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Addergoole Is Back! Ghost Story, Chapter 1: Leofric

Mar6

Addergoole – Chapter 1: Leofric

Leofric pulled his backpack out of his gym locker, slinging it over his shoulder with a cheerful smile at one of his classmates (kinda tall, muscular, and answering his smile with a glower that practically said “what’re you looking at”) before making his way past and out the door. It was the end of the school day, which normally he didn’t care about much — but this school day was only the second at his new school, Addergoole. His new boarding school. New, underground boarding school.

Plus, he had PE last, which meant that he got out earlier than the other classes and could avoid the usual packed halls. Leofric had been surprised how such a tiny school — barely even a hundred students! — could get such crowded halls, but as he’d realized yesterday after classes ended, the halls were really narrow.

read on…

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Love Meme: Reid and Regine

Feb27

The meme is here: Give me the names of two characters and I will tell you why character A loves character B.

Here is [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s third prompt. Reid and Regine are from Addergoole. This was a wee bit tricky~

Reid and Regine

For all of her noble quest to show the value of half-bloods, when Reid met Regine, she still had many of the prejudices of the pure-blooded.

Reid had been dealing with those prejudices for nearly as long as Regine had been having them. He found them irritating on a good day, angering on a bad day, and on his worst days, they tempted him into shouting.

She had a good project, a good plan, and a good point, so he set his jaw and joined her program, and that would have been it – a carefully polite working relationship, line drawn and never budged, colleagues and nothing more.

Except one of those bad days happened through no fault of Regine’s.

There was a phone call. It was a long-distance call, and such things were expensive. It was quiet, it was intense, and nobody but Reid heard it.

And that would’ve been it. He had long experience not blowing his lid, not showing his anger, but Regine chose that day, that exact time when he had just hung up, to ask/demand something in her particularly Grigori way.

And Reid exploded. He snarled and shouted and swore, all of it bloody with the rage that was his birthright and name-right, and informed Regine in no uncertain terms that if she had hired an expert in Mind Workings than she damn well ought to respect his expertise.

And Regine, in a move unprecedented for her, bowed her head and very humbly apologized. And then – and this might have been the kicker – she asked Reid if he would show her the Working she’d been asking about.

It wasn’t a Magic Moment. It didn’t change her forever. But it did allow Reid to talk to her as a colleague and, sometimes, as a friend, and that, in the end, helped more than anything else.

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Head South

Feb26

Cya, after the apocalypse but before her kids go to Addergoole

Cya knew she was one of the good guys.

That was: she knew she was one of Boom, and she knew Boom were the good guys.

She knew that was all that kept her from going off the rails most days.

Some days, all it did was remind her how to cover it up.

She looked at the boy – man – the Kept in front of her and sighed. “You’re a mess, darling,” she muttered. He was sleeping. The Working she’d done would keep him that way for a while.

She wrote him a note anyway, because Cya believed in planning ahead. I had to run an errand. If I’m not back by Wednesday night, take this note to Howard and tell him “look South.”

Of course, almost everything was south from the Ranch, except Canada, but she didn’t want her Kept to guess where she was going.

She took her car. It shouldn’t still be running, but at this stage, she wasn’t the only one with a much-repaired vehicle still on the road, and hey, she could turn dirt into gas, which did help matters.

She tried not to hold on too tight to the steering wheel, but there was a small fire of anger deep in her gut. It was, like everything she felt at that point, a cold fire, a lump rather than a storm.

It was going to hurt someone anyway.

The man sleeping in her bed… When she talked to Addergoole, they told her things were better. They were old fae and had old memories, and they meant Things like what happened to Eris will never happen again. They meant, if it was Luke, who had seen it, or Mike, who paid more attention than he was given credit for, they meant we’ll try to make sure what happened to Leo doesn’t happen again. Leo was harder. She knew that, even though she didn’t really forgive it. Leo’s breaking hadn’t been nearly as visible as Eris bleeding in the halls.

They told her things were better, but there was only so far they were willing to go. Some people just weren’t meant to Keep and some people just shouldn’t be Kept, and those mistakes, Addergoole wasn’t going to fix any time soon.

And sometimes people were just too good at hiding their poison; some people were just too good at hiding their wounds. Agi, the man sleeping on her bed – he was one of those. His keeper had been sharp with her knife and careful, and her abuse had been subtle enough that it had never been picked up on. He’d gone through the next three years at Addergoole thinking it’d been his fault.

She knew the story too well. This time, someone was going to pay.

She held onto the steering wheel a little too tightly and whispered Repair Workings at the road ahead of her. There was no reason not to clean up as she went, and if this went south instead of just South, Howard would have a trail to follow.

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Love Meme: Pelletier and Luke

Feb20

A long time ago

“Don’t mind them.”

