Archive | March 2017

Funeral: Negotiation

Mar19

First: Funeral
Previous: Funeral: Silence’s Inheritance.

Muirgen was still being handled by the security men; they had her in a corner and one of them was speaking very quietly to her. Senga ignored that situation as firmly as she could. Muirgen would not forgive her for having seen her in a foolish state, any more than she’d forgive Senga for having gotten something she wanted.

If today went as typical, Muirgen and Eavan would probably blame her for Muirgen’s loss of her inheritance. That was on par with their normal behavior around Senga or any of the other cousins who weren’t them.

She’d worry about that later. Right now, she had more important things on her mind.

She looked around; he’d only been gone a few moments before she stepped out of the office. Where had he gotten to? Had he left? She resisted the urge to swear. If he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain, he was going to leave her in a pretty precarious position. He’d need to be here after the reading. Otherwise… well. It was going to be a mess.

Not like she should expect that to matter to a complete stranger when her own family had put her in this situation….

There he was. She could’ve sworn she’d looked at that corner of the room before and seen nothing, but he was standing there, looking at her. Senga crossed the room, moving around mourners while trying not to lose sight of him. Mr. Silence. Erramun.

He was playing with an unlit cigarette. He noticed her coming up to him but said nothing. She thought about saying something, but the situation was a bit awkward. Hello, please agree to Belong to me so my family doesn’t kill me…

“My Name isn’t Silence.” His voice was gravely this time. “It’s just something I use to have a last name on the papers.”

She looked at him and waited. That sounded like an opener.

“It’s Death Comes Silently. You know what I did for your aunt.” He looked down at her. He looked considerably taller than she’d noticed him being before.

She cleared her throat. “I have a pretty good idea.”

“I’m not going to kneel.”

She was about to say something, to plead with him, when he continued.

“I won’t wear a leash. I won’t beg for food.” His gaze seemed to bore into her. “I won’t be told what to wear. Except for your funeral.” His lips curled upwards a little. “I can agree to wear black for that.”

No wonder his clothes looked new. She cleared her throat and made herself meet his gaze. “Those are acceptable terms. Anything else?”

She was going to work under that assumption, that they were terms, because otherwise he was using too many words to tell her that she was fucked.

He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t object to any of that?”

“Why would I? I didn’t sign up for a…” She remembered where they were and changed mid-sentence. “-a bond servant. I didn’t sign up for any sort of inheritance at all. I don’t know what Aunt Mirabella’s holding over you-”

“And if I have my way, you won’t. Ever.”

“-and that’s fine. What she’s holding over me is survival, among other things. As long as Clause Seven is in effect, the family won’t kill me.”

“Nice family you’ve got. What did you do to them?”

“I. Well, most of it, I don’t want to say here. Some of it is, I survived. My father didn’t. I wasn’t supposed to survive.”

“Mirabella always did work by some interesting rules. So. Those terms, they don’t bother you? Maybe I should have more.”

“I think you should,” she agreed. “Something about your emotions, probably. Something about sleeping arrangements. Hrrm. Sex.”

“Excuse me?” She’d either managed to startle or offend him.

“Sex,” she repeated. Her voice was quiet enough that she didn’t think it would carry, but she lowered it a bit anyway. “If you get it. If it can be a reward or a punishment. How much say you have in it.”

“…You’re being quite thorough. You don’t want to determine all that yourself?”

“We’re into negotiation territory.” She lifted her chin and looked him in the eyes. “Like you said, I know what you did for Great-Aunt Mirabella. It behooves me to make sure, if you’re going to not risk Envelopes A, B, and C, that I don’t end up with you hating me.”

“You’d care if your… bond servant… hated you?”

“Even if you weren’t… what you are, sa’Death Comes Silently.” She was certain he deserved the honorific and, from his expression, just as certain he rarely got it. “Yes. I’d care. As I said.” His eyes were not brown. They were gold and brown and green all at once. “I’m the white sheep of the family.”

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Beauty-Beast 2: Keeper’s Interview

Mar19

Previous/First – Landing Page – Next

🔒

“All right. Now… can you lean against me a little bit, let me hold your weight? Like that, yes. You were left kneeling too long, and you may be trained, but I know for a fact training goes out the window when you’re panicking. So. My name is Timaios, and Ermenrich wanted something from me that I didn’t particularly want to give up. That means you’re mine now.”

“I’m yours. Sir.” Ctirad’s voice was a raw rumble. He wasn’t trying to modify it; he wasn’t even sure he should. Ermenrich had wanted… but what Ermenrich had wanted didn’t matter anymore. He hadn’t wanted Ctirad.

