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Groundhog Day, Faerie Apocalypse

Feb2

The sun rose. Fran woke to the dim glare coming in through curtains that would never rot. There was something to be said for the way cheap motels had used polyester for almost everything. Ten years after the End, and this one was still running.

She wasn’t here to rate hotels, though. She headed into the fortified town, barely missing an angry guard dog. Something was wrong; she could smell it. She was a stranger, sure, and everyone here hated strangers, but the Rangers were legitimate and she was legitimately here on Ranger business.

“…Gates…” she heard someone say. The town was walled, and not badly-done, either. Any town that had wanted to survive was walled. “…Trade the Ranger…”

Shit! That was it. It wasn’t distrust, it was betrayal. Fran started running. Somewhere on the gate, someone was shouting “Franciszka! Give us Franciszka the Denier!”

She skidded up to the weak spot she’d seen in their walls before anyone managed to catch up to her and clambered over. Rangers helped the townspeople, sure. But they could only do that alive.

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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1059146.html. You can comment here or there.

Attrition

Feb1

A story of Addergoole, sometime between year 12 and Year 17.

The table in the middle of the Dining Hall was empty.

Corneille had been been at Addergoole for three weeks. His first day here, the table had been over-full: eight of them at a six-person table, the four of them that had caught the flight in from Philly, two they’d met at the airport, two more they’d met at the first assembly. This place was weird, they all agreed, but it was a hundred percent better than the reform school, the military school, the nerdy prep school they thought they’d been going to.

It had been Einar that asked the question. “Why do you think they all made up different stories? I mean, what’s so strange about this place that they had to lie?”

Einar had been the first one to disappear from the table, too. He’d been there one day, and then the next, he’d started spending all his time with this older girl. He sat with her, off in the corner of the Dining Hall with a bunch of other older girls, and when they’d tried to talk to him, he’d gotten squirrelly and weird about it.

Folami had sat down at the Table Of All The Girls to see what was going on with Einar, and never come back.

Celinda had gotten in a big fight with a guy, and then ended up sitting between him & his twin brother at meals. She still talked to Corneille and the rest of them, but if anyone asked about her twins, she just blushed and looked away.

One after another, they got picked off. Last Friday, they’d been down to five. The lights had been out Saturday… and Sunday it was just Corneille and Elissa.

Today, Elissa was nowhere in sight. Corneille sat down, trying not to look as exposed and obvious as he felt. It was like the moment in a horror movie when you realize the monsters have just grabbed your last surviving friend and…

“Hi.” A fey and beautiful person plopped themselves in front of Corneille. “You look lonely.”

 

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Trouble in Cloverleaf, continued, for @InspectrCaracal, exactly 409 words

Jan30

after this.

This story is of questionable canonicalness – it probably happened, probably about 100 years after Cya & Leo graduate from Addergoole (or about 93 years after the end of the world) – but the exact date is up in the air, as well as some details.

It follows the Apollo/Boom stuff you can find on top on the Boom tag by about 2 years.

Luke knew he wasn’t thinking straight. He was flying erratically. He was having trouble controlling his wing movements when not in flight. His fists were clenching and unclenching. He hadn’t been this stressed, this worried, in decades.

There were groups the Addergoole teachers and staff monitored, most but not all of them Addergoole grads. Boom had always been Drake and Luke’s purview, because they were the two teachers least likely to be sent away.

Luke knew, more than anyone else outside the crew, how Boom was balanced, and how precarious that balance was. If Cya had just thrown that whole balance out of whack – for whatever reason – he was looking at chaos, disaster, and the possibility of World War Four.

He landed with a thump far enough outside the city to not worry their guards. Cloverleaf had an efficient police force. He’d always assumed they needed such a force to deal with the threats of this post-apocalypse world: dragons and Nedetakai, lawless humans and the few remaining returned gods. He’d counted their numbers and wondered what would happen if he had to attack Cloverleaf, or if Cloverleaf attacked Addergoole, but he’d kept his concerns secret. Regine didn’t need to know. Mike would draw his own conclusions.

Cynara balanced by the rest of her crew would not go to war with Addergoole. The rest of the crew balanced by Cynara would not go to war with Addergoole. He’d watched them and run the numbers. He’d talked it over quietly with Shira and Laurel; he’d decided they weren’t a threat.

And now, now when he’d gotten everything calm, when he’d gotten used to the stability of Cloverleaf on his border, when everything had been normal for fifty years, now Cynara had to go and screw everything up.

Why? He stomped through the city, not minding that he was making a scene. He’d been visiting enough that they were comfortable with him now – guards, runners, shopkeepers. He’d been here enough that he was comfortable here.

