Archive | May 6, 2020

Detention

May6

I’m having a writing retreat day!  Tell your friends!  Tell your foes!  Tell everyone~

This prompt (two prompts, combined) – from @marionline@mastodon.art

~*~

It was the sort of thing that people – teachers, specifically, Mrs. Gruble, very specifically – thought was clever. 

Ani and Charlie had never gotten along, not since – well, if Ani was going to put a date on it, or a First Event, it was the second time they met, which would have been the third preschool Ani had gone to, the good one, the one that was fun, the one where Ani fit in.

Until Charlie showed up.

And that – that had been their entire school life.  Not just school. Scouts. Church. 4-H.  You name it – it wasn’t that big a town – and Ani and Charlie were both in it. And they were at loggerheads. 

But of course, since teachers like Mrs. Gruble only saw a tiny fraction of it, they tended to think that they knew what was going on, and they tended to think that it was nothing important, nothing rational, nothing but a little spat or something. 

Which is how Ani and Charlie had ended up working on a project together, which was how they’d both ended up with detention, which was how they had ended up in the theatre’s prop room, moving things around, sorting out ancient backgrounds, and cleaning everything. Twice.  Thrice, possibly. 

Which was okay – the theatre prop room was pretty big  – until they both sighted a really nice tiara in the middle of the room, right on the line that they’d agreed on, mostly silently, was their borderline.  Continue reading →

Malina and the Border Banners, Chapter 11 (A Story for B)

May6

Began here.
Chapter 2 here
Chapter 3 here.
Chapter 4 here.
Chapter 5 here.
Chapter 6 here.
Chapter 7 here.
Chapter 8 here.
Chapter 9 here.
Chapter 10 here.

 

 

The bed was soft and fluffy; it smelled of an herb Malina could almost remember and it felt like sleeping in a pile of silk and feathers, which she thought might be a bit more accurate than intended. 

The sand-cat slept on the pillow Malina wasn’t using, and thankfully, he did not snore. 

She had fallen asleep far more easily than she’d expected – a strange place with nothing but the reassurances of a cat that she was safe; a place far from home where magic seemed to do all the housekeeping, when she had considered magic something that was barely in one’s life, or at least barely in her life; a place where she was still, when she came down to it, quite lost.  She had slept solidly, but as the sun filtered in through screens of silk, paper, wood, and stone, all of her dreams were loud in her memory. 

She opened her eyes to the bedroom, the Queen’s sleeping-chamber, which was draped in silk so that the limestone walls seemed very far away, although it was not a huge room.  She closed her eyes to pull back to mind the banners flying in the air, crisp and perfect.  

“Three spears azure, upright, oh, bother.”  Malina furrowed her brow.  “I was never good at all that terminology.  Three spears azure, upright, per chevron, with tips bloody, on a field vert, the border or.”  She saw the banner fluttering, and it seemed to her like the blood on the spears, the spears themselves, were suddenly real.  

“The three chiefs of the place that became the Ever-Flowing Fountain, the Karanala.”  The cat had not yet opened his eyes.  It didn’t seem to matter.  “They lay their spears down on the green grass where it still remained green and not red with blood, and they swore an ever-lasting peace, so long as the fountain flowed.” Continue reading →

Weird

May6

I’m having a writing retreat day!  Tell your friends!  Tell your foes!  Tell everyone~
See more about Katydid and Whitney here – http://www.lynthornealder.com/category/verse/fairytown/ 

~*~

It was one of the weird days.

You’d have thought that, considering that she’d set herself to restoring a park in a city that was known for the magic flowing through it and the oddities in its shadows and in its sunbeams, a park that was a crossroads at the center of that city (if you read the right map), a park where the ghosts and the spirits were as likely to advise her and help her as the local gardening groups were, possibly more so, where a giant but see-through cat followed her around for the treats (along with the slightly more mundane cats, who were interested in  more mundane treats), well, with all that, you’d have thought that Whitney didn’t have weird days anymore. Continue reading →