Up from the Cracks, a story of The Cracks for the Giraffe Call

Feb15

For [personal profile] the_vulture‘s commissioned prompt.

In the same world as:
Through the Cracks (LJ)
“China is Here” (LJ)
The Dark of the City (Lj)

Content warning: there’s some atypical thinking and suggestions of prior abuse going on.

I woke like a dream from the dark, slipping out of the cracks in the sidewalk, slipping out of the holes in the world. I stepped out into the daylight world when she failed to pay attention, she who had been so dismissive of myths and dreams.

(Of course I know – well, think – assume, at least – where she went. That doesn’t mean I have to tell you, now does it? The wonderful thing about what I am. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to!

(Err, except the geasa, but don’t pay any mind to that. You don’t need to know about those!)

THE POINT BEING, I stepped out, and she vanished. *Poof* And, because this is what being a Changeling is, being a crack-dweller, a troll (so maligned!) a Fair Folk (Much better)… I took over where she’d left off. Because that is what you do, when you are the things that live between the cracks in the world.

Cue ominous music.

No, really, I’m a sweetie. I’m not going to eat your face or anything. I just wanted to be out in the world, not cramped in a nether dimension. I just wanted my own chance to shine.

(If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Goat-free. Shit, was that out loud).

You keep side-tracking me. Keep that up and I’m going to eat your face, and then what will you listen with, mister?

Sweet and innocent. Sweet as sugar and pure as the driven snow, that’s me. Or, at least, that was Her.

They teach you, when you’re waiting for an Other to step through a crack, what you’re supposed to do and not do. What you’re supposed to say and not say. The lines to walk.

They teach you how to be a good little Changeling, because their goal is to get as many out as possible. If you make a fuss, you might bring the attention down of Those Who Watch, and then bam, they come patching the cracks and it’s forever before we can get anyone else out again. And we don’t want that, do we, miss wants-to-play? No we don’t, Papa. We’re not our mother. We’ll be good.

You get really good at saying the right lines, down there.

And, well, I wanted to stay out, and I knew what Those Who Watch do when they catch a changeling before they’re all the way anchored in, so I listened to what I was taught. I didn’t just slip into her skin, I became her. Every twitch, every glitch, every issue, every freaking volume (and she had a few, let me tell you).

And then, slowly, I… improved her. I smoothed out a rough edge here. I sanded down a splotchy spot there. Her complexion got better, she stopped twitching randomly. She began to speak in sentences of more than three words. She got a raise.

Her life had been constrained by rules she didn’t even understand, but what am I but the breaker of rules? Slowly, I touched up the edges of her life, fixed her hair, introduced us to a nice guy. Slowly, I sanded off the bits that made her uniquely Susan, and made her, instead, uniquely me.

And everything was going beautifully! The way we do things now isn’t the way they used to do it, shoving yourself into the body and psyche of a human, sharing living space, as it was. That has all sorts of negative side effects, the worst of which the riders going crazy, getting kicked out, or both at once. A rider without a body ends up shoving themselves into the nearest possible vessel – you end up with a lot of “charmed” items that way that were actually accidentally possessed, the poor spirit stuck until that item (stone statues are the worst) “died;” disintegrating completely.

And a rider who’s crazy brings Those Who Watch down on all of us, and, perhaps harsher, makes the world look. And there are things we don’t want the world looking at, any more than Those Who Watch do.

And there you got me sidetracked again. Stop that!

The way we do things now, that’s what I was talking about. As opposed to the old way, that nobody liked, including the hosts.

Now, I’m not really sure the hosts like it – they don’t act too nice when they’re pulled Under, but the cracks can warp you a bit – but it works a lot better for the riders. For me, in specific. The host, all of her, goes Under, and the Changeling, with a copy of her body and her memories, pops out Over.

This is important! This is important in my case, because, while I started out with a copy of Susan’s memory and body, as far as I knew, I didn’t start out with any actual Susan. Nada. Nyett. She was Below, doing whatever the stolen ones do. Crying, probably, and rocking back and forth. She seemed really good at crying and rocking back and forth.

