake up for a little while every summer and get the place in shape, then sleep through the winter. I can live on almost nothing that way. It’s almost a superpower.”
Hearing the tired bitterness in her voice, Clarence began to understand her name. “How long have you been here?”
“I lost count a long time ago.” As she said that, she paused by an interior wall, her hand on a series of hashmarks. “For a while, I’d wait until the longest day of the year passed, and make another mark.”
When her hand moved, Clarence counted the marks. Ten, twenty… “You’ve been here longer than eighty years?”
“How long ago was the War?” she asked vaguely. “Do you still remember the war?”
“Remember?” Jeri choked. Darrel had been reduced to staring in awe. “It’s been over eighty years since you came here!”
“No, no, not you personally. I mean, do people still talk about it?”
“Oh!” Jeri nodded, q quick, nervous, rapid movement. “Sort of, I mean. Ther was a war. Bad stuff happened. There were faeries and gods, but they all left or died.”
“Or went into hiding,” Vinegar agreed. “Back then, people would kill fae on sight, because the people who started the war had been fae.” She pulled piles of clothing from a cupboard. “If you stand there in wet clothes, you won’t warm up. Change into something dry, and I’ll start the fire.”
“So you went into hiding? Couldn’t you just… pretend not to be fae? You don’t look like a faerie,” Darrel grumbled.
“I don’t age. I don’t change. And, back then, people didn’t move towns all that much.” She set wood in the fire and started it, Clarence noticed, like a normal person, with flint and steel. “It was very obvious what I was. And nobody cared, that I couldn’t have done those things. That all I could do, the whole of my magic, was to make roses grow. So I came here, and I made the roses grow.”
“Briars and Vinegar,” Darrel muttered. “Sharp and bitter, and so much longer lasting than flowers and wine.”
If Clarence hadn’t known better, he’d have said that his friend was in love. And from the look on the girl’s face, she was, for the first time in a very long time, contemplating something sweet.
“I do store well,” she allowed, her lips finally curling into a smile.
Next: Briars & Vinegar: Eating the Roses (LJ)
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Briars and Vinegar: For 100 Years, a story of fae-apoc post apoc for the Giraffe Call
For Stryck‘s prompt, although title from Rix_scaedu‘s prompt.
Part 3 of 4.
Fae Apoc has a landing page here.
Part 1: Briars and Vinegar (LJ)
Part 2: Briars and Vinegar: Blood on the Snow (LJ)
Bleeding, damp, and frozen, the three of them made it through the hedge of roses and crawled weakly towards the house.
The snow was falling in earnest now, covering their path, covering them as they struggled the last twenty meters, their clothing torn, their skin rended.
“If we never do that again,” Jeri mumbled,
“Yeah. I’ll count us lucky.” None of them mentioned that they would have to leave again. None of them were certain they could.
It was Clarence who made it to his feet to try the doorknob and, finding it locked, pushed off a mitten to pick the latch. They could break a window – but they would need the building as intact as it could be if they were going to survive.
It was Jeri who pushed the door shut again, making sure they’d all gotten in, with all their gear; it was Darrel who, knife out, began to clear the place, slowly but professionally. It would do them no good at all to get warm, only to be eaten by a monster or killed by a feral human for their gear.
“It seems warm in here,” Jeri murmured. “Some sort of geothermal heating system, maybe, old tech?”
It did, indeed, seem warm. “Could just be that we’re frozen,” Clarence pointed out. “There’s no wind here, so it seems warmer. It’s well-insulated, at least.”
“Guys,” Darrel called urgently. “Guys, come here.”
Knives out, they limped into the other room as quickly as they could, to find Darrel staring in distress at the bed.
There, in the bed, wrapped in blankets, her hair in a braid that reached onto the floor, slept – slept, because they could see her moving – a beautiful girl, no older than they were, maybe younger, with perfect-pale skin and ridiculously long lashes.
And, as they stood there gaping, roses began growing up around her, briars, mostly, with one white flower. She sat up, slowly, and they could see she was wearing a long-sleeved gown. “Goo ahway, plis, end noobahdy nids tah gite hahrt.”
Her accent was so thick, they could barely understand her. “It’s storming outside,” Clarence tried, speaking very slowly.
