Archive | February 2019

Rise

This is written to a prompt I encountered on Pinterest from here.

🛸

We had never come up with a cure.

Instead, we had come up with ways to deal with it.  I say we, but it was my grandparents and their parents who did most of that work.

The rest of us just learned what we had to do and got on with the work of rebuilding the world.  By the time I was an adult, you could barely tell that there had been a world-scarring, population-destroying mega war in my grandparents’ time.

And then, of course, the fucking aliens showed up.

They had spacefaring tech that we were only beginning to develop.  They had weapons that were, frankly, amazing, and, from a biologist’s point of view, also horrifying.  They had ships parked in our atmosphere.

We had zombies.  Continue reading

Hidden Mall 57: It’s Dead, Jim

“‘Via?  Olly?” Abby moved to the other side of Olly.  “What’s – “

In the grey shadows of the mall, three translucent figures were staring back at them.  Two of them were definitely her. The third she didn’t recognize at first, a taller man with a gaunt face and protruding bones.

“Abby?” Olly whispered.  “Abby, is that you?”

Abby hoped not.  One of the two grey women was missing a good third of her throat.  The other one had an axe settled in the middle of her chest. It looked—

It looked horrible. Continue reading

Month of Letters and Stationery!

I’m still doing LetterMo (and InCoWriMo)!  As of today I have mailed out 22 letters/postcards/cards (with one ready to go in the mail), received 3 replies and one letter-not-a-reply, and drawn castles, maps, lava, clouds, and barns.

I’ve talked about the weather a lot, Ithaca, winter activities, and whatever else came to mind – including often the paper or card I was writing on.

And Friday and today, as a reward for finishing my work self-evaluation and then for getting the taxes done and sent, I bought a bunch of stationery.  Continue reading

Haunted House 37: Preparations

First: A story featuring a male keeper and a female Kept.
Previous:  
Understanding

🌳

“I still think you should take the silk dresses to sell.”

MĂŠlanie had been losing this argument for three days, but she was still determined, if not to win it, to lose it having fought her battle very well.

“And I think they look delicious on you, or will with a little taking in.”

Continue reading

Running in the Bear Empire 34: What’s Your Name?

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Consummation
Next: 35: Hunting

🐻

“Wait.”

The thing about an Imperial Bed was, even if it wasn’t exactly comfortable in an emotional sense, it was always perfectly comfortable in a physical sense. The spells that Deline used to keep her lodgings tolerable were the basis of the magic on the Imperial bed, but then there were layers and layers of other work there.  One could lay here forever and not get the slightest bit uncomfortable – or at least for decades, until the spells wore off.

Continue reading

Time Passes

Originally posted on Patreon in February 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
After The Fairy Road and Planting Some Good on my blog and The Cats’ Ways and  Community Service here on Patreon.

🏞️

There was not, Whitney had thought, an easy part to the restoration of the Crossroads Park.  The whole thing was a challenge, and the whole thing was back-breaking work, work that ate time, hours and weeks and seemingly years passing by while she dug.  The whole thing was the hard part.

That was before she got to the really hard part.

There was a corner of the park now that looked fresh and beautiful — so fresh that not only had the local newspaper taken pictures, one of the national magazines had come in to tell her story.  The plantings, mostly perennials, had been picked to thrive with minimal care, the grass was trimmed weekly by a local kid who wanted something to do for a school project, and the local fae and spirits had taken to sharply … reprimanding… anyone who littered in the cleaned area or near it.

But that meant that first, the rest of the park looked far worse than it was, and secondly, Whitney was now faced with a wall of brambles where a raspberry bush and a rose bush had gone feral and started fighting over a statute of a Revolutionary War hero. Continue reading

The Visit

He could have had any man or woman in the whole nation — probably in several of the adjacent nations as well. He was a brilliant man,a dashing pirate, and his airship was one of the finest known to navy nor fleet. He was a folk hero the likes of which had not come since Dywin Talizen in the age of stories and myths.

And his airship had ducked in, dodging the royal navy ships and the cannons, to visit a political prisoner in a quiet exile in a mountainous corner. He had brought her a rose, the sort of gift that fit the stories, risking everything for a romantic gesture.

He couldn’t stay long; he couldn’t even risk a kiss, even if she would have accepted it. But he brought her a rose.

And he brought her a key.

Continue reading

Conlang, Calenyen

I wanted to write the Calenyen classic blessing-on-parting, “smooth roads, clear skies.”

Turns out I had almost none of the words! Well, I had 2 out of 4 if you don’t consider the implied “May you always have” or “let there always be”.

What I had:

the word for under-clothes comes from the word lur, meaning smooth, easy: from kiprat-lur to kiplur and eventually down to kur.

eetan – sky

Subject-verb agreement
-unu beyond use (the sun, the moon, the stars)

ah- makes a verb be “always”

Plurals:
ootun beyond use , plural
-ak useful, singular
-anan useful, plural

Two: -te or -tye
herd: -be or -bye
Many, unknown: -ne or -nye

New words:
kaab – to be

tidzieg – a path, a road
tidziegnye – Many roads
gud – clear

Which brings us to

ahkaabanan todziegnye lur
(Smooth Roads, or “may your roads always be smooth.”

ahkaabootun eetan gud.
(Clear skies, or “may your skies always be clear.”)

ahkaabanan todziegnye lur
(Smooth Roads)

 

 

Funerary Rites 40: Laying Blame

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“Something went wrong.”  The street was abandoned.  Senga still kept her voice low, conversational, looking over at Erramun to direct the sound.  “I don’t think it was us.”

“Was it one of the team?”  Erramun’s tone was as light, maybe lighter, than hers.

“Hey!”  Chitter complained over the comm link.  “We’re better than that.”

“Something went wrong,” Erramun countered.   “That means someone messed up. It wasn’t me.  It wasn’t her.” Continue reading