Tag Archive | character: kirkevarer

Strange Things and Stranger

Written to flofx‘s commissioned prompt.

The Kirkavare can be found in Fairy Town stories, starting with Re-blessing the Church.
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The was a boy in the church yard.

There were three boys in the church yard, but two of them were human. The third shone like starlight when Mirandabelle looked at him sideways, and glared like a demon when he caught her looking.

They were making a snow fort. It seemed strange, a fae boy making a fort in the church yard, but he was laughing along with his friends and seemed to think nothing of it, nothing of the iron so close. She set her mittened hand on the fence, and felt the soft burn even through the heavy wool.

A snowball whizzed past her ear. Mirandabelle jerked up her head, and say the demon-eyed boy grinning at her. Without thinking about it, she scooped up a handful of snow and lobbed it right back at the boy.

His eyes narrowed and he scooped up his own handful. Before he could throw it, Mirandabelle was running. She skidded in through the open gate – the iron gate that was never closed, that Father Nehemiah had firmly set concrete planters against so that it could not be closed – like she was making a home run, grabbing more snow on the way.

The handful of snow landed in the demon boy’s hood before he saw her coming, but he caught Mirandabelle in the face with a handful of snow as she skidded into their fort.

“No girls in the fort!” one of the human boys complained.

“What are you, ten?” The demon boy laughed.

“Girls are welcome if they can make it in. And this one has fire.”

“This one…” Mirandabelle launched a snowball at the demon-boy. “Has snow! Also, she has a name.”

“Of course she does.” He took a step forward, a massive snowball in hand.

Mirandabelle didn’t so much see the lamb as she saw an emptiness where it had been: One moment, there was some extra whiteness in front of the demon-boy’s legs, and the next it was gone, and the boy was stumbling and falling.

She took her opportunity and dropped a snowball down the back of his neck, while he sputtered and shouted. And then she saw-not-saw the flash of the lamb again, hopping onto and off of demon-boy’s back when he tried to stand.

“I think he likes me.” She tossed another snowball, although it really wasn’t fair when demon-boy was still down.

“I don’t even know you!” He obliged by surging to his feet. Mirandabelle readied another snowball.

“Not you, silly.” She grinned at him. “Though I wouldn’t mind changing that.” No harm in admitting that, was there? “The kirkevarer. The church-lamb.”

It was interesting, Mirandabelle thought, the way all three of them froze, not just the fae boy, demon-boy. It was more interesting, she noted, that it was the one who was against girls in the fort who spoke first. “There’s a corpse lamb here? But…” He looked at the demon boy.

Mirandabelle chuckled. “I told you, he likes me.” She patted the air where the spirit of the lamb was floating. “This church – this church is different.”

The demon boy made his way to his feet. He was eyeing the lamb – but he was eyeing Mirandabelle, too. “Yeah. It’s not the only thing that’s different, either.”

She jutted her chin out at him. He was an interesting one, this demon. “Nope. Everything around here -” she grinned, and gestured to include him – “we’re all strange. And that’s the way I like it.”

She was pretty sure, from the warmth under her hand, that it was the way the church lamb liked it, too.
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/869643.html. You can comment here or there.

Reaching out for the Congregation

For flofx‘s commissioned prompt, a continuation of

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The kirkevaren was watching Mirandabelle.

It made her uncomfortable. It made her skin crawl. It made her fingers itch and her shoulders twitch. It made her want to cry.

But she went by the church every day. Every single day, after school, before work, after partying, before she went to bed. Twice some days, three times some days.

She went by because her mother had told her what had happened; because her grandmother had told her mother what had happened. She went because she’d heard the stories and, while this kirkevaren and this priest were innocent – she could see their innocence hanging over them like a halo, like an aura, like a crown – but the church itself, new and hallowed and blessed, the church was not.

She walked the edge of the fence, because the kirkevaren could not stop her from doing that, and she kissed the iron spikes, brushing her snakebite piercings against the metal and accepting the brief burn as her penance.

“Florence Carter,” she whispered to the first pike, “Benjamin Tomes,” to the third. She looked up at the kirkevaren as she said the third name, “Juliander Tempest.” Juliander had been her mother’s mother’s mother. She had died here, died when the church still hunted the fae.

The corpse-lamb stared at her at that one. Every time. Every time, with its dead blue eyes. With its protective gaze.

“My kin died here,” she told it. “My kin and my kind.”

Every day. Every night. School uniform. Club clothes. Work uniform. She looked like a normal kid. She looked like a human kid. But the kirkevaren knew. The corpse-lamb had been guarding the church from fae for centuries, and it came to the work easily again this time.

“My kin died here. My grandmother’s mother. My best friend’s great-uncle. The one they called the Grey Cat. The one they called The Nose. They died ere. They weren’t buried here, no. They weren’t put under your guidance. I won’t be buried under your guidance.”

She told the lamb that every night. Every day. It was three months before she got an answer.

“I can not stop what has already been done.” It wasn’t the lamb, and she nearly bolted when she saw the new priest, Father Nehemiah, standing in the shadows. “I cannot heal the old wounds… it’s Mirandabelle, right?”

“Some people call me that,” she allowed.

