Archive | November 2016

White Queen, an AU story of Cya, Regine, Mike, Luke, and an Army

Nov9

After This Story from earlier today, which read first, because Au.

Regine, Again

She did not want to be here, sitting in Cya Red Doomsday’s office like a petitioner. But Luke was in danger, and Regine would not have it said that she did not value her crew.

Michael was with her. She didn’t know how Linden-Blossom felt about this, but she knew that the Daeva loved Luke, and she knew that she would not walk alone into the den of her enemy if she could avoid it.

“Lady of the Lake. Sa’Linden Blossom.” Cya bowed politely to both of them.

“Jae’Red Doomsday.” Regine was not in the mood for games. “I will meet with Luca before we discuss
anything.”

“No. You won’t.” The woman leaned forward, hands on her desk. “We meet and sign an agreement first.”

“I don’t think you understand your position–“

“My position?” Cya raised her eyebrows. “I have Leo, Leo has an army, and we hold the northwest. I have twenty Addergoole grads, in addition to Boom, all of them 11th Cohort or older, who have plenty of reason to hate you and more reason to be fond of me. Possibly of more relevance to you, I have Luke in a hawthorn cell. What’s your position, Director?”

“You will let us meet with Luca before this meeting continues!”

“No. I won’t. And if you continue to push the issue, you’re going to be leaving here without discussing anything.”

“Regine.” Michael cut in with a quiet, diplomatic tone. “She has the cards here.”

Regine sighed. “Very well.”

“I will, however, allow you to speak to him.” She pulled an ancient phone out of her desk and dialed a number. “Put him on.” A moment later, she continued, “sa’Hunting Hawk? Please hold for the Lady of the Lake.”

She pushed a button, putting the phone on speaker. Regine glowered at the indignity of it, but Michael had a point. “Luca?”

“‘Gene?” Luca sounded tired and strained.

“Luca, we’re going to get you out of there. Is everything all right?”

“It’s not the Hilton. But they’re not treating me poorly. Regine… don’t goad her.”

“Too late,” Michael murmured. Regine ignored him.

“I… I won’t, Luca.”

“And don’t let her goad you.”

“Too late,” Michael repeated.

Luca sighed. “Regine… just be careful, all right.”

“So.” Cya leaned forward over her desk. “These are my terms. sa’Hunting Hawk serves the same as anyone else who attacks me and mine: one year under the collar. All three of you swear oaths never to attack my city or my people again.”

“Preposterous!” Regine sputtered.

“Or,” and here Cya smiled, a slow and humorless expression, “you release sa’Hunting Hawk from any and all oaths he has sworn to you, and he pays the fine for his attack on his own. That would be more than a year, of course, because I, Director Avonmorea, am not an idiot.”

Regine raised her eyebrows. “Out of the question.”

“Then I suppose you don’t want him back too badly, do you?” Cya looked amused. Regine wanted to banish that expression from her face. “There are other ways, of course, but here I thought you’d be open to reason.”

The nerve…! Regine quirked her eyebrows at Cya. “You ask for quite a bit when you have an army at our door.”

“Technically, it’s at my door, at least at the moment. And no. The point isn’t the army. The point is that your man attacked my man and, well, that can’t stand. So. Release him and let him pay the penalty, or sign off on the whole not-attacking-us thing and let him pay the penalty.”

Regine stared at her. “You don’t seriously think–“

“Regine,” Luca cut her off, “just do it.”

Next: White Knight

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1196975.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Black Knight, an AU story of Cya, Leofric, Luke, and an Army

Nov9

The AU is Cloverleaf-Era, and Leo has gathered an army around himself and is, uh, taking over the northwest.

Luke is sent in to deal with it, but underestimates Leo’s style of fighting and has to nearly kill him to get him unconscious….

…all while Leo’s army watches.

The messenger had been pounding on her door for nearly a minute before Cya made it down the stairs. She’d been taking a bath, the sort of long, quiet luxury she only did when she had a full hour or more to herself, and she hadn’t been in the mood for company.

He took a long moment to catch his breath when she yanked the door open. She recognized his uniform – one of Leo’s, with the blue and the lightning-bolt – and she recognized the look on his face. “Slow,” she told him. “Single words.” It wasn’t good news. It wasn’t good news at all. She drew herself up a little straighter.

