Tag Archive | morepls

Rest between Runs, a story continuation for the June Giraffe Call

Jul5

For [personal profile] ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt. Set in the same era as the Lyuda stories, after Run for It

The cabin had three things that Engot would have paid any amount of money for: a functioning stove, set into the wall; a pump inside a half-enclosed back porch, that still provided clean water, and a bed platform with the springs still mostly intact, in a room whose roof still worked. “It’s not the Imperial Palace…”

“It’s not either royal palace.” Krynia wrung her dripping cloak out and hung it near the fire. The long-gone tenants had taken almost everything, but the hooks were, like the stove and the pump, built into the building. “Which means we’re safe and comfortable, two things we would not be there.”

Engot smiled. “There’s no tub, but there’s a basin big enough water to heat. We can wash.”

“And I have some rope to repair the bed. This is almost cozy enough to call home.” Their outermost tunics and trews went the way of their cloaks, and the went about the preparations of an evening as if they had been doing this together for years.

“Will they come after you?” Kyrnia pulled a bar of soap from her bag, wrapped in oiled leather.

“Will they come after you?” Engot provided a soft piece of cloth, unfolded from the middle of his bedroll, and a horn comb. “May I…?” His hands hovered near the complex braids of her hair, her veil pushed back nearly to her neck.

“If I may. I don’t know. With luck, they won’t think it worth it.” She pulled four long pins from her hair to free the ends of the braids, and reached for the cord holding the end of his beard-braid.

“Same here.” He finger-combed her hair, slowly working it out into a damp, frizzy cloud. “Your hair is so curly. It’s not just the braids, either, is it?”

“No, it’s like that fresh from a swim, too.” She brushed out the long, braid-kinked curls of his beard and reached for his hair, touching her nose to his beard. “You smell different.”

He pushed her veil the rest of the way down, releasing the last of her curls. “You smell… lovely.” He plucked a few dried leaves from the underside of her hair and sniffed them. “Sage and mint. That’s a good idea.”

She took the comb he’d left neglected and began working it through his hair. Close-toothed for his people’s straight hair, it wouldn’t work so well on hers, but it smoothed through his and plucked out tangles and briars with ease. “I don’t think nettles do the same,” she teased.

“No, but maybe I could stick some sweet herbs to the nettles.” He hesitated, his hand on the back of her neck, where the weight of her veil and braids had sat.

She paused, as well, her hand stilling on the top of his back. “They might come for us.”

“Let them.” His smile nearly covered his own worry. “We’ll be ready.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/366836.html. You can comment here or there.

In The Tower, Continued

Jul2

After In the Tower

Amanda liked her room. She didn’t know why, sometimes, her Aunt Tanta warned her against wanting to leave. She had everything she ever needed here, and it was warm, and safe, and comfortable – but most of all, safe.

She watched the television, and it told her about wars and rapes and murders. None of that happened here, in her tower. Nothing bad could happen to her at all, here in her castle. She was the protected princess. She was the safest maiden of them all. And she had everything she wanted.

Aunt Tanta told her she’d been found on the doorstep, a foundling. She told Amanda she was special, for she alone of the five children in the towers had been given Tanta’s personal care and personal visits. She alone had been bottle-fed by the ancient woman, she alone met with her for tea three times a week, rain, snow, or sunshine, summer and winter.

Amanda called herself, Amandianna, Princess of the Southermost Tower. She wrote long and involved stories about herself, about Amandianna, which involved a miniature horse and adventures in and around the tower, being wrested from it by force only to find a way to return, being pulled out into the world and fighting her way safe, back here, to her tower, to her safety, to the dragon who protected them.

—

Fred had been trying to send messages to the other towers.

Nothing else had worked so far, and he’d been trying for 584 hash-mark group-of-five days plus three.

He’d been growing out his hair for most of that eight years, thinking of the Rapunzel stories his sister had loved, back when he had a family. (He still didn’t have a beard to grow out. He wondered if that would grow faster). His hair dragged on the floor, now, when he didn’t braid it, but the tower was a lot taller than that.

Ripped sheets had just ended up with him not having a bed for a week, after an unseen hand had plucked him back into the tower from halfway down. Messages in balloons vanished into the wind and never came back.

He’d tried to take the dumbwaiter apart for the rope, but they’d just left him all alone and foodless for two days while they replaced and repaired it. “They:” the invisible keepers. He assumed they weren’t machines, but he wasn’t certain. He’d asked for seeds and started growing linen, but his rope had vanished overnight. They hadn’t stopped him from practicing climbing up and down the stairwell walls, but a fall on a slippery patch of rock (Moss, damn it) had left him with a broken ankle (set by maybe-robots while he was unconscious) and second-guessing that plan.

So now he was sending letters in schoolbooks, written in the margins of the boring sections, slipped between the pages, anywhere he could. How long have you been here? Why do you think they want us? Have you ever seen a person, since you got here?

Sometimes he just wrote I’m lonely. What about you?

