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Freewriting to 7th Sanctum Prompt: Martyr

Mar29

Written to a prompt from this page, which is the first sentence of this storylet.

I will be a noble, with my weapons and my bracelets, and it is disgusting.

I had planned to be a martyr. A martyr was an honorable thing to be, even if it made one’s father weep and one’s cousins nervous. Martyrs’ names were written on the great wall – or so we called it, though it was sun-baked mud and when the rainy season came, the names tended to bleed away down into the gutter. But so did we, and so we pretended it was poetic.

And yet when the fight came, I found myself doing the unthinkable. I saw a noble, a man no more than twenty years old, barely worthy of either the words “noble” or “man” and I threw myself over him, protecting him from the blast. I had meant to die on their soldiers’ bayonets, and instead I lived, and he lived. And worse, he thanked me, thanked me publicly.

I would never be able to show my face in the slums again, and so when his mother offered me a bayonet by the handle and not by the blade, when she offered me the wristlets of service, what could I do? I will be a noble, no matter how disgusting it is, and I will serve this man whose life I saved.

I might have meant to be a martyr, but there is no point in dying at the hands of my own people, and so my sacrifice will have to wait.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080292.html. You can comment here or there.

A New World

Mar19

Kael was one of the most-know potion-masters of her time.  Too well known; she spent far too long dealing with would-be heroes and others who didn’t really need her help.  So she brewed up a potion to put her outside of the world for a while.

It would prove to be one of a very few potions on which she made a mistake.

All The Stories

The World

Kael’s Tower – a Patreon perk Map

She Understood… a story beginning written off of a 7th Sanctum prompt

Feb17

From this prompt generator: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=writeprompt

There, in the hyperspace beacon, she understood evil. That woman, with her statues and her beautiful desks, filled with beautiful pens and inkwells, that woman, who surrounded herself in the handicrafts of bygone eras and far-flung worlds…

…she stood in the glaring radiation of the most modern thing she could find, and understood what every piece of every culture she could touch could not explain to her.

The Ruler, for it was she, stood in the cold blue light, staring out at the new world they had found, and felt chilled to the bone. She had found what she’d been looking for. At long last, she had reached understanding.

She reached out towards her desks and her statues, her pens and her rag paper, but there was nothing there that could cleanse the stain from her mind.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1067397.html. You can comment here or there.

The Water

Jan8

To sauergeek‘s prompt. Modern era, unknown setting.

The people of Greenville had been pleased to finally get a proper water processing plant. The wells had been producing sporadically for decades now, and the Crooked Lake, while beautiful, was too often green and not the tastiest water by far.

The company that installed it came in shiny trucks and cars with cleansuits and many instruments. “Looks like an alien invasion:” Bernie McDonald wasn’t the first to say it, but he was the loudest.

“Or some sort of government takeover. Men in black.” Gennie Simmons was far quieter than her cousin, but when she spoke, people listened.

“Nonsense, Gennie, they’re in white,” scoffed Bernie. But he, loud as he was, and she, in her retiring way, kept an eye on the workers and the cars, the machinery and and intake tubes, the chemicals and the filters. They were retired, decades past retirement, actually, like half the town. They had time to spy, and they spied thoroughly.

The problem in all that spying was, it wasn’t something the water plant people were putting in that was the problem. It was what they were taking out.

Want more?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1044390.html. You can comment here or there.

Dinner, a ficlet for the December Prompt Call for Wyste

Jan5

Written to [personal profile] wyste‘s prompt

There were things Taran expected from Ei. He expected dinner ready when he got home from work. He expected ridiculous movies and cuddling and a certain needy affection that he loved. He expected obedience when they were playing and backtalk when they weren’t, and an eye-searing sense of fashion that made office parties quite entertaining.

He did not expect to come home and find dinner for three on the table, and Ei sitting patiently on the couch with another guy. Ei was smiling, but it was a nervous smile, and the guy – shaggy beard, perfectly groomed hair, terrifyingly blue eyes – was smiling reassuringly and patting Ei’s hands.

“This, ah, this is Joseph.” Ei sprang to his feet. “This is Joseph, and I want to bring him home for dinner.” Taran’s partner jutted out his chin in nervous defiance. “And for good.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1040545.html. You can comment here or there.

Warm and Cozy

Jan2

to an anonymous prompt. It kept going, so I guess I was having fun with it 😉

The wind had been blowing hard all day, and the snow had not so much been coming down as coming sideways, stacking up against the house and making stripes of drifts along the yard.

It wasn’t a day to be outside, but Anya finished the last of her chores anyway. The ducks had to be fed, the firewood needed to be split, and the mailman got cranky if she didn’t check the mail at least once a week.

It was on the trudge back up the driveway that she noticed the strange way the snow was drifting near her front porch. It shouldn’t be lumping like that; the bushes she’d tried there hadn’t lasted through the last cold winter and there was nothing in that garden but ferns and moss now. And yet… there it was, a drift clearly pushing the snow up against something a couple feet away from her porch.