“Lightning-Blade,” he gasped. “Short guy, Mara-wings. Fight.” He swallowed and took three careful breaths. “sa’Lightning Blade found himself in, in single combat with this Mara. Both alive. Lightning-Blade down.”

“Take me there.” He wouldn’t be at her door if he wasn’t a teleporter.

“Ma’am, sa’Red-Doomsday, your robe?”

She was wearing one of Leo’s kimono. “It covers. Take me.”

“The army…?” He had a point. She hated that he had a point.

“Come in, bedroom, now.”

He obeyed. He was too good at obeying, but she’d worry about that later. She threw off her robe, threw on her best red dress – which, conveniently, was nearly as easy-on as Leo’s kimono – and held out her hand to the teleporter.

He was blushing brightly. It was a good look on him. She might care, later. Then they were twisting through the void, and there was no room for such things.

Some day, maybe when she was 200 or 300, Cya might get used to the feeling of being teleported, except it was different with every teleporter. This one seemed to bend space by folding his passengers up.

When Cya had been young, before the world had ended, there’d been a book called Flat Stanley, about a child who had been flattened and learned to live that way, including being mailed to relatives for a visit. Cya felt like that right now. It did not add to her general mood in a positive manner.

The teleporter dropped them out of his folded-space between Leo – on the ground, breathing, unconscious, missing an arm, bleeding badly, one ear gone, attended by a healer in the Leo’s-Army uniform – and Luke (the short guy, the Mara) – missing three fingers, half of a wing, and, it looked, three teeth, bleeding, but conscious, “restrained” between two army guards.

It took Cya less than a heartbeat to assess all that. She spun around while those on the ground were still realizing that she was there and punched Luke in the uninjured side of his face. “You fucking asshole,” she spat. “I had it handled. And you had to… abatu eperu. You fucker.” She waved at the ground and it opened up, her Working leaving a hole just about the size of Luke and 20 feet deep as she Destroyed the dirt and stone under him. “You fucker.” She turned to Leo and dropped on her knees. “And you, you bleeding idiot, what made you be such a fucking ridiculous man? Why on earth would you keep fighting? It’s Luke, he wasn’t going to kill you, you bastard.” She touched his shoulder, the one that still had an arm attached, and raised her voice to a bellow. “Where are the rest of the healers? If there are not two more healers here in the next five minutes, I’m going to start burying people. Come on, you assholes, he’s your general!“

The healer shot her an insulted look. She returned it with a calm and un-budge-able expression. “There’s more damage than anyone but a god can repair quickly,” she murmured, quiet enough that only the healer and the unconscious Leo could hear it. “And if I know Leo — and I do — there’s a whole lot more unseen damage. You’ll need back-up.”

She stalked away before she pissed off the person saving her beloved’s life. She stared down the hole at Luke, who did not appear to be inclined to argue with her. “You asshole,” she muttered. “This is going to fuck everything up.”

Luke didn’t answer, simply stood there, damaged wings folded tightly in the cramped space, and bled.

Flat Stanley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley

Cya

Cya was not talking to Leo, nor was she listening to him.

The good thing — not the only good thing, but at the moment the most useful thing — about Leo having sworn to obey Cya was that, when she was furious with him, she could ground him.

Right now, he was grounded, while the healers continued to work on repairing all the damage to his body.

The fact that she had grounded the general who had won the northwest did not escape Cya, but neither did she particularly care. He had been bad (never mind that Luke had started it), and until she calmed down, he was going to be grounded.

Hopefully, unlike her more mischievous sons, Leo didn’t try to climb out the window.

Luke

Luke had, at one point, wanted to see the cells Cya kept beneath her city.

He had not wanted to see them quite this close-up.

He’d surrendered as a gesture of goodwill, but now, locked into a hawthorn-lined cell, cut off from his magic and with his mind tingling with the effects of being surrounded by that much poison, he was beginning to regret the choice.

He sat gingerly on the provided divan. His wings had been mended, but he was still more injury than not.

He’d underestimated Leo. He’d underestimated both of them.

Regine

The letter was short, and she recognized the handwriting.

It had been delivered to her by a courier she didn’t recognize, in a uniform she was beginning to hate — blue, a lightning bolt, a sword.