He wrote one every day, and then did his homework, assigned the same way food was delivered, by dumbwaiter, read a book, ran up and down the stairs, maybe played some games, drew the few out his window, and then wrote another letter. The TV showed him a world so far away, so long ago, it might as well be another planet. The letters, at least, seemed like they might contact someone.

And then, thirty-five hashmarks later, a poetry book arrived with a note in the margins.

I was here for twelve hundred days when I lost count. I’m lonely, too.

Next: In the Tower, Continued

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/365052.html. You can comment here or there.

Paradox and… a story of Superheroes

Jul1

For [personal profile] imaginaryfiend‘s commissioned continuation of Returned Paradox

I was born to death.

I was born to the memory of a dead woman, forty weeks to the day after Paradox Maverick died, and I was told so, in whispers and glances and blasted macaroni and cheese on my birthday every year. I was born, it seemed when I was younger, to echo her back to my mother’s companions, to look like her in every way I could.

Sometimes I think that she did it on purpose, Paradox, tinkered with my genetics in the womb to put them off the scent, as it were, to make them keep looking in the wrong place and never think to look where they should have. I wonder, if she did that, if she had any idea how well she would succeed?

Here I am, now, exactly what they created, exactly what I created, and not what they would have had me be. Nothing, nothing, I might add, like Paradox Maverick, may she rot in a cold cell in the darkest corner of Hell.

I am Order. And today is my eighteenth birthday.

There will be macaroni and cheese. There will always be macaroni and cheese. And my mother will buy me a pretty dress, and I will wear it. It will be the last thing I wear that I did not choose myself. And it will be the last time I eat macaroni and cheese. Today, I am going to start my plans. Today, I am going to begin my empire.

~

“Bit serious, are you?”

The window was open. The window was not supposed to be open. Marciana looked up, frowned, and then felt her frown deepen from mere irritation to true anger.

“You don’t belong here.”

“Oh, but let’s be honest, neither do you.” The girl in the window was green, her hair blue, her wings – she had wings, humans did not have nor need wings – purple. She looked like she’d been dropped in a tye-dye pot. “You know it. All those tidy little notes in your journal. Didn’t anyone tell you that the primary flaw of villains is monologuing? Get in the habit and they’ll never stop. I’m Arsenic, by the way.”

“Lovely villain name. And I’m not a villain. I’m a hero. See,” she gestured at the tower they were in. “The Tower of Truth? Heroes live here.”

“Heroes and their kids. And Arsenic isn’t my villain name, it’s my given name.”

“Who names their kid Arsenic?” Because she was a kid, as much as Marciana was, maybe-eighteen, probably-less.

“Who names the daughter of two heroes Marsha?”

“It’s Marciana.”

“It’s Marsha with a flourish. Seriously. They knew they were going to let you grow up in the public eye. They knew they were already thinking of little Parry when you were born. Why in the world would they name you Marsha? Did they want you to turn evil?”

It was too much like her own thoughts. She squinted at the tye-dyed fairy. “Are you another one like Szec Mzip Wrisverhmersl?”

“Szeccie? Little pink goblin? No, Marsha, I’m not reading your mind. I’m not a mirror of your conscience – not like that, at least.”

“Then what are you? I mean, other than a green intruder.” She should be hitting the panic button. She should be calling in the Truth Troops. But she wasn’t panicked, and she didn’t want to see the Troops. Not now. Not with what she was planning.

“I’m you.” She waved both hands, making a blur and whirring noise like a flying bug. “Not like that. Not like Szeccie or any of the mirror-universe imposters.”

“Imposters, what?”

“Nevermind that. You people in the Truth Tower are awfully bad at telling truth, that’s all I have to say on the matter. No, I’m what you were supposed to be.”

It only took a second. Marciana was bright, after all, and her entire life had been haunted by the specter of what she was supposed to be. “You’re Paradox Maverick.” Her hand was on her blaster before she finished the sentence.

“I was. I’m Arsenic right now.” The green girl shrugged, looking entirely undisturbed. “Did you get any powers?”

“I did.” She didn’t want to admit that. “You know I haven’t told anyone else?”

“Neither have I. Of course, I haven’t told anyone I’m their enemies’ favorite troublemaker, either. You think I ought to?”

“Will they believe you? Nobody believes that I’m not.”

“Which is funny, all things considered. They think I’m…well, half of them think I’m Szeccie’s kid. Including my mother.”

“Wait, your mother thinks you’re a world-shifter’s kid? Your mother…?”

“I might be. It would suit my other me. Look, are you going to shoot me or what?”

“Your other you, what?” She set the blaster down but kept her hand on it.

“I’m not all Peri. I’m Arsenic, but there’s this little voice in the back of my head that is, or used to be, Paradox. I mean, sometimes it’s the other way around and she takes over. But for the most part, I’m me. Sennie.”

“Sennie?”

“Well, ‘Arse’ is a stupid nickname, isn’t it? Marsha?”

“Marciana. Yeah.” She was smiling. When was the last time that had happened? “So… why are you here?” Quick, think about business.

