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Mad Kings and Handmaidens

Sep7

My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to alexseanchai‘s prompt.

👑

The problem with mad kings wasn’t so much the madness part, Iounia thought, as it was the shifting of the madness.

The only sign she’d had that she’d fallen out of favor with the king was a slight shift in his giggle.  If she hadn’t watched Maia be dispensed with the month before after just such a slight shift – and before that Abri, and before that Martia – she might not have known it was time to leave.  

But Iounia was known for her sharp eyes and her attention to detail, which was what had brought her to the mad king’s attention in the first place, what had sat her at his feet as his adviser, and what had led her to stop by Nueva’s room and suggest quietly that she might want to get while the getting was good.

Nueva made long-term plans.  Nueva was really, really good at long-term plans. Dessie was really good at making do with almost nothing.  Between the three of them – because Nueva’s plan had led to grabbing Dessie on the way out – they had gotten out of the palace without a hitch.  They had gotten out of the city without a hitch.

And now, rather to Iounia’s surprise – although she should have seen it coming – they were planning a rebellion.

“Not exactly a rebellion,” Dessie demurred, as they sat in an abandoned barn, cooking rats over a fire.  “More of a housecleaning.  Let the Mad King keep his crown.  We’re just going to – ah.  Work around him.”

“Why let him keep his crown?” Nueva countered.  “Why not let the crown sit on an empty throne?”

“An empty throne invites someone to sit on it.  A madman on the throne invites people to stay away.”

“Let him give orders.”  Iounia understood the plan now.  “And let him believe his orders have been carried out.  Meanwhile, the rest of the country can get on with – well, with being a country.”

Safe in his underground chamber, surrounded by his crowns, the Mad King never did learn that he had fallen out of favor.


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The Empire Falls; The Emperor Stands

Sep7

My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to @dahob‘s prompt.

🦓

It was the day past the Autumnal Equinox, and the Emperor wasn’t dead.

The Rothenkill Empire, a wide-spanning mass of bureaucrats, generals, courtiers, financiers, farmers, and clerks, waited with their collective breaths held.

The servants of the Emperor moved slowly and carefully, as if their heads might fall off if they went about their tasks too quickly, or if they said the wrong thing.

Everyone was waiting.  Everyone was confused.  And almost everyone was worried.

In the Rothenkill Empire, it was said that the Emperors fell with the leaves.  And, like leaves, it was known that sometimes, the Emperors needed a little push, a helpful shove.

So where was the shove?

“This is nor normal,” complained the Chief Financier in charge of budgets. “What are we going to do?  Someone should do something.”

“Someone has to do something,” complained the Head Bureaucrat in charge of law distribution, re-writing, and deletion.

“Won’t someone do something?” pleaded the General of the Imperial Armies.  “He’s starting to give orders that make sense and can’t be ignored!  What are we going to do if we can’t ignore him?”

The Emperor, snug on his throne, pretended he could hear none of this.  He hadn’t ascended to the Poison Throne by looking or acting particularly bright, after all.  None of his predecessors had, either, not in decades, possibly not in centuries.

“The problem is,” muttered a person serving as a handmaiden, “nobody remembers how.”  Her grandmother had once helped off three emperors in a row, but that had been when you got a class of emperor that sometimes needed a shove.  “And with this one, I’m not going to risk it.”

And the Emperor smiled as the empire – the mass of functionaries that had killed his father, his grandfather, and countless of his various uncles and cousins – began to crumble under its own confusion.

  

 

The Mystery of the Broke(n) Church

Sep5

I rolled my story dice and ended up with this. 

🎭

The church theatre company was hurting.

Everything about the church was almost always hurting.  It was in a town that had once been prosperous, it had tried gimmick after gimmick – including painting the church purple – to draw in attendance – and it was suffering from having been built in the early 1800s and, purple siding or not, in need of repairs, constantly in need of repairs.

The theatre company brought in a little money, but their costumes were all fifth-hand, the stage was sad and falling apart, and the only person they could get as a stage manager was going deaf.

Then Pastor Jim had a brilliant idea.

“It is going to be sad to see this church go,” he commented at the little stop-and-shop, when he knew one of the town busybodies was listening.  “We’re never going to find out what happened behind that brick wall.”