Director Avonmorea, Lady of the Lake,

You have misplaced your Mara. I have him here — alive, and injured only by his attack on my people.

Meet me at the Tower in Cloverleaf to discuss terms.

Cya Red Doomsday

Next: White Queen

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1196306.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Spotlight Story: Addergoole

Nov8

A story written to showcase the Addergoole setting. If you find terms that I missed that are not accessible to the non-Addergoole reader, please let me know.

The halls were black, with only the faint red glow of the emergency lights illuminating them. It was early, and the only sounds were haunted-house spooky: the wind through creaking trees whispered down the passage, two stories underground where there were neither trees nor wind; the whispers of ghosts that probably didn’t exist, speaking in strange languages about deaths that probably hadn’t happened; the thumping of some giant that seemed to shake the whole compound.

Keely took notes. The sounds were a nice touch, and new; the thumping of the footsteps wasn’t new, but he still liked it. The cobwebs that seemed to brush across his face in the corners were an interesting touch, and there, at an intersection that went straight to the stairs, a deep puddle appeared to block the route. An exposed pipe (normally all plumbing was discretely hidden) dripped dark sludge into the puddle.

It looked as if the school was falling apart. On the other side of the intersection, the wall itself was leaking some green, glowing goo. The floor shook again; Keely steadied himself and kept going.

He was being herded. The puddle meant he couldn’t take the stairs; the thudding behind him meant he wanted to go forward. He went forward. Right now, that was where he wanted to be anyway. He stuck to the center of the hallway, avoiding the cobwebs and the strange discharges from the walls, the way the paneling seemed to bulge out in the shape of a human every so often; the way doors and passages seemed to vanish as he went past them.

A little music played somewhere, just below the conscious hearing range, the increasing chords of a horror movie. Keely watched a girl run by, her baseball bat clung firmly in her hands. He grinned approvingly at her fleeing back. It might not stop the monsters, but it would slow them.

A passage that had disappeared suddenly flickered. Keely took shelter behind a bulge in the wall and murmured a quick line of magic, disguising himself, painting the illusion of woodgrain over his own skin and clothing until he, too, was nothing but another lump in the wall. This was where he’d been headed: Pod 8. A head poked out, and he stifled a sigh. Not her. Had he missed her?

“Looks clear,” muttered the head — it belonged to a first-year student, a guy whose name Keely hadn’t bothered to learn yet. “We should move.”

The guy stepped out of the passageway, followed a moment later by Keely’s target. Kjellfrid; a first-year girl in Keely’s History, PE, and Literature classes. She had a smile like sunshine in this underground bunker and a way with words like a rapier. And today was the day for catching the underclassmen.

Keely stayed hidden for the moment. He’d seen a shadow move, and down the hall the goo was dripping into a humanoid shape. He’d have to time this right, if he was going to get what he wanted out of today.

The two first-year students moved cautiously down the hallway, the unknown guy sticking close to Kjellfrid’s side. She, in turn, was running her fingers along the wall, muttering at something. She wasn’t doing magic, was she? Keely frowned. The first-year students weren’t supposed to know magic yet.

Keely muttered a little spell of his own, keeping his voice as quiet as he could and still have the Words take force. He moved the air to his ears, amplifying her voice.

“Frickin school of fricking would-be monsters, goblins and ghouls and frickin demons and all of them thinking they’re so full of themselves. Haunted house. Of course there’s a haunted house. What else would there be?”

Definitely not some sort of magic Working. Keely relaxed and turned his attention to the other problems: the shadow that was about to move past him, intent on the first-years, and the goo that had almost completed its shape.

The shadow was the easiest. He stepped back a few feet, ducking into an entryway hidden by illusion, and muttered another Working under his breath. He couldn’t hold it for long at all, but for a minute, the whole hallway would be flooded with light – not just the electric lights, but fake sunlight and the equivalent of a spotlight pointing down the hall in both directions.

The swearing he could hear from the hall wasn’t just Kjellfrid and her friend’s. Some shadow-figure didn’t like light. Keely grinned to himself. He pulled a Working of Invisibility around himself and slid back out into the hall. Kjellfrid and her friend were making good time in the bright mid-noon daylight of the hallway, laughing with each other.