The real problem was, I was getting good at it too. Not on purpose! I was doing my damndest to step out of those obnoxious patterns, trying to make my dull, dull host into someone entertaining to be. And I’d been working all those rough edges off.

But they kept coming back! I’d spend weeks slowly getting her – me – to used longer sentences, and then one of those borrowed memories would pop up, and there I was hiding in the closet, terrified the boojum was going to get me.

Something had to be done. And quick, because I couldn’t afford to go crazy. If I went crazy, well, we covered that. Those Who Watch, yadda, yadda, and then the people back Below would rip me to shreds, and I would never get out again.

Ever heard of a Changeling in therapy? The thought was laughable. “So, doc, I have these memories, but they’re not really mine, even though I’m living the life of the person whose memories they are.” I’d get “help,” all right, but not for the problem I actually had.

So I tried to muscle on through. It was just some memories, right? Just some memories, and some twitches, and a few superstitions that seemed to make everything worse if I ignored them. It was just some memories, a couple twitches, some superstitions, and a growing fear of going outside after dark.

Just the memories, the twitches, the superstitions, the fear of the dark, and the urge to run away from any man with a handlebar mustache.

Just memories, twitches, superstitions, fears, urges to run, and a habit of counting everything I ate.

Just memories, twitches, superstitions, fears, urges, habits, and a rising desire to set places on fire that I could barely recognize, places that spurred a fragment of a memory that, it seemed, Susan had repressed very deeply, places that made my skin crawl.

When I came to myself standing in front of a bar muttering the words to a fire spell, I decided that muscling through wasn’t going to work anymore. This body was clearly defective. I had to go back through the cracks. I had to make Susan take her body back.

Getting through the crack in that direction isn’t hard. It’s not even a challenge if you came from there, which I did, barely, remember I had.

Finding my other self was a bit trickier, but magic works so much more nicely down there. I had to hurry, was the problem. Those Who Watch notice holes in the world, like there being no Susan at all out there. We didn’t want them, clearly, to notice that.

And when I found her – cleaned up, pretty, in a field with unicorns, dangling her feet in the brook – do you know what she said? Of course you do, don’t you? She said no.

“Take it back,” I told her. “Go back to your life, I don’t want it anymore.”

“No.” She smiled like it was the nicest thing in the world she’d just said, instead of the end of mine. “No, I don’t want to.”

“You have to. You have to go back, please.” I shook her a little, I think. Neither of us liked the contact, so I stopped. “The voices, the nightmares… how did you manage not to burn the city down? You have to take it all back!”

“No,” she said again, and, still smiling, “you’d better leave. But when you go back – don’t worry so much.” She patted my shoulder. “You just have to remember to follow the rules, and everything comes out better.”

So I went back, back to her life, and the memories, and the twitches, and the interminable rules. And I found you, because I hear you’re good at this sort of thing.

I need to burn down a few buildings. And I need it untraceable.

Maybe then, the memories will let me live.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/268548.html. You can comment here or there.

These Walls Can Talk, a story of Fae Apoc/Addergoole for the Giraffe Call

Feb14

This story contains magic and references to Addergoole but no slavery, sex, or violence.

For rix_scaedu‘s prompt

Faerie Apocalypse has a landing page here here (and on LJ).

This takes place during the apoc, ~2012-2013

Out There, the bombs were falling, and the people were screaming and fleeing.

Bethesda stretched, reaching for a set of eyes near the road. She had a feeling, as she did sometimes, that someone was coming who she should let in.

Not every refugee made it past Bethesda’s threshold, of course, or she would be over-flowing with people and nowhere to put them, nothing to feed them. She had to pick and choose, which was frustrating and sometimes enraging – both to her, and to those she left behind – but necessary. This war made for a lot of hard choices.

There, in the crowd, her senses told her there were four – a mother, a child, a young man, and a terrified girl in her twenties. Bethseda whispered the Words, and opened up a door for them. Would they take her hospitality? Not everyone did. Not everyone appreciated it.