“Then I will call you that. Mirandabelle, I cannot help your grandmother’s mother, save to pray for her. I can’t help those this church once failed. But miss, I am not the priest who once stood here, and this church is not the church that once stood here.”

“The hallowed ground is hallowed ground,” she spat. “The land and the blessing was there, and it’s here now.”

He shook his head. “Yes. Yes. But the land has been re-blessed, Mirandabelle, and I would like to re-consecrate our relationship with the fae again as well.”

She ran a finger over the iron posts and listened to the faint sizzle. “With iron and blood?”

“No.” He swung the gate open. “With open doors and a handshake.”
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/299183.html. You can comment here or there.

Guarding the Church

For flofx‘s commissioned prompt, a continuation of Re-blessing the Church

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Father Nehemiah wasn’t entirely comfortable in the new church.

He had been told, by the kindly woman that cleaned the building, Mrs. Bao, that most priests didn’t last long in her city (and that was how she put it: “You priests, you usually can’t make it too long in my city. Don’t worry your head about it when you find yourself having to leave.”) As such, he was determined to, as the vernacular went, hack it.

The corpse-lamb was his first challenge, although not the strongest or worst he would face. The spirit of what he was told was a kirkevaren was quite visible to the naked eye, hovering around the freshly-blessed churchyard, apparently waiting for someone to die so it had something to protect once again.

While it waited, the kirkevaren had decided to guard everything else. The pews. The baptismal. The children in the nursery on Sunday. Sometimes it inserted itself into the stained glass window patterns for a while, another lamb in the wide field of them. It was, Father Nehemiah thought, bored.

It was tied to the land, Mrs. Bao and her husband, Bao-Bao, told him; it could not go very far from it. So Father Nehemiah pondered things that the spirit could do to keep it out of trouble.

Much, he pondered, the way he did with troubled teens in other cities. Much as he was soon to find he would need to with the fairies here.

The fairies. He’d thought the kirkevaren was strange – no other church he’d ever served in had had anything similar – but the fairies, they were downright malicious.

He found the first one pretending to be a corpse, hanging itself from the iron fence posts at the front gate, eyes bugging, tongue sticking out. “This place kills us,” the thing told him.

“Now don’t you be silly,” Mrs. Bao told the thing over Nehemiah’s shoulder. “It’s a place of love and faith, and if it harms you, that’s your own silly fault.”

That one had moved on, shamed into stopping its protest, but they kept coming. They would catcall the congregation as they came for Sunday services, shout obscenities at funeral-goers and wedding guests alike. If Mrs. Bao was around, she would shoo them off with her broom, but she was not always around, and they would not listen to Father Nehemiah.

“I don’t understand,” he asked the cheerful cleaning woman. “What is it they have against our Church?”

“They have a very long memory, these creatures,” she told him, “a reborn memory, in some cases. And some just take any chance they get to complain.”

“Much like every other person I know,” he sighed. “What can I do?”

“What can you do?” she echoed back at him, with a shrug. “They are faeries. They do not follow human rules.”

“Hrrm.” Father Nehemiah had the glimmerings of an idea. He lit some incense, murmured a few prayers, and went to speak to the kirkevaren.

The next time the faries came to protest the church, the kirkevaren was there, fending them off, defending the church from their complaints. Mrs. Bao smiled at Nehemiah.

“You’ll do okay. You’ll do just fine.”

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Re-blessing the Church

For flofx“‘s prompt, with information from this site.

Very likely in the “Fairy Town” setting of many of today’s stories.

Possibly proof that I should stop writing before 11:30

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They were building a new church, which caused quite a bit of consternation in the City.

Not for the faith, which was as welcome as any other. Not for the construction, not in itself. Buildings were sometimes built, even in the legacy parts of town.

The problem was, they were doing it, as the saying goes, right, and thus they were doing it in such a way as to worry just about everyone.

They had torn down the existing building, or what was left of it, and in tearing down the lawyer’s office (they never lasted long, in the City), they had found that a church had once stood there, a church and a churchyard. And they had then found, in excavating, the cornerstones of the church in the foundation of the lawyer’s office, and, in digging further, two things they hadn’t wanted to find: the skeleton of a lamb, under what had once been the front step of the church, and a tome describing the blessing of the land.

There had been plans to turn the land into a museum, into a small shopping center, into a library. But the land had been blessed as long as there are feet walking on this ground, and there were still feet, so the land must remain holy.

The church-yard, the cemetery, had been moved when the church had burnt down, the skeletal remains and their stones heading down to Sacred Heart several blocks down. The human remains had been moved, but the kirkevarer, the church-warning, had not. A sensitive was hired to come find it and awaken it, while stone-masons and architects built the church.

“It must be holy,” they said, one person to the next, and so all the psychic energy of a city rich with power was pressed into the work of making the building holy, making it worthy of the blessed land, making up for the decades of lawyers and hair dressers. “It must be holy” and every person who had ever called themselves Christian in the city came to the first Sunday service, dressed in their best and focused on the purest thoughts they knew.

“It must be holy,” and the city, the whole city, murmured prayers over the building, over the new stone where the old kirkevarer was re-buried. And the corpse-lamb, the warning spirit, glowed over the whole block, shining brightly with their blessings.

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