Tag Archive | giraffecall: result

Late planting

Feb18

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt, after Bitter Vintage

Fae Apoc has a landing page here.

The Wild Ones are a family line of half-breed Ellehemaei; the lives of three of them are chronicled in my very dark webserial The Wild Ones’ Blood.

The guest at the gate turned out to be female, which set the trio of sisters no more at ease, female, and with pointed, Doberman-like ears. Kin, perhaps? they stood casually, their tails and their ears the only thing showing how tense and fight-ready they were.

The Doberman-woman wasn’t hiding it at all. Her face was set in a snarl. “You have what is mine,” she growled.

“This is our land,” Aglæca answered, her voice lazy, her hand on her knife. “We have only what is ours here.”

“You have what is mine,” the woman repeated, “and I will have it back.”

“Bitch, we don’t have anything of yours,” Cassandra hissed. “Be gone before we cut you into pieces and feed the pieces to our pigs.”

“He came here,” the dog-woman insisted, and now all three of them were listening very, very intently to her. “He came here, I know. he told me it was the last thing he had to do for the Old Man, and so I let him come. And he never came back.”

Aglæca was not certain if the low whining sound of anger came from her throat, her sisters’ throats, or all three, but she knew it was her that spoke. “He. He was your Kept, your possession? You owned that creature?”

A beat, and then Cassandra asked over the rising silence, “You owned our kin?” Because creature, monster, and bastard he might have been, but he’d been a Wild One, too. That was why, in part, he wasn’t dead.

The Doberman snarled. “Own. I Own him. He is my love, and it was the only way to keep him from the Old Man’s grasp. So yes, yes I Own him.”

“Then you should join him,” Angela snarled, and, in a heartbeat, they attacked.

~

They planted the second rose – a red one – and the second grapes near the first pair, so that the two could twine together, and when the time came to make the wine, they mixed fruit and petals from all the plans together. “Let them be together,” Aglæca toasted, with the first glass of the season, “in the only way they deserve.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/274267.html. You can comment here or there.

Bitter Vintage

Feb18

For [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt.

Fae Apoc has a landing page here.

The Wild Ones are a family line of half-breed Ellehemaei; the lives of three of them are chronicled in my very dark webserial The Wild Ones’ Blood.

This story has suggestions of violence and rape, but no on-screen either.

“That’s the last of this year’s rose wine.” Aglæca poured the dregs of the jug into two glasses, letting the last of the pinkish liquid drip slowly into the blue vessels. “And a month before it’s time to start on this year’s.”

“We’ll have to make do.” Angela took her glass and breathed in its floral notes. “It always sounds as if it’s singing to me.”

“Maybe it is.” Aglæca stared at her own glass, willing its secrets to her. “It’s always seemed to have a bit of… essence, I guess, in it, hasn’t it?”

“Life,” Angela agreed, and swirled a little in her mouth. “The last bit is always a bit bittersweet, you know?”

“The last we’ll taste of it.” Aglæca took an ungraceful gulp. “Until the next time. Yes, I think I almost heard a song. Or a scream.”

“Mm, screams.” Angela’s smile was sharp and fierce, like the woman herself. “Yes. I know there’s no blood in it, but you can almost taste it, can’t you? Just a little drip of his life, there?”

“You’re a poet, Ang. A bloody poet.” She stroked her sister’s claret-red hair, pushing it behind one tufted ear. “It should have his life in there, the way we’ve got the roots going.”

“Mmm.” That only made her smile wider, and she sipped the wine slowly, savoring it, savoring the essence in it. “Do you think he’s still alive down there?”

“I can’t imagine he can die that easily. And I made damn sure that he couldn’t get out.” She looked out the window, where the trellis of grapes shared space with the thorny roses.

“It must be horrible, having a plant growing into you, not able to move, able to feel everything.” Angela’s eyes clouded with memory, and her sister hugged her tightly.

“And he deserves every moment of it. Drink up. Cass heard something down the road, thinks it might be another one.” Before her sister could twitch, before she could show fear, Aglæca showed her teeth. “We might need to plant another rose bush.”

