Archive | January 2017
In Which Mieve Actually Says Something
First: A beginning of a story which obnoxiously cuts off just before the description,
Previous: In Which Neither Amrit nor Mieve Communicate.
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If there was any forgiving to happen, you have it.
She didn’t know whether to feel dismissed, pleased, or worried. She felt a little bit of each.
“I had a Kept. I had a lot of Kept, but I had one, well.” She caught her breath, counted to ten, and tried again. “I thought things were fine. I treated him well and we were even sharing a bed. But when I released him, he attacked me.” Her lips twisted. “That was the last Kept I released here. After that, I took them miles away first.”
For a minute, he didn’t say anything. Then Amrit smirked at her – which had not been the reaction she was expecting at all.
“You know, that makes it sound as if you took them off and shot them in a field somewhere.”
Mieve was startled into a chuckle. “No.” She shook her head, trying to make the giggles go away. “No, nothing like that.” It wasn’t really funny, but she snorted again. “More like ‘go now, you’re free, fly, you’ — oh, I can never remember the quote.”
“Something like ‘magnificent creature’ or something.” He smiled crookedly at her. “So catch-and-release?”
She found herself snorting again. “Catch and release, yeah. Because…” Just like that, her good mood was soured.
He looked serious. “Because the one attacked you. You don’t mean ‘said bad things’, do you? Swore at you, called you a bitch, that sort of thing?”
“No.” Mieve bit her lip, thinking about it. “No, I don’t. He tried to kill me. Nearly succeeded, too.”
Amrit gave her a considering look. “You didn’t sleep with ‘em again after that, hunh?”
“Ha.” This time the laugh had no humor. “No. Well, for warmth, sometimes, but not like regularly. Not as a lover.” She looked out the window, thinking about it.
“What did you do? To the one that tried to kill you?”
Mieve winced. “Something stupid.”
“Stupid would be slapping him on the hand and sending him away.”
“Sort of. Knocked him out, drove him hours away,and left him there with a day’s worth of food.” She remembered the way she’d felt, the knot in her gut, driving away with him still unconscious.
“Why didn’t you just kill him? It would have been fair. Would have been safer.”
She gave him the answer she kept telling herself. “There’s too few of us left to go killing them.”
“That didn’t stop him, did it?”
“Yeah, well.” She rolled her shoulders and sniffed at the turkey. “Cooking nicely. I…” She made herself look at Amrit. “I was fond of him, okay? Couldn’t bring myself to kill him.”
“That’s not stupid, you know. It’s just human — well, it’s part of existing, I guess.” He patted her hand a little awkwardly. “Okay. I promise you that, unless you attack me with intent to cause me real damage, I won’t ever attack you.”
Mieve stared at him. “Really?” She processed that. “… wait, ever?”
“Ever.” He nodded solemnly. “You have my word.”
She sat, stunned, for a moment, watching the turkey in the pan, watching his face. He looked uncomfortable — nervous? No, he had no reason to be nervous. Did he?
Mieve licked her lips. “If I promise not to attack you, I don’t have any defense against you trying to run away, you know.”
“I guess I’m just going to have to not run away, then.” Amrit gave her a crooked smile. “Okay, look. I’ll stay — I’ll stay here with you, under your terms, until the last snow has melted — here in this clearing — from this coming winter. I promise it, okay?”
Mieve just stared at him. “I wasn’t…” She worked her throat and dug for words that made some sense. “Thank you. I — why?”
“You always ask that,” he complained.
“You keep doing strange and wonderful and completely surprising things! And acting like — I don’t know. You’re angry and you hate being here but you promise not to attack me, you promise to stay here, you’ve promised not to run off once already. It can’t just be because you hate the gag…”
“It helps,” he admitted, looking embarrassed. “I don’t like the chain, I don’t like the gag. But come on, I was never going to attack you more than I had to, to get away. I’m not that sort of ass. And you’ve been fair and kind when you didn’t have to, and you don’t treat me like a thing.” Suddenly, he glowered. “You would not believe how many people can’t say the same.”
“I probably would, actually,” she admitted. “The people out there, well, there’s more than one reason that I don’t go out all that much. And a lot of it is just people.”
“It’s a nice place, here.” He frowned. “Your Kept, did you ever find out why he attacked you?”
“He was, uh. He was angry that I’d Kept him. He didn’t like the idea of being enslaved.” It sounded a lot like Amrit, enough that she eyed him sidelong. “He said he wasn’t a thing. And that putting a collar on him meant I thought of him as a thing.”
“Did you? Consider him a thing? Like your footstool or your shovel?”
He looked alarmingly intense. Mieve met his gaze. “No.” She gave the question a little more consideration, still looking him in the eye. “I considered him a subordinate. Some people, I know that’s how they treat their Kept. Maybe he’d had a Keeper like that before me. But I, heck, I live out here all alone.” She smiled at him, feeling it stretch her mouth with a sort of humor she hadn’t felt in a while. Maybe that was unwise, with him staring like he was trying to read her soul, but she couldn’t help it. “If I wanted someone to help out and not be a person around me, I’d have gotten a dog. I mean, I have the Words for animals.”