From the chuckle from behind him, it seemed like he’d probably made the right choice. “Yes. All right. So what you need to know about me. I’m a businessman – no, you can stay there, lean. Let your legs rest for a bit. So. I know you’re nervous, but I want to know who it is I just bought.”

“Why can’t I look at you? Sir.” Ctirad cleared his throat. “That is… No, that’s what I meant.”

He was expecting to be scolded or hit or pushed away any moment now, but Timaios did none of those things. Instead, he ran a hand through Ctirad’s hair.

“Because I’m selfish, and I want to know who it is that I’ve purchased. So tell me something about yourself.”

That was an order. “I’m short.” The words came out without volition. He cleared his throat again and tried again. “I… can play chess but I prefer Go.”

Timaios squeezed Ctirad’s upper arm. “These aren’t muscles you got playing chess.”

“I play with very big pieces. Sir.”

It was a risk. He was feeling like taking risks. It made him straighten up a little, made his voice deeper again.

Timaios chuckled. “This I may have to see, you realize. Take you up on it, get you some ‘very big pieces.’ Then again…” He trailed off. “Something else about you?”

That time, he had a chance to think. “I didn’t ask to be Kept, but I don’t object to serving.”

“Very interesting. Thank you for that. One more thing, and then I’ll turn you around.”

Ctirad cleared his throat. “What do you want to know, sir?”

“I want to know what sort of things you tell me without direction, of course.” Timaios patted Ctirad’s shoulder. “Tell me one more thing about yourself.”

Urgh, another order. “I’ve forgotten what my favorite color is.” It came out in a hurry. It covered over things he didn’t want to say. And it surprised him. From the sound behind him, it surprised Timaios, too.

🔒

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Continuation Poll Two!

Mar19

I’ve written a lot of little stuff as I fight all these bushes…

What should I work on continuing next?

By request, now with the ability to chose up to half the list.

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New kid moves in next door, a story beginning

Mar19

The apartment next door to Ainsley’s family’s home had been vacant since the Hawkings had left precipitously in the middle of the night, back when Ainsley was twelve. By this point, four years later, Ainsley and her sister Sinclair had started working on an application for the place. When they were both of age, they posited, they could move two or more mates in there easily enough, and still be close to their parents.

Now there were people moving in, moving in to their place.

“People don’t just move in.” Sinclair was staring at the wall between the two places. There wasn’t much noise – the Complex was well-engineered for many people in close proximity – but it felt like an invasion nonetheless. “Nobody moves in to the Complex.”

“Well,” Ainsley offered weakly. “Is it the Mccormicks? Their boys are just a couple years older than us – maybe they had the same idea.”

They opened the front door and peeked down the hallway around the potted plants their mothers had put up “to make it look more like a home”.

“Definitely not the Mccormicks,” Sinclair whispered. “They’re too tall. Who’s that tall, seriously?”

“Kind of cute, though… But they’re… tan. That’s…”

The Complex had sun lamps, because the plants in the hydro farms needed them, the animals down in the Ark level got twitchy without them, and humans functioned better with them. But that wasn’t the sort of tanned these people were.

“They’re Outsiders,” Sinclair hissed. “From…” She fell silent as the tallest of the family turned around and looked straight at them.

🏨
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Getting to (Re-)Know him (Cya)

Mar18

After Cya gets ready for a date and Almost Out the Door for a Date and Trying Again and Blind Dateand Catching Up.

Cya studied Manus thoughtfully. “You like Montana?”

“Let’s just say… I like what you’ve done with the place. I’m not old enough to remember Montana,” he admitted, “but I like the Cloverleaf region. You’re still here, though. When I was here, I thought maybe you’d move on.”

“I hope you’re not disappointed.” She struggled to keep anything out of her voice. Life had been easier, in a manner of speaking, when she just wasn’t feeling things.

“Oh, not at all.” He looked at her. “Something’s changed in you.” He flopped a hand. “Thirty years, a lot has changed, I’m sure. I’ve grown up, changed, I imagine you have too. But you’re a lot more animated.”

“I’ve been, ah. Learning a lot about myself.” She shrugged. “So you stuck around?”

“I worked for a caravan for a while. I’m pretty good as a guard, and there were trade caravans that were having trouble with bandits and Nedetakaei, wyverns and wolves. And that worked out fine, but when I talked a bandit out of attacking, he decided that I should be working for him for a while… so that was about four years.” He grinned, lopsided and not at all abashed. “Turns out I like working for people. I probably should’ve figured that bit out a while ago. But I didn’t like…” the smile slipped. “Well, I didn’t like what he was doing. So I moved on, which took some work, let me tell you. Did a few other things before I ended up with this judge-like gig. I like it.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at her. “I get why you built a city, now.”

