Tag Archive | giraffecall: result

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.

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.

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.

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.

All in your Head, a story continuation of Bug Invasion for the Giraffe Call

Feb11

For [personal profile] ysabetwordsmith‘s commissioned continuation of
From the moment they breathed our air (Lj) after: Staying in the City (LJ) and Spooks vs. Bugs (DW)

This came out a little strange, and I’m not certain it *entirely* got across what I was trying to do, but here it is.

Those who had already been bonded with a bug had a unique advantage over those who didn’t. They had many, many disadvantages: they shared their brain with a symbiote who could skim their thoughts, affect and shift those thoughts, alter moods, and take over their body. They were, because of that symbiote, tagged and lojacked, stuck, now that the bugs had been repulsed from continuing attacks, in small encampments behind enemy lines and even if they could get out, the humans had learned what to look for, and would often shoot them on sight.

On the other hand, they were behind enemy lines, with an enemy sharing mind-space with them, and the bugs did not seem to have a tradition of keeping secrets from their hosts. And they were learning how to reboot their symbiotes, giving themselves more and more time to talk – to plan, that was important – without their enemies overhearing.

And there were a host of things that they’d found the bugs just couldn’t handle. Ghosts and fae, that had been a fun one. Paula was still giggling about it – much to the consternation of her symbiote (The bugs had humor, but it was more on the lines of puns and clever-tricks than slapstick or situational comedy).

She wasn’t giggling about the chemical sensitivity – no one was. The expelled symbiote had died, and the host had nearly done so. But she hadn’t, and that told them something very useful. And the hosts were talking.

Talking was risky, of course. The symbiotes only stayed dormant for so long, and the “so” was hard to predict. And when they were awake, you had to trust yourself to not think about the plans, not even think that there were plans. You had to be very good at being a prisoner in your own mind.

She’d been going back and forth about that one for a while, when she had room to think, chewing over it, trying to figure out how to plot a rebellion against something in your own head. The ghosts helped, but the bugs were beginning to understand them and, as they understood them, were less likely to glitch out.

The chemical sensitivity was trapping the bugs into environmentally-controlled ships, buildings, and bubbles, which, in the end, would probably give the rest of the world the tools they needed to defeat their enemy. But it did nothing for those already bonded, if they didn’t happen to have asthma or a chemical sensitivity.

For all of her mulling over it, Paula ended up almost literally tripping over her solution.

Her symbiote, for all the little it talked to her, had clearly been worried ever since the woman with chemical sensitivity had rejected her invader. That had, she gathered, never happened before. But if it had happened once, the bug seemed to think, could it happen again?

It sent waves of pleasure-feelings through Paula in an urge to soothe and, she thought, bribe her: ::good human, you wouldn’t kick me out to die?::

::I don’t know how.::

But it could be done. Somehow. Somehow, if its body thought it was dying from you. Which was easier said than done, she was pretty sure, short of poison, short of actually almost-killing-yourself. Which really didn’t solve the problem.

And then she tripped over Anya.

Anya was new to their collection of hosts, a slight girl with a nervous tic and a habit of staying in the back of any conversation. She’d seemed shy but not all that unstable when Paula met her, but now, she was curled up in a corner, staring into space.

“What is it?” Paula asked her gently.

“My meds,” the girl admitted. “Without them, without them it’s hard to stay calm. I have to work to remember that the voices in my head aren’t real, and the worst part of it is, now, one of them is.”

One of them is. She sat down next to Anya, carefully not thinking of anything but the girl’s problem. “How do you normally deal with the voices in your head?” she asked. She’d had a friend in college with panic attacks… and another one who learned how to self-induce them to get out of tests.

“I tell them they’re not real,” Anya whispered. “And then they stop bothering me for a while.”

“Have you tried,” she asked, even more slowly, “trying that with the bug?”

“I…” She closed her eyes, and curled up on herself. “This isn’t real,” she murmured. “You’re not real. You’re just a figment of my imagination, and I don’t need to listen to you.”

When she opened her eyes, she seemed happier, more human – and Paula had the beginnings of a plan.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/265529.html. You can comment here or there.

Differences of Opinion

Feb10

For @inventrix’s commissioned continuation of

🔖

Mrs. Gent was either very easy to flatter, or she simply liked to play the game. She giggled happily at me. “You’re too sweet, dear. Thank you so much.”

