Tag Archive | giraffecall: result

Aetheric Cleansing

Nov6

For JanetMiles‘s commissioned prompt.

After Estate (LJ) and Lost Spirits (LJ)

and in the same setting as Heirlooms and Old lace (Lj)

“Three liters of water, boiling, with four cc of salt and one cc of rue. Testing with item one-seven-seven, ivory and brass dip pen.”

“Got it,” Johias nodded, and then, a moment later, “no. The aetheric resonances are still off the scale. What was your aunt up to, Ruan?”

“Wish I knew,” she sighed, pulling the pen out of the boiling water. “What’s next, salt, angel’s-tears, and holy water?”

“That’s after the holy water with rue. Here.” He handed her a towel, which she used to carefully wipe down the pen. There was no ghost inhabiting this one, yet, and if they were successful, there never would be. “Talking to the ghosts, they don’t even all seem to have known the woman. I suppose they still could have wronged her, if she was the sort to take offense at small things…”

“She was the sort to bind spirits into torment for her pleasure – well, for whatever purpose she had. I’m glad I didn’t ever get to know her. Holy water with rue, three liters boiling, one cc fresh.”

“You know,” he pondered, as he readied the aetheric detector, “it’s possible she had one of these set up for herself, as well.”

Ruan froze. “You think my father’s sister is in one of the ghost traps?” It still felt wrong to call Tansy an aunt.

“Well, it’s a possibility, at least. We haven’t checked for non-vocal ghosts because the ones we found were so very vocal.”

“I…” She dunked the pen very aggressively into the water and counted down seconds. “Ten.”

“Less aetheric resonance, we’re down to a measurable number. Nine point seven five.”

“That’s at least an improvement. Johais – I don’t like this woman very much.”

“I can’t say I fault you. Well, we could, perhaps, get some answers out of her if we did find her.”

“We could,” she admitted slowly, taking a towel and drying off the pen again. “All right, let’s try the salted holy water.”

“You don’t like the idea?” He aimed the detector at the third pot of water.

“Everything about the woman makes my skin crawl. She was evil, Johais, and that is not a word I use lightly. Evil, nasty, impolite… and I worry that she could, in some way, rub off on me. I don’t want to wake up evil.”

Johais kissed her forehead, just over the goggles, carefully. “Very unlikely.”

“Thank you.” They were alone, so she let the giddy smile she was feeling come out, just for a moment. “But you don’t know my family.”

“I have, to date, met thirty-five members of your family, counting the men, and that’s all your mother’s side. I’ve met four members of your father’s family, one of whom was, at the time, a ghost. I have a pretty good idea what your kin are like, my beloved. And I can easily see which family members you take after, and which you do not – and this one, this evil witch, if I may be so bold, is nothing like you.”

“You say the sweetest things. Holy water, three liters from St. James on East and Main, with three cc’s of salt and one drop of angel’s-tears, which, I will note, we’re almost out of.”

“Ready.”

She dipped the pen into the concoction, not, by this point, expecting much result. They had tried every suggestion from every aunt, cousin, grandmother, friend, quack, and even a couple from her father and uncles, and, to date, holy or not, water or vodka, nothing had given them the results they’d been looking for (although the blessed vodka had burst into flames, carrying with it a beautiful mother-of-pearl cigarette case said to belong to a former burlesque dancer).

“And… oh, my. That did it, Ruan. The aetheric reading just dropped to zero. Ruan, I think we found the solution… pardon the pun.” Johais was smiling from ear to ear as he set down the aetheric detector and hugged her tightly and rather inappropriately.

She didn’t mind. She pulled the pen out of the water and set it aside to hug him back properly, and, even less appropriately, kiss him very firmly on the lips. “You,” she murmured, “you wonderful man. I could not have done it without you.”

“I wouldn’t have had it to help with without you. This is a brilliant project, Ruan, a concrete application of research. And we succeeded!” The man’s glasses were fogging up, he was so happy.

“Once,” she pointed out. “Once, and with a very rare and difficult-to-obtain component. And we won’t know if we succeeded, in truth, until poor Mr. Anthony passes away.”

“Well, we have achieved something, at least! That’s… Ruan, did you kiss me?”

“I did. And you kissed me back.” Her own goggles were fogging as well; it had been a nice kiss, but not, she thought, quite that nice. “It was very pleasant.” She pulled the goggles off to clean them on the hem of her apron.