“What brick wall?”

Pastor Jim would feel bad using Trent Sheperd like this, but Trent was just the right sort of person.  And his voice carried.

“You know, in the basement.  They covered it over in the last renovation, of course…”

The next Sunday, the pews were packed – and the theatre company’s basement rendition of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart opened to a sold-out house.

Pastor Jim kept laying clues, and spent the rest of his time getting in the way of people trying to follow those clues.

If he came up with something clever enough, he reckoned, they might even raise enough to fix the broken old wall behind the brick wall.  And maybe the ancient catacomb behind that.

 
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A New World: Artle

Sep5

First: A New World

⚗

Kael allowed herself a small smile, even as she tried to puzzle that one out.  Hospital?  Hospes?  Something about guests.  

“Oh, that can’t be true, they wouldn’t open the place and have it be dangerous!”

So a hospital was somewhere for  – people who had been hurt?  Perhaps a place to rest after people had been taken by a sleeping potion.  There had been quite a few sleeping potion traps in those lower levels. Continue reading →

A New World: Tourists

Aug31

First: A New World

⚗

She had almost finished the potion when the first “tourists” arrived.  A “tourist”, it appeared, was a person with a flashing glass tablet held in their hand, clothing that did not seem appropriate for any time or era, and a habit of touching everything.

“It says here,” said the older woman, “that this is where Kael created her potions.  And this woman here is represents Kael.  She didn’t like visitors much,” she added in a stage whisper.  “Hello, Kael.”

Didn’t like visitors much.  That was an interesting way of putting it.  But between the fact that she was playing a representation of herself and what Mr. Vibius had said, Kael knew how to act.  “Shhh,” she hissed.  “At this stage, you may disturb the potion, and if you do that, I may test the next potion on you, and I doubt you’d like that one.”

The younger daughter – not a woman yet, not even thinking about being a woman yet – stepped right up to the yellow line of tiles someone had installed. “Why aren’t you using the big cauldron?  It’s got something boiling, too.”  She spoke in a curious but quiet tone and ignore her parents’ attempts to pull her backwards.

“The big cauldron can wait. It is merely a distraction potion and will not be hurt by a little extra boiling.  This one, though, this one requires careful attention, and for that I require a smaller cauldron.  See, with this cauldron, I can see to the bottom.  Careful, don’t breathe in the fumes.”

The girl stepped back another step and glanced over her mother as if looking for permission or reassurance.  

“There won’t be anything here that’ll hurt you, honey, it’s a museum,” her mother tutted.  “They’re not allowed to do anything dangerous.”

That was the sort of opinion that could get the girl hurt or maimed.  “Actually, this is my potions-room, and in here, things could often be deadly, not just dangerous.  Even a mild and curative potion could end up burning the nostrils and giving one visions or headaches.”

“Like hatters,” the older daughter put in.  “Breathing in mercury fumes.”

Kael only followed a few of those words, but the meaning was clear enough.  And the mother was tutting.  “I can’t believe-”

“When this place opened,” the father put in, reading from a booklet, “several guests had to be hospitalized.”

💧

Next: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2017/09/05/a-new-world-artle/

Swift of Hands

Aug30

Written to sauergeek‘s prompt, in a ‘verse that I just created.  

🏃

Defekisal was running.

This was not an actually common experience in Kisal’s life, because when you did things right, you didn’t have to run.

But luck had not been with Kisal today, and so it was time for pounding sandals on flagstones and the terrifying feeling when fingers almost caught on the back of a tunic.

There was another tunic under that one, just in case, but it was a blow to pride to get caught, on top of the ridiculous pride-ding for getting made in the first place.

Kisal skidded under a fence.  If they ever fixed that fence… but the fence-owner was a Sister and wouldn’t repair it unless the Guard or the Magistrate forced her to.  Which they might; Kisal had to remember not to run this way again for a while, and tell Podefemide to avoid it too.  Femie got made a lot more often than Kisal.  Something about the way she looked at people; she couldn’t quite hide the challenge in her eyes.