There were no shadows to keep to at the moment, but Keely’s invisibility Working was one of his best spells. He paused for a moment to gloat, silently, at the former shadow-figure, now revealed to be a very unhappy 4th-year student. Luces. He’d been doing the same thing last year. He’d almost caught Keely, that time.

Not this time. The light was already starting to fade. You couldn’t just turn the power back on, not when the whole school was rigged for this horror show. You had to play the game with the rules as written.

Lucky for Keely, one of the rules was “cheat”.

He was pretty sure the goo wasn’t actually a person, but it was directly in front of Kjellfrid and her friend now. He could let it take the friend, he supposed. Keely wasn’t all that in to guys or anything, but a lot of the fourth-year students were a lot more non-discriminating.

But he had to keep Kjellfrid away from whoever thought the plot of the original Ghostbusters was a good idea for Hell Night pranks. Keely waited until Kjellfrid shouted and whispered his Working under her noise, looking for the source of the goo. It wasn’t a plant, technically; it wasn’t an animal. What that made it… Well, he’d always been good at working with flesh-and-blood.

He found a nice, deep, shadow — it might have been his imagination, but as the light faded, he thought the shadows were getting darker — and waited until Kjellfrid friend yelped in surprise-and-distress.

Surprise-and-distress, Keely snorted to himself. The mating call of Addergoole. He shot a Destroy Working at the goo, throwing in a Dismantle just in case. He was better at Dismantle…

The goo fell apart in a puddle of water and yellow ooze. Kjellfrid shouted in dismay; nearby, another shadow swore angrily.

Evgenia. Working with Luces, then, and fuck them. Keely was pretty sure he hadn’t been seen yet. He muttered an elaborate Working, one he’d been practicing for months.

The shadows erupted in shouts, and Luces, Evgenia, and two other upperclassmen erupted out, swearing and shaking their feet, their hands, their tails.

Smirking to himself, Keely slid on to another shadow, watching Kjellfrid and her friend make their way to the back stairs. They weren’t quite in the clear yet, but they were past the worst of this. And if they made it past Hell Night, this ridiculous farce of a hazing ritual, then they were past the worst of the school year.

Kjellfrid might not know Keely was watching out for her, but he was going to keep on, anyway, even if he had to stay hidden in the shadows until June.

An angry, panicked shout echoed down the stairs, and Keely slunk upwards, ready to fend off more trouble.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1196232.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

In Which Amrit Makes a Run for It- a continuation of BeeKeeper.

Nov5

First: A beginning of a story which obnoxiously cuts off just before the description,
Previous: In Which Amrit and Mieve Share a Little.

His “owner” was in a foul mood when she chained him to the bed. Still, she’d given him time to brush his teeth and use the john, and she made sure the chains weren’t cutting into his skin.

Amrit couldn’t quite figure her. She didn’t like him. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t want him here – hell, they agreed on that, at least. She got pissed fine when he taunted her, but then she tucked him in like she was gonna give him a teddy bear and a bedtime story.

He pulled on the chains holding him. He wasn’t going to get out of them, not short of destroying his hands. He’d wait. Eventually, he could cut the shackle she used when he was working. A quick dash for the trees, and he’s never have to think about this place again.

The pie’d been good, though. All the food was good. The bed was comfortable. The gag was even comfortable, even it it sucked. The truth of the matter was, even with hard work, even with chains and a gag, she was giving him a better berth than anyplace he’d been since the world ended.

But there were chains. And a gag. And he really didn’t like being a slave.

“Uggit,” he muttered around the gag. He’d be gone as soon as he could. Someone else would give him a berth in return for food. Somewhere.

~

The next three days passed in relative peace. Amrit did the work he was offered – plowing, chopping down trees, splitting firewood, He worked hard, and earned his hours without the gag in every evening.

She didn’t have much to say to him, after the first night, but the food stayed good and she kept her word.

He slept hard, chains or no. She was working him to exhaustion – he’d wonder if it was on purpose, to keep him docile, but she worked herself every bit as hard as she worked him, and then some. Amrit looked for openings to escape all day, but at night all he did was sleep.

Finally, four days after their first conversation, he had a moment where she was communing with her bees. The axe went down hard on the chain and split it in two strikes. Amrit started running the moment the chain split, leaving the axe where it had fallen.