“It… what would your father say?”

“At this point, I believe ‘thank goodness you’ve managed to do something at all about Tansy’s mess.’ He’s quite embarrassed about the whole thing.” It wasn’t her goggles, she realized; the salted holy water was steaming over. She turned off the stove and moved it from the burner, then, to be safe, moved all the other vessels as well. The holy components had, after all, reacted very strangely to Tansy’s possibly-damned-artifacts. “Could you point the aetheric meter at the water, please?”

“That wasn’t quite what… well. Yes. But then I’d like to discuss this kiss again, if you don’t mind.” He stepped back away from her to point the boxy machine at the steaming water. “Ah… one moment, my glasses… hrm. Do did we simply transfer the aetheric connection into the water?”

She peered at the meter. “I don’t think so. There’s not nearly enough resonance left for that. It does make me wonder, though – and worry about pouring the water down the drain. Perhaps if we let it sit? As long as it doesn’t evaporate – I’d hate someone to die and then be bound to individual water particles throughout the world.”

“But it would be awfully convenient to know when he died.” Johais set down the meter and wiped his glasses off again. “Ruan, you kissed me.”

“Would you like me to do so again? To compare the results, of course, purely scientifically.”

“I do not believe there is anything at all scientific about what I am feeling, unless one wants to delve into biology. Quite messy.” The steam was curling his hair – and hers – and both goggles and glasses were fogged again.

“Johais, I’m fairly certain that whatever happens between us, it is going to be both biologic and messy.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/167824.html. You can comment here or there.

Rule Three

Nov4

For kelkyag‘s commissioned prompt.

Dragons Next Door Verse. DND has a landing page – here (or on LJ)

This comes after Over the Wall (LJ Link),
The Black Tower (LJ Link,
The Pumpkin (LJ Link,
and
Skeletons (LJ)

The dragon next door studied me, its claws flexing and settling down. Pinned between my shame and my discomfort, I was growing testy, feeling like a small creature in the regard of a much larger predator – which, of course, I was – with a rather reasonable urge to run and hide.

But Zizny wasn’t the enemy. Zizny was my very nice neighbor, and grown women did not run and hide from their neighbors. Instead, I coughed, and regarded the dragon calmly. “You seem very interested in our past.”

“I have been thinking quite a bit about my own,” it admitted. “And also, after a conversation with the Dapples down the street, I have been realizing that I am as guilty of making assumptions as any of the small races are.”

Only to dragons and giants are centaurs considered a small race. I spared a thought to wonder what they considered the tiny races (the nano-scale? Our terminology predated such terms, although it was possible dragons could not focus sharply enough to deal with the tinies). But there were other matters at hand, so I put that aside for another day. “Assumptions?” Anything to avoid talking about my family, please.

“Assumptions. For instance, that the centaurs were a family group.”

I admit, I felt a little smug. Only, I need to point out, because I’d made such a stupid mistake when it came to the Smiths and gender, and was still feeling the need to redeem myself.

The smugness just made me feel guilty, though, and I admitted “I’ve done the same. I suppose we all do; Smokey Knoll is a… very varied area. It’s hard to find two households from the same culture here, any given culture.”

“Indeed.” It dropped its jaw in either an invitation to climb inside or a parody of a laugh. “I thought all humanoid races were the same for quite a while.”

“I’ve found a tendency to overlay human society and perceptions onto other races,” I could admit comfortably now. “Gender roles included.”

“I think it’s a common habit,” it nodded. “Especially when your race is the dominant one in an area. Humans living in the dragon caves up north have often adjusted to our habits, as much as they can, so we attempt to do the same here.”

“I’d noticed,” I smiled. It would be interesting to live in a dragon cave; I could imagine that Sage would love it for his research. Maybe when the children were grown… I sighed.

Zizny blinked, far too perceptively for my comfort. “I will be sad when Jimmy flies the nest,” it admitted quietly. “There are so many predators out there that I cannot protect cx’za from.”

I nodded. “Yes. I worry about the decisions Jin will make, left on his own.”

Another perceptive glance. “You did not make good decisions when you were his age?”

“I didn’t have a lot of room to make decisions when I was a teenager.”

“No? Someone else made them for you?”

“My parents. My grandparents.”

“The same ones that you did not invite to your wedding to Sage?”

