Archive | June 16, 2014

Old Stories and old Fates, a continuation of Fairy Town (More-please)

Jun16

This comes after The Church in the Park and is written to a more-please request.

It is part of my Fairy Town setting.

Some things could only be written in blood and etched in stone.

Some fates could only be erased with sacrifice, changed with pain, altered with devotion and the strongest of emotions: love, terror, aw.

Some stories could be moved from their place in the Book of Life, but only if one had the proper needle, the proper sinew, the proper glue to settle them in their new place.

Bishop Macnamilla knew these things, more than most and definitely more than a man of faith in any other city might know. He knew where the tools could be found, for those things that had tools. And he knew what elements were needed, when it was not something one could change with tools.

There were things he had not learned, however – stories that had been taught to him wrong, pages that had been left out of his book.

All of those things that he had not learned were coming to a head.

It took the fae very little time to find him, a Bishop, a Man of Faith standing at the Godsplace. They slunk and skittered, snuck and slipped up to him, whispering to each other, whispering to him.

Is this the one that killed so many? Is this the one who shed so much blood?

Is this the one come back to us? Does he know where he is? Does he know what that is?

Does he know? It this him? The whispers swirled around the Bishop like a storm, brushing against him, ruffling his clothes but never quite getting through. It didn’t matter. They didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now but the task in front of him.

Does he know? He did not, not the way the faeries meant it. But he knew this spot – this stone that looked as if it were a table, the stones that looked like a doorway. He knew the crosses set in the ground around it.

And he knew that if he shed the right blood onto the stone, the world would change forever.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/735502.html. You can comment here or there.

Planting!

Jun16

I’ll try to get pictures soon (keeps raining, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it) but I finally got winter squash in the garden yesterday:

2 spaghetti squash
1 “carnival” squash
1 “table ace” squash
1 Buttercup
and, sadly, only one
1 Butternut squash (everyone was out!)

We already have one yellow crookneck summer squash and several cucumbers in, and I may replant the volunteer squash plants that came up in a yet-unfinished bed from my compost.

Now I just need to eat the last butternut from last year’s crop!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/735425.html. You can comment here or there.

Escape From Rochester (Camp Nano July’14 project) Prequil Vignette: Dorian

Jun16

Fifth in a series of stories leading up to my Camp Nano Project – this one stars Dorian.

For information on the events they’re discussing, see [tumblr.com profile] faeapoclive and [twitter.com profile] faeapoclive

Landing page here.

“I don’t get it.” Dorian’s shoulder was touching mine. I didn’t think she noticed, that or the way her knee was pressed against mine, or the way the short curls of her hair were wrapped around her ear.

Because I didn’t think she noticed, I tried not to notice. We weren’t here to talk about physical contact; we were here because she wanted to take the world apart and put it back together, and I’d suggested I might have a wrench or two.

If not a wrench, I at least had access to a couple parts of the blueprint. So I had pulled out the most useful books on the subject I knew, and I was slowly levitating a leaf in front of Dorian while she poked it with all sorts of instruments.

“I don’t get it.” It wasn’t exactly repeating herself; she’d changed the tone. There was a different it this time, I thought. “Gravity works, it’s one of the constants. So telekinesis oughtn’t work.”

“There are quite a few constants.” I could’ve, I guess, told her everything. Habits break hard, though, and silence was one of the oldest habits. “But look at those ‘portals’ – they’re one of the ways that the universe shortcuts itself. And there’s, well, smaller shortcuts here and there, too.”

“The universe has cheat codes?”

This was a lot easier to explain to gamers and geeks. “Yeah. The universe has cheat codes.

“So what happens if I Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start?”

“Look, if you can figure out the Start button on the universe… let me know.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/735029.html. You can comment here or there.

A slightly different sort of prompt request – brainstorming for a submission

Jun16

I want to write a story for submission based on the theme of identity (I’m working my way through the themes in this textbook, and I’m having trouble coming u with ideas.

Like, staring-at-the-chalkboard nothing’s-coming sort of having trouble.

So, this one-shot call is more like Ysabet’s fishbowls: if I write something based off your prompt, I will send it to you privately before I submit it. I will post one not-going-to-submit idea for free, and then if I’ve managed to get more than two flash fictions out of it, I’ll offer up story-sponsorship options.

But the main point here is to get me something to submit. So: ideas on identity?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/734810.html. You can comment here or there.