“Wine-tyre?” she asked, slowly. “Uhlyridih?”
“We were surprised, too. We don’t have gear for this weather.”
The roses stopped growing, and the girl stood up. “Steey,” she said, her speech becoming more comprehensible as they got used to the odd accent. “If you mean nah harm.”
“We mean you no harm,” he assured her. “We just want to warm up and dry off.” He turned to his friends, but they were staring at the girl in awe.
“Clarence,” Jeri said, very quietly, “she made those roses grow from nothing.”
“Fae,” Darrel whispered. “She’s a fae.”
“I am,” the girl agreed, “but the saddest sample you’ll evah find. That,” she gestured at the roses. “That’s all I can do.”
Clarence took a moment to digest that. “You’re a Fair Folk. A magic one. A myth…”
“…with the sole and entahre power of growing roses. Yes. You see why I hide out here?”
Part four is: Briars and Vinegar: Sharp and Bitter (LJ)
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Briars and Vinegar – Blood on the Snow, a story of fae-apoc post apoc for the Giraffe Call (@anke)
For ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anke‘s prompt, although title from Rix_scaedu‘s prompt.
Part 2 of either 3 or 4, we shall see.
Fae Apoc has a landing page here.
Part 1: Briars and Vinegar (LJ)
The snow kept blowing, pushing away the nice drift they’d been standing on, revealing more and more roses in front of them – not just a rose bush, it seemed, but an entire hedge, a monstrosity of roses sticking out of the snow, their thorns long and sharp, their buds few and blood-red, like the drips Darrel was leaving on the snow.
“Maybe we should head back,” Clarence sighed. “The deeper we dig, the more thorns we find. This seems fruitless.”
“But it’s right there,” Jeri complained. Indeed, they could see more and more of the house, through the hedge of briars. “And the other place was barely there. This one looks lived in.”
“Well, if it’s lived in, maybe they don’t want company?” Darrel pulled out his long knife and contemplated the hedge. “They might not be happy if we cut through.”
“They might not,” Clarence agreed. “I think I see a break over there.” He slogged that way through snow that seemed to grab on to his snowshoes and pull him downwards. Night was coming. If they didn’t find shelter soon, he wasn’t sure they’d survive. It was madness to stand here fighting with a flower bush.
And yet they kept doing it. He was surprised Darrel hadn’t mentioned sorcery yet. Darrel liked the old tales, the old myths. He liked to believe in magic, and dragons, and monsters. Jeri liked to believe, on the other hand, in old documents and old maps, old books and older pamphlets, as if the ancients had somehow had all the answers.
Clarence just wanted to find new things, or things that, at least, no-one living knew about, since, as everyone liked to tell him, the ancients had known everything, been everywhere, and done everything. But, since they were dead and he wasn’t, finding it all over again, he thought, should count.
“I found something,” he called. It wasn’t a gate, not anymore, but he could see the edges of the arbor that had been there, and the swinging door that had fallen off, or been pulled off by the weight of roses. They would have to crawl, but they could get through.
“Doesn’t it seem strange?” Darrel asked, as he and Jeri slogged over to him, “All these roses, still doing fine all this time later? We’ve never seen anything quite this alive.”
“They don’t have many flowers anymore,” Jeri pointed out. “Maybe they went wild?”
“But it’s winter, or, well, it’s acting like winter. They shouldn’t have any flowers at all by now.”
“We’ve seen stranger things,” Clarence soothed them. “Right now, we need to get to that house, so we warm up, then go tell the folks at home about this.”
“Right,” Darrel agreed, rubbing his hands. “And put a bandage on these thorn-holes in me.”
The tunnel through the briars seemed smaller than it had when he first looked, but surely that was just the perspective, comparing it against Darrel’s broad shoulders. “Right,” Clarence steeled himself. “I’ll go through first. Jeri, you bring up the rear.”
Part three is Briars and Vinegar: For 100 Years (LJ)
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Briars and Vinegar, a story of fae-apoc post apoc for the Giraffe Call
For ariestess‘s prompt, although title from Rix_scaedu‘s prompt.
Part one of either 3 or 4, we shall see.
Fae Apoc has a landing page here.