When she had first Changed, she had been miserable. She’d been in pain for weeks, of course, hands and legs, bones and skin shifting, stretching, until she was a tiny cottage, not remotely human anymore, except in mind, except in spirit. She’d finished her four years at school – near school, at least – and learned everything she could in that time.

One of the things she learned is that she was growing, and would continue to grow, possibly forever. Another thing she learned was that she had a great-grandmother who was now a castle, which gave her hope.

She learned that she could use Words. That she could still feel. And that, while she no longer had a body in the conventional sense, she still had ways of interacting with other people, even intimately. After all, her great-grandmother the castle had made children.

And she learned, slowly and with a great deal of effort, that, like Baba Yaga’s cottage (but with better legs), she was mobile. Slowly, very slowly (her legs were shorter), Bethesda could move. And, as she grew, she learned how to move her property with her, which had to be, she admitted, the strangest thing, a house walking through the city with a yard like a skirt hanging around her, covering her underpinnings.

Once she had these refugees, those who would stay, she might move again. This city didn’t seem like a good place to stay much longer. She opened her gate, and welcomed them into herself.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/268390.html. You can comment here or there.

In the Infirmary

Feb14

After Prickly. This is set in the Addergoole ‘verse, whose landing page is here on DW & here on LJ, in year 9.

Gar carried Sylvie to the Doctor’s office, met on the way by Luke, who, to Gar’s eyes, looked as if he was trying not to laugh. And then, mostly because she didn’t tell him to, he waited with her. He hadn’t meant to do… that. To perforate her like that. Parts were showing that shouldn’t show. And he’d done that, because he was angry. It made him feel a little ill.

“That,” she said weakly, “was not what I was expecting.”

He laughed nervously. “No?” Where was the damn doctor?

“No,” she confirmed. “I expected… irritation, I suppose.”

“Irritation?” He took a few long, slow breaths. He didn’t want to get angry again. “You trapped me into slavery.” He said it as quietly as he could.

“I did,” she agreed. “I trapped Arundel last year. And I was trapped the year before. It happens often around here.”

“And people don’t normally explode?”

She made a grimace he assumed was supposed to be a smile. “Not normally so… literally, no. Normally they just yell a little, and calm down. I didn’t even yell.”

He looked at her face, because that part wasn’t all messed up. “I can believe that,” he muttered. “You don’t seem like a yeller.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/267821.html. You can comment here or there.

On the River

Feb13

This story is safe of all slavery and/or Ellehemaei Law, although it does include some small magic and a guy living through all of US history.

For Friendly Anon’s prompt.

This takes place from the late 1600’s through 2011

~*~

He’d built one of the first houses on the river, and tried to pretend it was his home, which he’d left so far behind.

At that time, there hadn’t been all that many people around, so he’d cut corners here and there – lots of here, and a little here, as his mother would have said – pulling up the beams, bending them from small trees into large ones with Workings, preserving those giant straight maple beams so that they would last forever.

He was no good with earth, so he’d moved the rocks for the foundation the hard way until another exile had come by, and then he’d traded favors – his skill with wood for Constance’s skill with stone. Their houses had looked like everyone else’s, but they were sturdy, solid, watertight, and built to last the ages.

After all, they were exiles in a strange land, and they didn’t know how long they’d be there.

He moved on, as the territories opened up, leaving the house to his son and Constance’s youngest daughter, with a promise of “you’re-always-welcome-Father” so he’d have a place to stay. He moved West slowly, looking for a place that felt like home, staying in a city for maybe thirty years, then heading back to visit his family and meet the newest generation, then heading out again, further west every time.

Gannon was fond of feminine companionship, and so he found himself making friends with women – usually human women – in each new territory, so that, after a century or so, making his way back to Albany took him quite a while, visiting every solid-beam house he’d built over the years, visiting each new generation of children. Telling them all sanitized stories of The Good Old Days, stories of the secrets he’d hidden in the houses, stories of their grandmothers, their grandfathers, of the way their city had been.

It took him from 2000 to 2011 to make it from Washington to Albany, and, at that, he rushed the last three family visits.