“The same,” I agreed tiredly. “That was one of the first decisions I made on my own. That was Rule Three.”

“I’ve been curious about your marital ‘rules’ for quite some time,” it admitted. “Tell me, what is Rule Three?”

“Rule Three.” I smiled wistfully, remembering. “We hadn’t been dating long, Sage and I, but I was having a bad time of it. I kept running into things where I’d say ‘my mother’ this and ‘my mother’ that, or if it was really bad, ‘my grandmother.’ It had to get really, really bad for me to mean Grandmother Austen, my father’s mother. Usually I meant the one who was paying my tuition to the Pumpkin. It wasn’t so much that I lived in fear of disappointing her as that I knew, without a doubt, that everything I’d done since being conceived was a disappointment. Grandmother O’Reilly is like that.” Even all these years later, it made me wince to think of it.

“Impossible to please? Judgmental?” Zizny asked, in what I thought was a sympathetic tone. “She sounds like a very difficult woman.”

“That is a very, very good way to put that. Very apt. She never approved of my mother’s marriage to my father – my dad’s family is dirt poor, what Grandmother O’Reilly would call ‘trash.’ I was a failure in her eyes just existing; she sent me to the Pumpkin in hopes that it would either kill me or, somehow, redeem me.”

“A lovely family.”

“She’s the best of the lot. But she was hanging over me in my head, this specter of everything I was doing wrong, and I know it came out in how I acted, in what I said. Finally, after the nine hundredth or thousandth time that I said ‘my mother’ or ‘my grandmother,’ Sage sat me down and had a talk with me.”

“‘I am not dating your ancestors,’” he said. And that, even now, made me smile. “‘I am not dating your mother, and I don’t want to marry her. I want to marry you.’ And that is how he proposed to me and instituted Rule Three all at once.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/166596.html. You can comment here or there.

Neighborhood Watch, a story of Dragons Next Door for the Giraffe Call

Nov2

Consider this a down payment on kelkyag‘s commissioned request.

Dragons Next Door Verse. DND has a landing page – here (or on LJ)

This comes after Fears (LJ Link) and Loopholes (and on LJ).

The neighborhood had been getting weird.

Juniper, babysitting Baby Smith as she did most afternoons after school, found that there were three pixies sitting in the windowsill – not kids, either, but adults, armed with tiny spears and wicked-looking knives. She fed them sugar-water and a well-diced tomato, and, since they didn’t seem to want to play, went back to reading to Baby and playing Pirates Against the Mean Monarchy and Princesses Held Down by the Cruel Oppressors and Adventure on the Island (which was her favorite, though it helped to have more people).

Baby was starting to follow what she said, although it still only answered on belches and burbles (and the occasional tiny steam-gout, which mostly only curled her hair). But even Baby noticed something was up when the Harpies started flying by the next day.

It only got weirder. Juniper would have thought that the Smiths and her parents had decided she couldn’t be trusted, except that all the kids in the neighborhood were getting the same treatment. Three centaurs had started galloping alongside the bus home from school – just their bus, just the bus to Smokey Knoll, not the busses to the human neighborhoods – and the gremlins that you never saw were suddenly a little bit visible, sticking out of mailboxes and, on more than one occasion, hiding in Juniper’s backpack.

“It’s the poacher, isn’t it?” she asked Jin, who was spending a lot more time around the house lately. She didn’t know if he’d answer her – Jin was in that weird place between kid and grown-up – but when he nodded, she risked another question. “Nobody poaches human kids. I can see protecting Baby, but what are the gremlins doing following me at school?”

Jin’s face did the switch-thing it had been doing lately, kid-adult-kid, and, instead of giving her a decent answer, he squished her into a hug.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/165780.html. You can comment here or there.

Trash and Treasures, The Aunt Family, for the Giraffe Call

Oct30

For JanetMiles‘s commissioned prompt.

Just after Heirlooms and Old lace (Lj),

and in the same setting as Estate (LJ) and Lost Spirits (LJ)

Commenters: 0

It took Evangaline’s family less than a week after her yard sale to start coming to her with complaints.

She had been expecting the nosy visits, wanting to see what she was doing with the old house, now that she had managed to clear out some of the clutter (or throw away priceless family heirlooms, depending on who you asked).

