Archive | November 2018

#Lexember is coming!

Nov30

I decided the Bear Empire needed Ancient Bear, a tongue used in magery, rituals, religion, and medicine that looks nice to chant.

And here is Lexember.

I’m gonna do this backwards: I’m gonna start making up a few words, and then work the language around them.  I have a couple ideas for phoneme and morpheme sets, but since this one is for flavor in books, I might steal the grammar of Latin wholesale.

First, I need words.

So I’m taking prompts for words.  I will TRY to do a noun and a verb every day, but I’m not going to stress about this.

And past experience has shown that if you ask me for the word for cheese, I end up with the whole dairy system.

BUT

Don’t ask me for the word for cheese, please.

Instead, think about a spell (If you’re reading Running in the Bear Empire or if you’re Eseme and reading OTStrange, you’ve seen some spells).

Then think about the words you might use for that spell.

Or just suggest a spell and I’ll go from there.

Go!

 

  1.  the spell for making your sleeping space safe and comfortable
  2. Does how you would address the Mother Bear count?
  3. Vermin. As in the spell to get rid of vermin from your house.

Two “PrepTober” Pieces

Nov29

These have been sitting in my drafts bin for a bit, but here we go…

Based on Twitter Prompts

“Write your character sick“  – Deline, Bear Empire, some time before the book

“Bear Claws don’t get sick.”

Deline had been saying this for a week, but the evidence was mounting up against her: chills, fever, an unfortunate habit of losing whatever she put in her stomach, an increasing inability to stand up.

“We don’t.   It’s part of the magic of the Claw.  It’s part of the initiation, it’s part of what we are.  We don’t get sick.”  She wasn’t really arguing with Anire, her husband’s junior wife; she was more arguing with the facts.
Anire had never turned down a fight.  She looked Deline up and down and huffed.

“Well then, someone poisoned you.  Or cast a nasty sort of magery on you.  Something like that.  Either way, you cannot go on a mission today, and you shouldn’t be going to a formal dinner. You shouldn’t be going anywhere except to bed.”  Anire took a firm hold on Deline’s arm and tugged.

It was a sign of how miserable that Deline was feeling that she didn’t feel strong enough to resist the tug.  “We have to be at that dinner.  Any absence, any of the four of us, it will be noted.”

“This, this is why you need another husband.  You need someone to send you to bed and then take your regrets to the dinner.  You need someone to tell you when you’re being foolish, Deline.  And make sure that you don’t knock yourself over.  If you’d listened to me, if you hadn’t gone out on that hunt yesterday-”

“Enough.”  Deline tried to put some firmness in her voice, but she found she had none to offer.  “Enough, Anire.  I will go to bed and sleep until an hour before the dinner.  You can send your junior husband in, if you’re worried about me staying in place.  And then, when it’s time for the dinner, I will put on my best gown and my best bright-eyes spell, and I will walk around.  Then, if someone has poisoned me, they will see that they’ve failed.”

“Sleep.”  Anire shoved Deline lightly into bed and hauled a blanket over her.  “If you sleep now and drink broth when I bring it to you, I will make sure someone wakes you up in time for you to dress for the dinner.  But if you give me any trouble at all, I’m going to sit on you, and we will both miss that dinner, and the scandal can say that we would rather spend the day in bed together than meet with the governors.  Which, considering it’s the Lynx and Elk governors, has more than a small grain of truth to it.  Sleep, Deline.”
Deline blinked up at her husband’s junior wife, wondering why she looked as if she was shining.  “Sleep,” she agreed.  She was so cold.  “Another blanket?”

“Another blanket.  And, you know, Deline.  I’m a Claw, too.  You know I know there’s no such thing as magic to keep you from getting sick.”  Anire kissed her forehead lightly.  “Rest, Sister Claw.  I’ll watch your back.”

Continue reading →

Funerary Rites 31: Orders

Nov28

🔑

“I’m just saying, she knows more than she’s saying.”

Ezer was following Senga and Erramun around the house.

This might have been adorable in a normal case, but since Senga was trying to get a moment or seven alone with Erramun, it was growing a little frustrating.

“And I’m saying, of course she does.”  Senga checked the back door to the garden – the one in the Sturdy – and found it, too, locked.

Her cousins were fae.  They couldn’t enter a house without an invitation, any more than she could. But that wouldn’t stop them from sending an agent, or a team of them, if they thought it would work.

“What do you mean, of course she does?” Continue reading →

Thimbleful Thursday: Enigma

Nov27

It came out over coffee, the way many things do.

In the Bureau of Enigmas, there was an entire department devoted to Mapping, and yet the seven of them rarely consulted.  Each would pick a phenomenon – or, more often, be assigned one – and would map out its trends.

This was not, despite the name, soley geographic mapping, but tracking over time and over demographic notes.