She was rewarded with a feral smile in return. “This time, let’s plant red ones.”

Continued here

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/273929.html. You can comment here or there.

Tasting

Feb18

For F. Anon’s Prompt.

Note: I have never tasted a $5000 bottle of wine. I have, however, tasted a wide range of $5-$50 bottles.

She’d spent years getting to know suppliers, tasting their wares, sampling them on upcycles and down, knowing their accounting departments and the local gossip about their spouses. She’d worked in every food-industry job she could negotiate her way into over the past decade, getting to know every nuance of the world of cuisine, and, in the evenings, taken culinary classes. She’d hired the best cooks she could find, enlisted the best, most reliable suppliers, and worked with the most consistent PR firm in the state.

Now it was time for Liaza to pick the wines for her restaurant.

The sommelier poured her glass after glass. Riesling. Chardonnay. Niagara. Gewurtztraminer. Merlot. Pinot noir. Cabernet Sauvignon.Shiraz. She sniffed, sipped, swirled, spat.

The red wines were easy. She settled on four within a tasting of the first eight, and had reached a final six by the time she’d sipped sixteen. The whites…

“Boring. Sweet, but bland. Lemonade without the sugar. Not enough flavor. What, is everyone just pissing in a bucket?” Liaza was not normally crude, but she was growing frustrated, more so, because the sommelier just kept smiling.

Finally, he brought out five bottles. “These three,” he told her, “will suffice for most of your audiences. These two,” he set the others aside, “these are for the true connoisseurs.”

He poured one, then the other of the “will suffice,” and she had to agree. They were rich, flavorful wines, with strong notes that were not overwhelming. “And the others?” she asked, already much happier.

“Ah-ha. This one, first. This is a $5500 bottle of wine, from a tiny valley in France where they have been producing this single kind of wine for as long as France has history. It is a rich, storied wine, with a flavor to match.” He poured, she sniffed, smelling the fruity notes and a faint hint of spice. She sipped, tasting a light sweetness over an aged flavor that slid down the throat like ambrosia. This wine, she did not spit.

“Very… Very nice,” she agreed. “And the last?”

“Taste first.” He passed her a couple bland crackers, then a glass of water, and then he poured.

She sniffed, and her nose was overwhelmed. “Pear and… is that mint? How interesting! And something like the breeze over the water.”

“This,” the sommelier told her smugly, “is the most interesting wine in the world.”

“I…” She sipped, carefully, swishing the wine around in her mouth. Notes of pear, of course, and, yes, that faint mintieness and just the faintest sweetness. “This is…”

“…from a vineyard so small, most people don’t even know they exist. On the banks of a tiny New York State Lake. Yes. Fifteen dollars a bottle, although, once they are known…”

“We need a contract.” She sipped again. “And a dish that can stand up to this wine.”

The sommelier smirked. He’d told his brother this was the way to get their name out there. And it had only taken fifteen tries.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/273835.html. You can comment here or there.

Down in Kitty Town, a drabble of Tir na Cali for the Giraffe Call

Feb17

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s prompt.

Tír na Cali has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.

“I need you to head up to Oregon City,” Miles told her.

“One of the seventeen people up there causing trouble?” she joked weakly. She’d had plans for the weekend, but Miles had a way of knowing these things and sabotaging them.

“It’s not, technically, Oregon City. Not anymore.” He passed her the data pad with the file. “Baroness Maeve deeded a square of it to a daughter of one of her slaves, a moddie. And her daughter, Baroness Sybil, expanded that to two square miles. Autonomous. Her own law there.”

“She can… yeah. She can do that, can’t she? If the Countess above her doesn’t object, she can call on the Yseult precedent.”

“Exactly. But what I’ve got now is the granddaughter of two moddies – Agency moddies, mind you, not skin jobs – who controls her own territory. And Vrrronica ni Annawrrra – don’t forget the triple R when you talk to her – who has, I’ll note, been ennobled by Baroness Sybil – Lady Vrrronica has set herself up a little moddie town.”