Names from here
The world had fallen into chaos two hundred years ago, although the exact year was unclear. Record-keeping was not as precise as it had once been, and the exact year that the old world ended had been, it seemed, in some debate at the time.
The remaining population had gathered together in small communities and, from there, rebuilt a world, a much smaller world than their ancestors had known. Large portions of the world were simply left alone, either unsafe in and of themselves, or too far from a population center to be safely or easily traveled to.
Slowly, the world rebuilt. And slowly, as towns grew back into cities, people began to explore the lands they had left abandoned.
Clarence slogged through the early-season snow on unfamiliar snowshoes, muttering quietly at the sudden and unexpected fall that obscured trail and hazards alike.
“The map,” Jeri offered, “says there should be a road here.”
“The map,” Darrel countered, “is a million years old. The road is probably long gone.”
“The old roads don’t just vanish,” she countered stubbornly. “Besides, an old map is better than no map.”
“Unless there’s a dragon around here that’s not on there.”
“There’s no such thing as dragons.”
“Guys.” Clarence hissed out the word. “Guys, shut up for a minute.”
This wasn’t their first exploration, even if they were acting like kids – it was the snow, it brought out the five-year-old in all of them – so both of them fell quiet at his tone.
Once it was clear that nothing was immediately going to attack them, they moved forward, to see what he was looking at.
“Is that a rose?” Darrel whispered. “How is it…”
“I have no idea. Maybe the snow took it by surprise, too?” In the middle of a drift that Clarence’s walking stick said was at least a meter deep, a single red rosebud stood out like a blood drop. “It looks unreal.”
“Do you think there are more?” Darrel began digging in the snow, pushing aside the drift. “Or maybe an old wall, or some sign of something other than this endless nothing?”
“There could be a whole town under the snow,” Jeri put in, but she, too, was digging. “Or a road.”
“You and your… ow!” Darrel yanked his hand back, the blood drip clear on his wool mitten. “Blasted ruins, there’s something down there.”
“Roses have thorns,” Clarence offered helpfully. “Guys, it’s starting to snow again. We should get back to that building we saw.”
“If by ‘building,’ you mean ‘two walls?'” Jeri shook her head. “Look, just over the edge of the drift – there’s a chimney. It’s closer, at least.” The wind was beginning to pick up again, whipping snow back into the hole they’d been digging, whipping it away from the rose. “We should be able to make it there before dark.”
Part two: Briars and Vinegar: Blood on the Snow (LJ)
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Pure as… a story of Unicorn/Factory for the giraffe call
For ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt.
Unicorn/Factory has a landing page here.
Terebina had thought, when she had first heard of unicorns, that they would be beautiful, majestic creatures.
She had thought that they would be proud, shining, pure beings, glittering white things, above dirt, above eating.
She had thought they would be like angels in her storybooks. That is, after all, what the whispers sounded like. “Pure,” she had been told, “So pure they clean water with their touch. So proud they won’t be seen by the unclean.”
But Terebina was clean, chaste, cloistered, or, at least, she had been cloistered, Back Home, back before her father took a position here. Before he had signed up to help run the Factory, and dragged her and her mother out to this tiny town which, at the very least, could boast of unicorns, since it could boast of very little else. There was no need to keep her cloistered here, she’d complained in frustration to her father, and he had agreed smugly. There was no one to cloister her from.
She dutifully took her lessons in the mornings with the other children, the daughters of the bureaucrats, and the sons too young to work, the daughters and sons of factory workers either too young for working or whose parents’ wages paid for this education for them. She studied, too, mostly from boredom, diving into her books in a way she never had back home.
And when all that became too boring, she enjoyed the fact that, here in this small Town, she could walk around unescorted, unprotected, unchaperoned, because there was nothing to protect her from and no-one to make her need a chaperon. There was the foreman’s son… but she avoided him, lest her father get ideas.
With time on her hands and an urge to explore, and a pressing need to avoid young men of her own age, to keep from being locked up again, and thus ending up avoiding the few other young women her age, Terebina ended up quickly an expert on the Town’s geography, on its small but well-tended yards and gardens, on its tall and snooty front facades and very practical, plain back walls. And, soon, she began to encounter Unicorns.
