Beauty-Beast 25: Kitten

Oct3

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He was startled and then terrified to find Timaios’ hand at the back of his neck.  He was going to be hauled off to a cage.  He was going to be locked away like the miserable bad thing that he was.  He was –

“Ctirad.  Look at me.”

He didn’t try to the fight the order.  He looked up, unable to control his expression and barely even thinking of trying. “Sir?”  A surge of misery struck him.  That was wrong, that wasn’t what he was supposed to call his master.  “Timaios?”

The hand was still on the back of his neck.  Timaios was crouched next to him, looking down at him.  “Ctirad.  My kitten.  Were you telling me you wanted to submit to me?  To kneel at my feet for dinner?”

“Yes?”  He fought against the misery and, once again, lost.  He lowered his head, only to find Timaios’ other hand on his chin, keeping him in position.  

“Ctirad.  Why?” Continue reading →

Dream: The King’s Castle

Oct3

Story based on a dream I had

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The King was raving.

Not that anyone would ever say that; he was the king.  You didn’t mention he was raving  — or hallucinating, or having fits — if you wanted to hold on to your head, your soul, and your volition.

But the King had gotten it in his head that one of his trusted advisers and lieutenants had betrayed him, and was going around the castle, using The Voice that filled every corner of that huge edifice, declaring that when he found that Lieutenant who’d betrayed him, he would kill them, rend them, destroy them.

And because this wasn’t just any King or any edifice, all of his lieutenants were running around shooting one of their lieutenants in turn, which was getting more than a bit exhausting and very bloody.

And me?  I was staying out of the way and trying not to be seen.  When you are a human in this place, in The Castle of the King, you do your damndest not to attract any attention save that attention that brought you there – and since the one that had brought me there was currently chasing his lieutenant around trying to shoot him and complaining that the man wouldn’t hold still for it, well, I didn’t want his attention either.

And that worked fine until the King called a general assembly.  You didn’t not go to those, but even sitting in the back, I felt someone come up behind me.  Not my paramour, such as he was; no, he was in front of me, eyes glued to the podium and the throne at the front.

No, this was another human-like person, and he had a hand on my shoulder.  And then, while the King talked about traitors in his midst, a bag came down over my head.

I was going to die.  I had never known anything so clearly as I knew that.  I was dying, here, too far from home, with a burlap sack over my head to hide my shame.

An image flashed into my mind. No, a vision.  I did not see visions, I who did not belong here.  But there it was, a creature all scales and plates, green and blue as the sea it was crawling out of, our sea, the sea the Castle of the King hulked overlooking.  

It was coming.  And it was the reason the King was raving.

I lost consciousness, only then understanding that that was why the bag was there.

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Patreon Posts!

Oct3

Originally posted August 21, 2011 and, would you believe it, the only thing to show up in a Google search for “harvest” of my Dreamwidth blog.

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The Aramob had not been expecting resistance when they went against the Village. Town people were soft, and folded easily. That was the wisdom of the elders, that was what the young warriors preached. Especially water-towns, where their food came easy and they could waste their time in games.

Read On

This is Viddie (ViĂ°rou, but his mother didn’t want to call him Vitthie.), the son of Cynara and Leofric from, among other things, Addergoole: a Ghost Story.

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In theory, it should have been easy.

Viddie knew pumpkins.  He’d grown up eating pumpkin pie from scratch, and he knew all of the ins and outs of what made a pumpkin a pumpkin.

Read On!

This turned out a little strange…

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Sub-bureaucrat Azenia had her hands full and her lamp was burning far past closing time.

She knew, of course, that the over-bureaucrats liked it that way.

Open to all Patrons!

The Great Pumpkins- a bonus story of Fae Apoc for Patreon

Sep29
This is Viddie (ViĂ°rou, but his mother didn’t want to call him Vitthie.), the son of Cynara and Leofric from, among other things, Addergoole: a Ghost Story.

 🎃

In theory, it should have been easy.

Viddie knew pumpkins.  He’d grown up eating pumpkin pie from scratch, and he knew all of the ins and outs of what made a pumpkin a pumpkin.