“Moddie town.” Irena stared at the notes. “And you want me to…”

“Put on those cat ears you wear so well and go looking into it. They can’t tell a skinjob from a deep job if the acting is good enough, and I know you can do it. You did really well in the ni Uhura case last year.”

Irena sighed. “All right. Rrrina it is. But Miles… I had hairballs for a month last time.”

“It’s a deep cover operation,” her boss smiled. “It’s good for hazard pay, and I’ll put you in for a week leave someplace with a nice big spot of sun, too.”

She scratched behind one ear. “All right. Since I can’t really say no, anyway.”

“Ain’t government service grand?” Her boss’s grin stretched to downright shit-eating. “Have fun in kitty-town.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/272436.html. You can comment here or there.

Window Shopping, a story of Tír na Cali for the Giraffe Call (@anke)

Feb17

For [personal profile] anke‘s prompt.

Tír na Cali has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.

Setting note: Jane’s thought “no ap to the end of his name” means that Andrew does not have a name following royal naming conventions, despite the royal-red hair.

Content warning: this story includes mentions of slavery and nudity.

Jane liked going to the mall, hanging out with her friends there, like most of the people she knew did; like, she was pretty sure, teenagers everywhere did.

So when family moved from a small, middle-class neighborhood in the burbs to an upscale one with her mother’s second promotion in a year, she prevailed on a new friend in her new school, a shy boy named Andrew with a shock of red hair but no ap to the end of his name (immediately giving him and Jane something in common), to show her the mall.

“It’s not going to be the kind of thing you’re used to,” he warned.

Jane scoffed. “I can handle a mall, Andy. It’s not like I grew up in the ghetto or something.” Even though, to the super-rich and royals they went to school with, she might as well have.

“All right. If you flip out…”

“I know. Do so quietly. Geez, Andy. I’m not an American or something.”

He’d only smiled weakly, and agreed to show her around, because, really, what else was he going to do?

Freak out quietly. She wasn’t going to freak out. She wasn’t a country bumpkin. She really wasn’t. But this mall… if mall you could call it…

“Andy, tell me I don’t look like a country bumpkin.”

“You really don’t,” he assured her. “Do you want to put me on a leash? You’d fit in better.”

She eyed him thoughtfully. He looked serious. He sounded serious. And there certainly were any number of people wandering around with collared slaves, some on leashes, some not. She smiled, a slow thing that seemed to start at her toes. The stores were fancier. The floors were fancier. There were naked slaves in a store window right there, practically in front of her nose. Naked! Her family was well-off, but Jane had only ever seen two or three slaves up close, and never quite this close.

She wrapped her arm around Andy’s waist, getting a small smile from him. “I think we’ll do just fine,” she said, feeling it becoming true as she said it. “Let’s just window shop.” The blonde in the window was pretty cute, after all.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/271694.html. You can comment here or there.

Step on my Tail

Feb16

This story contains magic and references to Changes but no slavery, or sex. It does involve references to violence.

For @DaHob’s prompt

This takes place during the apoc, ~2012-2013

~*~

I love that house, you understand?

First house, paid for it right out of college with a fudgie little mortgage I only had to twist a few arms to get. So that’s my house, that’s my pride, my joy, that’s my territory.

And yes, I’m territorial. Find me an Ellehemaei who isn’t. It’s in the Law. It’s in our blood. And those of us with animal Changes… yeah. Snarl, hiss, spray on the corners. It’s our territory, gods-damn-it.

And there is, in that year, one thing I love more than I love my house, and that is my man. My beautiful buddy, my partner. My Tiger. We grew up together. We Changed together. Went to college together. We’d been side by side since we were kits, and we were going to be side by side forever. Tiger was the only person with a permanent invitation into my house.

And then three goddamned gods rip through the walls between the worlds and decide our little city is theirs.

I could forgive them that, live with that. I don’t need to be queen of the land, not me. I don’t need to be queen of anything but my own house.

And Tiger, Tiger isn’t really a King-of-the-Jungle sort, either. He’s content with his bars and his clubs and his dance halls, and me. He’s content being a small-beans king and a sometimes queen. We’re happy.