She had anticipated the complaints about her color choices, the inappropriate gifts of things to make the house the way her cousins, sisters, aunts, and grandmother thought it ought to be; she had come armed with several stock phrases to fend off opinionated relatives, the chief among them being, “If you’d like to live here instead of me, I’m sure you could paint it however you wanted.”

She had three unmarried nieces on whom she refused that line, however, and she paid close attention to the opinions of the youngest, Beryl. Their tastes weren’t identical, but there were enough similarities that she could allow Beryl to design a guest room to her own tastes – with the added benefit that such annoyed, distressed, and confused Beryl’s mother without in anyway giving her ground to stand on. There were benefits to being the maiden aunt.

She was still stripping out old molding and repainting the walls, taking every spare moment of time between work and other commitments to work on the house before inertia could catch up with her and resign her to chintz and floral patterns, and so she was in her oldest clothes and up on a stepladder in the living room when the first of the complainers came stomping in.

Her Aunt Antonia hammered a cursory knock at the door and let herself in, the way she probably had when the house was owned by her sister Asta. “Eva,” she snapped, “this rose you sold me is trash.”

“Hello, Aunt Tony. There’s tea in the kettle and cookies in the jar. I’ll be just a moment.” She didn’t bother turning to look. If she turned to look, she might make eye contact.

“Did you hear what I said? The rose is broken.”

“I’ll be right with you. I just need to finish the crown moulding or I’ll get lines.”

“Strip it and do it again. It’s a horrible color anyway. Asta never would have used something like that.”

“But she willed me the house, Antonia. I’d pass it to you, if you wanted it…?” It was a safe offer, after all.

“Tea in the kettle, you said?” Her mother’s oldest sister huffed into the kitchen, giving Evangaline time to finish painting the lovely plum shade onto the elaborate crown moldings. She wondered, in passing, if anyone else had ever noticed the sigils and signs painted tone-on-tone in the shadowed portions of the trim. She wondered if that’s why they were so worried about her redecorating.

She picked up her tools quickly, rinsed the brush in the laundry-room sink and then, having kept her aunt waiting long enough, headed into the kitchen. There, Aunt Antonia was perched uncomfortably on the narrow chair Eva kept bare of books or paperwork for just that reason, eating a cookie and drinking heavily creamed and sugared tea.

“Finally,” she huffed. “This place is a wreck, Evangaline.”

“I’m still moving in,” she answered placidly. “There’s a lot to be done, and a lot of moving about, and-” she brought it up even though she knew better “-I’m working it all around my job.”

“You don’t need to work now, you know. The family trust fund will take care of you.”

The trust fund had been left over from an era when women did not, as a general rule, work outside the house. Eva shook her head. “I like working. The house will take as long as it takes.”

“But you can’t properly host company until it’s done.”

“Well then, I will improperly host company until then,” she answered tiredly, clearing off the comfy seat and taking two cookies for herself. “Now. The rose?” Maybe then she could get her out of here.

“The rose is broken! When Asta was a little girl, it used to smell like flowers all year round.” She waved the glass sculpture indignantly at Eva. “Now it smells like stinkberries.”

Eva took it from her Aunt carefully. It hadn’t smelled like either flowers or stinkberries to her – and now that she sniffed it again, it seemed to small faintly of rosemary and sage. “Mmm. Perhaps it is.” Safer to agree than to suggest that her Aunt’s personality stank. “I’ll refund you the twenty-five cents you paid for it.”

“But it’s a treasure! It’s worth hundreds of dollars! The craftsman who made those was a friend of Aunt Ruan’s; he only made a hundred.”

“Mm, but you paid twenty-five cents.” She pulled a quarter out of her pocket and passed it over. “If that’s all…”

Aunt Antonia was only the first of the visits Eva received as a result of her yard sale. Some admitted quietly that the item they had gotten was a family treasure, charmed or enchanted or cursed in some useful manner, and worth far more than they paid. To them, Eva said “Keep it. It’s still in the family, after all, and I don’t need it.”

Some complained that the item they had thought was a steal turned out to be trash; Eva refunded their money if they were willing, or sent them on their way if they couldn’t let go of the thing. Some wanted to know what she’d sold and to whom; she did her best to ignore the ones that made that question sound like a demand. She had an inventory, of course, but it was none of their business.

