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Bereavement Leave – a bonus story for Patreon

Sep25

A bonus story of the occurred-to-me-in-a-flash sort.  Warning: a bit of morbid humor here.
⚱️

“Miss Hemlock, you have been on Bereavement Leave seven times this year.  Nobody has that many—”  The HR manager clearly changed what she was going to say “–grandfathers.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Harris, but I do.”  Juniper chose to answer what the woman had meant instead of what she’d said.  “Dead relatives, that is, not grandfathers.  I had six of those in living memory… No,  I’m afraid it was something of a chain reaction.”

“…Chain… reaction?”  Mrs. Harris had heard a lot of things in thirty years in HR.  From the look on her face, this was not one of the things she’d heard.

“So, it all started with my grandmother’s second husband, my Grandpa Rich.  You know about that one.  He lived a long life and passed away easily, may the spirits take his soul.”

We commend his soul to any god who can find it.  The funeral had been quiet, a little snarky, and full of tension. Continue reading →

Know When To Walk Away (Know When To Run)

Sep25

Written to eseme‘s prompt.  This comes after Tangles and Knots, Snarls and Combs. 

🔥

There were bits of Tattercoats everywhere.

Sometimes literally: pieces of his coat tended to come off in the strangest places, so that he was always sewing on new bits.  Sometimes figuratively: a book he’d left in her place or a letter he’d written, the smell of his particular musk in a blanket she’d put away.

Autumn did not know exactly what had happened.

She knew that Tattercoats had precipitously left Faire without a fare-thee-well or anything but the forwarding address of the itinerant courier network. She knew she was done with him, as if she’d woken up one morning and understood that pining was shredding her to pieces and she really needed to pick herself up and stop hurting so much.

The radio had played The Gambler and Autumn had nodded as if Kenny Rogers had been speaking right to her.  Know when to walk away.  Know when to run.

She burned his letters in the Moot Fire that they held every Thursday night to rid the air of “shit, drama, the modern, and the miserable.”  But she could still close her eyes and see that ridiculous smile. She could still reach over to the nightstand and see the little jewelry box he’d sent her for Christmas.

She sold the ring to a pawn shop and gave the money to a hunger campaign.  She dropped the skirt and the corset he’d given her in the Salvo box.  Maybe in a Faire town, someone would find a use for them.   The other gifts went to used book sales, sometimes the Salvo or Goodwill, a church rummage sale.

That left the things that belonged to him. A carved figure he’d bought from a vendor.  Three DVDs he’d brought over to watch and then left in her van.  A book on figure drawing that she was pretty sure he’d stolen. A vest of his.  His underwear.  A long green ribbon she was pretty sure was a token from another lover.

She burned the underwear, to a great deal of groaning, moaning, and laughing, using the longest tongs she could find.

The rest she wrapped up.

Carefully.

Three layers of shrinkwrap and then two layers of duct tape.

For every two items, then in a box.  Duct taped.  Then wrapped carefully in butcher paper with more tape than any three parcels needed.

She had a friend with curly, swirling, girly handwriting address the boxes, and then each one went with a different itinerant courier to a different drop spot.

They had to be light, of course.  She wanted to be careful, because the drop spots sometimes got wet.  Of course.

She wanted to irritate him, to get under his skin and make him twitchy, the way he was under her skin, the way she couldn’t quite wash him out.

She drew a long pattern of empty open roads and paths she hadn’t yet walked along her entire body, wrote his name on a piece of paper in her best handwriting, and drew a sketchy portrait that took in what she could remember of him.

She stood in the rain until the pattern she’d drawn on herself washed into the earth, watering the ground with her ink and her hopes and setting them free.

She stood by the fire and watched his face burn until it was ashes, and finally felt free.


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Small Victories – a story of Aunt Family for Patreon

Sep21
A story of the Aunt Family, in the same time period as Excuse Me? ; i.e, very early in Eva’s tenure as Aunt.🌱

 

“Evangaline, what are you doing?”