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The Trouble With Chickens…

Mar18

“The trouble with chickens,” Professor Feltenner had written in her journal, “is that they don’t scale very well. And when they scale up, their instincts do not. They have been domesticated for far too long. What I need is a wild chicken, a chicken who has never been bred for tameness and domesticity. That, then, should be clever enough for what I need.”

Professor Feltenner’s travels into the jungles were the stuff of academic legend. It had become the very morbid joke around the university that if you did not like a student, it was a clever idea to get them to take Feltenner’s classes, because there was a very good chance she would then take them with her on one of her summertime or winter-break expeditions – and then there was a very, very good chance that they would not return.

Professor Feltenner, on the other hand, always returned – even that last time, that fateful trip when she came back with one bedraggled grad student, two smallish cages, and a man named Gorvald she claimed to have found in the middle of the jungle. Since Gorvald’s accent spoke of the Rus and the far-Eastern mountain ranges, everyone at the university raised eyes at that – but Gorvald was good with the things in the cages, and someone needed to be. Gods above knew the poor grad student whimpered every time she saw so much as a feather.

“The trouble with chickens ought to be solved by working with a more pure specimen,” Professor Feltenner wrote in her journal. “Today, Gorvald and I begin the experiment on the junglefowl we have acquired. With luck, working from an enlarged junglefowl pair, we can begin breeding better and juicier meat with a much more sensible bird.”

The junglefowls’ thoughts on that were never properly recorded; once they had dealt with Professor Feltenner, they (with brains that scaled up, it seemed, much better than their domestic counterparts’) opened the doors to the lab and fled, taking several carriage-sized domestic fowl with them. You could hear their cries late at night in the forests near the University, and the professors had a new way to rid themselves of difficult students.

Next: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2017/04/30/the-trouble-with-theories/

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Bridges in Walls – a fic continuation of Dragons Next Door

Mar18

After Sturdy Walls

The Tinies had appointed an ambassador to come speak to Anne. Said ambassador had a beard nearly to his feet, was wearing a very sharp bottle-cap hat with trimmings of what looked like gold wire and the ribbon she’d misplaced, and had a quiet voice that nevertheless was somehow very hard to ignore.

“I am Yeg-Tren-Opar, and I am the elder of this family.” He sat down politely in the small cushion Anne provided – the lining from a jewelry box that had come with some familial present last year. “You present to us an interesting conundrum, and as you seem sensible, we thought we would share that conundrum with you in turn.”

“I’m willing to hear your conundrum,” she offered as formally as possible. She was talking to tiny people. Some part of her brain was squealing with that. Tiny. People. Who lived, it appeared, in the wall behind her kitchen.

“You are, as far as we can tell, a human.”

“That’s my understanding.” She spoke with humans every day who took themselves at least as seriously as this small man. She could keep her face straight even when she thought she was saying or hearing ridiculous things.

The thing was, she wasn’t entirely sure this was ridiculous.

“This house is in Smokey Knoll, but the positioning of such has meant that, from time to time, it passes into human hands. This can cause some problems, as humans and Tiny Folk do not always get along.”

“The previous residents of this house…”

The elder lifted his tiny, bushy eyebrows. “Moved out.”

There was a world of meaning in those two words. Anne sat back and considered them.

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Beauty-Beast 1: Sold

Mar17

Landing Page – Next

🔒

Ctirad knelt.

He ducked his head down low and folded his hands behind his back. He wasn’t really looking at anything.

His Keeper had sold him. He wasn’t supposed to have done that. It wasn’t against the Law, Ctirad supposed, but it was an awful feeling, that way his Keeper’s hand had brushed over his jaw, lingered, and then left. “The thing is,” Sir Ermenrich had purred, “you were a lot of fun when you were new and angry. But now I need to make a deal, and you were the best bargaining chip I had.”

So Ctirad knelt. His jaw was set. His hands were perfect. He was showing nothing, not a goddamned thing. And he was most definitely not falling apart inside.

“Rise.”

He hadn’t even heard anyone enter. He rose, like he was pulled up on strings, mortified to find his legs weren’t sure about holding him.

“Oh, easy there.” As he stumbled, he felt an arm around his waist, catching him, holding him up. “Easy, easy. Your legs fall asleep?”

The touch sent fire through him and long streaks of warm pleasure. Ctirad tried to focus on the facts and not the emotions. Someone was holding him up. Someone whose voice controlled him.