She didn’t want to admit, either, that she hadn’t known about all the enchanted items she’d sold, some of them to complete strangers. She was fairly certain she’d kept the nastiest ones in the house, and the most powerful in the family, but the more complaints she got, the more stories of “Aunt Asta’s friend” or “Aunt Ruan’s associate” she heard, the less certain she was.

The complaints about the yard sale trinkets, like the complaints about the house, surged and trickled off, until she allowed herself to believe, two months later, that she was done with family meddling for a while. She had her music blasting, all the window open to the unseasonably warm autumn day, and her skimpiest, oldest tank top on over a neon-pink bra when her Great-Aunt Rosaria knocked on her door.

Eva tried not to squirm with embarrassment as she poured her grandmother’s sister a mug of fresh tea, having cleared off the most comfortable chair in the living room for her.

“The place is coming along well,” Rosaria murmured. “I see you re-did the protections – but, interesting, you got rid of the evil eye, there. I always thought that leant a certain urgency to door-to-door salesmen’s visits for Ruan.”

“I didn’t like the FedEx guy dumping and running quite so much,” she admitted nervously. “You don’t mind the plum?”

“I think it makes it look like a French Whorehouse in here, but if you want that look, it’s your house. That’s how the thing is set up, after all.”

“Thank you.” She wracked her brain, trying to remember what her oldest surviving relative had bought at the yard sale. “No problem with the doilies or the ash tray then?”

“Aah, the tatting whines sometimes on a cold night, but it’s always done that. Surprised Asta kept it around. And the ash tray – well, when you want that back, dear, come and get it. I came to bring you these.” She pulled an ancient-looking ledger book and a slightly-more-modern spiral-bound notebook from her bag. “I can’t find Elenora’s or Zenobia’s, and neither could Asta – you might try between the walls.”

Not wanting to look greedy, Eva leaned forward carefully towards the books. “I’m sorry…?”

“Their catalogs. Asta gave me these before her death, to keep them out of her sisters’ hands. I wanted to see how you handled the hodgepodge on your own before I gave you her notes.”

Eva’s heart skipped a beat. “And…?”

“I’ve been watching you since you moved in here, dear. I’d say you’ve been showing very discerning eye.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/163546.html. You can comment here or there.

Frying Pans, etc.

Oct28

For The [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s commissioned prompt, a follow-up to Fae-Bane (LJ)

Faerie Apoc, Addergoole Year 9 – landing page here (or on LJ)

Commenters: 0

Timora had two little brothers and an older stepbrother. The moment the hand covered her mouth, she did what had worked so many times before – she licked it.

“Ew!” The hand pulled away, giving her a chance to turn around and see her would-be assailant. The boy held up both hands defensively, then quickly dropped one to wipe it on his pants. “Just… be quiet for a minute, okay, and come here in the shadows. I swear I mean you no harm today.”

Today. She nodded uncertainly, and let him tug her deeper into the shadowed hallway, trying not to stare. It was hard; even in the dim light, his eyes gleamed green – and slit-pupiled, like a cat, which, given the tiger-like ears sticking out of his hair, made sense. She reached out to touch one, wondering if they were on some sort of headband. She’d seen some of the upperclassmen with – Calvin said it was a Mask, like a glamour out of a fairy tale – with their glamour down, but she hadn’t been brave enough to touch. Now – well, he didn’t look scary at all. He looked, if anything, like he was afraid of her.

His ear twitched, and he chuckled nervously. “They’re real,” he assured her. “Now… please don’t scream, okay? I can’t protect you if you make me run away.” He gestured dismissively to a complaint she hadn’t voiced. “Okay, okay, you can do pretty well making everyone else run away too. But… you’ve noticed some weirdness?”

Timora pinched his ear pointedly. Weirdness, said the boy with cat ears. Siberian tiger ears, she was pretty sure. And oddly familiar, although the stripes were throwing her off.

“Ow! Yeah, okay. And some of the strangeness is… inhuman…?”

She didn’t pinch his ear again, much as she wanted to, instead wiggling all her fingers at him: oooh, scary woogy stuff.

“Yes, that, exactly. All right. So, did you wander the through the Hallway of no Sound?”

Hallway of no… She shook her head, then nodded it, hoping he got the point – she understood. Would her voice really scare people away? Or was this another stupid prank? “Calvin…” she began, and stopped when the boy’s ears went flat.

