Faries in the Church

Jun9

For flofx‘s commissioned prompt, a continuation of

⛪
“There are fairies in your church.”

Bishop Macnamilla was of an older school of thought, practically antediluvian. Most of the time, Father Nehemiah avoided conflict by avoiding the Ninth Street house where the Bishop kept his residence. The Father’s church was new, and not entirely conventional, and not near Ninth Street, and the Bishop’s body as well as his mind were old, and did not move easily.

But someone had said something, the Father was certain. The jowls on the Bishop were shaking in the way the once-fat man only did when he had been being yelled at by a parishioner who Didn’t Like Something. Probably not one of Nehemiah’s regulars. But sometimes the gossips from the other churches liked to stop in and visit.

“There are fairies.” Sometimes he could get away with just agreeing with the Bishop until he went away. “Margaret and LaKeisha are in there now. They’ve been helping Mrs. Bao with the cleaning, as it’s almost Easter time.”

“You have fairies in your church services, Father Nehemiah.”

He wasn’t going to be able to dance around this. “Better than having them standing outside the gates, glaring.”

“Do you know what happens when you allow – INVITE the fair folk into consecrated ground?” He was bellowing, or trying to. He must have been an impressive man before the long waste of age started eating him away.

“I’ve heard the stories. Mrs. Bao told me some of them. The kirkevaren told me others – and the fairies told me another set.”

“Ruin and ruination is what you get. Sin and sinners. Filth and the filthy.” The Bishop shook his head. “It leads to nothing but badness.”

“And blood?” Nehemiah drew himself up. He was tall, taller than the Bishop’s shrunken form by nearly a foot. “I know why there were no fairies in the church before, sir.”

“There are no FAIRIES in the church,” the Bishop shouted the word as if it were an obscenity, “because to allow them into out sanctified ground taints not only the ground but the entire city.”

Father Nehemiah was boggled enough by this to lose the edge of his anger, although he did remain standing straight, staring down at the top of the Bishop’s head. “You are aware, sir, that you live in the densest population of fae in the country, correct? The city is teeming with fairies.”

“The city is rotten with them. The elders did not listen to me. They were squeamish.” The older man’s voice finally dropped. “No. It was me. I was squeamish. I knew what needed to be done, and I could not do it. I failed my superiors. I killed them, Nehemiah, I killed those fairies you have heard of. I spilled their blood in the name of the city and its sanctity. I scrubbed the floors with the blood. I blessed the altars with it. But, in the end, I could not do what needed to be done.”

He didn’t have to ask, although he wished that he did. He’d already heard enough to put the rest together.

“You killed them before you buried them, you mean.” It hadn’t been meant to be another lamb under the church at all. “You blessed their deaths, instead of leaving them to roam.”

“I could have saved us all. I could have protected us all from what’s in the wind. But they look human, Nehemiah. They look human. And that was my undoing.”

Addergoole Year Nine Character Profile: Kheper

Jun8

Addergoole Year Nine won the reader poll for “Next Year’s serial;” the story proper will begin the first full week of September.

In the meantime, please enjoy the third of twenty-something character profiles: Kheper.

Kheper
b. March 15, 1987

Kheper is fiery, stubborn, strong, and hardworking, a handsome dark-haired man with a resemblance to Disney’s Aladdin. His Change involves chitin armor, beetle wings, and claws, as well as scarab horns.

His mother, Tanith, is an Egyptian student-visa to the US. Her Name translates to Brings the Pain and her Change is draconic, with arm-wings that are long and fluttery and head-spikes that are quite intimidating. She is iridescent orange in color, at least in her scales and wings.

She was a studious, serious student and matured into a strong, serious woman who demands the very best of everyone around her.

His father, Jibril, is a far-older Arabic immigrant to the United States. He has a similar change to his son, an insect Change with chitin armor that resembles small plates of jointed armor, with a set of horns resembling an ancient samuri helmet. He takes his responsibilities seriously, but that is about all he takes seriously. His Name translates to Withstands.

Jibril was held against his will by a female Nedetakaei Hunter for some time immediately before joining Regine’s project, resulting in

Spoiler
[collapse]
.

Kheper is not the first child either provided to the project, but when conceiving him, they fell in love and were married soon afterwards. They have two other children, who will come to the school in later years.

Kheper was raised by both parents, in an affluent Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. He grew up with his mother pressuring him to strive to the highest summits he could reach, his father driving home the importance of responsibility, and both expecting him to, perhaps, be a bit more adult than he was ready for.

