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Stranded in Winter, a story of Stranded World (ha) for the Giraffe Call

Feb10

This is to [personal profile] moonwolf‘s prompt here to my February Giraffe Call, with a side order of [personal profile] librarygeek‘s prompt here

Warning: cliffhanger.

Autumn (and Winter, et al) are from Stranded World.

Winter – the season, not her brother – left Autumn stuck in one place, this year not just in a single town, the way she often spent the colder times, but stuck in the town’s tiny inn, the snow actually pressing the doors shut.

She’d spent the first day sitting in the tavern down stairs, drawing, playing online when the spotty wi-fi was working, and working on her very messy accounting. The second day she’d spent half hiding in her room, and the other half helping the also-stuck cook-and-owner clean the kitchen top to bottom. The third day, when it was clear that the snow really wasn’t going to let up, they’d both crawled out a second-story window, jumped off the porch, and started shoveling their way down to the ground.

When they’d gotten the door clear and most of the inn’s sidewalk, and after they’d taken a break for cider and cheese, they dug across the street to the Library. The Librarian, eighty years old if she was a day, had been subsisting on biscuits and tea. She was so grateful for the rescue that she let Autumn check out whatever she wanted, on the theory that it wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway.

The inn-cook, no older than Autumn, had said, over and over again, that this was the worst winter he could remember. When the Librarian said it, too, it pricked Autumn’s curiosity.

She read ancient newspapers while munching on onions rings and chicken wings, helped the inn-cook shovel to the grocery and then to the grocer’s house, read until she fell asleep, and read over breakfast. When she and the inn-cook had re-cleared paths that had gotten a foot of snow overnight, she headed up to the highest place she could reach – the Library’s cupola – and started looking. Looking.

She drew the patterns she wanted on her arms: the weather, which was generally mild, with inches, not feet, falling at once. The people, who were generally stoic and tended not to leave town much (except Autumn, and others like her, who came and went with the seasons). The anomaly, snow past her hips and still falling.

And when she was done, her arms and chest bare to the frigid air and covered in snowflake patterns, she opened her sight to the Strands.

And fell down, nearly blinded. “Oh.“

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/663858.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Seven: Stranded

Feb7

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The seventh question comes from Kelkyag and is for Stranded World

Is perceiving and manipulating strands innate or learned? How do people acquire and develop these abilities?

References: Magic in Stranded World
Strand-workers and Strand-Working Organizations

Yes. 🙂

The ability to see or manipulate the Strands is an inheritable innate ability.

There are those who believe that, at one time, all humans had this power, but most of them are poo-pooed; studies show that almost every case of a known Strand-Weavers can be traced genealogically to a handful of magically inclined people in approx. 450 AD.

The innate power comes in a number of different types: not everyone who can work with the Strands can do the same things, and, indeed, the categories barely overlap at all. Thus, Spring’s ability to be a Tangler versus her brother Winter’s ability to smooth and calm the Strands, and so on.

Of course, part of the reason that the known strand-weavers can be traced back to the same people has to do less with insularity of genetics and more with insularity of training, knowledge, and literature.

The innate abilities – any of them – can be problematic without training, and can in some cases lead to abuses of the power, either accidental or purposeful. The organizations that exist to train and educate new strand-weavers can be very harsh with those caught in abuses. (Some say this is because they want to keep all the power controlled, others because they don’t want word to get around that rogue magicians, such as they are, are capable of hurting people and throwing around dangerous “spells.”)

Thus, most people who are “known” to be Strand-Weavers are educated by the same group of people, and thus know the same group of people (and thus, often, marry or at least have children with the same group of people).

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/659869.html. You can comment here or there.

100-word stories

Feb6

My card lives here and on LJ.

Story: For All Time
Prompt:Foolish Wishes 750A(French)
Setting: The Aunt Family
Warnings: Paradox

Story: Cherry Blossoms
Prompt: Cherry Blossoms
Setting: Stranded World
Warnings: grief

Story: Accident
Prompt: Accidental Marriage
Setting: Space Accountant
Warnings: none

Story: Gone Rummaging
Prompt: Rummage Sale
Setting: none
Warnings: None

Story: Treacherous Sister
Prompt: The Treacherous Sister
Setting: The Aunt Family
Warnings: treachery

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/659327.html. You can comment here or there.

Bingo Row – 5-100-word stories from the Generator Card

Feb6

My card lives here and on LJ.

Story: For All Time
Prompt:Foolish Wishes 750A(French)
Setting: The Aunt Family
Warnings: Paradox

Story: Cherry Blossoms
Prompt: Cherry Blossoms
Setting: Stranded World
Warnings: grief

Story: Accident
Prompt: Accidental Marriage
Setting: Space Accountant
Warnings: none

Story: Gone Rummaging
Prompt: Rummage Sale
Setting: none
Warnings: None

Story: Treacherous Sister
Prompt: The Treacherous Sister
Setting: The Aunt Family
Warnings: treachery

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/659327.html. You can comment here or there.

Chilly Spring, a 100-word fic of Stranded World

Jan18

To [personal profile] meridian_rose‘s prompt to my other bingo call.

Content warning: grief.

The air was still crisp, this far north. The sun was bright, the sky clear, but it was still in the mid-forties.