The fur-taker looked up to see a man filling her doorway, wings spread, carrying something on a tray. Bowls, mugs – whatever it was, it smelled good.

“Come in,” she offered weakly. The threshold here was so much less than her swamp, so thin she was fairly certain it held only out of courtesy. Even in her little house in the Village, Regine’s magic weighed heavily. In here, in her office…

It was nice of him to pretend, anyway.

“You’re Luca, aren’t you? The Hunting Hawk.”

“And you’re the pelt-taker. Regine said you’re using the name ‘Shira’ here?” He stepped inside and closed the door with his foot.

“It’s close enough.” The Fur-taker wondered if she ought to be worried, but he was not giving off any sense of menace or danger, spread wings or no.

“The others…” He sat down and put the tray between them on a small table. Stew. And tea. “Don’t mind them.”

“You said that already.” Which meant he had more meaning in mind than the words themselves held.

“They’re…” He shrugged. “… Fancy.”

The fur-taker smirked. “And I am not.” She plucked at the hem of her sleeve, a loaned outfit – from Luca here, not from one of the women – and comfortable.

“I’m not, either. But it suits us. They’re not sure about seers. The pure-bloods, they don’t like what they don’t understand.”

The fur-taker smiled her sharp smile, the one that said life is hard. “And they understand so little. But you.” She looked at him, Looked at him, and nodded. “You understand too much. Be ware, Hawk, or it will cripple you.”

It would, she already saw it. But there were paths in which it would free him, too.

The meme is here: Give me the names of two characters and I will tell you why character A loves character B.

Here is [personal profile] chanter_greenie‘s first prompt.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1255494.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Love Meme: Kai and Rozen, Autumn and Ink

Feb15

The meme is here: Give me the names of two characters and I will tell you why character A loves character B.

Here are [personal profile] rix_scaedu‘s second and [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s first prompts. Kailani and Rozen are from Addergoole; Autumn from Stranded World.

Kai and Rozen
End of Year Five

Some days it felt like she hardly had time to think, like Conrad was too busy to even look at her, like nobody in the suite but her would look at Tolly’s child, because the boy was Tolly’s, even though he was hers.

Kai had the twins in a stroller and was walking down the halls. It was a week before graduation; she doubted anyone was going to try to attack her now. Besides, she still had Conrad collared, even if he was acting more like it was a collar now and less like a trophy.

She noticed someone sneaking up on her anyway. One of the Thorne Girls might’ve done something clever, like going around in circles until they were behind their stalker.

Kai wasn’t that sort of clever. She turned around so that the stroller was behind her.

“Rozen.” She found she was pleased but not too startled, and smiled. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Nobody ever does.” He smirked, proud of himself. “You’re looking good, Red. Motherhood suits you.”

“Yeah?” There was nobody around to yell at her for blushing, which was good, because she hadn’t figured out a Working to get around that yet. “Thank you.”

“I mean, it would suit you more if those were my brats, but hey. Take what you can get, hey?”

Kai rolled her eyes at him, but she was still smiling. “They’re not brats. And I think they’re happier with their mother having some free will.”

“Yeah, well.” He leaned down to whisper in her ear, his breath tickling her. “Some day you might feel differently.”

What she felt had nothing to do with it. She didn’t think she needed to say that, though. “Some day.”

He was leaving soon, after all, and it was a big world. She’d probably never see him again.

Autumn and Ink

Autumn would probably always remember the first time she’d put ink to her skin.

Winter was struggling to teach her, their mother was busy with Spring and Summer, and their father had been dead for two years. Autumn’s skills weren’t falling into line with Winter’s, with their mother’s, or even with what they could remember of their father, so she had gone on her own to a family friend and asked him to teach her.

Pastor Jim had taken a long look at the wide-eyed child and sighed. “All right. But we keep this between us and your mother, all right? We don’t need to tell the parishioners.”

“Church magic is church magic and Strand magic is Strand Magic.” Even then, Autumn understood that.

“Good. Now.” He’d called her mother, been very very polite and respectful – everyone was polite and respectful when it came to Autumn’s mother, but he was even more so. When he’d hung up the phone, he’d headed to the daycare section behind the church and come back with some washable Crayola markers. “Let’s see, shall we, if what works for me works for you.”

He drew a circle on the back of Autumn’s wrist, and suddenly, she understood so much more.

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Love Meme: Doug and Fridmar, Cxaidin and Zizny

Feb15

The meme is here: Give me the names of two characters and I will tell you why character A loves character B.

Here are rix_scaedu‘s and kelkyag‘s first prompts. Doug and Fridmar are from Addergoole; Cxaidin and Zizny from Dragons Next Door. To quote Zizny in an earlier piece:

“For a grown adult dragon, the pronoun is ‘thez.’”

“Theza” is the possessive.

