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Second-year magic lessons

Apr18

This is written to a prompt cluudle left back in August, 2015

Luke didn’t like her, and he really did not like teaching her.

Shahin found that a little amusing, but she tried not to antagonize the man too much. She wanted to become better at Kwxe. Everything she found in every vision told her she was going to need it. Everything the teachers didn’t want to tell her enforced that – up to and including the fact that, despite the fact that Luke did not like teaching her, he’d agreed to meet with her three times a week to practice Kwxe.

“What are you going to use this for?” he demanded today. Shahin smiled, a small expression that was as dry and as careful as she could make it.

“I was thinking,” she offered, “that I would use it to stop Dragons. Or – if I can’t stop them…” She would stop them, she knew it. But that would be much later. “…then to stall them.”

She noted that he was surprised, and a bit chagrined, and quite a bit worried. She decided she could live with that.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1089486.html. You can comment here or there.

♪When the dog bites, when the bee stings…♫

Apr14

A very small continuation of ♪Brown Paper Packages♫ and …Tied up with String.

It’s Addergoole, so all AG warnings apply. Suggestions of [former abuse] (highlight for spoilers, if those count in a 125-word ficlet).

Ackelea walked around the boy twice. He was vaguely familiar – she hadn’t been hunting this year, so she hadn’t spent that much time looking at the younger students. He was pretty rather than handsome, beardless, his black hair braided and twisted into a bun at the base of his neck.

He had scars, she noted. Scars on his neck, scars on his wrists. She walked around hi a third time and he stayed entirely in pose, but he was trembling.

“All fours,” she ordered lazily, just to see what he would do. Without hesitation, he shifted position. He had scars on the back of his thighs, too.

“Sit comfortably.” She fell into a cross-legged seat in front of him, never mind the kilt. “Tell me something about yourself, my dear.”

Tip Package 😉

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1088102.html. You can comment here or there.

Dungeon-bound, a continuation for fun (Fae Apoc)

Apr11

After Dungeons, written last year, which includes forced imprisonment.

The whimper was the hardest part.

That was… well, it was true, but it was dishonest in its truth.

It was the hardest thing for Tan to do, to make the sound as if she had broken him, to let her thing she was winning.

The hardest thing about this whole process was not letting that whimper be true.

She said it had been a month. He could guess she was close to honest about that. Meals came irregularly, but the dead-eyed man who brought them would say “breakfast” or “Lunch” or “dinner,” even though there was never more than two thin meals in a day and they were almost all the same mush. Tan had counted by the pit of hunger in his stomach, and then he’d counted by the times she visited her other prisoners.

“I suppose I’ll have to leave you in here a year,” their captor had threatened, but Tam was not worried. For one, he could last longer than a year in worse circumstances than this. For another, she did not strike him as the sort who was willing to wait that long.

No, she would come down again long before another month had passed. And then the fun would begin.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1086958.html. You can comment here or there.

Aging in Cloverleaf, a story of…well, of Cloverleaf… now available for Patreon patrons~

Apr11

Aging in Cloverleaf

Fiana was getting old, and Edgar was not…

Years after they helped to build Cloverleaf, a plumber and his wife discuss their choice.

Now available on Patreon to all patrons!

Pledge just $1 a month to gain access to all these stories; pledge $5 or more a month to prompt these tales.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1086715.html. You can comment here or there.

A Rude Awakening

Apr7

I found the first half of this in my e-mail. To be honest, I have no idea where I’d been intending to go with this, but this is where it ended up.

“You’re interesting.”

Whistler was not sure what he’d expected, but that was probably not it. The short girl was perched on the footboard of the bed, wearing an indigo silk bathrobe and, as far as he could tell, nothing else. And she was staring at him.

In terms of ‘ways to wake up,’ it was definitely his weirdest yet, even here in Addergoole. And yesterday he’d woken up to screams and a power outage.