He smirked slowly. “That’s really why you took the gag off every night.”
“A little,” she admitted. “But it motivated you to work harder, didn’t it?”
“You’re kind of clever, in a scary way,” he admitted. “So, you get lonely? That makes sense, just you and your bees.”
“That sounds a little bit pitiful.”
“No.” He shook his head, a thoughtful, considerate gesture. “No, I don’t think it makes you sound pitiful. I think it sounds reasonable, all things considered.”
🐝
Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1241915.html
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Patreon contents for patrons: Winter Photos and a November story
Winter 2011 pictures: We don’t have the snow this year, but I have some nice shots of a year that we did~
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Cetus had stopped struggling when one of them got an arm around his throat.
Before that point, he was pretty sure he’d broken someone’s ribs and someone else’s nose; dislocated three fingers on a grabbing hand and pulled out two handfuls of hair. He’d also twisted his own ankle and sprained his wrist, as well as getting a nasty gash on his forehead, but that was nothing. He’d done worse to himself falling down stairs, when he went through his clumsy phase.
Available for all Patrons!…
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1236155.html. You can comment here or there.
Setting Meme
Okay, that's fun enough to make into a meme:
✍🏻
If I wrote a setting just for you, what would it look like?— Lyn Thorne-Alder (@lynthornealder) January 15, 2017
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsI was playing around with my friends on Twitter (thinking about Month of Letters) and this came up.
So: If I wrote a setting just for you, what would it look like?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1235280.html. You can comment here or there.
Weekend Blog: The Smile Game
Nobody who really knows me would deny that I’m an introvert (Except my mother, who somehow thinks it’s an insult). I like people, sure; I’m not a misanthrope (most days), but I’m perfectly happy not leaving the house for days at a time.
(Caveat: I DO get a little antsy if nobody’s online for a while. I get a lot of my social interaction via electrons)
But I am, despite social anxiety and a habit of hiding in my cave, gregarious, and there’s a little game I play when I am dealing with strangers.
Strangers in service positions, specifically — retail sales people, delivery guys — people I might encounter over and over again but with whom my relationship will almost always be cursory.
I like to see if I can get them to smile.
And, in cases of repeat visits, I like to see if I can make enough of an impression that they smile when I walk in.
Sometimes this takes a long time. At my last job, we had a paycheck-delivery person who was The Grumpiest. But I’d bounce down the stairs and grin at him and say “Hey! My favorite guy! You bring the money!”
Eventually, he smiled. After even longer, he smiled before I said anything.
It’s fun. There’s that thing where if you smile and mean it, it’s not only easier to get other people to smile, but you feel better – and sometimes I could really use the reminder to give myself a pick-me-up. There’s sometimes added benefits, like the extra appetizers my favorite Thai place sometimes slips in for me. And there’s the awesome feeling of someone smiling when they see you not because they have to, but because they remember you.
I’ve finally gotten our bulk-store guy to smile when he sees us. This makes Saturday errands just a little bit sweeter, and I can grin back at him with a private sense of triumph. I won the game!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1234830.html. You can comment here or there.
January By the Numbers Fourteen: The Aardvarks (fiction Piece)
January by the numbers continues (now three days off, meeps~)!
From ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kelkyag‘s prompt “Ancient aardvarks are always achey;” a ficlet.
👷
They called them aardvarks, because they worked on the unknown continents, because they worked at night, and because they burrowed.
They called them aardvarks, and they were the ones who told the rest of them everything they needed to know about their new lands. Explorers, scientists, miners: the aardvarks were all of those, and more.
They worked at night because the suns of the new planets were dangerous, because the screens that would make the world safe for human habitation had not yet been installed. They burrowed, because all the secrets of the world lay under its soil — its mineral balances and its mineable wealth, its loam and its sand and its clay. And every place they went was a new and secret place, an unknown planet that might, at one point, be colonized by convicts and run-aways, drop-outs and adventurers, wild people and quiet people.
It was hard work, and it was rootless work, as deep in the ground as these aardvarks dug. Eventually, they would end up moving on to another planet, another continent, another dig. And another one, and another one. The aardvarks who did their job the best had the fewest roots, for they spent the least time in any given hole.
There was an honor amongst them, these deep-underground adventurers, that no other could touch, not the companies, not their families, not the colonists who came later. And there was a pride, the dig patches worn on one’s coveralls like passport stamps. Some digs were harsher than others, the way these things always were, and so there were a few patches one wore with a special kind of pride and sadness: Gedder-Fess, where only three had walked away. Kor’pek, where it was said that anywhere from two to twenty had lived (depending on the tale-teller), but half of them had gone absolutely stark raving mad. Loliarinaethellie, where the patch almost guaranteed you were missing fingers, toes, maybe an arm or a leg.
They worked until they’d left more pieces in the digs than they could stand to lose, or until they found a mustering-out point at some dig slated to run long, where they could Advise and Account, talk to the people and talk to the companies, and no longer handle the shovels and the picks and the fussy little brushes and slides. And they were always achy, always tired, and always willing to tell the tale of every dig they’d been at.
