From a story I’m writing for submission!
“Profit and doom. Doom and madness.” She thought she could smell the fumes, wafting up from an infinitely deep hole of acid. She thought she could taste the way they were coloring her mind. The first to go would be practicality. The animal instincts would go last.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/361389.html. You can comment here or there.
From my upcoming serial, Addergoole: Year Nine (52 Weeks, 52 Stories).
Some of them liked to pretend they didn’t. Some tried to say it was all the students’ choice, and they mustn’t do anything at all to influence it, even think about it. Some said let nature take its course.
Shira had been a hunter, a trapper, long before she’d been a teacher.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/361183.html. You can comment here or there.
From a project I’m working on, in my Tir na Cali setting. (landing page – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/22621.html)
Content warning: discusses kidnapping and enslavement.
“Look at it this way.” The woman was too damn calm about everything. And smiling. She was having fun, the bitch. “You can’t escape. You can’t do anything about what’s going to happen. All you can do is cooperate and smile for the buyers. And you’ll do that easier if you’re rested.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/360706.html. You can comment here or there.
The Deep Inks is/was my November 2011 Nano novel. I got to 50K…
This is a story of Stranded world, Autumn. The landing page is here – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/23315.html
Even with his hands broken, he was still trying to yank strands. Autumn could see the way he was pulling, reaching. Not trying to commit suicide. No, he was stalling. “Buddies coming?”
“I’m not the only one who understands. And Alex isn’t the only one with the cleansing gift.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/360648.html. You can comment here or there.
Noam is a character in my Year Nine Addergoole pieces, including Birthday Present. This is an excerpt from his description:
He’s even-tempered to the point where people think him phlegmatic, calm, and rarely prone to outbursts; he was a quiet child who became a quiet teenager. This leads to people under- or over-estimating his intelligence; it also leads to them under-estimating his anger when it does flare
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/360275.html. You can comment here or there.
For ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lilfluff‘s prompt. The Callanian language does not have an “f” sound.
Cairifan had learned early in his career that too much pride was a useless hindrance.
Pride in a job well done, yes. Pride in your people, yes. In your land, yes. Pride for pride’s sake would get you killed, sacked, jailed, or all three.
It had been easy enough when he had been Mayor of one of Bithrain’s biggest coastal cities. It had been harder when the Callennan overran the city, but then all he’d needed to focus on was putting out fires and keeping his city intact.
It was harder now. Cairifan bowed low to the Callennan officer overseeing his city. Not his city, anymore, not with the invaders everywhere, but Goulunder was still his home. “Your Ladyship.” He was glad he was not married. He would not want to describe this to a wife.
“Kairipan. You have the reports?” Her accent was clipped and short, making her sound angry even when she wasn’t.
“I have them, your Ladyship.” He set the slate down, the numbers written in Bitrani script and notated with pictured. Cairifan spoke about a hundred words of pidgin-Callenian. That number was increasing daily. Yesterday, he had learned “submit.” Again. He had trouble with that one.
She perused the slate, her finger hovering over the words and numbers. “Why so few goats?”
“Our herds have not been rebuilt yet.” He was not a livestock-herder. His people never had been; in between wars, they had hired Callennans to do that work.
“Tch. I will send someone to help. You will need more goats.”
“I? We?” He swallowed a lump of hope that was as dangerous as pride.
She leveled a look at him that he had no words for. No polite words, at least. From another man, it would have been a challenge. From her, he didn’t know. “You are a clever man, Kairipan. And this place is not my home.”
Her hand on his arm he understood well. He’d had secretaries before; he’d put his hand on their arm like that. Cairifan was very glad he was not married.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/360148.html. You can comment here or there.
“She’s playing with the horses again.”
Kakaya leaned out on the porch, watching their oldest daughter in the pasture behind their home. Her braids bounced on her back as she ran back and forth with the tiny, goat-like creatures, the biggest hardly bigger than their dog Guard.
“I worry that they’ll bite her.” Pokas had settled onto the porch as well, using the bright daylight to work on his carvings. Their high-valley house gave them access to the best wood for his work, but the herd of horses that shared the field and nearby forest-edges made him nervous.
“Their bite’s hardly as bad as a goat’s, and she’s been bitten by Loudmouth before. She’ll be fine.”
“But shouldn’t she be playing with other children? When I was her age…”
“I knew you then, Po. You can’t fib to me. When you were her age, you were off in the woods, playing with the trees.”
“The horses won’t give her a livelihood, the way the trees gave me.” He frowned to realize the goat he’d been carving had turned into a horse, with the long curved neck and the strange back legs. “And she’s been skipping her lessons again.”
“Well, that can’t stand. I’ll go get her.”
“Hunh. It looks like you don’t have to. She’s coming back.. and is that Loudmouth’s harness?”
“Can’t be. Maybe from when we had her kids?” Their daughter was heading into their goat pasture, leading two tiny horses in two tiny harnesses. They were prancing, turning their heads – but neither were attacking her. And they looked finer than the others, prettier, their spots almost symmetrical.
“I thought,” their daughter announced, “like we were learning about in class? Breeding goats for size and prettiness? These two are very pretty. They might pull a baby cart…?”
Kakaya and Pokas shared a look. Kakaya won the exchange, although both were picturing tiny horses for the rich country-visit set. Perhaps their daughter’s strange obsession with horses would provide, as Pokas’ with the forest had.
“That sounds like a wonderful idea, dear.” Pokas set his carved horse down behind himself. It would be a good winter gift for her.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/359896.html. You can comment here or there.
This comes after everything posted in the Rin/Girey timeline.
There was a great deal of hand-shaking going on, and a good deal of bowing, and more than a little bit of staring.