He simultaneously rebelled against this mindset and took it in, becoming a studious boy in some classes and an absolute goof-off in others, dependant on his respect, or lack therof, for the teacher and, to a lesser extent, the season.

He likes sun, and likes to be outdoors during the summer months quite a bit. He spends more time than is good for his studies playing hooky as soon as the weather warms up, and takes winter with more than a little bit of grumbling.

When he decides someone is “his person,” nothing short of a complete and utter betrayal will change his mind.

He has expensive tastes, and already knows good wine and good food. His parents did manage to instill that at an early age.

Physical, he is a slight, tall young man. He’s 5’7” as he enters Addergoole and will gain another three inches in his first year, another inch each year afterwards. He isn’t prone to athletic activities that put on muscle, although he was learning skateboarding and brings his ‘board to school with him.

He has black hair that he keeps shaggy and shoulder-length because it offends his mother, chocolate brown eyes, and slightly-too-shaggy eyebrows. His skin starts out a deep brown, summer-sun baked.

Because his mother told him he was coming to an exclusive prep school, his wardrobe consists primarily of prep-school clothes: polo shirts, button-downs, khakis. He even has two shirts with the Addergoole crest on them. He prefers light colored clothing, and almost everything he owns fits in that category. If dressing “down,” he wears tailored jeans and fitted T-shirts.

Math and history are his least-good classes, because he didn’t get along with those teachers back home. Science is his best.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/351444.html. You can comment here or there.

Draconic – or this really isn’t how you should do a fantasy language – A Guest Post

Jun6

[personal profile] becka_sutton is a fellow webserial author and friend. She has a new book out, Land of Myth, the first book in her Dragon Wars saga.

We share an interest in constructed languages, and today she is going to tell us about Draconic, a language from Dragon Wars.

Draconic – or this really isn’t how you should do a fantasy language (not even one that’s just for naming)

When I started writing The Dragon Wars Saga I had to do some world-building. It was interesting because while I’m not the first (and won’t be the last) writer to create a fantastical rather than hard fantasy world there was precious little advice on the web about how to do the former. I really had to go it alone. One of my previous guest blogs over at Feral Intensity discusses this.

I also needed a naming language – Draconic, which is the formal language of the Dragons in the series. I really didn’t have the faintest about conlanging and I kind of just winged it. This probably wasn’t the best idea, but there you go.

It was lucky because it’s just a naming language – even dragons only use draconic formally – so I didn’t need to work out the grammar in any great detail. But looking back I perhaps should have made a phonetics and phonotactics table. When I need a new draconic name I don’t have a table of permissible sounds and combinations which means I have to work out if the word I’m thinking of sounds right by saying it and comparing it to other names and words. Fortunately I have a pretty good grasp of the phonotactics in my head so it hasn’t been much of a problem.

I did run into phonotactics problems a couple of times. One of the dragon ranks/honorifics alra/alran did not pluralise nicely – which I didn’t realise until I tried to do it. Alri is just wrong (pluralising Ala rather than Alra) and Alrri would indicate trilling the r twice as long. But natural languages are full of such bumps so I resolved it by having a vowel insert in such situations to give Alrari.

Here’s some other facts about draconic:

• Draconic is rich is approximants – r,l and y especially. The r’s are trilled and the l’s very liquid. They also use stops a lot though not so much they make the language sound closed.
• The language is gendered – -a = female, -an = male, -ri is plural, plural can be used where gender is unknown but more usually they use female in that case. There is also -te which refers to abstracts and neutrals. Example words (miri – chief or ruler) – miria, mirian, miriri for people, miriate – everything that falls under the rulership of a particular miria. Worlds are always referred in the feminine – Taloa (Earth), Talonyka (The Speaker’s World), Kithra (The world of the Kithreiri).

If I had to give any advice to someone making a fantasy naming language for the first time it would be to at least work out all possible sounds and the way they can fit together before you start. It’ll save you pain later.

Becka Sutton is a self-described crazy cat lady, but she’s not very good at it: while she is crazy she only has one cat. She was born in Britain in 1972 and has lived there her entire life. In her early teens she started scrawling fantasy stories in exercise books her mother bought her to stop her scribbling in her school books. She hasn’t stopped writing since, and she credits writing as the outlet that allowed her to recover from the nervous breakdown she had after her parents died.

Her other interests include reading, listening to music, attempting to draw, growing her own vegetables and looking after the aforementioned Pumpkin cat.

No, you can’t read the novel she scrawled as a teen – she burned it long ago because it was awful.


Read Dragon Wars; buy Land of Myth

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/350597.html. You can comment here or there.