Evangaline’s Aunt Ramona had a habit of inviting herself in that Eva had not yet broken her of.  She blamed her late Aunt Asta, who had found it easier to allow the family to appear to walk all over her than to contradict the pile of aunts and great-aunts, grandmothers, mothers, and sisters (In their family, the men knew better, at least, than to contradict the capital-A Aunt).  Aunt Asta had not been gone long enough, and Eva had not established herself well enough, that the family had managed to differentiate between Asta’s bad habits and Eva’s.

On the other hand, she had no interest in listening to that tone for the rest of her life – or at the very least, for the rest of Aunt Ramona’s life.

“I am making a greenhouse on the sunny side of the stable barn,” she answered calmly.  Calmly was best.  It irritated the older relatives.

“You are – yes, I can see that.  The question, Evangaline Jane, is why you are making a greenhouse.  Workers!  On our property!” Continue reading →

Desmond’s Climb Twenty-Nine: Getting To Know…

Sep19

First: Slaves, School
Previous:  Seeing Things

🗝️

Desmond was exhausted.  He dragged himself from dinner to the dormitory with hardly a thought other than finding his bed and becoming as horizontal as possible in it.

::We have homework,:: the collar reminded him.  ::And it will not be dark for another hour.::

“I could sleep for an hour, then, do my homework, and sleep some more?” Desmond offered.  “They have lamps here.  Everywhere.”

::Homework first, then a bath, and then sleep.  We are going to commune, are we not?::

“You and I commune just fine.” He wasn’t the only one muttering to himself as they trudged up the back stairs; next to him, Talia was mumbling incoherently, and behind them, so was [cc]

::You and I also make force-shields just fine, do we not?  Help out your fellow students.  You’re going to need it on the portals.::

“Gee, thanks.  All right, all right.  Jefshan,” he raised his voice, “want to do that communing thing with the group tonight?’

“Tonight?  Oh, man, I wanted to – urrgh.  Is your collar telling you that  you can’t go to sleep, too?”

“Mine is being super helpful.”  His voice was dripping with sarcasm.  “In that sort of ‘helpful’ way that won’t let me sleep and reminds me that I’m supposed to commune with it.”

“I suppose there’s ways that could be considered helpful,” Wesley pointed out.  “What if going to sleep after doing too much magic makes you sick, or it’s like sleeping with a head injury and you never wake up?”

“Then you’d think they’d tell us that,” Jefshan complained.  “But fine.  We’re going to commune with our collars and ask them questions.  We’ll – hrrm, we’ll sit on the bottom bunks, that’ll work best, and each of us will ask a question and we’ll share the answers.  I mean, if the bottom bunk people don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind,” put in Doria.  Wesley and Lufet agreed.  They settled down – everyone but Cataleb, who was sitting on the middle bunk on the far side, sulking – and looked around at each other.

“All right.”  Jefshan seemed to have lowered her voice to a whisper.  “I’ll go first, if nobody minded?”

Desmond certainly didn’t mind, and nobody else seemed to either.

“Okay.  We’ll start with … does your collar have a favorite color?”

Someone giggled.  Desmond was pretty sure it wasn’t him.  Doria was certainly smirking.

“I’ll go first,” Doria put in.  “So my collar tells me that color is completely different for collars, since they see the world only through our eyes and through clairvoyance and other magical sense, but it likes, um, the feeling of magical portals and the hue of the inside of said portals.”

“Oh, hey,” Wesley says in surprise.  “Mine likes the portal color best too.”

“Mine likes the sensation inside a clairvoyance. Or…” Talia giggled.  “Or, okay, looking at blue through my eyes.   Aww, that’s nice.”

What about you? Desmond thought carefully.