The house was still there, sitting on the Husdon next to Constance’s place, two stone-and-maple houses in tall, sturdy groves of maples and oaks. The city had grown around it, flowed around them like the river around rocks, the road bigger then he remembered it, the place a bit shabbier. There was a cemetery across the street; he remembered when there had been a church there. Down the road, there was a Kwik-E-Mart and a strip mall, but the stonework on the strip mall looked familiar. Constance? Or one of his descendants? The carving on the beams, too – Gannon recognized his own style, but not his own work.

And, he had to smile, the clerk in the gas station had eyes he remembered from what had to be her ancestress, and, he was willing to bet, probably the same tail, too. “I’m Gannon,” he told her, glad to be home.

~*~

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/267525.html. You can comment here or there.

In the Jam, a story of Fae Apoc for the Giraffe Call

Feb13

This story is safe of all faeries and/or slavery.

For [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt. Faerie Apocalypse has a landing page here here (and on LJ).

This takes place during the apoc, ~2012-2013

They called it the Great Traffic Jam, although it was much more Jam than Traffic.

When the people had started fleeing the city en masse, inevitably, someone had realized that they could move faster walking than in their car. One person and another abandoned their cars, until those who had stuck it out driving had to walk, too, because they were, in effect, parked in.

This wasn’t the only city this had happened in. In some others, they had brought out the earth-movers and the bulldozers to clear the highways, turning their medians into junkyards. But this city had been one of the first and worst hit, and there was nobody left to clear the roads, and no reason to do so. So the cars remained.

Eventually, as it became clear that the gods and monsters were not coming this far out, people, some people, stopped walking and simply colonized the cars, those the furthest from the city, on a stretch of highway where there was, for several miles in every direction, very little except the cars and a couple farms.

Kota had been born in the back of an SUV, a giant gas-guzzler that had given up the ghost early on, run out of gas on the side of the road. A bank of four of them made up their colony’s hospital; her sisters Exie and Essie had been born there too.

She learned to read from a shipment of books overturned on the side of the road; she and her sisters grew up in the back of an RV. Their colony’s dearest possession was a grocery semi of canned goods.

And now that Kota and Exie were old enough, they were going exploring. They had heard, from travelers, that there was a tanker truck stuck in the Jam. If there was still gas, they thought, maybe they could move the Jam.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/267282.html. You can comment here or there.

Midnight, Summer Solstice, a story of the Aunt Family for the Giraffe Call

Feb13

For moon_fox‘s prompt

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

The bonfire had died down to embers by midnight. The children were asleep, the husbands and brothers drinking beer and playing poker, and the sisters-in-law settled off watching the children.

Most of the older aunts and grandmothers had drifted off, too; this wasn’t really a time for them. This was a time for the middle generation; this was the hour to let their hair down.

Evangaline took the lead, with a literal pull-pull of her hairsticks, letting her bun release and fall down her back. “Well,” she smiled. “and the world keeps turning.” She lifted her beer with a smile.

“It does,” her cousin Suzanne agreed, as she finger-combed out her braid. “Blessings on it.”

“You know,” Beryl commented, imitating Suzanne, “the neighbors think we’re witches.”

“Let them,” Hadelai snorted. “They have as long as they’ve known we exist.”

“The air of mystery is good for us,” Fallon agreed, smiling. Her hair was cropped short and practical, so she shed her cardigan instead. It was summer solstice; she hardly needed it, even after dark. “And they do like our yard sales more.”

“Well, that has something to do with the occasional lucky trinket Aunt Asta used to ‘accidentally’ seed in, too,” Hadelai laughed.

“Or the ones Aunt Ruan would put in?” Suzanne chuckled. “Oh, I grabbed one of those one year – mom smacked my knuckles so hard, I couldn’t hold a pen for a week!”

Eva grinned, and then, catching movement out of the corner of her eye, looked up. “Janelle,” she called, because if she didn’t, one of the others would send the poor girl away again. “Kids asleep?”

“Like logs,” her sister-in-law agreed. “The men, too, and Mom Ardelia. Everyone but you guys.”