He was out of practice, running, but it hadn’t been all that long that he’d been in chains. He stumbled once, caught himself, and was off again, as fast as he could move and as silently as he could make that speed. She was way on the other side of the clearing; he ought to be able to make it to the trees before-

He ran into a wall and fell backwards, sprawling. He pulled himself up to his feet and moved cautiously forward. There was nothing there, nothing visible, at least. But when he reached out his hand, just before the treeline was a wall as hard as rock.

He felt the grip around his neck before he noticed she was coming towards her. He held up both his hands in surrender.

“You’ve got an impressive swing. But you know what comes next.” She pulled him towards her as she walked to him, tugging on the invisible tether around his throat. “I warned you.”

She looked sad. For a moment, Amrit almost felt guilty. But she had … shit. His leg. And she was picking up the axe he’d dropped. Amrit bit hard on the gag. This was going to suck worse than getting kidnapped had. She was lifting the ax already, getting ready to swing.

The back of the axe was going to shatter his leg into pieces. Even with his healing, it was going to be a bitch to put it all back together, and it might never heal properly. She didn’t look like she liked the idea. She looked like she was steeling herself as much as Amrit was.

He took a gamble and held up both hands, grunting out the closest to wait he could manage.

She set the axe down. “I warned you what would happen,” she repeated.

He nodded. “Eh. Uh…” He whined in frustration. Making himself understood through this thing was frustrating in a good situation, and this didn’t count as good. He tapped at the gag. “Eee?” he pleased.

She frowned. “All right,” she allowed. Her telekinesis was still holding him firmly, and Amrit wouldn’t have tried moving even if it wasn’t, but she still circled him carefully, as if afraid he was going to attack.

He supposed it was a reasonable concern. Amrit held very still and tried to look as nonthreatening as possible.

“This is not the time for anything stupid,” she warned him, as the gag came out.

“No, I know, I won’t.” Amrit stayed still. “It’s… I heal fast?” he offered with a sigh, “so things heal bad really easy. And if you, well, here,” he held out his hand, where his pinkie finger had healed wrong years ago. “An axe, a hammer, anything, it’s going to be awful.”

He held up his hands to forestall whatever she was going to say. “Look. You said it, I did it anyway, I don’t mind taking my punishment. I’ll even fix the chain, if you want me to. But uh, I can break it. With a Working. And it’ll still be broken and it’ll still hurt like hell and… it won’t hurt for the rest of my life, is all I’m saying.”

Her face had softened, a bit, until he said Working He’d feared that would happen. “And if it’s a trap?”

“Then you knock me unconscious with your power there and smash my leg. Or both of them. You’re the boss. But it’s not. It’s really, just, I get freaked out by things like that because when they heal bad, it really sucks.” He rubbed at the side of his mouth surreptitiously.

Not subtly enough. She winced. “The new gag…”

“The new one’s nice. It doesn’t cut at all. The old one, that was bad.”

“If this is a trick, any sort of trick, then I am going to break both of your legs.” She looked him in the eyes. Amrit was suddenly glad that it wasn’t any sort of trick. “But you can do it.”

“Thank you.” He sounded a little pitiful. He was okay with that. “Can I, uh, may I sit down?”

“Yeah… yes. go ahead.” The TK she’d been holding at his throat loosened.

Amrit sat gingerly and stretched his left leg out straight in front of him. He said the Words carefully, so she didn’t have any question what he was doing: first an Idu, a Know, so he knew exactly what he was doing, and then a Tempero, shattering the bone in two places.

He got through the Working before he swore, loud and without shame, a long line of ”Fuuuuck, fuck fuck fuuuuck.” He slammed the ground with both fists and leaned back, trying to find a position where it didn’t hurt.

“Can you set it?” She was crouching in front of him, her hands near but not touching the break. “Or do you need me to?”

Setting it, shit. “I… Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck… yeah. I can…” He gritted his teeth, pulled himself together, and did another Tempero Working to set it in place. “‘Bout… five days,” he told her through gritted teeth. “If it’s splinted or held together somehow. Longer if I jostle it.”

“Okay. Here, hold it still for a minute.” She picked up two boards from a stack near the door and muttered a Working on them, then shaped them around his leg as if they were putty. In two minutes, she’d entirely immobilized his left leg. “You really thought you could make it? Or you wanted to see if I’d do it?”