::Green.::  There was something prim about the collar’s answer.  ::Green and the hue of a sunrise just touching the water.  We can TOO see real colors, we just see them with our Bearers, with our people.  That’s what we are, and they’re being rather silly if they want to pretend otherwise.::

“Green and sunrise-on-water,” Desmond reported carefully.

They went around the circle with that one; most of the collars has magical colors, but Kayay’s preferred blue, purple, and sunlight-through-glass.

“Do you think they missed sensation?” Jefshan mused.

“Do you think they ever knew sensation?” Talia countered.

::Don’t ask,:: Desmond’s collar warned.  ::Not yet.::

From the looks on the faces around him, everyone was getting the same warning.  Desmond cleared his throat.

“All right.  So, how about: does your collar have hopes for a placement for the two of you after school?”

“Oooh.”  Jefshan leaned forward.  “That’s a good question!”

Desmond found himself flushing and smiled crookedly. “Thanks.  Thanks, I – we’ve been talking about it a lot?  But like, uh.  The stairs.  We could go until we didn’t agree with our collar anymore?  So it seems like agreeing with our collar is a good idea, for things like position.”

“Blasted smoke and the dead hells no!”  Poiy stood up and pushed away from the bunk as if trying to get away from the collar around their neck.  “No!”

“Poiy?”  Lufet hopped off the bunk hurriedly to hurry over to Poiy.  “Why, what did-”

“The sea!  Who but a madder wants to go to the sea, tell me that?  They’ve given me a broken collar, I tell you!  Broken!  The sea,” Poiy scoffed.  “No.  No, I don’t care if we end up shoveling horse shit for the rest of our lives – hells and drowning, we could make portals and drop the stuff into the deep sea, there you go.  Sea enough for you, you mad thing?”

Desmond shared a glance with Jefshan and Doria.  Doria had turned pale, so pale it looked like even the blue cravat was losing color.  Jefshan looked, Desmond thought, possibly a little amused, but trying to cover it well.

The sea? He asked his collar quietly.

::Have no fear on my behalf.  I am not particularly interested in the water, or in ending up spending a collar’s lifespan deep beneath it or in the tidepools.::

Good.  Lufet had managed to calm Poiy down, although the latter was still tugging at the collar and muttering.  

Jefshan cleared her throat.  “Mine wants to work on the caravans.  Says there’s a lot of interesting things to learn that way, new people, lots of chances to grow with magic.  I – well, I guess we’ll see.  It’s not my first choice.”

They went through a couple others – some reasonable things, no other water-based occupations – before Desmond asked his so?

::Caravans sound very nice, but ideally we would be bodyguarding the Potentate.::

Desmond coughed.  “My collar has a lot of ambition.  Which, ah.  I already knew.  He wants us bodyguarding the Potentate.”

“Wow, think highly of yourself?”  Kayay snarked.

“Hey!  It’s not me, it’s the collar!  Come on, we’re supposed to be getting to know our collars, right?  So I know my collar has a lot of ambition.”

“’Which you already knew’,” Kayay snapped back at him.  “Why, by the way, might you have already known that?”

“Because it wanted to push up higher than I did in the stairs. Come on, I’m not trying to prove anything here.”

“I suppose if you were, you’d find the spare stairs AND find out what they’re for without being caught, wouldn’t you?”

“If I was trying to prove something-” I’d manage to get a portal open, he meant to say, but everyone was saying ooo and “come on” and before he knew it, Desmond had allowed himself to be goaded.

::This is going to end poorly,:: his collar informed him.

I know, Desmond agreed.  But he was committed now.

🗝️

Next: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2017/12/30/30people/

 
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The Hidden Mall: Into the Woods

Sep15

“If we see a faun,” Abigil muttered, “I’m running away.  Just so you know.  All right, so, we’re going to go…”  She consulted her mental map.  “This way.”  She jutted her chin. “And we’re going to go quietly, Liv-one, because Liv-two is right.  It’s snowing.  We want to move quietly.  Liv-two, we need to deal with that wound, okay?  Snow tracks are bad enough, but you’re trailing blood.  And we want to move fast, because we’re going to freeze to death if we don’t move.”