Something peachy brown. Something peachy brown with a tuft of… black? On top that could, sure, be some sort of junk or debris but could also be…

“Shit.” Anya didn’t so much live in a neighborhood as five miles outside the closest thing that could be in any way called a neighborhood, the sort of place where even the local radio DJs sometimes joked about dumping bodies. Nobody had actually done it, at least not in living memory, but there were always the stories.

First things first, check the crime scene. She’d watched enough procedurals to know that much. There was one set of footsteps, quickly being filled in. She snapped a picture with her phone, and another of the body.

The body moved. It wasn’t much, mostly a shudder. Anya jumped, yelping. The body twitched and moaned.

“You are not a body.”

A head lifted out of the snow. Blue lips croaked out the beginning of a word, lost in racking coughs.

“Right. If I don’t want you to become a body right here on my yard, I’m going to have to warm you up.” She knelt down beside him. “I’m going to pick you up. Don’t fight it, okay?”

She was answered by another hacking cough.

“I’m going to take that as a yes.”

He was heavy, but he wasn’t much heavier than a dead deer. She got him up – she was going with him, although she hadn’t gotten enough snow off of him to be sure yet – in an awkward carry, inside in a series of stumbling heaves, and dropped him as gently as she could on her love seat.

“Hypothermia, hypothermia.” She thumbed through her phone until she found what she needed. “Right. Off with your – snow, I guess. Are you wearing clothes?”
He shook his head.

“Right. Goddess, when I said I wanted a man, this is not what I meant. Towels, towels.”

The towels were easy; drying off a naked man who could barely cooperate was harder. She read over her phone again and stuck some water in the microwave to warm, talking all the while. “You’re supposed to shiver, if you can. Here, have a blanket, and here’s another.”

He was skinny, when she got the snow off of him, tattooed all over in patterns like a drunk man’s paisley, and his hair had gone shaggy. Wrapped in a plaid blanket and sipping on mint tea, he looked a bit like a hipster. “If you say you were freezing before it was cool,” she muttered, “I might just throw you out in the snow again.”

He held up his hands in surrender, and she got a glimpse of what his smile looked like. “Good, good.” The house was warm, but she put another log on the fire just in case. “Get settled in.” She talked to the ducks, she talked to the snow and the cats. Talking to another human being that didn’t seem to talk back wasn’t even close to strange. “Get yourself all warm and cozy. Once you’re up to temperature, we can worry about things like clothes… and how you ended up in my front yard.”

There were scars hidden in the tattoos, and a long mark she thought was probably a brand. She had a feeling it was going to be a long story. Anya glanced out the window; the snow had covered over the last of his tracks and the road was a foot deep in white. “We’ve got time,” she assured him (and herself). “Nobody’ll be bothering us for quite a while.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1038035.html. You can comment here or there.

The Monarch

Dec28

She was, above all else, tired.

The rain was coming down again. It seemed like it always rained, these days. The monarch sipped her tea and stared out at the yard, where the ravens were dancing in the downpour. The ravens had always danced there. Soon, her son would visit, and she would have to have a long-postponed conversation with him. She found herself exhausted at the very thought.

It was the reduction that did it. When her children had ruled over the planet and her empire had stretched over continents, she had never felt tired. When the world itself had been much smaller and she’d had only her little island to rule over, she’d never felt tired.

She stood, although the form she was wearing now protested. She had not gotten this old in a very long time. It suited, however; the aging body’s exhaustion matched the tiredness she felt. She felt the rain in her joints and in her soul, and it never stopped raining.

It had been bright and shiny when she was young, shiny and small.

The world had grown, and she had grown with it; her empire had grown, and she had stretched herself over the planet, sending out children, sending out bits of herself to the New World, to India, to Africa, to Australia. Very little of that had come back; she found herself small again, small and old in a huge and juvenile world.

The monarch paced. This was the fortieth form she’d worn as Monarch, and the transitions grew harder every time. More people knew her with this face than had ever known any of her other faces – perhaps more people could recognize this face, this Elizabeth, than had known all of her other monarch faces together. Not just her face, but Charles’ face and mannerisms, and William’s and Harry’s.

She allowed herself a small smile. Leadership changes you. Thus they had been saying for centuries. People would notice that the new King shifted uneasily under the mantle of leadership. They would notice he seemed different – more somber, perhaps, or older. They would make up a story that suited.

The Queen chuckled to herself. There had been the time where they’d said she was a body-snatching demon, and tried to burn her at the stake. That had been awkward, to say the least. It had taken some fast talking and serious footwork to get out of that with a viable heir left to become.

And now… and now… Now she was laying plans and readying herself to move on to a new face, and the rain would not stop coming down. Something was wrong, seriously wrong.

“This is my country, damnit.” The Monarch punched her own leg, sensible frock and varicose veins be damned. “This is mine.” She raised her voice to shout for her secretary. “Anna! Anna, get in here.” The rain had been falling for three weeks straight. It was no more natural than the Monarch’s endless reign was. “We’re going to save my country.” Again.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1033035.html. You can comment here or there.