“Thought I could make it. You were… unh. All the way on the other side of the clearing. Talking to the bees. You go all not-there when you’re talking to them.” The splint took a little pressure off, and his body was already trying to repair the damage. “Gods. How’d you even see me?”

She stood off, brushing her hands off. “You’re going to need crutches… I didn’t. See you, that is. You’re right. I got buzzy when I’m talking to them. One reason I don’t talk to people much.”

“…You didn’t?” She was already Working some wood into a pair of crutches. He noticed when she faltered halfway through the Working, and put two and two together. “Have you been keeping up some sort of…”

“Shield. Here, try these for size.”

“That’s nuts.” He took the crutches and began pulling himself to his feet. It hurt; he bit his tongue and hissed. “…That’s fucking nuts.”

“You weren’t exactly cooperative.”

“No, I mean. Well, I mean it’s nuts. I wasn’t cooperative, sure, but you had me chained.”

“And you broke the chain the minute I stopped paying attention.”

“Well, yeah, but… how much energy have you been pouring into that?” He got himself onto the crutches and tested them with a couple steps.

“It doesn’t seem all that wise to tell you that, now does it?”

“I mean… this is a good height on the crutches. Shit. Okay.” He leaned against the woodpile to get his weight off his leg. “I, uh. Well, I can’t go anywhere for a few days, but for…. the next month, I promise not to leave the clearing without your permission, okay?”

She stared at him. “What? Why?”

“Because you’re swaying on your feet from a minor Working and that’s dumb! And, uh. I don’t want to be here, don’t get me wrong. But I’m not going anywhere until I heal up anyway.” He looked at the woodpile. “I guess you can put the gag back on me and I can try splitting some more wood.”

She hadn’t stopped staring at him. “All that fighting and you just agree, like that?”

“Well…” Amrit glowered. She wasn’t going to stop talking about it. He was going to have to explain.

He really missed living out in the wilderness. Alone. In the cold, with the bugs and the rain. “I lost, right? You won. I’m stuck here. And I even did it to myself.” He shrugged shortly. “And you need your energy. That’s why you were looking for a Kept, right? Because you need more energy than you have in a day?”

“Yes, but…”

“Right, I don’t care.” He raspberried. “I don’t like being bought and sold. But I’m not a total asshole, all right? You feed me, you shelter me. Eventually, I’m going to escape. But until then, I mean, why should I be an actual drain on your resources?”

Was that enough? She was still frowning. Amrit shut up and hoped she’d accept it.

“You… have an interesting way of looking at the world. I accept your promise. Want to throw in one about not attacking me, and I can leave the gag off?”

He studied the gag, studied her. “Hrmff… put the gag back in for now. I’ll think about it tonight.”

She didn’t look disappointed, which was interesting. “All right.” The gag went back in, with the now-familiar mouth-stretching feeling and the slight sensation like he’d eaten too much. “Take a break for the rest of the day. Give your leg a little time to heal before you try to chop wood on it.”

He wanted to complain, but he’d already let her put the gag in. He gestured, to the gag, to the woodpile.

“You heal in record time,” she pointed out. “There has to be some punishment to trying to run away.”

Amrit huffed and agreed, or at least nodded at her.

“Find a place to sit down. Have no fear, I’ll have enough work for you once you’re healed up.”

Fuck you, Amrit thought, but he didn’t bother to vocalize it this time.

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1201394.html

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Introductions to Characters – two people in my Nanobook

Nov4

written while I was waiting for the clock to tick over to midnight on hallowe’en

The government people showed up a week after the test.

Noth wasn’t expecting them. He’d done the test, done what his uncle always said and done his best, but he’d been doing that for years and nothing had changed. Nobody wanted him or his brothers for anything better than the trade school they were already enrolled in. Nothing was going to change. The tests were a pretty stupid formality.

He was at work when they came, in the foundry. His uncle pulled in scrap from four different waste sites around their hometown, and turned all of it into weapons for the army and, sometimes, plows and tools for the village. Noth had been working part-time there since he was old enough to work the bellows or handle the giant crucibles.

He was handling molten steel when the government workers came in, so he didn’t pay that much attention to strangers. The foundry rewarded inattention quickly and painfully, and Noth had only had to learn that lesson once.