They took a hurried moment, Abigail holding tightly to Liv-one’s hand, while Liv-two cleaned up her wound – a scrape high on her leg – and tied it with half of the scarf Abigail had used.  She cut the scarf with a long, nasty knife – Abigail didn’t ask where she’d gotten it.  She wasn’t sure she wanted to know how long that Liv had been in the malls. Or, for that matter, where Abigail-two had gotten to.

And then they hiked.  They were moving in a mostly-straight line, not because Abigail thought it was a good idea, but because the trees were way too dense to move through otherwise.  Once, when she thought she saw an opening, the trees seemed to shift, and the opening was gone.

The only positive, as far as she could tell, was that the snow was falling fast enough that their tracks were obscured.  There was no wind, either, which was a blessing of sorts.  

She was still pretty sure they were going to freeze to death.  Wherever they were didn’t seem to have doors, didn’t even seem to be a mall.

“Hunh.”  Dirty-Liv stopped and frowned. “Did you see that?”

“S-s-s-ee what?” Clean-Liv was clinging close to Abigail.

“Oh, come on, if I’m not that cold, neither are you.  Did you see something moving in the trees?”

“There’s no room for anything to move,” Clean-Liv complained.  “It’s all packed together like – hunh.”  She frowned at the trees.  “Abigail, do you see that?”

“What?”  Abigail hated the way she wanted to snap at her friend, and the way her heart sank at Liv’s did-you-see.

“There, between the trees, or maybe in the trees.”

“Don’t tell me it’s a beaver,” Dirty-Liv groaned.

“No, but it’s, look.”

They looked.

Abigail frowned.  

It was a doorway.  In a tree.  It was a little small – all of them would have to duck – but it was definitely a doorway.

“Well,” Abigail muttered, “at least it’ll get us out of the snow.”  She tilted her head.  “Go ahead and open it, I guess.”

🌲🌳🌲

 
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A New World: Carrenonna

Sep14

First: A New World
Previous: Artle

⚗️

Kael struggled to hide her horror.  The cliff.  They had…  done something to it.  Something about an edict and a gift?  How did you give away a cliff?  Or power it? Power it away?  She needed to drink this potion quickly; there was far too much missing in her vocabulary.  “They did what to the cliff?  The large one into Artle?”

The clever daughter looked at Kael sharply.  “You have to have seen the bridge.  If you flew in, it is big enough that you can see it from space.   And if you drove in, well, almost everyone comes in from Artle. The train, the bus – did you come in from Carron?”

Kael had the sense from the way the girl shifted topics that she was being thrown a lifeline.  She took it.  “Carron, yes.”  She was going to have to look it up.  “I’m sorry, it is just something that I read about – that is.”  She was supposed to be in character.  She cleared her throat and winked at the girl.  “I know not of these places you speak of.  A bridge over the River Meadon?  A place called Carron?  Is that Carrenonna’s Annex?”

The girl leaned forward.  “Caronn- Caronn, say that again?  Please,” she added hastily, presumably before her mother could tell her to be polite.  Or her father, who seemed very engrossed in the leaflet.

“Carrenonna.  Carrenonna’s Annex, a tower much like this one with several buildings around it, making up a small village of sorts.  It was granted to Carrenonna in the same year that this tower, Kaelingrade Torrent-Step’s Black Tower, was built, and it stood such that on a clear day, you could see one tower from the other.”

“There’s no tower in Carron.”  The older daughter had heretofore been engaged with her tablet, taking notes of some sort.  Now she looked up and turned the tablet so that Kael could see a map – no, a tower’s-eye view of a large town or a small city, rendered in shining glass.  “See?  This is Carron, and there’s nothing taller than maybe six stories.”  She smirked, and considered Kael.  “In the terms of the age, Lady Kaelingrade Torrent-Step, the entirety of Carron reacheth not to the top of your secondary annex.  Which has way too many stairs.  You should consider an elevator.”