He had a book with diagrams and a list of the appropriate – or close enough to appropriate – Greek and Old Tongue Words.

And he was in the grotto, kneeling in front of a little patch of dirt, alternately muttering words and spitting out curses his mother probably didn’t know he knew.

The vines were growing, sure.  They were even putting out little flowers.  But there wasn’t – right.  He needed to pollinate them.  He couldn’t remember if this sort of plant was self-pollinating, so he started another one. Continue reading →

The Hidden Mall: Cozy and Clean?

Sep27

Liv-clean opened the door and peeked inside.  “I think we’re still in the same world,” she murmured.  “And I don’t think it has anything to do with Beavers, but I think – well, come on.  I think it’s a store.”

“A store.”  Dirty-Liv grumbled.  “If it involves clowns, knives, or fish, I’m going the other way.”

Abigail was with her on that one.  “Let’s peek?”

They ducked in through the doorway and looked around.  It was – well, it really did look like a store would look, if it were inside several trees all at once.  There were large branches stuck out from the walls at strange angles holding clothing on hangers, and in the front was a desk like a register.

“Hello?” Abigail called out, at a loud whisper.  “Hello?”

“There’s dust everywhere,” Liv pointed out.  “Half the malls we’ve been to have been abandoned.  This one looks – a little less recently abandoned, maybe?  I can get clothes that fit.  Even if I do want a shower.”

“There’s a fountain back here,” Clean-Liv called.  “We could all clean up.  And maybe leave something for payment.  I mean, I guess we could just take things.  It’s not shoplifting if they’re not coming back, is it?”

“Cleaning up sounds great.”  Even if Abigail was still wearing her normal clothes, she still felt like she’d – well, fought an army and waded through an ocean in them.  “Is there any food?”

“Would it be safe to eat, if there were?”  Dirty-Liv sounded worried.  “We gave in to eating after a while, but I never have figured out if it was safe.”

“Well, you’re… you’re still alive, right, and it didn’t make you sick?” Abigail offered.  

“But what if it was like Persephone and the pomegranate and I’m stuck?  We never did find a door that opened into anything like normalcy.”  They could hear splashing from the other side of the small store, where Liv’s voice was occasionally obscured.

“Well… then you’re probably stuck, now, but we could find a nice, cozy mall to settle down in if it comes to it?  I don’t want to.”  She held up both her hands, stopped as she remembered she was still holding on to a Liv, and shook her head.  “Not that I WANT to stay in the mall.  I want to go home.  We all want to go home.  But maybe – well, maybe we should start thinking about a Plan B?”

“So far,” Liv-Dirty pointed out, “we haven’t seen anything like a nice or cozy place since the first weird one.  Not unless you count this, and I’m not really sure this counts as cozy yet.  We’d have to see if there’s sharks or bears or something first.  Come on back here, you two, there’s plenty of room.  And Liv, grab some clothes in your size.”

“You’re not actually my size anymore.   I know the clothes hide it, but you’ve lost a lot of weight.”  Liv picked up a couple handfuls of clothes and handed a couple to Abigail.

“I want to be happy about it, but believe me, you do not want the Mall Hopping Weight Loss Plan.  Come on back, the water’s – oh.”

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A Different Stripe

Sep26

Written to Anke’s prompt. 

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When you spend your time trying to learn as much as possible about the other people around you and working on finding the best in all of them – sometimes by viewing them by your cultural standards, sometimes by theirs, sometimes by some neutral third party – and then you find them using a kind of casual racism against creatures you think of as being the same as them, you tend to find yourself a little shocked or, if you are like me, a little stupefied.

I was, I’m afraid to say, used to the casual racism of humans towards the magical races, especially the categories we called The Small (or Tiny) Races and The Beast Races – Tinies, Pixies, Gremlins and the lot in the first category; centaurs, harpies, fauns and such in the second.  But I spent a lot of my time talking to Zizney, and thez, it seemed, treated all smaller races as, well, smaller but not particularly lesser, just curious. And the worst I had ever heard any of the Smiths say about another dragon was a sort of personal insult, along the lines of “messy and untidy scales.”