“Welcome to solstice,” Fallon laughed dryly. “No-one else can be bothered to watch the world flip over. Come on, pull up a rock and watch the fire with us.”

Eva hid her smile in her beer. She could always trust her sister to follow her lead.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/267035.html. You can comment here or there.

Learning of History, a continuation of Fae Apoc for the Giraffe Call (@inventrix)

Feb12

After
Scrounging for History (LJ)
Digging through History (LJ)
Delving in History (LJ) and
Bringing Home History (LJ)
Singing down History (LJ)

Part 5 of ~7.5
Fae Apoc has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

Karida let out a whoop as the creature they were fighting landed in a puff of dirt and dust, and then a quiet whimper as the sight of blood and, worse, bone caught her eye. “Shit,” she moaned, and stepped back. She didn’t want to faint into the pit. Dropping yourself on your enemy was a poor tactic.

“Got you,” Amalie murmured. “Here we go. Jasfe tlactl Karida,” she murmured, and sang the rest, “jasfe tlacatl Karida-my-kin, jafse tlacatl βραχίων.”

“Jasfe,” their captive murmured, and the air rang. “Jasfe tlactl?”

“That’s it,” Amalie hummed happily. “There you go, Karida, good as new. And seems our new sister is a healer.”

“Wonderful.” She flexed the healed arm and muttered a quick repair on the sleeve, as well; she wasn’t that good at those Words, but good enough to not have the cloth flapping around. “So we have something in the pit, do we? Dor?”

“I’m working on it. There’s some pretty impressive invisibility Workings going on. I didn’t know monsters could work.”

“Some monsters snarl/ and some monsters hiss,” Amalie hummed, “Some monsters know/the way the world is.”

“That’s one of Mom’s,” Dor complained, and then, with an oof, sat down on the edge of the pit. “Come look.”

“Coming.” The four of them looked over the edge of the pit together, at the image Dor was slowly forcing into existence. Foot-long claws. Tusks, like some sort of goblin in the old stories. A long tail like a dragon, lashing back and forth angrily. Hooves like a goat.

Fiery was the first to speak. “Witch,” she grunted. “Witch-woam.”

“Witch,” Amalie hummed, getting the feel of the song. “Tell me again, Fiery-sister?”

“Witch-woam,” the girl repeated. “Sundown.”

“Sundown,” Amalie repeated. “There we go. The witch, they said, lived in the dusk/ the witch they need but cannot trust./The witch who brought their water clear/ the witch who kept their lives so dear.”

“Nasty people,” Karida swore. The creature in the pit was, fangs and tail and hooves aside, a woman. A witch, perhaps, an Ellehemaei. But was she monster or foe? “They traded services with her?”

“That’s the tune that’s singing to me,” Amalie confirmed. “Sundown, you better beware/If I find you’ve been sneaking ’round my back stair… Mmm. I see.”

In the pit, the witch hissed and snarled.

“Some monsters hiss?” Dor offered. “If she was doing Workings for them, she can’t be feral.”

“And probably isn’t a monster.” Karida looked down into the pit. “If you don’t fight us, we won’t fight you. We aren’t looking for a war.”

“Nasty humans,” the witch-creature spat. “Let me out.”

“Human?” Dor laughed. “No more than you are.” He muttered the beginnings of a working, shaping stairs into the pit. “Did they kick you out, the way they kicked Fiery out?”

“What do you care, scrounger trash, trash-scrounger?”

He stopped the Working, stairs stepping down but ending above the woman’s reach. “If you don’t care, then I don’t either,” he answered tightly. “But it seems the sort of thing that our company might take note of… scrounger trash or no.”

Next:
Getting Over History (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/266959.html. You can comment here or there.

Unexpected Guest

Feb12

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s prompt

Evangaline modern-era.

Evangaline had spent a nice afternoon talking with Janelle and spoiling Anna Marie with love, explaining some of the more-explainable strangenesses of the family to her sister-in-law and reassuring her that no, the aunties and cousins didn’t hate her and yes, Aunt Beatrix really had known what she was doing when she gave her that silk negligee, and, yes, lavender silk would look lovely on her and Owen would love it, and, just for good measure, repeating her willingness to babysit.