And then those fucking beasts decide that they wanted to go to the clubs. And they decide they’re kings of the goddamned fucking clubs. Of Tiger’s club. Of my Tiger’s fucking club, do you understand?

And there is one thing my Tiger can’t stand. And one thing I can’t stand. And when they tear out three of my Tiger’s ribs and leave him for dead, not knowing he was fae…

Then I get angry. And that’s why the city burns.

*

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/271577.html. You can comment here or there.

Story of the City, a story of Reiassan for the Giraffe Call (@ellenmillion)

Feb16

For EllenMillion‘s prompt

Reiassan has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

When Sahsyō returned home from the city for the festival of Veignevar, she told her family: “The first thing I thought when I saw Ūnetkabyē? I wondered where they kept the animals.”

This was, as her new friends at University would say, a poetic retelling, and as her grandmother would have said, if she’d known, a steaming load of what came out of the far end of the goat.

Yes, Sahsyō had, after a week or two in the largest place she’d ever seen, wondered where the animals were. She had grown up on her family’s farm, raising barrel-chested milk goats and the biggest chickens in the mountains. There had always been animals around: goats and chickens, mousers and dogs. She had never been away from animals.

But she’d never been around that many people, either. And what she’d first thought when she’d stepped into Ūnetkabyē had been “Loud!” The city was loud in a way that she’d never imagined possible, louder than the ocean had been, louder than anything she’d ever heard. There were people everywhere, crowded up against each other, talking all at once, riding through the streets, carriages and goats and people shoulder to shoulder until there was nowhere safe to move.

Sahsyō had, she known, gapes and gawked. Stared, pressed up against the wall, terrified to move. She had tried to go back inside, but she couldn’t find the door-handle, and when she did, she couldn’t make it work. She had, for one long moment, been absolutely certain that she’d made the wrong decision. University wasn’t for her. Ūnetkabyē certainly wasn’t for her.

But she couldn’t make the door work, so she walked forward, through the carts, through the people, through the noise, to the University.

And when she home for Veignevar’s festival, she could laugh and joke. “I wondered where they put all the animals,” and pretend she’d never been terrified.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/271072.html. You can comment here or there.

The “A” Shelves

Feb16

For @inventrix’s commissioned continuation of

📻
The tension in the store was thick and uncomfortable. Jordan was unhappy, and Mrs. Gent was getting back-straight and glowering, like our neighbor down the street that liked to count heads as we left and frown at the number of people who lived in our three-bedroom house.

I didn’t know what to do about it, either. Jordan was in charge of smoothing situations over. I was pretty good at putting my foot in it, but that was about it. Making it better generally involved lots of apologies. I didn’t think I had anything to apologize for, but it was worth a try, wasn’t it?

“I’m sor-”

The floor shook, the items on the shelves rattling. “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Gent frowned. “This is not a very good time.” She turned towards me and Jordan with a careful smile. “If you two could take your lemonade and go into the aisle labelled ‘A,’ please? I think that would be the safest place.”

“Safest?” Jordan snapped, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue anymore. I picked up my tea.

“A is which way?” I asked, talking over whatever Jordan was going to say next.

“That way, thank you,” Mrs. Gent gestured. “Past the radios and behind the coffee makers.”

“Thanks,” I said, laying it on maybe a little thick. “Come on, Jordan, you heard the lady.” Past the radios, that was easy, and we turned left, following her gesture, to find another row of shelves at a right angle to the first set. Candelabras, squiggle-circle-dot-squiggle (looked like fancier, smaller candelabras), 15849(23-09) (looked like long pieces of steel in various shapes and sizes)… there were coffee makers, although they were labelled in French. Close enough!

We headed “behind” that shelf, which meant around, and there indeed was another aisle labelled “A,” appearing to be at right angles to le cafe makier shelf.

“A” seemed to start with a stack of abaci, from bright children’s beaded toys – we should get one of those, I thought, for the beansprout at home – to ancient-looking counting racks with characters painted on the beads. Then were adzes, many of them looking practically stone-age, hung on a rack with their sharp edges dangling free.