Doug and Agmund Fridmar

Some people went into battle like a well-oiled machine. Doug’s father, for example; he moved with sparse, sharp movement, did what needed to be doing, and drank afterwards with the same mechanical precision.

Some people fought like it was sex: with ridiculous intensity, angry, wild, some strikes almost like caresses, some like orgasms. Of the Thorne Girls, Massima fought the most like that, and she fucked like she fought. Afterwards, she drank as if she was going to take the bottle to bed with her, too. Sometimes Doug felt as if he envied the bottle, and other times he pitied it.

But so very few people fought like a dance, like every move had a place and yet was beautiful. So few people fought such that you could choreograph your movements around theirs and they would notice and do the same right back at you.

Agmund Fridmar, big, fierce, bearish Agmund, fought like a ballet, like a symphony, like a dance, and afterwards, when they drank, his movements had the same precision.

Once, once, Doug had thought of an old and awful quote on dancing bears: “The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all.”

That proverb had it wrong, Doug was sure. The marvel of Agmund Fridmar was definitely in how well the Bear danced.

Cxaidin and Zizny

Zizny had fire.

In a literal sense, of course, all dragons had fire. It was their birthright, their gift, their curse.

But dragons were a long, long-lived race, one of the oldest, and they tended, after a few times of setting their nest alight, to be calmer, more thought-out creatures than their flamey breath would suggest.

Zizny was not calm.

Zizny questioned resolutely. Not only the assumptions of others, not only the writings of dragons and other-creatures of the past, but theza own assumptions, theza own truths. Zizny would ask one day why the sun was rising as it always had, and then the next day ask exactly why the dragons got along with humans – or, perhaps, why they shouldn’t get along better with said humans. Thez would question the entire stork arrangement and then snarl at a passing centaur for some comment about dragon history and its habit of going up in smoke.

(This did happen, sadly, but most of the very important dragon records were carved in stone or etched in metal. Very heat-durable metal).

Cxaidin loved Zizny’s fire, the sparks that seemed to fly off whenever Zizney was involved in a new quest, the way thez made Cxaidin question even thezself. Above all, and after all, and in spite of all, Cxaidin loved Zizny’s heat.

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Love and Letters, reposts on Patreon

Feb14

❥

This is a series of tiny stories written to an old Love Meme – little vignettes of various characters in various types of love.

Taro and Kailani, from Addergoole the Original Series

First week of Year 5:
“She’s gorgeous,” Taro told Conrad, who had heard it all already at least a hundred times. “Those eyes. Those legs. That hair. Gods, Con, I’ve got to have her.”
💖
read on…

In the spirit of the greats, I offer a rhyming couplet poem I wrote in 2013 as a signal boost incentive. I only got through G, but I do think it’s still a fun poem.
It’s a survey of my characters and my worlds, from A through, well, G.

With annotations.

A for Aelfgifu, for Audrey, and Autumn,
Addergoole, and Aelfgar’s myriad daughters.

read on…

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January By the Numbers Three: Butterflies (Fiction piece)

Jan3

January by the numbers starts here!
From [personal profile] anke‘s prompt “butterflies;” a story of Addergoole (Year 9 character).

“So, I’m going to teach you a few very important things, and when you have figured them out, I want you to be sure you think about them as examples, not just as truths in themselves. Allegories, all right?”

Alhandra remembered her father’s stories for years. The one about the monk who climbed the mountain. The one about the monkey who made bad promises. The one about the princess with the sword. This, this always stuck in her mind, in part because he didn’t start out like he always did:

I’m going to tell you a tale, and when I’m done, perhaps you can tell me what you learned.

All of his tales were lessons, but these, somehow, these were supposed to be more important.

So Alhandra remembered.

“Butterflies first. Pretty things, butterflies, small and fragile, right? They’re not the most dangerous-looking things around. Lots of people are like butterflies, angel. They look pretty, they look weak, like they won’t last too long. You know the sort.”

Allhandra nodded. She knew the type, all right, even then.

“Butterflies can be poison. And people who are beautiful, they can be poison, too. They can be deadly.” He touched her hair, gently. “They don’t have to be. The little butterflies that wander around the meadow behind the house, they’re safe. And not all pretty people are poison – that’s important, too. But you know about the viceroy butterfly, how it imitates the monarchs? Remember that. Some people are poison in a pretty coat, and some people are harmless and look like poison.”

“So… look beyond the wings?”

“It’s more important than you’d think it is, princess. Not just the pretty faces, but the pretty words. Not just the pretty words, but the soft touches. You have to really, really know someone before you know if they’re poison or just pretending.”

“What’s the next part?”

“Noam!” Alhandra’s mother had called from the back yard at that point. “Noam, it’s time.”

She’d had to wait for another day to learn about sharks.

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