Now, I full well know the danger of extrapolating such experiences out.  Not only is one dragon different from another, a dragon is inherently different from a harpy, and so on.  “We are all people” is a good way to treat people but not a good way to try to understand behavior patterns.

But knowing the dangers of something is different from remembering and internalizing those dangers. So when I encountered Leeland, the dapple Bay centaur from down the street, passing by the new neighbors’ stable, I was stunned to hear him mutter “ugh, Zebra-centaurs.”

I was actually stunned enough that I stopped and stared at him.  He was several steps along before he stopped to look back at me.  “What?”  He flicked his tail at me.

“’Ugh?’” I quoted back at him.  The family moving into the stable was, indeed, zebra- looking, the stripes going up into the clothing they wore over their humanoid torsos. “Really?”  I didn’t even have the words for I thought you were one of the good guys, come on.

Now that I think about it, those would have  been the words.

“They’re not centaurs.  Everyone thinks they are, and, I mean, in English the word is just zebra-centaur, but they’re no more centaurs than zebras are horses.  They’re pushy.”  He wrinkled his nose and pushed out air in a very horsey gesture.  “And that’s the problem.  They’re going to come in.  They’re going to be loud and pushy and in everyone’s faces, and everyone’s going to say ugh, centaurs, and it’s not us, it’s them.”

I didn’t really want to interfere in intra-species – or inter-species – troubles, but I couldn’t help myself.  It’s what I do, after all.  “So you know these zebra-centaurs already?”

“I know about zebra-centaurs.  We’ve been through this before. They’re loud.  And messy.”

I lifted up an eyebrow.  “And all centaurs are brilliant scholars and great aims with an arrow,” I added, as if I was agreeing with him – with Leeland, who was a blacksmith.

“That’s not true!  That’s…”  He huffed at me.  “That’s not the same.”

“Well then.  Perhaps I’ll have your family and the new family over for dinner, and you can all explain it to me.  In detail.”

“…With tea?”  He looked at me out of the side of his eye.  I smiled at him.

“Yes, of course, with tea.”

“… I can handle loud and messy for that long.  Fine.”

I hadn’t solved anything.  All I’d done was planted a seed, and it might never take root.

But when you spend your time trying to learn as much as possible about the other people around you, sometimes you have to spread that back out a little, like collecting manure, and hope it doesn’t stink up the place too much in the process.

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I had been watching: https://youtu.be/DEaWFX5nzg0?t=174 over my husband’s shoulder. (Ignore the part on cats; they’re wrong). 

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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.
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“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. 

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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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Bread Crumbs – a recipe blog for Patreon

Sep24

We have been experimenting with bread, now that the warm weather has subsided a bit (well,it had.  It appears to have come back with a vengeance but… hey).

The current experimentation is breadcrumbs.

The thing about homemade bread is that it goes stale far more quickly than store bought bread, so if you have a couple days of not eating bread, you have a rock in your fridge.  Good for breadcrumbs or bread pudding or stuffing… but there’s only so much of that you can eat, and Igo through maybe one tube of breadcrumbs every five years.

So… mixing bread crumbs back into bread.  The first experiment was ¼ cup to a 2-cups-of-fluid recipe, and you could barely notice any difference.  The bread was a little crumbly in texture — but that could have been the lackadaisical kneading.  (I am not all that good at making all variables the same, but OTOH all variables are never the same over a stretch of days.)

The second bread was one cup of breadcrumbs into the same 2-cups-of-fluid standard House Thorne bread recipe.  This one, I kneaded with the machine, and I also had a longer (overnight) sponge period — both of which build gluten.

Super chewy bread! The breadcrumbs made a nice texture in the bread without interfering with the crumb or the structure.  Hooray!

Next: cup and a half.  That’ll be this weekend, if we finish the second loaf before then…

…or maybe we’ll end up turning yesterday’s loaf into breadcrumbs for tomorrow’s loaf.

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