He turned to look, but found a hand in his hair, holding his head. “Not yet. Eyes forward or close your eyes, your choice. Were your legs asleep?”

Ctirad swallowed and closed his eyes. “Yes, sir. I know better, but… yes, sir.” He was not feeling any more sanguine about his situation.

🔒

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Catching Up, Cya

Mar17

After Cya gets ready for a date and Almost Out the Door for a Date and Trying Again and Blind Date.

“You look good.”

It was no surprise he was handsome, of course; for one, he was from Addergoole, where handsome was the norm, and for another, she’d picked him to be her Kept, which almost always meant that they fit within her two very specific types.

It wasn’t what she meant, in this case.

He smirked back at her and pretended to misunderstand. “Good genes.” He brushed away her response before she could say it. “I’ve been doing well. Doing good, too.” He ducked his head and grinned up at her through a sudden fringe of brown-black hair, a trick he’d excelled at thirty years ago and seemed to have been practicing. “Turns out your lessons stick.”

She sipped her water and studied him. “I’m not looking for someone to teach lessons to, right now.”

“If you were,” he teased, his smiled wide, “You’d be at Addergoole and not on a blind date, right?”

“Exactly. You know, there was a time when they tried to threaten me to stop Keeping people.”

“I can imagine. It was probably a little worrying for them, having someone they distrust scooping people up every year.” HIs smile turned a little crooked. “Not that your Kept don’t benefit.”

“Well, that’s the idea…. half the idea,” she admitted. “I like having Kept around, too.”

“I’d noticed.” It was his turn to sip his drink. “You know I liked being around, too? I mean, most of the time.”

“I guessed. I’m not good with – with emotions.” It grated to admit that, but if she’d learned anything with all the work she’d been doing with Leo, it was that. “But you didn’t seem miserable, at least.”

“I knew I wasn’t ready for the world, I just, well, didn’t think what I was ready for was a collar.” He shrugged a little. “It was a good year. And, like I said, you rubbed off on me.”

“Doing good, you said.” She eyed him thoughtfully over her cup. “What sort of good?”

“Oh, you know, building walls, mending fences, working as a diplomat-slash-small-town sheriff and judge. Pretty much I tell people that the black cow is Farmer Gonzales’ and the white cow is Farmer Jones’, and they both agree to let me make that decision, and the I do the same thing between Neihart Mt. and the next two city-states that aren’t, well, here. I do a lot of talking.”

“I don’t remember you being all that talkative.”

“I’m not, normally.” He smirked crookedly at her. “But it turns out I’m good at it, and they needed someone who wasn’t from around there. Since I’m from the East Coast…”

“Oh, dead gods, I didn’t strand you, did I?”

“Oh, hey, no. I never wanted to go home. And you offered to have your teleporter take me anywhere, remember?” He shook his head. “We’re good. I just wanted to stay here.”

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Black Thumb, a Thimbleful Story

Mar17

“Shit.” Consia flopped down by her failed garden. “I have a black thumb. I can’t keep anything alive.” She ran her fingers through dead leaves. “Carrots! The book said they were great for kids.“

She wasn’t talking to anyone in particular – the cat didn’t care, and there was nobody else around. Her house had been isolated before everything ended; half her neighbors had died and the other half had fled. That left her and the cat. She was running out of food from her neighbors’ cupboards. “I’m going to die because I can’t grow a freaking carrot”

“You know, you could just come with us.”

That was not the cat. Consia rolled to her feet to face three men, the foremost of whom was leering at her. They weren’t skinny. That was the first thing she noticed. How in the names of a billion gods-like-rats were they not skinny when the world had ended?

The answers that came to mind seemed no more reassuring than the man’s smile.

“I’d like to stay here.”

“Well, we were going to take your food, but I guess we can’t do that. So we’ll take you instead, put you to some use. And if we can’t,” he leered, “then… Long pig gets tasty after a while.”

Consia stared at them. “Excuse me?” Her voice was steel; new, strange steel. Something was growing in her.

“I said, darling, we’re going to work you or eat you.”

“I thought so.” Not steel. Ironwood. She was standing, growing taller. “No. Go away.”

“Oh, darling, I don’t think-”

The vine that shot out of his mouth wasn’t a carrot, but it looked like it would bear fruit. Consia stretched; the yard, no, everything came to life.

The formerly-dead raspberry bush up front caught his friends. Consia glanced at the cat.

“Those are yours,” she told it. “I’m going to see to the carrots.”

Her thumbs were solid green. She figured that was a small price to pay.

Written to yesterday’s Thimbleful Thursday prompt & part of my fae apoc ‘verse

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