Callennan weddings appeared to involve a good deal of talking. This part of the ceremony, where a Bitrani temple would be full of silence and reverence, was instead full of a good deal of milling about and chatting, sometimes directly interrupting the ceremony.
There were a thousand things on Girey’s mind, very few of them directly related to the wedding. Arinyanca’s parents had been talking, and when they weren’t talking, they were sending pointed looks. Her Uncle – and then some other relatives who she called Uncle as well – had been making his own set of pointed looks. In the heart of what passed for Callennan diplomacy, Girey would not be able to pass as “Girey of Tugia” forever, no matter how many times some rude Aunt or cousin suggested that “All Bitrani look the same. That nose, that silly hair.”
As a matter of fact, while Elin pledged her strength and her bow (That wasn’t in the priests’ book of vows), her saddle and her tent to her new groom, another probably-an-aunt was sniping about his hair.
“How do they do anything at all with that? No wonder they keep it short; it wouldn’t hold a braid for anything.”
He had grown up in the heart of Bitrani politics; Girey didn’t even show that he’d heard. But Rin did. Just a smile, a very sharp smile.
She shifted her hand so that she was holding his, the glittering band around his wrist clearly obvious. “Aunt Alunyez. Have you met my companion, Girey of Tugia?”
The look on the old woman’s face was worth every snipe about his hair.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/359573.html. You can comment here or there.
Content warning: Control, Ownership, punishment. No sex, no penetration. Some nudity.
“You’ve seen what they have to offer.”
He hadn’t been there on Hell Night. He hadn’t been there at the dances. She’d barely seen him, until he was standing right behind her. Slight, beardless, beautiful.
“Would you like to know what I have to offer, instead?”
It should have been harder than that to convince her to accept slavery, but she had knelt for his collar with barely a second thought. Some day, some day far later, she might consider the whys and wherefores of this. Today was not that day.
Tonight, he had laid out for her the terms of her surrender. “Every order I give you tonight, you may choose whether or not to accept. Every word I speak to you tonight, until tomorrow morning, except these: you may not leave this room without permission. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Choice hadn’t been part of the deal. She wondered what he was up to.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes…” So this was how it would be. “Yes, Master.”
“Very good. Kneel.”
He’d given her permission to disobey. What happened if she did? “No, Master.”
“No?”
Maybe this hadn’t been a good idea. “No.”
“Last chance.”
“I like standing.”
“Hrrm.” He turned his back on her, opening his closet. “Take your clothes off.”
In for a penny… “No. No, Master.”
“Do you like those clothes, my pet?”
“I’m very fond of them.”
“If you do not take them off yourself, I will remove them, and they will not come off in one piece.” He was holding a long crop and a pair of handcuffs. “Last chance.”
“Yes, Master.” She peeled her clothes off, never taking her eyes off of him. So that was what he meant. She knelt, wondering if it was worth it.
“Ah, but I already told you you’d had your last chance. You look so pretty like that, my pet.”
His orders might not be binding her, but his praise still felt warm, rushing over her fear. “Thank you, Master.”
“Put your hands behind your neck.”
“No, Master.” What was she doing? She frowned, but kept her hands in her lap.
“So you wish to see, is that it?” He was behind her in a heartbeat, muttering Words under his breath and grabbing both her wrists. Then the struggle was on in earnest.
He wasn’t a big man, not really, but he was strong, and she couldn’t kick in this position. In a moment, he had her hands pinned behind her neck, the cuffs slammed on. Tight. Too tight. He hooked the chain between the cuffs to her collar, and pushed her forehead towards her knees.
“I will always give you a choice to obey or not. But there will be consequences for both.” He caressed her back, then cupped her ass with both hands. “Do you understand, my pet?”
“Yes, master.” Her voice was muffled by her knees.
“Very good. Stay down there, pet, and count.”
This time, she obeyed, as the lash landed across her bare back.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/359296.html. You can comment here or there.
For imaginaryfiend‘s prompt and @dahob’s prompt
“It’s a prototype, of course.” Diryid ran his hands over the long shafts of his new machine. “And I still believe the river-boat was more practical. Our rivers and canals, after all, are smoother than our roads. But this will go, and if you stack the wood properly in the back by the boiler, and if you keep this little pocket here loaded with the proper fire-aether, it will go nearly as long as my river boat. Which is to say, it will get you easily from city to city in less time than a conventional carriage.”
He tightened a nut and burnished a shining piece of brass, smiling all the time at his audience. Finally, Syadaia cleared her throat.
“But what is it? I thought you were working on a dirigible?”
“Oh, that.” The engineer waved his hand in the air. “That is much easier, although its distance is, at the moment, more limited. We do not have a proper way, yet, to contain the most flammable aether. And wood weighs it down, you see. But it will go.”
They all looked over his head, where he was pointing, but they were in his garage, and there was nothing to be seen. It was Syadaia, youngest of the group, who was delegated by eye contact to ask, again.
“Where is the dirigible? And what is this… thing, Diryid? What does it do?”
“This. This is a goatless carriage. It will go, as I said, from Lannamer to the Arran cities in two-thirds the time it will take a two-goat conveyance. And, unlike that monstrosity your other contractor was working on, it will not blow up. Nor will it eat its passengers.”
“It never…!” Tallgua’s denial was only half-feigned. The “other contractor’s” conveyance hadn’t actually eaten anyone. But he’d been using wild aether. Nobody used wild aether in something that close to people!
“But the dirigible?”
“Dirigible, dirigible.” Diryid stomped his foot. “You will have your damn dirigible. But anyone can design one of those. This… this is my masterpiece, and you all will admire it.”
There seemed nothing to do but make the appropriate noises. They needed that dirigible, if their plans were to succeed. And to have the dirigible, it appeared, they needed… this.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/359150.html. You can comment here or there.