Some days she thought that the family had Aunts to provide a nanny for the endless children produced by all the other siblings.

She finished cleaning up after tea-and-baby, and sat down with her knitting for her self-allowed hour of evening TV before she got back to cataloging and figuring out the mess the last three Aunts had left of the house (just yesterday, she’d found an entire box of haunted mousetraps, each one carrying around a tiny mouse shade).

She was only twenty minutes into NCIS when the first of the wards around the property told her she had a visitor. Sighing – she’d asked the family, time and again, to call first, to come up the front way, but they did what they’d do – she paused the TV, set down her knitting, and listened for the second set of wards.

When the presence went for her barn and not for the house, she began to get suspicious. She picked up the baseball bat Owen had given her when she first moved out, and the glass globe that had been Fallon’s gift, focused on the pitch of the wards – they had to be not-too-sensitive, or they’d go off every time a raccoon wandered through – and headed carefully for her barn.

Unlike older Aunts, she had no need of a horse, no need of a milk cow, no need of chickens, so she’d done basic clean-up to make sure nothing would fall over, and left the barn for the next year. Thus, piles of old horse blankets and unknown family detritus still filled most of the stalls.

And, uncomfortably huddled in one of those stalls, a teenage boy looked up at her, nervous, uncertain, and trying to make himself even smaller.

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” he muttered.

“No,” she agreed. At the moment, at least, he wasn’t. “But I think you should come inside.”

Next: Followed me Home (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/266269.html. You can comment here or there.

The Silver Road, a story of Unicorn/Factory for the Giraffe Call!

Feb12

For [personal profile] skjam‘s prompt

Unicorn/Factory has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

There was one road, between the villages and the Town.

There were paths, and cart routes, and packed-dirt trails wending back and forth through the areas that was called, by the townsfolk, “the villages,” and by the villagers a hundred different names, depending in which particular clump of houses you were standing. There were small streets going crosswise through the bigger villages, and the well-beaten paths that went down to the River.

But there was one road, one thing smoothed and graded and wide, and it made its way through the Town and out to the Villages, one long chain holding them all together, and it was called Silver Road.

Newcomers to the town, those from bigger towns and cities further down the mountains, perhaps, or those from other areas, thought, generally, that the road was called that, poetically, because of the greyish silver color of the stone used to pave the more-traveled areas, or because it had cost, as some of the Townsfolk joked, buckets and buckets of silver to build it. But the villagers, the older ones, at least, the ones who told tales by the fireside, they remembered the truth.

“There was no Town,” they would say. “Not in my grandmother’s time. There was a village there, of course; it’s a prime spot, by the place that the River splits, and the road comes up around the pass. But then they built the factory, and the workshops. And when that happened, they needed…”

They never wanted to say it, so they said other things, and their children and grandchildren didn’t like those either, so that what the Town and the workshops had needed originally was lost in generations of guilt and squeamishness.

“…they needed stuff from the Villages. Food. Labor. But the small farmers and the small craftsmen didn’t want to give up their lives to go into the Town. They didn’t want to deal with the smoke and the dirtiness of the factories. So they kept destroying the road, flooding it out, digging ditches through it.

“It got so every month, the Town people would have to rebuild the road, and they were getting really, really irritated. And when you irritate the Town, they make you pay, they do.”

Everyone knew that. Everyone knew the prices paid when the Town was too irritated.

“So they built their road again, with…”

Nobody wanted to say it. But they all said it, because it was the truth.

“…with blood, unicorn and human. The blood ran silver, the way it does, you know.”

They all knew, or they’d all heard. When Unicorn and human touched that way… yes. It ran like moonlight, like mercury. Like silver.

“and it stained the road, and the land under it. It stained all of us, Town and Villages alike, and still does, to this day.

“And it chained us together, villages and towns. It’s silver with blood, the Silver road, and silver like a chain, because that’s what it is – our lifeblood, and our prison.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/266129.html. You can comment here or there.