Spring had missed proper spring, proper weather, and now she was back for all the wrong reasons. She strode blindly, her fur coat and her anger tightly wrapped around her.

All things pass, Spring What words to end on. All things go around. She was left with that.

Tears were streaking hot down her face. Above her, the cherry blossoms declared it was Spring. Her time. She pulled them into the air, a transient dance. All things pass.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/639534.html. You can comment here or there.

A Favorite Place, a story of Stranded World for the Giraffe Bingo Card Call

Jan5

To [personal profile] rix_scaedu‘s prompt to my Orig_fic Bingo card; this fills the “Favorite Place” square.


Autumn and Summer (and Bishop and Melinda) are characters in my Stranded World setting; this story is later in their lives than most of the stories.

“Let me show you this place.”

Summer watched her sister. She had been watching her sister much of her life, it seemed; the way she moved, the way she smiled, the way she seemed to dance through life without a care. She watched the way Autumn smiled with her mouth without smiling with her body; she watched the way she flirted shamelessly and almost never carried through, and the way, when she carried through, it was a dance of the body, without the heart.

Summer had been watching Autumn and Winter forever, picking and choosing what parts she wanted to emulate, and then parts she wanted to throw away (On some level, she knew that Spring did the same with all three of them, though with Spring it looked as if she was throwing away everything, just to confuse and confound them all).

This year, she was spending the summer, or at least part of it, with her sister and her own lovers, which lent a certain color-commentary feel to the whole art of watching Autumn.

“Is she…” Bishop whispered it in Summer’s ear, which cause Mellie to squirm closer on the other side.

“Hssst. Wait and see.” Summer adjusted her bodice – this silly Ren stuff Autumn insisted on; maybe this year she’d splurge on one that fit properly. Two, one for her and Mellie would look lovely in a wench dress, maybe…

“A place?” The man had been hanging around Autumn’s booth for the entire weekend; he’d wander away to hang out with his friends and slowly gravitate back to admire the art, to admire Autumn’s ink, to admire Autumn herself when she wasn’t looking. “But your booth?”

“Well.” Autumn’s breath hitched, the cut of her vest making it obvious. “You could always come back after the Faire closed. It’s prettier by moonlight, after all.”

“Mmmmm, look at the way he watches her.” Mellie was nearly purring. “Good thing we brought our own tent.”

Summer was smiling, but inside she was cheering, albeit a bit nervously. In all the years she had been coming to this Faire with her sister, never had she known Autumn to show a lover – or anyone but kin, actually – her favorite place.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/629191.html. You can comment here or there.

Freedom, Orig-Fic, Stranded World

Dec18

To Rix_Scaedu‘s prompt to my orig-fic card. This fills the “freedom” slot.


Autumn and Winter are characters in my Stranded World setting; this story is earlier in their lives than most of the stories.

“It’s about Freedom.” Autumn sat on the edge of the bridge, feet dangling over the edge, not so much looking at the water as looking at the reflections in it. Hers, wild-colored and wild-haired, and his, cool-hued and smooth-tressed. Even here, even ‘dressed down,’ he looked proper.

“Of course it is about freedom. Everything in life is.” Winter spoke in measured tones, careful tones.

“How can you say that?” She twisted to look at in properly now, him, the connections between them, the lines around his life. “When you are so tied up in strands, so smoothed-out and constrained?”

“How can you say you are free?” His voice was, of course, calm. “When you do not know where your next meal will come from, when you are uncertain where you will sleep at night, when you have no home?”

“This is the life I chose.” Autumn tried not to raise her voice too much. He was her brother. He was her big brother; he would always be her big brother.

“And this is the life I chose, Autumn.” He patted her shoulder. “You find your freedom on the open road, and I… find mine in an office. Are we not both free?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/618700.html. You can comment here or there.

A Week of Settings – Day Three: Stranded

Oct11

Stranded Verse

The world is made of magic.

The world is made of connections, and in the ability to understand and manipulate those connections lies the magic.

The world is made up of the sparks of life, of creation. Every spark connects to others, and that is both magic and the building block for magic.

All of those are true in Stranded World, and yet all are untrue – just metaphors for an existence few understand well at all.

The world has connections, that much we know. Everyone and everything make connections. Those connections are often pictured as multicolored strands, tying everything together until they world is made.

Some people can reach out and tangle these strands, complicating everything. Some can smooth them. Some can tie bows in them, and some simply understand them.

In the RoundTree Family, Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, they have one of each.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/578631.html. You can comment here or there.

Magic in Stranded World: Summer

Apr23

See also Magic in Stranded World.

As mentioned, most Strand-manipulators in the Stranded World fall into three categories: Strand-smoothers, Tanglers, and Connection-readers.

Autumn’s little sister Summer is one of those who falls in between.

What Summer does with the Strands is closer to witchery or charming than to the tangible geometry of her brother Winter or the kitten-tangles of her sister Spring. Summer tugs on the Strands by virtue of charms, hexes, a few muttered words and a few drawn symbols.

Those symbols have the power to hold the Strands into a position, to tug them later into that place, or to keep them from going somewhere: she can cause someone to fall away from good fortune, or to it. With effort, she can pull people together or push them apart.

Although Summer’s power is limited – she cannot use it easily, if at all, without her words and symbols, and it rarely has an immediate effect on anything – it can be immensely powerful as well.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/517156.html. You can comment here or there.