Reacheth?  Wait, elevator? Something which raised, that was easy enough. “But then…”  She glanced out the window.  Quite some time had passed.  “Then Carrenonna’s Annex is fallen to dust, and likely Carrenonna with it.”

“Well, uh, Carrenonna, if she lived the same time as Kaelingrade – I mean, as you – lived a thousand years ago.  Even if the old people back then were like Methuselah or something, their towers weren’t.  Right?  I mean, this place is a replica and all.”

Metuselah!  Kael struggled to maintain her composure.  “It would take a great deal of work for a tower to stand for a thousand years, yes.”  She’d thought Carrenonna had such work in her.  Perhaps she hadn’t.  

“So, I do have a question.”  The daughter turned the map back towards her.  “Why’s that one named after Carrenonna, then, and this place isn’t named after you?  After Kaelingrade, I mean.”

 

 
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Patreon Posts!

Sep13


Originally posted February 27, 2015

🌶️

The fighter pilot with the callsign Spice was new to the team and, although all her credentials assured that she was not, indeed, new to space fighting as a concept or a skill, still the team had to be reassured.

Read On

Fancy Dresses, long lingering kisses, awkward moments with your friends, bullies… Prom!

✨

Anton had figured he didn’t have a chance.

He was new to Hieder Hill High, he wasn’t one of the popular kids – was the new guy ever the popular guy? – his family wasn’t rich or even that well-off, and he didn’t dress like or act like the popular guys.

Open to All Patrons!

I live!  It’s been a hell of a month.  But here I am. 

🍎

This story originally posted June 4, 2011.

📚

He came to the school in autumn, once the crops were in. They’d gone back to old habits and old practices in the Academy, as in so much of the world, knowing that the old existed and had survived for so long for a reason.

Read On!

Lightning in Autumn

Sep13

My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to Inspector Caracal‘s prompt.

Set after Addergoole Year 10 but before the 2011 apocalypse. 

🦌

There were tourists in the bar again, the sort of people that made what was normally a pleasant place feel like the back of the locker room.   Nathan felt his shoulders tensing, felt his grip on his drink getting tighter.  “Another?” he asked Patti.  

The bartender shook her head. “Not yet, son.  Nurse that ice a little longer, and then I’ll pour you another.”  Then she was gone, tending to the New People at the other end and the other regulars in between.

“Shit.”  How Patti did that and kept in business, he never knew.  He turned slowly on his stool, taking in the tourists at the pool table, the regulars at tables further and further away from the tourists, Liza the bouncer at the front door…

He turned back around in time to see Leo strutting up to the tourists and getting in the tallest one’s face.  Nathan’s heart did a little twist.  Leo.  That blonde hair, that arrogant, playful smirk, that – that body.  It wasn’t just Nathan’s heart that was twisting.

The tourist took a step back.  His friends were jeering.  Leo didn’t seem to notice, stepping back in to the tourist’s personal space, running a hand over the man’s cheek.  Nathan felt a stab of jealousy.  My cheek is right here!

“There’s a reason they call him Lightning, you know.”  

He hasn’t heard anyone sit down next to him, but now there was someone there, sipping a drink and watching the same scene Nathan was.  “I’ve never heard anyone call him that.”

“Yeah?”  The guy was, unfortunately, undeterred.  “They call him Lightning because he never strikes the same place – or the same person – twice.”

“I’m not the same person.”  Nathan chewed on his ice and watched Leo work.  He was louder than he normally was, and he seemed to be – from the words that wafted over the music and the conversation – suggesting that the tourist ought to come back to his place and show him exactly what his sort was worth.

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve changed,” the peanut gallery continued.  “He doesn’t care.  He just hits once and he’s gone.”