“Calvin ran away when you screamed. Ass that he is, he was probably waiting to trap you.” He shook his head – more and more, she thought she ought to know him, if only he weren’t so catty – and kept talking before she could try voicing another objection, or the oh, god, I made him run away, now he’ll never go to a dance with me. “I know he seemed nice, Timora, but a lot of people are really nice around here until Hell Night.”

“How…” Was she going to have to go through life mute? She pressed her lips together unhappily.

“Oh… sorry.” He made a complex hand gesture, and then, from behind him somewhere, produced a fedora. The hat went on his head – and the stripes and slitted eyes vanished, revealing a boy she’d sat behind in Lit and next to in History for two weeks. “I’m Porter.”

She mimed “Oh,” figuring that was safe enough, and gestured out into the hall and back to their hidey hole: What are you doing hiding here?

He was really quite good at charades. “The same thing as every other upperclassman on Hell Night,” he told her sadly.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/161126.html. You can comment here or there.

One Sharp Mother

Oct27

For [personal profile] rix_scaedu‘s commissioned request for more from the Baram story posted in Monster (LJ) and Memories (LJ)

Faerie Apoc, Addergoole Year 17 – landing page here (or on LJ)

Thanks to @inventrix and @dahob for the names.

Commenters: 0


Late October, 2011

Jaelie was in the garden when the gods attacked. The garden, such as it was, was her territory, her sanctum and responsibility. She’d been the first to be hired, such as it was, by Baram (“bought” might have been more accurate, but the pay was good and the work not onerous, and she had little to complain of), the first to come looking for him after graduation, intrigued by the legend he’d left behind, and she’d thus been the first to carve out her own place in his haven.

She’d taken to spending her mornings there, getting it ready for winter, mulching the beds and wrapping the trees. Baram didn’t mind what they did in the areas of the house and yard they’d claimed, so she coaxed hawthorn and rowan trees into a hedge along the back and grew tomatoes, peppers, potatoes (their employer was quite the meat-and-potatoes sort of guy), herbs and poisons along the fences, strawberries for the kids and squash for Viatrix. It gave her something to do with her free time, and a way to practice her Working and keep the magical muscles, as her former Mentor liked to call them, in shape.

Pruning the hawthorn – doing anything with the hawthorn, but on this day, she was pruning it – took thick gloves and a patient hand, Workings mumbled under the breath and a quick eye for trouble, so it wasn’t until the kids came yelling into the back yard that Jaelie realized their city had been invaded.

She counted noses with the force of habit – two, three, five, six, nine? Nine? Like every graduate of Addergoole, she had her two, and Baram’s other two “house elves” had theirs with them as well, (at least in Alkyone’s case, not out of any maternal sense, but because Addergoole taught you to never give up any advantage, and never give away anything for free). There should be six children, and – she counted again – yes, the six that were theirs were there, as well as, no, not three, another six kids from the neighborhood. Seven; they were trailing slowly in past her gates, looking around nervously.

“What’s going on?” she asked sharply, looking to the children that belonged here for an answer.

Gerulf spoke up first – the oldest and one of Jaelie’s by blood. “School got let out and nobody’s parents are home, but I knew you’d be here, so I figured this was safer.”

Safe was an acceptable reason to break protocol by bringing friends home. “Safer?” she repeated anyway. “What’s going on?”

“There’s monsters in the streets,” one of the kids’ friends offered. “And some sort of dragon in the air.”

“Shit.” She ignored the giggles from the kids not her own. “Ger, get them inside. You know the drill. Stop and let Vi and Aly know what you told me, then get behind the heavy doors.”

“Aw, come on, Mom.” He’d just turned ten and, with Baram as his male example, thought he was old enough to fight the world. “Can’t I stay and help?”

“No.” She pulled the trump card. “You need to protect Lilja.” Vi’s youngest was barely three years old, the pampered baby sister of their tribe. “Go.” She shooed them on, not wanting the mundane children to see what she was about to do.

~

Jaelie never knew if the creatures followed some sort of scent-of-Ellehemaei, or if it was sheer dumb luck that they stumbled into her hedge. By the time they arrived, her Workings had taken hold, and the sleepy hawthorns had transformed into an angry hedge. She wasn’t Named Briar Rose for nothing, after all, and the first creature through was nearly dead by the time he reached her.