“Thank you,” Jordan tried, and, after another moment sipping lemonade, “I don’t see prices on anything?”

“Oh, Mr. Ting sets all the prices when he sees the customer,” she chuckled, as if Jordan had said something silly. “You can’t just write prices on a shelf and expect them to be right all the time. As it is, sometimes we have to change our labels.”

“The labels, really?” That startled me, and Jordan was still stewing over the price thing. “I see some of them aren’t in English.”

“But some of them are,” she snapped. I’d hit an invisible nerve. “And what you need will be labeled for you, and priced for you, by Mr. Ting.”

“He sounds like a very hands-on guy.” So now Jordan was pissed, and Mrs. Gent was pissed, and I was feeling under fire for no good reason, which, yes, I’ll admit it, made me feel kinda pissed off too.

“He is,” Mrs. Gent answered coolly. “He prefers to handle each of his customers with the individual attention they deserve, whatever language they speak.”

“So, wait.” The language thing had clearly tweaked her, but I really didn’t understand why. “You’re saying that the signs are in the languages of the people who might need them? Ma’am.” I didn’t want to get kicked out before we’d had a chance to ask Mr. Ting for an air conditioner. I really, really didn’t want to go home without one.

“Yes, exactly. How else would you do it?”

“Uh…” Jordan frowned. “Generally, stores that we go into around here – that is, in this city – have signs in the language of the neighborhood, or just in English, or both. And the price is the same for everyone.” That part was added sharply. None of this “pricing for the customer.” I think it stunk of prejudice for Jordan; I know it smelled a little bit like that for me.

“What a strange way to do business,” Mrs. Gent complained. “But then, if you don’t read English, or whatever this language of the neighborhood is, then how do you shop?”

“With practice?” I spent a lot of time shopping in Asian food markets; I knew how this worked. “Or buy pointing and gesturing.”

“It seems very inefficient. And the prices?”

“The same for everyone,” Jordan repeated.

“So for you two and, for example, a … what is the word… fat-cat businessman, the same price for a radio?”

“The same.”

“That doesn’t seem right,” she frowned. “When Mr. Ting returns, perhaps I shall go looking at these stores. But in the meantime,” she said firmly, “you are in our store, and our store does not work that way.”

“I see.” Jordan looked with a frown at the lemonade. “We are.” We exchanged a short glance: we were, more or less, stuck with this. We needed that air conditioner.
🔖

Next is The “A” Shelves!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/265464.html. You can comment here or there.

The Snow War

Feb9

For [personal profile] kay_brooke‘s prompt.

They used the weather against them. They knew, after all, how to handle the snow. Their enemy did not.

So they stayed ensieged, locked in their city.

Summer turned to fall, and they moved deeper into their territory, ceding land when they had to, moving to the higher ground at the center of the city.

The enemy pushed forward, slowly, inexorably. They had never been stopped. Sometimes they took their time, as they were here, but they were never rebuffed, never defeated. And they would not be defeated this time. No man, no strategist, no army could beat them.

And the city, slowly, retreated, folded in on itself, gave up the lower ground, as it did, every autumn, as winter encroached on the city, as the snow began to fall. They people moved into their tight little winter houses, packed together under the hill, where they could conserve heat, where they could conserve energy.

The enemy, who were never defeated, certainly not by a little snow, plowed on forward, taking gleefully the land the city abandoned. They stomped through the late-October falls, and the November hail and blizzards. They bombarded through the first week of December.

And then the real storms came, the second week of December, when the enemy had really begun to think they were winning. They were bivouacked a mile into the city, stretched out around the whole city like beads on a string, camping in abandoned houses. Abandoned summer houses, with wide doors and no fireplace but the cooking fire. And then the snow fell, they were trapped, trapped and unprepared.

And when they were trapped, the city struck back.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/264946.html. You can comment here or there.

Exterminator

Feb8

For anke‘s prompt

Dragons Next Door has a landing page here.

Unusual calls were the norm in Steve’s line of work.

Ever since the non-human races had started moving into the cities in the mid-twenties, spurred by talk of prosperity and just in time for the Depression, the underbelly of the urban areas had been getting weirder and weirder.