He wondered if that had been part of Cynara’s plan. He’d been thinking of her as sort of a mini-Regine, and Regine wouldn’t have thought of calming down the opposing Mara. But Regine was a scientifically-minded super-genius Grigori (if that wasn’t saying the same thing three times), and Cynara hadn’t even gone to college.

What was she up to, and why now? He stomped into Leo’s dojo, ignoring the students who tried to stop him.

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1059494.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1057996.html. You can comment here or there.

When the Angels Came, a story of the Faerie Apocalypse, is available for Patreon patrons

Jan27

Ciarán Wiegand was the unfortunate soul that saw the first creature flying in.

Ciarán was so fresh out of Basic that the fact they were in a war really hadn’t quite sunk in, and he’d gotten sent out here, out to the ass end of nowhere, where there really wasn’t, yet, any sort of war.

There were creatures, he knew, taking over many of the major cities all over the world…

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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1056261.html. You can comment here or there.

Trouble in Cloverleaf? A Storylet of Mike and Luke for @InspectrCaracal

Jan26

This story is of questionable canonicalness – it probably happened, probably about 100 years after Cya & Leo graduate from Addergoole (or about 93 years after the end of the world) – but the exact date is up in the air, as well as some details.

It follows the Apollo/Boom stuff you can find on top on the Boom tag by about 2 years.

Mike was grinning, tanned, and dressed in new, strange clothes when he sashayed into Luke’s office. In green and brown, he looked like he had stepped out of a Robin Hood film – or, knowing Mike, possibly the pornographic spoof of a Robin Hood film.

“Cloverleaf,” Luke guessed. Mike had way too much fun on his little excursions, wherever he went, but only Cloverleaf left him grinning like that. They liked him in the bars there, it turned out, and probably the brothels, too.

(Luke wouldn’t put it past Cynara to have put in brothels just for Mike).

“Cloverleaf. They have newspapers.” He flopped the tri-folded paper down on Luke’s desk.

“All the comforts of the modern age,” Luke muttered. “Next thing we know, she’ll have self-driving cars.”

“Horses do that pretty well, actually. They say the press is pretty free, there. Only a couple rules, if my informant is to be believed.”

“How drunk was your informant?” The paper was called The ‘Leaf Leaves, and the first headline was something about Mayor Collapses? Luke picked up the paper.

“Faiiirly sober?” Mike hedged. “As sober as normal, at least. They like their papers. They like their city, turns out. I mean, nationalism and all, but it’s nice to see people happy in their home. And, ah,” he gestured at the paper. “With their Mayor.”

Luke unfolded the paper and stared. “Mike, what is this?”

“They’ve redeveloped photography,” Mike added helpfully.

“I can see that. What is this?”

“It’s a photo of the Mayor collapsing, like the paper says.” Mike was grinning, damn his soul.

“No.” He stared at the photo. It was grainy and pixelated, printed in four colors with the offset slightly off on the red. But it was very clearly Leofric Lightning-blade carrying Cya Red Doomsday. They were smiling. They were happy. And Leo was wearing a golden collar around his throat. “Mike…”

“Most of the rumors say it’s her collar.” Mike’s smile had vanished, replaced by something strange and thoughtful. “And all of the rumors say they’re happier now.”

Cya Red Doomsday’s best Words had always been Tempero and Intinn, Control and Mind. And she’d always been balanced by Leo’s absolute certainty that he was a good guy. Luke was already headed for the door.

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1057996.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1055765.html. You can comment here or there.

Tangled and Tied, a continuation of Fae Apoc for the Christmas Prompt Call (@Rix_Scaedu)

Jan25

This is written to Rix_scaedu‘s commissioned continuation of Bound Up from the Christmas Prompt Call

Fae Apoc, unwilling Keeping, bondage, nudity.

He had not been this clean since last he knelt to the Gyrfalcon, and he was known as a man meticulously groomed and tidy. She had enjoyed every moment of it, of course, but, in a less common move for her, his former Mentor had made certain that he enjoyed it as well.

“She’s not a bad person, as far as these things go.” She ran a brush through his hair, although it was already smooth and shining. “Not cruel. But she is going to be raw, and you’re going to have to be able to handle her being edgy sometimes, and uncertain others.”

He cleared his throat. “She will Own me. There’s…”

“If I hadn’t taught you how to top from the bottom when your mistress needs, then clearly I haven’t taught you nearly enough. Should I bring you back home, first, and educate you?”

First would mean weeks, months, added to his sentence, more time away from the business. “No, Ma’am. I will do as you say.”

“Of course you will. You’ve always been a good boy.” Her lips brushed damply over his forehead. “Here she is now. Stay there.”

He was bound hand and foot, thigh and bicep and chest and cock. To do anything other than stay there would have been to use Workings, and that would only mean that he’d quickly find himself gagged. “Yes, sa’Gyrfalcon.” He bowed his head as much as he could and listened to her heels click on the floor as she walked away.

