This story is set in the late apoc of fae apoc, and follows
Mourning Lost Gods and
The Destruction of the Gods
and The Dead Gods Come Visiting
.
We’d gotten ourselves as settled as we were going to be, gotten ourselves a little more comfortable with the end of the world, and, most importantly, we’d gotten comfortable with the lack of godlets everywhere. Then a godlet walked into what served us as a house and fell down half-dead.

We were all looking at each other when Kingfisher pulled out his filleting knife. Then it went from a cautious twelve-pointed look to a panicked 11-pointed look. The question was half what is Kingfisher going to do and half what do we want him to do?

“She’s a human being…” Kingfisher looked at his knife, then at the stone-skinned girl lying on the floor. “Well, she’s a being, and one that isn’t trying to kill us. And someone was clearly trying to kill her. Makes her, if not an ally, then not our enemy right now.”

There was another look around the room. Finally, it ended up being me that had to speak up.

“It’s logic, I guess.” I looked down at the elf on the floor. She looked so harmless. Then again, they often did. “But when she wakes up, we’re gonna need promises of no-harm and no-brain-fuckery from her. First thing, no hedging.”

“I agree totally.” Kingfisher leaned over to speak to to her, although I’m not sure she could hear him. “I’m going to cut the arrow out, miss. This is going to hurt a lot.”

She didn’t answer, but, then again, when the knife went in, she didn’t moan, either. She didn’t make any sound at all, not when he cut around the arrow-head, not when he pulled it out.

“Did you kill her?” Jason leaned forward. Worried or relieved? I couldn’t tell.

“With this?” Kingfisher waved his steel knife around. “Hardly. They might have, though.”

“I..” The elf groaned. “You want… promises.”

Somehow, the elf levered herself onto an elbow. Her color was better, I think: how do you tell on someone made of marble? She looked less ashy, at least.

“Lay down, lay down. You’re injured.” Paramedic training won for Marie again.

The elf shook her head. “Had worse. A promise.” She looked around, her eyes settling on every one of us. She looked so young. Then again, their ancient ones sometimes did. “You twelve. I swear I mean you no harm, and will do you no intentional harm, save in active self-defense.” She fell back to the floor with a small thump.

Marie tugged a blanket up to the girl’s hips, and began bandaging the hole the arrow and Kingfisher had left. “It would have waited,” she muttered, but the girl was back beyond listening.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/839925.html. You can comment here or there.

This story is set in the late apoc of fae apoc, and follows
Mourning Lost Gods and
The Destruction of the Gods.

We’d gotten – not comfortable – but okay with the quiet, even in the few weeks it had been. We’d started to become accustomed to the lack of aerial fights, to the lack of strange semi-human people attacking us, to the way the world stayed the same – ruined, barely habitable, but the same – from day to day.

And then this half-dead… elf limped into our shelter. She was muttering under her breath, things we could barely tell were magic, and she was bleeding from at least seventeen places. Her stone-like skin was cracked, split, and burned, and underneath, she was bleeding red like the rest of us.

We froze. I froze, at least. Around me, the others shifted, reaching for weapons we no longer kept at hand. The god was barely over five foot tall, a tiny girl, but we had been less terrified of muscle-bound bikers with shotguns.

I saw the minute she noticed us, her tiger’s-eye eyes going wide. She ducked her head in what, in a human, I would have thought was an apology.

“I saw your fire,” she croaked. “I…”

And then she fell over. Sticking from her back was an arrow shaft; they hadn’t even bothered to strip all of the thorns off of the hawthorn before shooting it.

We spent a few minutes arguing. Quite a few of us wanted to dump her off the roof or, preferably, another roof, further away. A couple wanted to cut her head off, just to be sure that she stayed dead.

But Marie and Donald, who had been a paramedic and a school nurse before the world ended, they checked her pulse and found her still among the living, and that made everything more complicated. We didn’t so much talk about it as we shared a twelve-pointed look.

Then Kingfisher pulled out his filleting knife.

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This is a continuation of a piece chosen by random-date-choice.

It follows Mourning Lost Gods.

February, 2012

We thought the fights had died down.

There were twelve of us, now, refugees every one of us from a world that simply did not exist anymore. We had found a building near the river that still had walls, still had a roof, still had doors that shut and locked, and we had turned it into what we could of a home.

There hadn’t been any GodFights in weeks, not since the last major brawl, but it was February in the Mid-West; maybe even those that would call themselves gods didn’t want to be out in the cold.

From what we could gather – from the radio, from the one tv station that still came through, from the refugees that came and stayed, or came and left – it was the same everywhere. The fights had died down.

They said someone had nuked a god; someone else said they had nuked the doorways. We didn’t care, not as much as we should have. I know I, at least, felt like all my caring had been seared off like burned nerve endings, somewhere in the collapse of everything I’d ever known.

We were like trauma victims, like refugees, like unwilling colonists starting over in the ruins of a civilization. If we thought about the gods at all, we thought to be glad that they had stopped, be glad that, maybe, this building might stand, be glad that we could breathe, and be warm, and move on.

We had found a way to make a proper chimney, and we had pulled together a wood-burning stove. We had found food – you don’t want to know some of what we ate, but there was enough that what we were eating wasn’t each other – and we were beginning to find community.

And then a half-dead god limped into our little haven, muttering words of magic and bleeding on our doorstep.

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