The Bureau covered such a large span of enigmas – cryptids and their wake at one end, the Tiny Ones at the other end – that there was always some trend that needed documenting, some break in reality that needed following and studying so that, if the study itself did not heal it (and in 45.6% of the time, it did), those that were tasked with dealing with such things could do their job equipped with the most information possible. Forewarned is forearmed, the saying went, and in the Bureau of Enigmas, forearmed often meant the difference between life and death.

Still, despite the work, there were always coffee breaks.  And when three Mappers happened to be sipping dark, fresh coffee with the slight taste of the Other-Sphere, they did as all people did, whatever the papers or oaths or soul-binding contacts suggested, and they chatted.

Today they were chatting about three things with no pattern, a plague, a spate of madness, and a serial killer.  None of them appeared to be settling into anything regular.  None of them were predictable, and predictable was important.

Until one mentioned Chicago and the other two stared.

Twenty minutes later, coffee forgotten, they had put their three maps together.  There, in Chicago, there was their nexus.  And from there-

“There’s a method,” one of them breathed.

“It’s madness,” another one muttered.  But most of what they did was madness.

“But it’s a shape,” the third agreed.  “There’s a pattern to the madness.”

They rang an intern to tell Field.  They had their Enigma.

 

Written To Oct. 25th’s Thimbleful Thursday Prompt, although not really in the wordcount. 

Want more?

Community Service

Nov27

Originally posted on Patreon in November 2018 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

 After The Fairy Road and Planting Some Good on my blog and The Cats’ Ways  on Patreon.

 🏞️

The storm had come through the city in a rush and left much the same way, like the sort of relative you never really wanted to have staying in your house, leaving everything a disaster zone behind it.

There were branches down on every street; there were power lines down all over the place.  Work was closed.  The city was closed.

And Whitney was in the park.  It seemed,  if she’d been asked – which she hadn’t – like the thing to do; you cleaned up.  Her apartment building had power – slightly erratic, but better than nothing – so she’d cooked everything that might go bad and brought it all, stacked in her biggest coolers with warming pads, to the park with her.

She shared with the couple homeless folk who refused to go anywhere else.  She shared with the policeman who was doing his best to walk a beat; she shared, of course, with the cats and with the Cat.  She shared with the line workers, even though she knew that they didn’t mind the overtime.

In between sharing food, she moved branches and detritus.  She picked up someone’s schoolwork – Tyler Halpert – and put it in a neat stack under one of the little roofed areas, along with the newspaper, the paperwork from the insurance office, and some sort of mail that came in a red envelope with hearts drawn on it.

When she looked back, there was a ghost sitting on it.  She smiled at the ghost; he smiled at her.  They both went on with their days.

Whitney thought nothing of it when she saw the policeman talking on his radio.  That was his job, after all.  She was much more surprised when three vans pulled up. Continue reading →

Hidden Mall 45: We’re Not Safe

Nov26

Abby swallowed against the intensity of Vic’s voice and forced herself to be strong.  “Is it you, then?  Because the only thing that wanted to hurt me before I came in here was you.”

Vic gave her a level, cold look. “I don’t know how it was in your reality, but in mine, that is complete BS.  Sure, I gave you shit.  But who gave you the black eye in eighth grade?”

Abby shuddered.  “Alec Harden.”

“I thought so.  And that rumor about you and Tem Brenner, that wasn’t me.  That wasn’t even Tem, which I could almost see.  No matter how lame you are, you’re still a step up for that piece of trash.”

Abby snorted. “You said the same thing.  I mean, in my world.” Continue reading →

Bits of a story born from a dream

Nov24

The dream ended the first time at about the first scene below, after the viewpoint character was Undergoing A Complicated Challenge In the Nether Realms, but she was definitely the daughter of (someone important in hell) and (someone female important some other way).  The story has been tiddling around in my head since. 

~

“That’s a nice collar.”  Her fingers brushed the air near it.  “Would you like to wear mine instead?”

“Dey…” Chris’s words were a warning.  “You just saw her…”

“I saw her climb out of the Nether Realms like she owned the place.”   Dey was a little impressed.  He was also more than a little turned on. “And now she wants to put her collar on me?” Continue reading →

For The Best

Nov21

Dark Hermione, complicit Harry, post-books and ignoring the Epilogue.

This is mad magiscience, with most of the actual results being offscreen, but it still involves attempting to reproduce the effects of the Imperius Curse without using an Unforgivable, and it does involve human (wizard) experimentation.

And I kind of want to expand it.

Continue reading →

Quite Pleasant

Nov20

Story written to @SkySailor’s prompt on Mastodon, because it is that sort of day. 

Content warning: Non-consensual sex (not in detail but definitely there), incarceration, impregnation, transportation, and almost anything else you can think of that ends in – ation

Continue reading →

Hidden Mall 44: Story

Nov19

They made it into the health-food store with nothing breaking under them and nobody insulting anyone else.  The way the day had been going, Abby was going to take that as a victory.

The store had clearly been picked over, but there were still a few sports drinks and chewy meal-replacement bars on the shelves, as well as some smaller containers of protein powder.  While they ate – first making sure Vic-starving got something into her stomach – Vic tried to explain things. Continue reading →