She saw her first one in Goodwife Jorie’s back yard, chewing on the roses, thorns and all. It looked up at her, its wicked-looking horn pointing in her direction, whickered, and went back to eating as if she wasn’t even there.
That was long enough for her to notice that its horn was not, indeed, shining white, but a coral pink, as if with blood flowing through it. And that, while standing in mud, it seemed to shed the dirt, a trick, she thought impertinently, that their horses would do well to learn.
She saw what she thought was another one – they looked rather similar – a few days later, eating the boots the foreman had left out on his back stoop (and never mind what she was doing in the foreman’s back yard); and a third – this one’s horn was almost entirely red – girdling a tree in her neighbor’s front yard. The adults couldn’t see them, she soon discovered, which make it even more entertaining to watch the creatures gleefully nibbling at everything they could reach.
“Aren’t you supposed to be pure?” she asked a small one, as, wobbling a little, it stood on two legs to eat the leaves off of a newly-planted tree.
In response, it looked at her, eyes clear and amused-seeming, and dipped its horn into a bucket of rainwater, turning the murky stuff clear as crystal. Its meaning, too, was clear: unicorns purified. Giggling, Terebina left it a sugar cube she’d meant for their horses, and left it to its lunch.
Unicorns, she was discovering, were a lot more fun than angels.
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Prompt all the writings!!
clare_dragonfly has opened her Garden of Prose! The theme is fountains, statues, & gazing balls.
My Giraffe Call is still open; the theme is win and/or roses.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/275219.html. You can comment here or there.
The Bloody Rose of Morning
For Vryka’s prompt.
Facets of Dusk has a landing page here.
Cole woke.
He generally considered this a good start to the day, getting things off on an immediate positive note.
He woke in a bed, which was even nicer, a comfortable bed with soft sheets. The day was already looking up. And there was a warm presence next to him, soft-skinned and pleasant smelling. The night was beginning, slowly, to come back to him, in blurry flashes. The team… the team was in another room, in the same house, or perhaps several rooms. Their hostess…
…Propped herself up on one elbow and smiled at him. “The water of the dawn falls sweeter than the rain of the evening.”
Ah, this.
Cole wracked his mind, but the only thing that came up was
“He drinks a whisky drink
He drinks a vodka drink
He drinks a lager drink
He drinks a cider drink
He sings the songs that remind him
Of the good times
He sings the songs that remind him
Of the better times”
The girl smiled uncertainly at him and reached for a bottle by the bedside, while, still smiling, Cole cursed himself. Josie had been on a roll last night, pulling lyrics out of her ass, and even Aeric had been able to come up with a poem or two. Cole? Cole could manage Chumbawumba.
“But the sweetest morning comes,” she continued, her gaze far too intense for his comfort, “with the coldness of reasoning.”
Oh, shit. Where was Josie when he needed her?
Right, not watching him in bed with another woman. Or at least not with this bronze-skinned beauty with the stunning eyes.
Stunning eyes. Stunning… blue… eyes. Sinatra!
“I thought I found the gal I could trust,
watta bust, this is how the story ends:
She’s gonna turn me down and say,
‘Can’t we be just friends?'” He gave her a game smile, but she was frowning at him. Which was still a lovely expression, but not the one he was hoping for.
“Those who would be drunk upon the bloody roses of the morning beware the price of the wine,” she informed him firmly.
“The price…” He quashed the Kanya West lyrics that came to mind, and just shook his head. “It was a lovely night, beautiful.”
“The bloody morning wine,” she repeated, one hand gesturing crudely at parts of herself, “is sweet, but ware the path its taste will lead.”
He had to get out of here before he ended up married. Again. Was it bigamy if the wives were in different worlds? “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” he tried weakly, and, because it generally solved things, he kissed her.
She kissed him back, and seemed to agree with him, by the press of her body, that it was a good idea. So he kept kissing, fully intending to keep on tasting her bloody morning roses as long as she’d allow it.
Until someone started pounding on the door. “Those who taste the morning wine must pay the sherrif’s rosy fine!” shouted a deep and angry voice.
Sighing, Cole reached for his pants, the girl, and his gun. And the morning had been looking so good!
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“…and Thou,” a story of the Aunt Family for the Giraffe Call.