To her flanks, Viatrix and Alkyone had finished the pit traps and were waiting with to burn and shock any intruders. They’d hoped they’d be lucky enough to be missed – even with the hedge, from the outside they still looked much like any other house on the block – but they weren’t taking chances. They hadn’t survived four years of Addergoole by taking stupid chances.

When the first creature broke through – fell through, really; her hedges were hungry and she’d taken lessons from Valentina as well as Valerian – Jaelie speared him to the ground. “Submit,” she demanded.

He coughed blood on her shoes, blood that slowly began eating at the leather of her boots. “Bitch,” he choked, “I’d rather die.”

Viatrix obliged him, her backhanded stroke casual enough to make Jaelie wince, while Alkyone turned to knock down the next intruder. Then a third came through, and a fourth, and the battle was on in earnest.

The combat was bloody and hard. Training her magical muscles or not, Jaelie had been out of school for six and a half years, and PTA meetings were an entirely different sort of battle. Her sisters in arms, younger, fresher, and cy’Fridmar, both of them, fared somewhat better, but the damn things kept coming. In all, Jaelie counted nine of the returned-gods monsters, although at least three of them could have been the same guy with an obnoxious power.

With every thrust and stroke and Working, with every cut she took and every stab she dealt out, Jaelie focused on keeping the intruders from the house, wondering, even as she fought and bled, where the hell their monster was. Where was the man who had bought their service with his protection and cash? Where was the monster she’d sought out because, of all of Addergoole’s legends, he seemed as if he’d be possible to work with? As the battle pressed on, the thoughts took two directions at once – damnit, where’s Baram when we need him? and shit, where’s Baram? If there’s this many here…

And then they had the last asshole pinned to the ground, three rowan spears holding him on place, and Viatrix was spitting out the line they’d already used five times. “Submit.”

“I yield,” this one choked out, through a mouthful of blood – thankfully not the burning sort. “Shit, you women are fierce. I didn’t think a halfbreed could…”

“Not the throat, Alkyone!” At the last minute, the former cy’Fridmar’s second spear went into the asshole’s chest instead.

“Yield better,” Jaelie told the returned-and-debased god, amused despite herself. “We’re not big on senses of humor around here.”

The god – probably a Grigori, or whatever they called themselves when they stepped through from the other side – coughed ruefully. “I place myself in your hands, because I don’t really want to die to-” he fell into a hacking fit for a moment “-day. What’s your Name?”

They shared a look, and, in the end, it was Jaelie who offered “Briar Rose.” She’d had lots of practice getting the tone right – laugh and I’ll kill you. He didn’t laugh this time.

“Then I am yours, Briar Rose, until you choose to release me.”

Her answer was cut short by a crashing from the front lawn.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/160866.html. You can comment here or there.

Carrying in the Spirit – Reiassan – for the Giraffe Call @inventrix

Oct26

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt.

Thanks to @inventrix and @Anke for the names.

Reiassan, some generations before Rin & Girey. Reisassn has a landing page – here (or on LJ).

After Giving up the Ghost (and on LJ)

Commenters: 5

::We’re almost there.::

Ostovin found it more than a little creepy to be carrying his grandmother sheathed at his hip.

It wasn’t her, quite, not the woman he remembered; the soul in the sword had been, the High Priestess told him, distilled, hardened. The Empress Ellanasia had been a loyal and wild devotee of Veignevar, and it was that part of her, the wild red woman, that had survived death in the sword. But it was still his grandmother, the woman he remembered best as an ancient, cadaverous figure on the throne, passing him candies and advice about his fighting stance.

The advice had not stopped. ::If you want to win this war, grandson, you’re going to have to do something about your footwork. You sword-fight like a farmer.::

The truth of the matter was, while Ostovin was a loyal servant of the threefold, and strong enough in the red to please the temple, he had never expected to inherit the throne. He was rather far down the line, or had been, but the war his grandmother had instigated had served to winnow the numbers down, until it had been just Ostovin and a cousin. The cousin had slipped and fallen in a rainstorm within hours of their grandmother releasing her ghost, and thus, the would-be-ranger-and-tracker found himself cleaning up his grandmother’s mess.

“We’re there, Os. Your Majesty.” The look his lanky, lifetime-soldier cousin Erenya giving him was half assessment and half concern. He didn’t blame her. He’d be giving himself nervous looks, too, if he had to follow his own orders.

::You ARE nervous.::

“Of course I am,” he muttered. Bad enough to have to live up to your grandmother’s legacy. Worse to have to do it with her watching.