She didn’t return. The feet that returned were quiet, sandals or slippers, shushing across the floor as if wanting to be unheard. He held very still.

“Oh.” It was a gasp, just as her feet came into view. Ballet flats, pink. Pink. “Oh, wow.”

Oh, wow. Really? “Mistress?” He didn’t let anything but subservience show in his voice. The Gyrfalcon was listening, he was sure of it.

“Andra?” She knelt down next to him, giving the impression of more pinkness – a dress, gods help him, with flowers – and long hair, dirty blonde. “I’m Deitra.”

What, she wanted to make friends? “Pleased to meet you, Deitra.” The Gyrfalcon was listening. The Gyrfalcon would not be pleased if he was rude.

“You Belong to me now.” She caught up some of the ropes holding Andra, seemingly at random, and gave them a very light tug. “For the next year, you are Mine.”

It wasn’t the most elegant of phrasings, but it avoided some of the things he didn’t really want her thinking about that came with the formal wording. What I have belongs to you… “I Belong to you now.” He comforted himself with the fact that he really had no choice in the matter. “For the next year, I am Yours, body and soul.”

She ran a hand over him, pinching one rope and pulling another. “You’re not very mobile like this. Am I supposed to get to know you here, do you think?”

Yes. Here, where his former Mentor could supervise. “I wouldn’t presume to know sa’Gyrfalcon’s motives.”

“Let me see. If I undo this and this, and this,” she plucked three ropes, “that ought to let you walk. Assuming you can?”

That was an interesting question. “I can walk, mistress.”

“Good.” He never saw where the knife came from, but it dealt with the ropes far too quickly for his comfort. When she had loosened his bonds enough that he could stand and walk – albeit hobbled – she tugged him to his feet. “Come on. It’s a short drive but I’d rather get to it sooner rather than later.”

He swallowed an urge to apologize. “As my mistress requires.”

As he walked with clipped, short steps, he realized he was terrified. Terrified, and so very exposed. How was he going to keep her from ruining him?

How was he going to make her happy with him?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1054216.html. You can comment here or there.

Addergoole in the Apocalypse: Prompts!

Jan22

I have this prompt call open:

It’s 2013, 2013, 2014, 2015. The world started going to shit in 2011. Now, our characters are coming to Addergoole… or trying to get there. Or running away from it. Or just graduating. Or..??

It’s a pretty specific prompt-request, but have at it: Prompts regarding Addergoole students just after the apocalypse.

I’m still looking for prompts!

If you want, look at the tag for this and see if there’s some interaction you want to see. They should all be tagged by the year in which they occur.

Addergoole years:
Year 5 – 1999-2000
Year 9 – 2003-2004
Year 13- 2007-2008
Year 17- 2011-2015 * Apocalypse
Year 19- 2013-2014
Year 23- 2017-2018

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1052659.html. You can comment here or there.

Coming to School

Jan21

Written to [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt

Mike hadn’t done many of these new student pick-ups – Luke didn’t quite trust him to be adult about it, and he didn’t have the travelling resources that, say, Laurel did – but Tzivyah’s extended, adoptive family were friends of his from his wild days in the seventies and eighties, and the girl herself was a strange case. There hadn’t been a peep on Shira’s radar, to the point where they’d thought that she wouldn’t Change at all without serious prodding, not a whisper from either of the sensitives they employed in the Village, and then all three of them, at once, had come to Regine’s office. Yesterday. Pounding on the door. Insisting that right now, right now someone had to go get Tzivyah.

When your clairvoyant, your clairsensitive and your precognitive agree that urgently, someone goes, right then.

Mike had enlisted the help of a teleporter to drop him outside of town. It was a risk – everyone was very touchy about fae right now, and teleportation was very obviously fae – but Shira had been breathing down his neck so badly he’d thought she might end up getting carried along in the teleport.

Ten feet away from the drop spot, he understood why. Screams were echoing through the small farm community, screams and shouts and pleas. Mike broke into a run. He should have brought Luke. He should have brought Shira. He should have brought an army.

He had himself. The screaming was too far away, and yet it was too close. His skin crawled. Humans could be awful, awful people sometimes – people could be awful people. Mike had broken into a run before he knew it.

Too far, too far. He muttered one Working after another, making himself faster, tougher. He could get there. He had to get there. The screaming was only getting louder and more intense. Someone was panicking, someone was in pain. Not the same someone, probably.

He skidded into a clearing between three buildings. The noise was unbearably loud here, something like twenty people gathered together and all of them panicking. The last time he’d been here, there’d been a quiet fireside orgy going no. Now…

He pulled himself up to his current full height, muttered a Working to deepen his voice a bit, and borrowed Luke’s best teacher voice. “What is going on here?”