When he was done pouring the steel into the molds, then he pushed off the visor and turned to the visitors. He found himself freezing.

They were too clean for the foundry. They were too clean for reality. They looked like they had come out of some book, some un-real story.

And they were looking straight at him.

She’d been expecting a transfer for years.

She was better than anyone at her local school, so they’d sent her to a military school when she was ten. That had been fine for a few years, but Zara was driven, pushed, and she was better than anyone in her school.

It took her a while to convince them of that. She was smaller, more “delicate.” She hadn’t really finished growing yet and, the way they fed them at the school, she might not have ever, except she got good at stealing food, good at bribing others to give her their food, good at taking things people hadn’t realized yet that they didn’t want.

They were either going to send her to a better school, or they were going to Disappear her, and either way, she wouldn’t be bored anymore and, with luck, she wouldn’t be hungry anymore, either.

When the transfer came, Zara wasn’t quite sure which she was getting – a new school or a vanishing, into some deep cell or deeper grave. The plain government vehicle, the armed Main Office workers who were actually better than she was, the manacles – it could have been either one.

She was pretty sure that being Disappeared didn’t come with the sort of food only Main Office high officials and ranking officers ate, though.

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Pieced, a continuing ficlet of early pre-Arlend

Nov3

After Shattered, written after [personal profile] thnidu‘s tip.

Having the ghost of a cat following you around was not something to be talked about, certainly not in the current climate.

Having a ghost-cat who could mend things, well, that was nearly worse. Certainly, it would be looked at almost like hoarding, if anyone ever found out that Hannah had been hiding an ability to repair broken goods.

They had so very few goods these days. It had taken almost twenty years to get any sort of manufacturing back online, and, once they had, it had all gone to the war effort. Certainly, those guys next door had something we wanted – as it turned out, they had minerals and metals that didn’t currently exist in the borders of their fractured city-state. Mugs, plates – if you couldn’t scrounge it or make your own from back-yard clay, you were Sure Outta Luck, as Hannah’s mother had liked to say, those times she’d noticed Hannah was listening.

Besides, what if nobody else could see Buster? If she really was going nuts, Hannah didn’t want anyone to know. Some people had, from the fumes, from disease, from – well, they called it Plague, back then, but the only symptom appeared to be closer to the screaming meemees than what was traditionally considered “plague”. Seeing things was enough for some of her neighbors to waste a bullet on her. It might be enough for other, more kindly or more parsimonious, to commit her.

Hannah had seen the inside of the sanitarium once, on a charity visit. She never wanted to see it again.

She went four weeks without anyone finding out. She learned that Buster would, if bribed with petting and sweet words, fix things that had been previously broken, but that he preferred new damage. She learned that the more “made” a thing was – plastic was great, plates made in a factory were wonderful – the better Buster could make it look. He couldn’t – or wouldn’t – fix the apple tree outside when a hailstorm damaged it, but he did fix a wooden spoon she’d left too close to the flame.

She’d just gotten used to the feeling of having the cat in bed with her – he might be twice as large as he had been, but she was a lot bigger than she’d been, too, and they still seemed to fit – when she learned that other people could see him, too. It was early morning, and she was weeding her garden, a hobby Buster liked to “help” with, mostly by batting around the weeds. Usually, nobody was out this early, but today, of course, Lacey from down the street was walking by, head in the clouds and not really paying much attention.

Until she saw Buster. Lacey froze in the middle of the sidewalk, staring. Buster stared back, tail high and proud as anything, never mind that you could still see the tomatoes through him.

Lacey shook her head and walked on, saying nothing. For a brief while, Hannah thought maybe she’d gotten away with it. Lacey hadn’t been right for a long time, but, like Hannah, she stayed just right enough to stay where she was. She wasn’t going to tell stories; any stones she threw could bounce back far too easily on her.

It was all going to be okay, Hannah told herself. You got away with it, she told Buster.

And then one night, after dark, after curfew, they came knocking on her door.

Lacey. Gerald the grocer. Tammy the hunter. Desi the Librarian. All of them, sneaking in, hiding in the shadows. All of them followed by the shadows of animals.

Lacey had a mastiff bigger than a pony. Tammy had a hawk whose wingspan filled the room. Gerald had a badger, which amused Hannah, although she tried to hide it. And Desi had a snake.