The fence wouldn’t hold the guards for more than a couple seconds, but that was all Kisal ought to need.  She grabbed a rain-gutter at just the right spot and swung herself upwards.  There was more than one reason to stay slender and keep in good shape, and throwing oneself bodily up onto a shed roof was one of the best.  She slid down the steep roof, caught the flagpole, and hurled herself over the next fence.

Her shoulders ached, but she was nearly away now.  She ducked into the nearest temple – a lowercase-T temple, the sort that were safe but only allowed on suffrage by the big-T temples – and dropped the outer tunic into the donation bin it had come from.  The rag tied over her hair became a belt that looked far nicer when turned inside out, and a wash at the charity fountain cleaned the dirt and make-up off of her face.

The back door of the temple held a selection of scarves; she dropped three gold walek in the bin and wrapped one around her waist as a skirt, the other around her head for a pretense at modesty.

She meandered down the road, stopping at a vendor to buy a posod-fruit and pass on a message.  The Guard hurried by her, never even noticing her.

Kisal picked up another old tunic at the next temple down the road and went back to work.

 
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A New World: Potions

Aug25

First: A New World

Joaon. The letter shapes, the strange way he ended certain letters – she could not read this, not yet, but she could recognize his handwriting, even in a script that had changed immensely.

She needed.  Well, she needed potions.  She needed a whole bunch of potions.

It was time to see what this pretend-workroom had been stocked with.

And what this pretend-cauldron was going to do.

She started going through the cupboards, one through one.  All of them were labelled in this strange script – not in her handwriting, or in Joaon’s – but they were also labelled right after that in her own language.  There she was, tongue-of-the-maiden and kisses-on-eyebrows, her favorite flowers.  They had grown in the rooftop gardens, once upon a time.  But if she was “forbidden” to go up there, it was unlikely anyone had maintained them.  She would have to find all the right ingredients again. Continue reading →

Find Me?

Aug23

Written to kelkyag‘s prompt. 

🌱

She had a lot of earth to work with.

Estella had walked half a day in each direction and not seen another living human.

She’d found more than a few who weren’t alive anymore, and done what she could for them as she went, wondering all the while why she had been left alive when nobody else seemed to have.

The radio made static and sometimes a whimper, but nothing she could consider company.  The power was still running, more or less, but the TV was showing Please Standby on all stations and the internet – well, it was there, but she found only bots on twitter and only advertisements on Facebook.  Reddit was a ghost town. Imgur’s last photos were of The Event – dozens, hundreds of photos, and then nothing.  Not even a downvote.  Continue reading →

Whole World Whispering

Aug21

For TNG, Cap, and Tal, with all my love. 

 🌑

The whole world whispering
Born at the right time

It was said that if the the royal seers and astrologers could not find an appropriate sign for a royal event, they would make one.

Few could argue, however, that when Ahana, the moon, covered over Orena, the sun, in a total eclipse over a large stretch of the kingdom, the moment was ideal for all sorts of signs.

It was then that the royal child was born, into the darkness of the night-at-noon, and the world, or at least the kingdom and those near it, leaned forward to see what the astrologers and seers would say.

The astrologers and seers, who would normally be standing on those balconies allowed to them declaiming their message to the public, were nowhere to be found.

They were closeted deep inside their tallest, largest tower, whispering to one another.

“Should we tell them?” hissed a younger astrologer.

“Should we lie?  They’re the King and Queen!” hissed a middle-age seer who had never been much for those times when a sign needed to be found in a less-than-obvious manner.

“We should tell them the truth,” declared the head of divination.  At the looks she was given, she smiled dryly.  “We tell the truth as we always have.  As we always have.”

They stood on their balconies as the King and the Queen presented their tiny newborn child.  “The child has been born who will have the mighty quest,” declaimed the loudest of them.

“The child has been born who will have the kindest heart,” declared the oldest of them.

“The child has been born who will see what has not been seen,” cried the head of divination in her strongest voice, to the silence of the gathered crowds.

In the Queen’s arms lay a child every bit as ordinary as every other royal child for the last three generations.

On the far side of the nation, in a midwife’s arms in a small farming town, lay the child who had been foreseen, born as the eclipse passed over the family farm.

👶🏻

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