30Days: Falling Falling Falling Down
Day 21 of 30 days of Fiction:”23) Prompt: falling”
Another snippet of Facets of Dusk. 🙂
It was Xenia’s turn to hold Alexa’s hand, although they arranged such things without ever speaking about it. The world they were leaving was too unpleasant, too cold, for Josie to be any use at all, so she came in near the end, buffering Aerich and Alexa, focusing on his turmoil to avoid thinking too hard about her own.
Cole stepped through the mist, so comforting and incongruous inside the steel doorway, vanished into its embrace one limb at a time, until his hand jerked out of her grasp. Unbalanced (some would say she always was, but what did they know?), Josie tumbled after him, Aerich nearly atop her.
And they fell, nothing around them but grey storm clouds and one perplexed bird. There had to be a door; that was how the whole system worked. A door in the middle of thin air? She twisted to look up, trusting her teammates to manage the problem of landing.
Through the clouds, she could barely make out the darker grey of stone. A balcony? She moved the wind, carefully, not wanting to impact the climate more than she had to.
Next to her, still holding her wrist in his dry, firm grip, Aerich chanted, drawing glyphs in the air with his free hand. Below her, Cole swore, the sort of calm, rhythmic swearing that meant he had a plan and was working on it.
And stretching up above them all, taller, it seemed, than the skyscraper they’d stepped out of, was the ruin of an ancient tower, grey stone spiraling into the clouds.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/66437.html. You can comment here or there.
30daysmeme: Identity, Rin/Girey @inventrix
Day 21 of 30 days of Fiction:” 22) Write a scene with children,” yes I’m doing Day 21 twice.
Reiassan/Rin & Girey, after Bridged (a Green Man story, sponsor for $20), which is after Crossing Into Lannamer
Reiassan has a landing page here (LJ Link)
He wanted to stare at the city.
Lannamer was one of the oldest cities on the continent, old as Ouyknan, and as big (some small part of him, still loyal to his home, refused to acknowledge that it was, in actuality, bigger). As brightly painted as Ossulund, it should have seemed garish, but the colors seemed to flow together when he glanced up.
Only glanced up, because he was staring at the plaque bracelet around his wrist, at his other wrist, smoothly un-shackled for the first time since the battlefield, for the first time since he’d met Rin.
Rin. She sat arrow-straight in her saddle, riding beside him, turning to smile at him reassuringly. Would he finally learn who she was? She couldn’t keep on being Rin the Healer, Just Rin, here in her home city, could she?
He turned to ask her, to demand one last time to know who she was, before someone called out her name, before he learned from a stranger. But the sound of small children drowned out his question unasked.
“Lady, lady!” They rushed toward her eagerly, the way they had in every town and city. “Lady! Lord!”
Lord threw him, shook him, reminded him who he was (who he was pretending to be, who he had been; what he would be was still up to her, still in the air). He sat up straighter, and raised his chin. Damnit, prisoner or no, false Duke’s son or no, he was a Prince. He ought to act the part.
“There you are,” Rin murmured to him. He had no chance to figure that one out, however, before the children clamoured again.
“Lady! Lord! Are you here for the wedding?”
My current fund-raising goals:
art for the Rin & Girey Ebook
and bedroom carpet for our new-house-to-be.
Donating gets you access to special donor-only posts! Every $4 gets you one month of access.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/66241.html. You can comment here or there.
Protected: 30 days meme: Cleaning up (Tir na Cali)
Protected: 30 days meme: Collectors (Tir na Cali)
Protected: DailyPrompt: Down, Down, Down (The Planners)
30days: Beginnings
Day 21 of 30 days of Fiction: 21) Write a scene with a drink(ing) of some sort.”
In The Planners setting, long before Hello but not that long after Ants, Grasshoppers, Magpies.
“Sit down.” Jasmine poured two finger-widths of the thick bluish drink into each of the tiny crystal cups; on the other side of her desk, her three most promising young relatives (a niece, a nephew, and a second cousin, twice removed, none of them old enough to drink, if the rule of law was still holding) sat like their strings had been cut.
“You know what the family has been doing.” It wasn’t a question. If they hadn’t known, they wouldn’t have been called here. Still, three heads nodded silently; the niece, Theresa, frowning while she assented. Interesting.
“You know that we have locations around the continent where we have been stockpiling supplies.” They barely bothered to nod to that one; it was common knowledge. “And that there are elders of the family, senior Planners, at each site.” Of course. This time, it was the nephew, Jonah, who frowned. The family elders, Jasmine included, were often considered hide-bound and too traditional, too slow to respond, by the younger generation. So had it been through human history. “This is why I need the three of you.”
All three faces lit up; she paused to hold their attention and sipped from her cup. Politely, they all did the same; only the cousin, Bauer, didn’t flinch at the thick fruity alcohol.
She took a second sip; so did they, more carefully this time. Impatient: Jonah’s foot was tapping. She set her class down.
“I need you to keep an eye on the elders.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/64840.html. You can comment here or there.
30daysMeme: I Hate You
Day 20 of 30 days of Fiction: “20) Write a scene with the opening line “I hate you; I just want you to know that.”
(Days 18 & 19 are waiting on ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kc_obrien to wake up)
Fae Apoc, Addergoole, year Nine, new characters. Fae Apoc’s landing page is here (Lj Link); Addergoole is here.
“I hate you; I just want you to know that!” She shouted the last words as she headed for his bedroom door. Somewhere, she could go somewhere and get away, think for a while, get away from his smug smiling face for a while.
“Sit down,” he said, without so much as a frown or a raised voice. Unwillingly, without any choice at all in the matter, she sat, her ass thumping on the squishy carpet.
“I hate you,” she muttered, scooting towards her escape on her ass. Unhurried, he walked past her and leaned against the door.
“And Friday you thought I was such a nice guy,” he teased.
“That was before yesterday,” she retorted. She wasn’t getting out that way, and the underground room had no other exit; she stopped moving. “I hate you.”
“You’ll get over it in time. At least enough to see that you made the right choice.”
He was so damn self-assured. He had seemed like the best choice, when he and his friends had been bullying her in the hallway Saturday night. “Just pick one of us and it will stop,” they’d kept saying. When the short one with the fangs bit her, she’d made her choice. Now, now she didn’t want anything to do with him, and she was stuck. At least she could still hate him.
“You can’t change the way I feel!” Could he?
“Actually, I could.” He sank down to the floor, so he ws only towering over her by a foot or so. “I could order you to love me. But I won’t.”
He sounded as if he thought he was being so very generous. “Thank you,” she muttered. “I still hate you.”
“That’s okay,” he replied, the smile finally gone. “I understand.”
My current fund-raising goals:
art for two upcoming e-books, and bedroom carpet for our new-house-to-be.
Donating gets you access to special donor-only posts! Every $4 gets you one month of access.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/64564.html. You can comment here or there.
Protected: Cali-Novel – 5 continued, and some 6
Yay!
Have I mentioned how much I LOVE it when people play in my worlds?
kc_obrien (lj –> kc-obrien) has posted two stories for the 30 Days meme, set in my Tir na Cali. He’s promised a third to complete, and I’m hoping boosting this incomplete will encourage him to finish.
Pride goeth (LJ link) begins the story, anf
Not in Kansas Anymore (LJ link) continues it.
It must be noted that while I conceived of Tir na Cali, kc_obrien is one of the short list of people who have helped me really develop it.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/63939.html. You can comment here or there.