Nathan glanced over. His helpful new friend looked, in a  general sense, kind of similar to Nathan: dark hair, dark eyes, not all that tall.  “Not what I meant – ooooh!”  Leo had somehow ducked a punch the now-beset tourist had thrown and instead tossed the tourist on to the floor.  “You saw it, Patti, you saw it!  The asshole threw the first punch!”

“That’s not gonna save my furniture, now is it?  Liza!”

The fight was in full swing, as it were, when Liza waded in and hauled the tourist out of it, and then hauled his friends out.  “Parking lot!  All of you! You, too!”  She glared at Leo.  It might have been Nathan’s imagination, but he thought Leo looked a little sheepish for a moment.

They allowed themselves to be herded – tourists, Leo, two other regulars who had gotten involved – out past the pile of broken furniture they’d left in their wake and through the side door, but the swinging door showed the tourist spinning around with a punch the minute his feet hit the asphalt.

“Looks like he’s going to hit someone more than once,” Nathan muttered, not particularly generously.

“Ha.  Good one.  Yeah, he’s plenty violent, isn’t he?  But he don’t come back, kid.  Like I said.  Never the same person twice.”

“But I’m not the -”  Nathan gave up.  He didn’t want to explain to this stranger.  Hell, he didn’t even want to explain to Leo, who would probably scoff and walk away, no matter how different this could be, Nathan could be.

The front door swung again and a redheaded woman walked in.  Another tourist, Nathan thought, noting the dyed-crimson of her hair and the clothes that wouldn’t have fit in here even if she were male.  Then she kissed Liza with an intensity that suggested comfortable familiarity and an intimacy that said maybe she wasn’t all that out of place in a gay bar after all and plopped herself down at the bar next to Nathan’s new buddy.

“Telling the same old lies, Trev?” she teased.  “Don’t listen to him, kid, whatever he says.  Patti, my love.  The usual and one of whatever these nice boys are having for them, too.”

Maybe that was supposed to cover exactly HOW big the wad of money she was passing over the counter was, or how two of those top bills would probably cover the furniture damages.  

“They’re not lies, and anyway, how would you know?  You’re not exactly his type!”  Trev – if that was New Friend’s name – looked put out.  The woman just laughed.

“I know because I know Leo.  And I know you.  Like I know I’m not your type but I might… sometimes… be this guy’s type.”  She sipped her whisky – neat – and grinned at them, a grin that looked more hungry than cheerful and, Nathan had a feeling, was covering over a seething kettle of pain.  

She saw through him, he knew that much.  “Doesn’t matter.  Lightning never strikes the same place twice.”  He finished the drink Patti passed him in one gulp and laid his money on the counter.  “I gotta go.”

The redhead’s voice followed him out the door. “Don’t believe that old lie, kid.  Lightning strikes wherever he damn well pleases.”

🦌

See stories about Leofric/Leo (that have been migrated) here.

See stories about Cya(the redheaded woman) here.

🦌


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This Emperor’s Son, a surprise continuation

Sep12

This was meant to be a comment fic like thus after this comment by Kelkyag, but it turned out a wee bit long. So… bonus ficlet?

After (Before) The Empire Falls, the Emperor Stands.

The young son-of-the-Emperor (they were all sons of the Emperor, although their fathers were all several years dead) waited until two of his cousins were making an appropriate fuss and two more seemed to have decided to climb the bookshelves all the way to the top.

There were seven nursemaids for the lot of them, but, from the things the nurses said when they thought their young charges weren’t listening, there were more of them, the sons, then there had been in recent memory — “recent” in Hildeh’s case and Galleh’s, at least, being a number that stretched back quite some time — and the bureaucracy that funded their employment did not seem inclined to send them any more help.

This particular son — whose name, like easily half of his brothers, was Eranodi, after Eroni, the first Emperor — was glad for the overwork and the subsequent distraction, because it gave him a freedom he was fairly certain young Emperor’s-sons were not supposed to have. Continue reading →