Time to pay for DW again O_O

Jun6

With the note that [personal profile] kc_obrien still needs to ask me for a story for last year!!

Dreamwidth doesn’t take Paypal, and it’s time to pay for my account again. Outside of my normal Giraffe Call hours, I will write 125 words/dollar within the next month, on the subject of your choice (comfort-level caveats apply) for anyone who puts paid time on my DW account.

<3

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/350413.html. You can comment here or there.

Standard Addergoole First-few-weeks timeline

Jun2

Regine likes things to be tidy and does them almost the same way every year. 🙂

(* week before first sunday: old students arrive)
* First Sunday: New Students arrive
* First Monday: Classes begin
* First Friday (probably lunch): the “reveal” of the Changes. Many students don’t drop Mask now, however.
* First Saturday: first dance. In theory, every second saturday after that
* Second Thursday: theoretical mentor-choosing deadline
* Second Saturday: Hell Night
* Third Monday: Magic testing, magic classes begin
* Magic classes switch off every 2 weeks.

Anything I’m missing?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/349867.html. You can comment here or there.

Camp Nano

Jun1

I am doing Camp Nano! (I’m aldersprig over there, too).

I’m doing the first ~50,000 of the Addergoole: Year Nine serial, and, as such, I am soliciting for one or two alpha-readers to help me take 50,000 of scribbles and kick them into the first semester of the serial.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/349562.html. You can comment here or there.

Taproots, a story of Rin & Girey for the May Giraffe Call

May31

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s commissioned continuation of Roots.

Reiasson has a landing page here And a wiki here.

Girey wasn’t sure she’d heard him at first. She didn’t answer, at least, instead continuing to flip through the ancient book in front of her.

“The papers go back further,” she said, instead of answering, after a while. “Not much more, and most of it is incomprehensible. But it’s clear we came here, my people, yours, the Arrans, all of us.”

He was not yet used to her speaking heresy as if it were truth, and, more so, as if nobody would stop her. “That’s what…” He trailed off, frowning. Rin picked up the thread of the conversation.

“You said the heretical texts mentioned Tabersi. You’ve heard of those texts then, or read them?”

“It’s a crime against the throne to read the texts. The priests keep them locked up.”

“But you…” She paused, and looked around, and raised one black eyebrow in question.

Son of Tugia, she taunted in his memory. But she was asking the Prince of Bithrain this question.

“I did. And the Tabersi are mentioned, them, and the callentate of barbarians, the Ideztozhyuh.” The word was uncomfortable on his tongue, the consonants sounding harsh and alien.

“The Idez… the people of the old earth. Interesting.” She flipped through a few more pages of the book. “So my texts speak of the origins of your people, while yours -“

“Talk of visiting barbarians who decided to stay.” He frowned at her head. “Not about how they set up shop here, on this continent, though.” And not how they’d beaten his people at war.

“Interesting.” She flipped through the book. “This one’s too old, it doesn’t say where the wars started.”

“Didn’t it say your people rebelled?”

“The looks of that, however, was a bloodless rebellion. The cold season was hard, the passes were closed, and it was long into the hot season before anyone noticed anything had changed.”

Girey frowned, and didn’t say what he was thinking. That seemed wrong, somehow, but it had been many years ago that he’d read the proscribed texts. “The Bitrani don’t speak much of that era.”

“I think it has something to do with your priests.” She held up both hands, forestalling a complaint he hadn’t been intending on making. “I am not speaking ill of your people or your priests.”

“The Bitrani and the Callenians have the same faith.” It came out like the complaint he had been trying not to make, and he frowned in frustration. “We worship the same three gods, in the same temples, with the same words. You took me to a service,” he reminded her, “to show me that.”

“We do. I’ve been to Bitrani services, as well. In disguise, and with the headscarf some women wore covering her hair, but she had been. “We worship the same gods. I believe that. But your priests hide things by calling them heresy…”

He couldn’t help interrupting. “We don’t have priests anymore, remember? ‘We’ don’t have anything anymore.”

Her hand in his hair was surprisingly tender. “You still have a culture. We couldn’t wipe that out if we tried. And that’s the thing.”

“What’s the thing?” He was both lost and angry now, his confusion making both worse.

“We couldn’t erase your culture if we tried – but I’m beginning to wonder if somebody else tried. And from the inside, maybe it was easier.” She set a finger on the book. “Where did the Tabersi go? And the Ideztozhyuh? And why?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/349330.html. You can comment here or there.

Being the Monster

May30

For rix_scaedu‘s Commissioned continuation.

Addergoole has a landing pagehere.

After Cursed.