Gone were the days when an exterminator could lay down some poison gas and call it good; gone were the days when cockroaches and rats were the biggest problems. Drets, tiny dragon-like insects, proliferated (and ate cockroaches, and sometimes started fires). Creels, about the size of a large mouse but armored like an armadillo, chewed through wires and ignored rat poison.

The family that called him Tuesday, however, thought they had a mundane infestation of termites. They’d heard scratching in the walls, and noticed some sawdust near an electrical outlet. Steve knew of seventeen things that could be, only two of which were more benign that termites, but if they wanted to insist they had small wood-eating insects, well, he’d come in and pretend he was looking for small wood-eating insects.

The wife hovered. He hated that sort, but what could he do? He set out his kit, ignored her worried fussing (“You won’t need any of that magical stuff. We just have bugs.”), and set to work finding out what was in their walls.

“Do you have to cut into the wall?”

“Yes, ma’am. This is where you said you had the problem?” He already knew it wasn’t termites, but he wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

“Right there, yes, all through this wall. That wallpaper was very expensive.”

“I’ll cut on a seam; it will be easier for the paperer to repair it that way.”

“You don’t…?”

“No, ma’am, that’s all in the contract you signed.” He sighed – they never read it – and went back to sawing into the supremely ugly wallpaper.

“Ey, ey! That’s my wall!” The tinny voice made Steve stop cutting; down by his toes, a tiny man – a Tiny man, to be specific, was shaking a fist at him. Steve grinned.

“Ma’am, I’ve found your problem, and it’s definitely out of my jurisdiction, but I can suggest a good co-habitation counselor.” He carefully picked up the Tiny man so that the client could see him. “You have Tinies.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/262800.html. You can comment here or there.

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

Feb7

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

Part 4 of ~7.5
Fae Apoc has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

The rope seemed rather superfluous, but Karida didn’t want to risk their new… sister… wandering off, so she finished the ritual, giving the girl a little more water and then binding her wrists in front of her, leaving the end of the rope as a leash.

Fiery didn’t even fight the rope, looking at it with an expression Karida thought might be resignation. “Show us what you know of this place?” she asked, to take their minds off of that.

The girl nodded, and looked around for a moment, orienting herself, maybe. Or buying time. Amalie hummed softly, getting the thread of the song back. “This changes the tune. It adds…” she hummed for a moment more, and then sang a quick scale of nonsense sounds. “Ah. A minor note.”

“Sounds like there ought to be a thudding drumbeat,” Dor commented. “Maybe just the walking? Ba-bum, ba-bum.”

“Ba-bum,” Fiery smiled, thudding a beat on her thighs, da-da-da-DUM.

Let them sing the trip. Someone had to actually MAKE the trip for the song to finish. Smiling in exasperation, Karida started walking again.

The buildings nearby were in bad shape, fallen in, collapsed. She went past three without entering, because her sense told her they were death traps, empty of anything useful and full of rotting boards.

Behind her, her little party followed, humming and singing as if they were on parade, Amalia holding Fiery’s lead. They turned down what had to be a road, between the wrecks of two homes, and then down another road, while the music evolved and trailed behind them.

The song, as far as Karida could tell, had taken a detour into their captive’s life, or at least what little she was capable of telling them so far.

“‘Monster,’ they said, who had eyes but no sight,
“‘Monster!’ They threw their kin to the night.
“‘Monster,’ no beast, just a girl with a gift,
“‘Monster,’ their child, set loose and adrift.”

“Monster,” Karida snapped, as her sense told her something was coming, something that had gotten nearly up on her without her knowing. Too big to be a human, too silent to be a normal creature.

“Kar…” Amalie complained, but Karida didn’t have time for that.

“‘Ware danger,” she repeated, reaching out her sense. The damn thing was invisible, wasn’t it, and there it was, almost on top of them and she could smell its breath, like carrion rotting. “There’s a monster.” She swung with her stick and connected, landing on something tender, from the sounds of things. “Dor!”

“On it.” Dor muttered and then yelled, pressing his hands and his power towards the monster, guided by Karida’s swings and the solid thunking noises they made. Something caught her arm, raking a long cut through her sleeve and into her skin, burning and going numb all at once.

She shifted her grip to her other hand, cursing softly, and kept swinging. Any moment now…

“And thud,” Amalie sang with joy, and the ground under the monster opened up in a pit.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/262108.html. You can comment here or there.