“I’m…” Whistler moved to sit up and realized that he was pinned down. No… strapped. He looked to either side of him slowly – dresser, open door to the bathroom, large posters of landscapes. It was anything but institutional. He looked down at his chest. Straps. He moved a wrist. More straps. “I’m strapped down,” he finished. Just because it was a familiar feeling didn’t mean he liked it.

“Well…” She rubbed her neck, where, Whistler noticed, there were bruises in the shape of fingers. “I figured I ought to make sure you were calm before we started talking.”

Whistler swallowed. Oh, no. “Oh, god,” he whispered. “Did I…”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1085477.html. You can comment here or there.

A Stretch after Sleep, a continuation

Apr6

After After Long Sleep.

There were five men staring at her. Well, she had just stepped out of the ground.

Besides, Aster was used to staring, except that the looks they were giving her were not admiring, they were concerned. That was new. She checked herself – nope, she was still Masked, although she was naked. She’d been clothed when she was buried, she was pretty sure. But no, nothing but a few sad tatters, and the air was a bit chilly.

The man in front cleared his throat. “Ah. Did we wake you?”

“Well, some rather annoying people stuck me in the ground…” She frowned. “So I suppose it’s more as if you rescued me.”

“Buried you?” The man that spoke this time sounded urgent, worried. “When? That is, how long ago?” Aster frowned at him.

“Well, let me see.. I believe it was around seventeen-ninety…”

“Seventeen?” The first man stared at her. “Well, then you’re not one of the returned gods, at least. But then what ARE you?”

“What I am,” Aster answered, perhaps a wee bit crossly, “is hungry.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1085398.html. You can comment here or there.

Road Trip Write-Up the Beginning of a fic

Apr5

This was supposed to be a blorp of description and then, well, this happened. This happens a couple years before the current Regine-visits-Cya story.

It was a nice time of year for a travel: early autumn, and a mild one at that, not too hot and not too cold. The roads were solid and smooth from Cloverleaf all the way to what had once been Denver; the first week went quickly. Not only were the roads smooth, but they were relatively safe; Cloverleaf had a long arm, and was known not to tolerate bandits.

Past Denver, that all changed. A week’s travel was as far as Cloverleaf maintained the roads, and thus was as far as their protection was assumed to reach. The roads got bumpy – nothing a couple quick Workings couldn’t smooth out, but that took time. And the bandits got brave – nothing the sight of Leo couldn’t handle, in most cases, but that, too, took time. Sometimes they actually had to fight some thief or slaver whose ambition was greater than their sense.

Outside of what had once been Des Moines and now was a collective of small city-states around Crater Lake, they ran into a different sort of threat – bureaucracy. The toll-booth takers wanted a tithe to use the one paved, clear, safe road, and they wanted written statements of intent, and a tithe of any profits made while in the Crater Lake region. What’s more, they didn’t take Cloverleaf clovers for payment, muttering something about “fairy money.”

It wasn’t the first time they’d run into things like that, so they paid the toll in more acceptable currencies and made mental notes about the situation. They could probably conquer the Crater States, but there were easier, cleaner ways to turn people’s opinions around. If trade didn’t do it, culture might. If that didn’t, maybe education. And failing that, well, they could always send a small team of their ambassadors.

It had been a few years – decades, really – since Cya had been running Cloverleaf actively, but it was still her baby, after all.

Just outside the mess that had been Chicago, they ran into a slaver ring. That took a day off of their time, but, while Cya could tolerate the existence of slavery, there were certain types of slavers that made her skin crawl.

Besides, it didn’t hurt to leave a reminder. Cloverleaf might be nearly two weeks’ travel away, but they would interfere where they wanted to, when people were doing awful things.

The Find Cya had done was sending them quite far afield indeed. They traveled through the night to get around once-Chicago, then settled for a day in a quiet little patch of forest to rest. Then it was on to Detroit.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1085173.html. You can comment here or there.

Flight

Apr1

Written in response to a lovely picture @dahob showed me – here.

