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Running in the Bear Empire 34: What’s Your Name?

Feb15

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Consummation
Next: 35: Hunting

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“Wait.”

The thing about an Imperial Bed was, even if it wasn’t exactly comfortable in an emotional sense, it was always perfectly comfortable in a physical sense. The spells that Deline used to keep her lodgings tolerable were the basis of the magic on the Imperial bed, but then there were layers and layers of other work there.  One could lay here forever and not get the slightest bit uncomfortable – or at least for decades, until the spells wore off.

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Time Passes

Feb14

Originally posted on Patreon in February 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
After The Fairy Road and Planting Some Good on my blog and The Cats’ Ways and  Community Service here on Patreon.

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There was not, Whitney had thought, an easy part to the restoration of the Crossroads Park.  The whole thing was a challenge, and the whole thing was back-breaking work, work that ate time, hours and weeks and seemingly years passing by while she dug.  The whole thing was the hard part.

That was before she got to the really hard part.

There was a corner of the park now that looked fresh and beautiful — so fresh that not only had the local newspaper taken pictures, one of the national magazines had come in to tell her story.  The plantings, mostly perennials, had been picked to thrive with minimal care, the grass was trimmed weekly by a local kid who wanted something to do for a school project, and the local fae and spirits had taken to sharply … reprimanding… anyone who littered in the cleaned area or near it.

But that meant that first, the rest of the park looked far worse than it was, and secondly, Whitney was now faced with a wall of brambles where a raspberry bush and a rose bush had gone feral and started fighting over a statute of a Revolutionary War hero. Continue reading →

The Visit

Feb14

He could have had any man or woman in the whole nation — probably in several of the adjacent nations as well. He was a brilliant man,a dashing pirate, and his airship was one of the finest known to navy nor fleet. He was a folk hero the likes of which had not come since Dywin Talizen in the age of stories and myths.

And his airship had ducked in, dodging the royal navy ships and the cannons, to visit a political prisoner in a quiet exile in a mountainous corner. He had brought her a rose, the sort of gift that fit the stories, risking everything for a romantic gesture.

He couldn’t stay long; he couldn’t even risk a kiss, even if she would have accepted it. But he brought her a rose.

And he brought her a key.

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Conlang, Calenyen

Feb14

I wanted to write the Calenyen classic blessing-on-parting, “smooth roads, clear skies.”

Turns out I had almost none of the words! Well, I had 2 out of 4 if you don’t consider the implied “May you always have” or “let there always be”.

What I had:

the word for under-clothes comes from the word lur, meaning smooth, easy: from kiprat-lur to kiplur and eventually down to kur.

eetan – sky

Subject-verb agreement
-unu beyond use (the sun, the moon, the stars)
ah- makes a verb be “always”

Plurals:
–ootun beyond use , plural
-ak useful, singular
-anan useful, plural
Two: -te or -tye
herd: -be or -bye
Many, unknown: -ne or -nye

New words:
kaab – to be

tidzieg – a path, a road
tidziegnye – Many roads
gud – clear

Which brings us to

ahkaabanan todziegnye lur
(Smooth Roads, or “may your roads always be smooth.”

ahkaabootun eetan gud.
(Clear skies, or “may your skies always be clear.”)

ahkaabanan todziegnye lur
(Smooth Roads)

 

 

Funerary Rites 40: Laying Blame

Feb13

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“Something went wrong.”  The street was abandoned.  Senga still kept her voice low, conversational, looking over at Erramun to direct the sound.  “I don’t think it was us.”

“Was it one of the team?”  Erramun’s tone was as light, maybe lighter, than hers.

“Hey!”  Chitter complained over the comm link.  “We’re better than that.”

“Something went wrong,” Erramun countered.   “That means someone messed up. It wasn’t me.  It wasn’t her.” Continue reading →

Outta the Woods Yet?

Feb12

The big cat had been chasing Pren for heart-rending minutes when she managed to skid into a cave she’d never seen before.  She shimmied through a hole that was barely big enough for her and scooted up into a little ledge area. The cat might wait for hours for her, so she made herself comfortably before she pulled out the flint and steel and lit her torch.

The walls of the cave glittered and shone the way that sometimes a small piece of rock would.  The whole area was smooth, rounded, like she had scooted up from the cave into something even less natural than her tree-house.

On the far side of the room was a lever.  Pren looked at the lever. At least, it was a stick poking out of the wall at an angle.  Her mother had shown her how to use things like that to set traps for animals, when she had been small.  When her mother had been around. It might dump her into a net or drop something on her, although both the floor and ceiling looked sturdy enough in the torchlight.  It might drop something on the cat.

The cat was trying to get up the hole she had slipped through.  One clawed paw batted upwards, bigger than Pren’s foot.

She scooted backwards and pulled the lever.  Even a trap was better than being eaten by a cat.

She fell backwards as the wall opened up, into a brightly and smooth room full of strangers and shining lights.

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Hidden Mall 56: Out of the Brier Patch

Feb11

‘Via’s stuff turned out to be in a record shop a few rooms down.  She had her own nest there, but it looked more like a hovel or a hut than a comfortable place to stay.  She muttered something that sounded almost like an apology, but Abby really wasn’t listening. She had caught sight of the people on one of the record sleeves.  ‘Via was right. She didn’t want to know what the rabbit-them looked like.

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