He nodded to Erenya to his right, Igerial (another cousin, another one more suited to this role than he) to his left. “Onward.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/159879.html. You can comment here or there.

Eat, prey, live – for the Giraffe Call

Oct26

For KC_OBrien‘s prompt.

after “On Top,” (Dreamwidth link)) from the gender-funky-giraffe call.

Commenters: 3

I couldn’t deal anymore.

I’d set myself up a perfect situation, or so it had seemed, but here I was, in my happy little pack with my happy little alpha who did what I said… and I hated it.

I hated his passive-aggressive bullshit. I hated being everyone’s mommy. I hated hearing everyone’s. Fucking. Complaints. Because, well, everyone knew the alpha’s bitch was who you went to when you had a problem. Everyone knew I’d listen to their problems without ripping out their throats for it, listen and be compassionate and pat their shoulders and tell them it would be okay.

And I was beyond sick of it.

It took a night sleeping on the floor, because Chris was sick and tossed and turned, followed by the world’s whiniest werewolf having a bad day all over my tiredness, for me to snap. I threw the cur out of my room – and I do mean threw – threw some clothes in a bag, and left. Just left. Out the door and gone.

I shifted to wolf form as soon as I made it out of the city, the backpack one of the doggie sorts modified for this, and ran. Ran and ran and ran.

I chased some hikers down into a ravine and terrified them for a little bit, ate rabbits and deer and, once, a raccoon that sassed me. Never humans, but it was fun to make them run. Fun to listen to them stop whining and focus on just living for a little bit. Even a wolf in a backpack is still a wolf, and I was a damn big werewolf.

I came across the human version of my whiney cur in a truck stop in Nevada. He was trying to tell me his problems. I guess I have that face.

“Sorry, I don’t care,” I told him. It was the most liberating moment of my life. Better than my first Change. Better than making Chris win the alpha challenge. Better than my first kill. The look on his face – sweeter than blood.

“You…” he sputtered.

“You might ask, the next time,” I suggested. “The last guy that whined at me without asking is still trying to find all his teeth. And I’m sure your wife-” there was a ring “-doesn’t like it either.”

“You…”

“Just. Don’t. Care.” I grinned at him, and I’d been spending a lot of time in wolf form. My teeth were still pretty damn sharp on two legs. “Not sorry, either.”

“I…” He ran away… and I stopped running away from myself. I’d never felt better.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/159452.html. You can comment here or there.

Giving up the Ghost – Reiassan – for the Giraffe Call @inventrix

Oct26

For Lilfluff‘s prompt.

Thanks to @inventrix for the name.

Reiassan, some generations before Rin & Girey. Reisassn has a landing page – here (or on LJ)

Commenters: 1

“It’s getting close to time.”

Ellanasia lay comfortably on the slab in the back room of the temple, no companion, now, except the High Priestess of Veignevar. Her family had come and gone. Her courtiers had come and gone. The healers and herb-mongers and attendants, maids and bed-warmers and chroniclers had all stepped in and out in their due time, but now, at the very end of her life, there was time only for Veignevar, and for herself.

“This is going to hurt,” Tabyna warned her. Ellanasia choked on a laugh.

“Everything hurts, most honored one. Everything has hurt for a long time.” The scars from a lifetime of service to the red god ran tracks over her body like a map of her conquests, and every one of them ached with the cold of the coming snows, and the cold of the slab beneath her. “I will welcome the rest.”

“I know you will, Elle.” The Priestess set a kiss on her lips, a thing far more tender than either of them were known for. “I can’t say I’m sad you’re choosing this. I’d miss you.”

Ellanasia smirked, trying not to show how much effort even that cost her, now. “The most complicated ritual in all of the threefold faith, and you’re doing it out of sentimentality.”

“No more than you are, Your Most Exalted Majesty,” her old friend retorted. “I’m doing it out of necessity.”

“Then do it.” She leaned up, struggling, for one more kiss, then set her head on the slab with a thump. “We’re nearly out of time.”

“We are. With Veignevar’s blessing, then, Ellanasia.” The sword slid into her, hurting like nothing she’d ever felt before as it split her ribs and pierced her heart, and then, as the chanting of her priestess slowly faded into whispers, and then into dark silence, the Empress of Callanthe slid into the sword.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/159168.html. You can comment here or there.