She hadn’t meant to run – to flee, that is. Drifa hadn’t really been meaning to do anything, not consciously. The pain had come, and she’d been trying to get away from it. A little walking, that would help. A little running, maybe that would help more. She hadn’t noticed for a good twenty minutes that she wasn’t running, she was flying. She hadn’t noticed until she landed that she was wearing a sheet and nothing else.

Crows were landing all around her, settling in the snow and cawing questions at her. Drifa cleared her throat and answered. “Lost,” she told them, “new-fledged.” It was close enough, and none of them questioned her size.

Nor did they question her nudity in the snow, but, then again, they were all nude in the snow, too. And neither she nor they thought it was strange that she could both understand them and talk to them.

It seemed the crows knew more strangeness than they wanted to admit: They understood where she had come from. But none of them would show her the way back.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1083221.html. You can comment here or there.

Summer Plans

Apr1

written to [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt. Year 17 of the Addergoole School.

The teachers had been on edge all year. Dáin figured it had something to do with the stuff that had been happening when he came to school – portals opening to other worlds, people disappearing and reappearing, miracles and horrid things all over the world, if the news was to be believed at all. But the news didn’t come through – no TV came through at all, down in Addergoole. The older kids said it used to work, but something about the shifting wards or the weather patterns had turned out to mess with any incoming signal. Phones to the outside didn’t work well either, if they worked at all.

The teachers being on edge had bothered Dáin more than the lack of contact. Addergoole had this way of sucking you in, making you forget about the outside world. He’d barely thought about his parents, just enough to send them a couple slightly-guilty letters. He’d thought about his old boyfriend even less, and the letter he’d sent him had been a lot more guilty.

Mostly, though, Dáin had been pretty engrossed in his first year of school. There had been magic to learn, an awkward Change to handle, his Keeper to, uh, be Kept by, and the rest of his classmates to mostly-try-not-to-bother, as per orders.

And now he was standing in the Auditorium. His bags were packed. His Keeper had graduated. He was ready to go home and play video games all summer and not think about magic or collars or babies or anything else about Addergoole until September rolled around.

The gym teacher strode to the front of the room and cleared his throat. Then Director Regine and Professor VanderLinden joined him. But it was Luke who spoke.

“In June of last year, strange things began happening all over the world. The human media didn’t know what to make of it, so I’m imagining the reports you got were pretty sparse.”

Dáin swallowed. Strange things. That was an understatement if he’d ever heard one.

“We weren’t sure what to make of it, either, when it first started. We thought maybe it was a world-wide Nedetakaei attack – even though the Nedetakaei have been very bad at any sort of coordinated fighting. It turns out…” His wing folded tight to his chest, and when he continued, Luke sounded not only sad, but miserable. “It turns out that the Departed Gods are back.”

Shouting erupted. Dáin sat down slowly. This was – it was impossible. The Departed Gods were a myth, the sort of creation story nobody really believes.

The projection screen behind Regine lit up. Dáin swallowed against a hard lump in his throat. That was… no. The rubble, the fire…

“This was Pittsburgh, four weeks ago. As far as we’ve been able to tell, the fires have been burning for months and are still burning.” Luke cleared his throat. “There were survivors. In every city, there were some survivors that we know of. But there weren’t many – there weren’t nearly enough.” He hung his head, and for a moment, he was silent. Dáin didn’t blame him. He didn’t feel like saying anything either.

The rest of the auditorium seemed to feel the same, at least for a minute. Then, shouting erupted.

Dáin didn’t have anything to say. Over the din, Regine’s voice carried. “I am afraid this is not a hoax.” She sounded genuinely sad. “If you wish to go home for the summer, we will do our best to help you make arrangements. But there is no guarantee that any sort of mass transportation — airplanes, busses, trains — will be running, nor that gas stations will have fuel for cars. We do recommend that you stay here, at least while we work to ascertain the situation fully.

“That being said,” she continued, “if you do wish to leave Addergoole for the summer, gather to the left of the auditorium. If you wish to stay, you may wander as you wish.”

Dáin looked around, watching as people moved slowly, shuffling as if they were ill, one way or the other. He couldn’t seem to make himself move.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1083020.html. You can comment here or there.