Barypos ended. Ended, in a way he had never imagined possible, Ended, Name and name and soul and memories. He ended in a twist of pain and a gut-punch, air lost, while the world burned around him.

He dreamt of death, of spears, of the lamentations and screams of women following him through the years. He dreamt of blood and pain, and of fire, and more fire, and more.

When he awoke, Barypos was gone. He woke to consciousness of a sort, remembering nothing but pain and fire.

Slowly, he stood, and brushed the sand off of his skin. White skin, skin like a dead thing, rippled with muscle and lined with scars that were, as he watched, vanishing into the whiteness. He looked around; sand, and the long-gone remains of buildings. To the north, sand, to the east, sand. To the south, sand, and to the west, sand and the sun.

That was a direction, at least. Not knowing what else to do, he walked into the sun.

A caravan found him, some endless time later, coated in dust and parched. “Where do you come from?” they asked, and he could not tell them. They gave him water, and asked his name.

“Buh-” was all he could remember, so Buh he became, for the few moments before the women brushed the sand off of him, before the men saw what he was.

“Monster,” the youngest woman screamed. “Beast, corpse-eater!”

Those who had welcomed and rescued him drove him off again, screaming monster, beast, creature! and, confused, Buh ran off into the dessert.

Baram woke sweating and swearing and reached across the bed for the girl. There was a girl there. That was the deal; there was always a girl there.

The girl pressed against him in her sleep, stroking his back, her hands firm. Viatrix. Vi’s hands were the strongest. Like Etheldreda. Like Joan.

The memories were beginning to sneak back in, around the edges, when he was sleeping or nearly so, when one of the girls was holding him, and, sometimes and most painfully, when he was holding one of the children. Ethldreda, who had been able to stand him the longest of anyone before these girls, who had stayed with him when the torches lit, stayed with him until the very end. Joan… Joan who had gritted her teeth and tried.

That wasn’t him. That was some other guy, some monster in his nightmares.

He looked down at his body, at the slabs of muscle, at the pale, corpse-like skin. This didn’t change. He died and was born again, died and died and died again, and this returned, white and death-looking. Monstrous.

“I’m here,” Via whispered in his ear, and he clutched her closer. He had never understood what had brought them to show up on his doorstep, Jaelie and then Via and Alkyone, nor what, aside from his protection, drove them to stay, but he knew their warmth and their – he wouldn’t call it love. Nobody could love him. He’d never Kept anyone, that he could recall, to not force the imitation of affection – their friendship seemed to push back the dark.

He knew he would die again. But until that death came, he could be their monster.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/349081.html. You can comment here or there.

Addergoole Year Nine Character Profile: Timora

May30

Addergoole Year Nine won the reader poll for “Next Year’s serial;” the story proper will begin the first full week of September.

In the meantime, please enjoy the second of twenty-something character profiles: Timora.

Timora is a shy, uncertain girl who reached her height (5 foot 7 inches) quickly and the rest of her growth more slowly, making her awkward and uncertain around her classmates. Added to a generally retiring nature – in a family full of loud and boisterous people, she has always been the quiet one – this generally led people to misunderstand her name as a pun for “timid.”

As a child, she was fond of books, animals, and farming, with a propensity for spending a good deal of time in the local dairy and goat farmers’ barns, helping out or getting in the way. She was not, perhaps surprisingly, much into horse fantasy, although she did love the Narnian centaurs, preferring the fauns, dryads, naiads, and such.

Her introversion, her choice of reading material, and her preference for outdoor life rather than playing games or going to the mall, all added up to her being a rather ignored, unpopular child in school. For many years, she hardly noticed, until boys started becoming interesting to her.

She spent her last two years of high school before Addergoole in a state of embarrassed frustration, uncertain how to deal with boys, what she was supposed to say, or why the romance-novel-inspired dresses and skirts she loved so much were suddenly giggle-worthy and inappropriate. A more attentive mother may have been able to put her on the right path, but Douglass Dark-Water is not known for being all that involved in her children’s lives.

Timora is a slender, willowy, coltish girl with long sandy brown hair that tends to wave and curl. She has a pointed chin and hazel eyes, and wouldn’t know what to do with make-up if somebody gave her step-by-step directions. She wears her hair loose, or with the front braided back.

Her brother, Smitty, tried to tell her about Addergoole. He was hampered by first the geas, second by the fact that his experiences at the school were some of the mildest around, and third by their six-year age gap and his long absence from home during Timora’s formative years. She is left understanding that there is a family legacy relating to the school, and that there are animals to spend time with there.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/348699.html. You can comment here or there.