“We thought maybe you would,” Lacey admitted. “We thought you were the sort. But you never let on. You never showed anything.”

Gerald snorted. “Didn’t want us to think she was crazy, probably. Same as you. Same as us.”

“So…” Hannah looked around. “What does this mean?”

Gerald laughed. “Damned if I know. Damned if I know,” he repeated slowly. “But I don’t think it’s good.”

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Patreon This Month: The Animal People are Invading!

Nov1

 The anthropomorphic animals are invading!  One day late for Halloween, they’re here in force… or maybe they’ve always been here. 

Places to look for animal-people in my writing include, but are not limited to:

Tír na Cali – this modern-fantasy slavery-alternate-history setting involves genetically modified beings (moddies) and cosmetically-changed animal-people (Skin jobs)

Fae Apoc/Addergoole – Where fae Change into a not-quite-human form, animal-people abound.  Canonical examples include Shiva and Magnolia (cat-people), Wyatt (dog-person), and so on; the Change usually involves personality as well as physical changes. 

Fairy Town has the Lion King stories. 

In the Foedus Planetarum, many Variations on a base humanoid model exist.  Yira has hair like snakes; Jahan comes from an arboreal people.  Who’s to say there aren’t cat-people out there?

And of course, we can’t forget the Invasion of the Kaa-Tah.

The prompt call is  open HERE for $5 patrons and higher.  
Everything I write on Patreon is available HERE for anyone pledging $1/month or more. 

Want to see my furry writing? This is the month for it!

Want to see more Patreon examples? Here’s a list of months before that and their stories.

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Shattered, a ficlet of early pre-Arlend

Nov1

Last night I asked for a few prompts to get me started. This one is many generations before the story I’m writing, just a few decades after the world shattered.

1 is for broken pottery….

The mug had shattered when it hit the floor.

Hannah swore quietly. They only had the two mugs left, and here she was breaking one. Everything in the old stores had been picked over by now, anything that had survived the earth-slits, the tremors, and the battle afterwards. Anything that was still intact had been taken, hoarded by the military, who needed it to win the war.

Hannah didn’t care about winning a war. She wasn’t fighting anything, anything except the shakes that had been with her since the day the world split, like she was still splitting apart, all these years later, and the hunger that was a little gnawing hole in her stomach, and the – no, she couldn’t say she was fighting the grief, not really. She’d stopped fighting it and let it move into her heart long ago. But she wasn’t fighting a war. She wasn’t part of the battle.

(“You are either part of the war effort or you are fighting for the enemies!” shouted the soldiers. She didn’t know why. She didn’t even really know why they were fighting at all. Hadn’t they all been one nation, before the split?)

She bent down to sweep up the pieces. Not enough left to glue back together. Not enough left to even add to Marcie’s broken-world mosaic, the thing she’d been building since the tremors stopped. Not enough left to do anything but cry over.

A cat butted against her leg. Hanna sighed, reached out to pet Buster… and cursed. Buster was gone, run off in the tremors. On good days, she told herself he’d lived out his life on some calmer shard of their former world, hopped a fissure and found some other little girl.

“I miss you, Buster,” she told the air, and a cat butted against her again. There weren’t stray cats around. There wasn’t anything around.

She turned slowly. There, see-through and twice the size of life but clear nonetheless, there was Buster, rubbing against her leg. And pawing at the pieces.

“You broke it, kitty,” she giggled. Hysteria was seeping in, but why fight it? Why fight anything? “We broke it.” She’d been five when the world had shattered. She and Buster had broken more than a few things, back when you could drive down to the store and fix it.

The ghost-cat pawed at the pieces. She moved to stop him, the way she had so many times as a child, but a ghost couldn’t get cut.

“Yeah, it’s a mess. My favorite mug, too. But crying don’t fix the pottery,” she muttered.

The cat pawed a few more pieces together. And, where he pawed, they stayed together, slowly mending themselves.

Hannah gasped softly and picked up a piece, fitting the next piece in with it. Buster-ghost touched it, and it stayed.

She was going mad, she knew it. She put another piece up against the mug, and Buster nosed it into place.

“I’ll take it, kitty,” she muttered. Maybe she was going mad, but if she went mad with Buster, well, maybe she could take it.

Next: Pieced

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