The Aunt Family has a landing page here.
“Where, exactly, is it that you are taking me?” Ruan was trying not to be short with Johias. He had really been being a dear lately, helping her weed out a cousin’s estate, working with her on the automatic tarot machine, and helping her with that blasted demon that had been stuck in one of Tansy’s messier pigeonholes (her late Aunt had, if nothing else, developed some impressive pigeonhole technology. They would be studying the science behind that for the rest of their lives, and, likely, their heirs would be doing so, too).
“Somewhere.” Johias was, despite his recent darling behavior, making it very hard to not snap at him. Very, very difficult. “You’ll enjoy it when we get there.”
“Sir, you are acting in a fashion I do not find in the least appealing. Bundling me into your automobile without as much as a hellow-how-are-you, and then refusing to tell me what we are doing, and, I will note, you appear to have finally tuned your aetheric dampers properly and I am very displeased with you right now!”
And now she’d done it. He was going to snap back at her and they’d have a fight, and there’d been a few of those, with the pigeonhole project, and they were awful, especially with both their families hanging on every sign of discontent.
Ruan tensed, but Johias, instead of yelling back at her, laughed. “Ah, Ruan,” he chuckled, “I deserved that. But if you will bear with me just one more minute, I promise it will all be clear.”
“One more minute,” she allowed, attempting not to sulk at him. Sulking was, in the very least, unattractive, undignified, and not at all ladylike.
“And there. Than you, my darling woman.” He stopped the car and got out, offering her a hand out. His other hand, she noted, was carrying a basket. She bit her lip, refusing to ask any more questions.
“It is such a lovely day,” he explained, leading her in the dimming sunlight to the top of the hill, “and we’ve been cooped up inside all spring and into the summer. So, what is it the poet said…? ‘A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou?'” He pulled a blanket from the basket, and lay it out over the grass. “Would you sit with me, Ruan, and watch the sun sink low over the reservist?”
“Oh, Johias,” she began, even as, a twinkle in his eye, he added, “I hear there’s a phenomenon that only occurs at sunset here. I think we’ve enough time to study it over our wine.”
“Oh, Johias!” she repeated, as they both, laughing, sank down onto the blanket to watch the water.
The line is from “From Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Persian Poet‘s verses.
I originally learned it out of context, and use it here, again, out of context.
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Picking Grapes
Shiva and Niki are characters in the webserial Addergoole.
Addergoole has a landing page here.
“Niki, stop squirming.” Shiva flicked the back of Niki’s ear with forefinger and thumb in exasperation. “You’d think no-one had ever picked your grapes before.”
“Shiiiiiiiva,” her Kept whined, sitting very still because he had no choice and still managing to give off the impression of wriggling. “It tickles. And you didn’t have to thwap me,” he added, sulking.
“This was your idea,” she pointed out. “You can hold still, or I can tie you down.”
She felt a stillness come over him as he stopped fighting the order. “That could be fun.”
“It could,” she agreed. She leaned forward to breathe against the back of his pointed ear. “And if you’re very good, then we will do that later.”
A tiny moan escaped him, a sound she was pretty sure he didn’t know he was making. “I’ll be good,” he whispered, the words seeming to come from deep inside him, from the person behind the bitchy mask.
“I know you will,” she purred. His ear was right there, so she licked the back of it slowly. “You’re my wonderful, wonderful slave, aren’t you?” And was he in the mood to take that as it was meant, and not act insulted?
The soft groan suggested that he was. “All yours.” Sometimes, sometimes she could remind him why he’d asked her to collar him. It seemed today was one of those days.
“Lay on your stomach for me,” she murmured, “and I’ll finish harvesting this batch of grapes.”
She waited for him to shift around, and then straddled him, one hand on the center of his back pinning him, while she used the other to pick the juicy red grapes that grew, Bacchus-like, from thick vines in his hair.
On the bedstand, a bowl already overflowed with the fruit. “I’m going to make the sweetest wine from you, my beautiful boy,” she whispered, watching him shudders at her breath on his shoulders. “And then we’ll get drunk off you.”
“Yes, Shiva,” he groaned, twitching as she murmured the Words to coax his vines to fruit again.
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