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January By the Numbers Thirteen: Poise (fiction Piece)
January by the numbers continues (now two days off~)!
From kelkyag‘s prompt “Poise;” a ficlet.
This one turned out a little weird~~
🍹
It means weight.
Well, it doesn’t mean weight, but it’s all about weight.
Poise. When I was little, I thought “being poised to” was the same as “being poisoned” and I thought if someone was poised to, say, leap, it was because someone had poisoned their mind.
(Speaking of leaps, I made quite a few strange ones when I was young)
Turns out a poison is a potion, and not necessarily a weighty one.
Turns out a potion, if you mix it just properly, can actually stand in for proper poise.
Or not mixed with much care at all: a libation (meaning a sacrificial wine, poured out for a deity, or, I suppose, for one’s fallen friends) can do the same, albeit only if ingested in small amounts.
But back to poise. I needed some. I am a small woman and one without much weight to my manner; people underestimate me, they under-value me, and they often undermine me, because I have so little weight.
So I indulged in a small libation, poured a tithe out for those who hadn’t made it this far, and climbed the thirty-seven flights up to the witch’s apartment.
It might have been a potion; it might have been a poison. I watched her mix it with far too little interest in which.
From underestimated to under-taken was not really where I wanted to go; I wanted to be under-writ. But at that moment, I found I had far too little concern for which way it went.
That happens, I’ve been told, when one is under a great weight (and so we return, again, to weight).
I drank down the thing the witch had brewed for me, hoping for poise. Hoping for enough weight, enough gravitas (which actually means seriousness, nothing to do with weight, but hey), to do what needed to be done.
Poised. I was poised to talk to the big bosses. Now the question was… was I also poisoned?
🍹
Next: Poise-oned – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1256733.html
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1233573.html. You can comment here or there.
A Story about a Pegasus, for @midnight_Blaze_
So, unsurprisingly (look at the user icon), Midnight_blaze_ told me
“WRITE!
>.>
<.<
A story about pegasuses!”
So, here’s a story about a pegasus, set in a magical-apocalypse setting I created for a submission story I never finished (The concept being magical animals).
🐎
Lodestone could remember being an ordinary horse.
Not in words, not really; Lodestone remembered the taste of fresh grass and the sadder flavor of drought-dried pasture, the feeling of a saddle, the difference between a good rider and a bad rider.
Lodestone remembered being spooked. Being spooked was almost the hardest thing to get over. That, and the feeling that she needed her herd with her.
Lodestone missed her herd. But when the great brightness had come and the explosion had split the sky, something had changed. Not for all of them. It had been Lodestone and Jareth that the strange light touched, while the others in the herd remained…
Well, they remained horses. Jareth had grown taller, his bony back smoothed out, his coat brightened from grey to silver. The silver had touched a horn, and his hooves had changed, being just as silver, being furry and cloven.
Lodestone had not seen any of this. Jareth told her once, later, how much it had hurt, when the horn grew, when his body changed. He hadn’t needed to. Lodestone remembered the wings. She remembered feeling like she had been split apart.
She remembered the look of horror on her rider’s face as she ran out to the barn, dressed in her pajamas, staring at Jareth and Lodestone. She remembered the way it felt when her rider – when Tabitha – tried to cast a spell, the way Tabitha often did, pulling the magic and making the words.
(Words, Magic, Spell; Lodestone had not known those words before that moment, but she remembered them anyway.)
She remembered rearing up into the air, her own now-opal hooves flashing and her wings – wings! spreading, and the magic Tabitha had meant to cast coming out of her mouth.
Lodestone could remember being an ordinary horse. But the time for being ordinary animals had passed for her and Jareth, and there were many more non-ordinary beasts to find.
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Now on Patreon: Soup for Christmas (A recipe blog) and
🍜
I’ve mentioned a couple times that my parents are going vegan. For my mom, this isn’t all that much of a stretch – she’s been lackadaisically vegetarian my whole life – but for Dad, well, this is all new.
So I’ve been trying out vegan recipes for them. For the last three, four years we’ve been making Mom a jar of soup (I don’t know why Dad doesn’t like soup, I really don’t, but soup is for Mom & cake is for Dad), and then a dessert for Dad as part of our Christmas presents to them. Part of the gift is perfecting a recipe so Mom can make it later, if she likes it.
Available for all $7-and-up Patrons!
Originally posted February 16, 2014. Set in my Faerie Apocalypse setting.
🌨️
“I don’t think we can, exactly, call him ‘Old Man Winter.’”
Giselle was feeling argumentative. Of course, Giselle was often feeling argumentative.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1232945.html. You can comment here or there.
MARKED – Lorque is very chatty, isn’t she.
MARKED – 1.12
“A tour?” That had been on the agenda, hadn’t it been? “Could we rest for a minute, first? I know sitting on a train isn’t that exhausting, but I would like to sit on something not moving for a moment.” Nilien sat down on the edge of her bed. “What is it like here?”
“Well, if I gave you a tour…” …
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1232616.html. You can comment here or there.