The building shook again there, and, as all those cutting edges swayed near us, I wondered a bit at Mrs. Gent’s definition of “safe.” We had, after all, gotten her sort of annoyed.

Jordan seemed barely fazed, staring at a single acorn, packaged as if it were something really expensive, nestled in azure silk in a maple-bole box and placed between stacks of katana. “What is this place?”

“It’s Mr. Ting’s,” I answered helpfully. It wasn’t the altimeters that were getting me, it was the collection of vases labelled “ἀγγείον.” “And they figure the alphabet differently here.”

“They figure lots of alphabets, I’d guess,” she murmured, picking a narrow box off the shelf. It was rusted on the corners, but a pin-up painting of something with more tentacles than body was still clear and bright on its cover. “And… lots of different clients, too.”

📻

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/270460.html. You can comment here or there.

Laying the Foundation

Feb15

For [personal profile] kelkyag‘s prompt.

Stranded World has a landing page here.
🔨
“I think you should come hang out next weekend,” Calgary told Autumn, over the last beer of the last day of Faire. “Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur are building a house.”

“Seriously?” she raised an eyebrow. She was far too drunk to be polite when faced with that.

Calgary grinned, and quaffed her beer. “Three friends of mine, been together since college. Not Faire folk but fair folk, if you know what I mean. And they’re house-raising.”

“Sounds like fun.” She set her mug down with exaggerated care. “I’ll be there.”

“I know you will,” Calgary grinned. “And you’ll love it.”

The location was as out in the middle of nowhere as it was still possible to get in a northern state, a two-acre lot in the middle of two hundred acres of field and half-wild forest. And it was a mess, a mass of machines and parts-of-buildings and everywhere people, people in a cacophonous of color and personality, like the Ren Fair only a hundred times louder.

And there was Calgary, at the center of it, waving Autumn down. “Come on! Huey, Dewey, and Louie want to meet you! I’ve told them so much about you!”

And that was a danger line, but Autumn was in a good mood, so she smiled, and let Calgary lead her to what looked like it would be the front door.

“Caetlyn, Gemini, Xavier, this is Autumn. Autumn, this is Larry, Curly, and Mo.” Calgary cheerfully introduced her to a buxom blonde in a pink flannel shirt, an androgynous person wearing a yellow t-shirt, and a tall man, head shaved, wearing a blue polo.

“Pleased to meet you,” Caetlyn smiled. “Calgary told us that you might be able to bless our threshold? You know, in the weaving way?”

Smiling and nodding, Autumn resolved to have a word with Calgary later.

“This would be easier if I had my brother with me. He’s very good at the orderly things. But I can lay down a foundation for you, and I’m pretty good with a hammer and a trowel, too,” she smiled. “Do you mind if I paint a little, where it won’t show?”

“Heck,” Xavier grinned, “we’d love it if you’d paint where it would.”

“See?” Calgary was unrepentant. “Flora, Fauna, and Meriwether are good people.”

“I see they are,” Autumn agreed sincerely.

She’d come prepared to help hammer nails and wrestle building materials, but it seemed the trio had enough people for that. So she settled in what would be a doorway, and began to weave and twist the strands.

She laid down a solid foundation of welcome and kinship, pulling from everyone who was here, every bit of love they poured into the building, and making it a tangible, knowable thing: this house was built with love. Enter it with love as well.

While she watched them place two stained glass windows, she painted a design that would be hidden by the doorjamb, a secret series of imps: Don’t forget the humor. Come here with a smile.

They put up an interior wall, and she got to work on the art that would show while, behind her, three people carefully installed a hidden door and three hidden compartments. Into her mural, a tree reaching for the sun, with three trunks woven together, she added: respect one another’s secrets, and keep them.

Tired at the end of the day, and drinking a beer with the trio and Calgary, she sketched them a doodle: Chance encounters are the best sort. Smiling, she bid them a good night, and kissed their doorway in benediction as she left.

🔨

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/270007.html. You can comment here or there.

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.

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