He was only a little surprised when it worked. Four people stood up, two worried and reaching for weapons, the other two looking for someone to fix things. He recognized one of them as Tzivyah’s adoptive father.

“Can you help? Someone has to help, please. Make them stop. Make it stop.”

Mike walked towards them with a brusque stride he’d borrowed from Luke. “What’s the problem?”

Tzivyah’s father – Donald, his name was Donald – and the other concerned-looking man began pushing and cajoling the crowd out of the way. “This is Mike Linden-Flower,” Donald explained. “He knows about this sort of thing. He can help.”

“‘Knows about this sort of thing.’” The weapon-wielder on the left was snarling and unimpressed. “You mean he’s one of them.”

Donald raised his chin in defiance. “No. I mean he’s always been one of us. And he knows about this sort of thing. She’s hurting. And they’re…”

Mike’s stomach twisted. Three women were holding down another woman, a young woman that had to be Tzivyah. A fourth was leaning over her with a saw. “What the hell?” he shouted.

The woman with the saw stood up. “They’re hurting her. And they’ll kill her. The horns, the protrusions, they’re causing her pain. And if we don’t cut them off, those people, people out there, they’ll kill her.”

Mike muttered under his breath, both swearing at the madness of people and making himself stronger. “So you’d maim her, torture her? No.” He scooped the girl up in his arms. “Hang in there, kiddo,” he murmured, just loud enough for her to hear. She had bony protrusions coming out everywhere, and the ones that had been cut were leaking ichor. “I’m going to get you somewhere safer, and help you deal with this, okay?”

He waited only long enough for a tiny nod before raising his voice for the crowd. “She is coming with me. And nobody is going to stop me.”

There were benefits in being able to sway the mood of an entire mob. If later they told themselves that the devil had taken Tzivyah, that was fine. Tzivyah would have been taken, and she would be safe.

Mike cuddled her as carefully as he could, muttering Working after Working to heal her ills as he strode out of the village.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1052378.html. You can comment here or there.

Changes and Adjustments

Jan21

This comes after Retirement and Retirement 2, some 50 years after the Addergoole stories, and features two characters from those stories. It is written to [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s Prompt.

The wagon was small, and sometimes it felt more like a cage than a living space, a cage, and some awful test, the sort other people might have stressed about back in school.

Rozen had driven a wagon before, but he’d never gotten good at it; he had the Words to understand horses, but he’d never really practiced them. Kailani had taken a thoughtful look at him and said “here. You drive the first stretch. We’re taking this highway south, and we’re staying on the highway unless there’s an issue.”

“What if I don’t want to?” he’d grumbled, instead of “what if I don’t know how.”

She’d smiled placidly at him. “We all do things we don’t want to.”

He knew how to bully people, but he had no idea how to be Kept. Rozen had clucked to the horses and got them aimed with more trouble than he’d thought possible and, when they proved recalcitrant, muttered a Panida Working that spurred them on.

He felt like he was being spurred himself. Her orders were like thistles rubbing against his skin, goading him on, pushing him. Her calm, unflappable smile was weird and it made him twitchy. Kailani wasn’t calm. She wasn’t placid.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, finally, an hour out of the town she’d been living in. “You don’t look like you anymore.”

She ran her fingers through her hair – red again, that was a relief, not the white it had been when he’d been deposited on her doorstep – and hrrm’d. “I feel like me.” She smiled, a little mischief there he didn’t remember either. “Are you certain it’s me and not you?”

Rozen twitched. “I haven’t changed.”

“I find that interesting, actually. It’s been decades. Our grandchildren are grown adults and the world – the world has changed considerably. And yet, if I ran into you in the hallways of Addergoole, instead of the Rozen you were then, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

He shrugged. He knew his smile was lazy and a bit sharp. “You’d be surprised. You were always surprised when we ran into each other.”

“Frightened, Rozen. The word is frightened.” He stole a glance at her, but she was smiling. “You were quite scary. It was your job.”

“Haven’t changed,” he drawled. He didn’t know what it meant when she only smirked wider.

The wagon moved on, the world – such as it was now – moved under their wheels, and the woman he’d once wanted to Keep hummed cheerfully while she watched the scenery.

“The world’s changed,” he offered after a bit. “It ended, I guess.”

“The world we knew ended.” She looked sad for a moment. Rozen stomped on the surge of guilt he felt. He had not made that sadness. This was not his fault. “And you kept going.”
She made it sound like a complaint somehow. Rozen looked at her sidelong, trying to figure her out.

“You’re still here, too.” And young again. Being Kept by Ancient Kailani had been weird.

She smiled sadly. “If you ran into me in the halls of Addergole, as I am now, as you were then, what would you do, Rozen?”

The same thing, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t lie to her. He stared wordlessly at her instead.

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