“Well.” She sat down on Marciana’s clean desk, one foot on the journal, leaving a smudge of dirt over Marciana’s declaration of self-hood. “Half of me was homesick. The rest of me was sick of being there, not being what they wanted. Watching their confused faces…”

“While they try to figure out who this cuckoo in their nest is, what she’s planning, why she doesn’t fit in.” The words tumbled out. She was half-standing. She sat down again, mortified. “Oh, Fillzbot.”

“No, no, you’re right. Exactly. They know about you. They think you’re me, too. Or sometimes they think you’re her, one of theirs, that died.” She paused. “Are you?”

“As far as anyone can tell – and everyone has looked – there’s nobody in here but me. It might have been easier if I really was the enemy.”

“Well… my folks are the agents of world domination, and yours want to protect truth and light. How do we go about being enemies of both?”

“We?”

“Well, who else have we got?” The green girl’ smile was pink, very, very pink. “And maybe if you have someone to talk to, you’ll stop monologuing.”

“So we become…” She thought about it for a moment. “Chaos and order. Paradox and reason. We’re monkeywrenchers. We’re the ones who tell them when they’re all being stupid. We crash wild schemes and stupid plans and bad press conferences.”

“Awesome.” She held out one long-fingered hand. “You have a deal, partner.”

~

I was born to defy expectations.

We were. We were born to be nothing our parents wanted. We were born to be trouble in their sides. We were born to legends we didn’t ask for, habits we didn’t have. We were born to ask questions. All the questions.

We are Order and Chaos. We are Madness and Reason. We are the Wrench in the Machine, and today is our eighteenth birthday.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/363365.html. You can comment here or there.

Goatless, a story of Steam!Reiassan for the Giraffe Call (@dahob)

Jun27

For [personal profile] imaginaryfiend‘s prompt and @dahob’s prompt

“It’s a prototype, of course.” Diryid ran his hands over the long shafts of his new machine. “And I still believe the river-boat was more practical. Our rivers and canals, after all, are smoother than our roads. But this will go, and if you stack the wood properly in the back by the boiler, and if you keep this little pocket here loaded with the proper fire-aether, it will go nearly as long as my river boat. Which is to say, it will get you easily from city to city in less time than a conventional carriage.”

He tightened a nut and burnished a shining piece of brass, smiling all the time at his audience. Finally, Syadaia cleared her throat.

“But what is it? I thought you were working on a dirigible?”

“Oh, that.” The engineer waved his hand in the air. “That is much easier, although its distance is, at the moment, more limited. We do not have a proper way, yet, to contain the most flammable aether. And wood weighs it down, you see. But it will go.”

They all looked over his head, where he was pointing, but they were in his garage, and there was nothing to be seen. It was Syadaia, youngest of the group, who was delegated by eye contact to ask, again.

“Where is the dirigible? And what is this… thing, Diryid? What does it do?”

“This. This is a goatless carriage. It will go, as I said, from Lannamer to the Arran cities in two-thirds the time it will take a two-goat conveyance. And, unlike that monstrosity your other contractor was working on, it will not blow up. Nor will it eat its passengers.”

“It never…!” Tallgua’s denial was only half-feigned. The “other contractor’s” conveyance hadn’t actually eaten anyone. But he’d been using wild aether. Nobody used wild aether in something that close to people!

“But the dirigible?”

“Dirigible, dirigible.” Diryid stomped his foot. “You will have your damn dirigible. But anyone can design one of those. This… this is my masterpiece, and you all will admire it.”

There seemed nothing to do but make the appropriate noises. They needed that dirigible, if their plans were to succeed. And to have the dirigible, it appeared, they needed… this.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/359150.html. You can comment here or there.

Run for it, a story of Reiassan for the June Giraffe Call

Jun25

For [personal profile] ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt. Set in the same era as the Lyuda stories.

The rain started an hour before dark, and three hours out of camp. Krynia and Engot had shared a look, then another, and then they’d spurred their goats into a run up the side of the mountain.

There was no going back, not for either of them. He was a deserter, now, and she – well, they’d call her worse than that, if they found her. Losing her commission in the priesthood would be only her first problem.

So they ran, on stolen goats, into the storm, seeking a shelter, anything, anywhere. “Look at it in this light.” Engot’s Bitrani was not the best, but it was clearer, still, than the Callenian Krynia could manage without divine intervention. “The storm this bad, our tracks covered. Nobody will search.”

“Nobody will find our bodies.” She muttered her answer into her cloak, in hopes that he wouldn’t hear her. The storm provided, cracking thunder across their path. “Your country is wet.”

“So is yours.” Then there was nothing at all to say for a while, just the steady thumping of their goats’ hooves on the dirt road and the loud cracks of the lightning. Night fell with little change, the sky already black with clouds. Krynia risked a tiny pull on the sira, enough to make a small globe of luminescence to light their path. She hoped the gods would forgive her. She could not worship them if they died here. She could not worship them if she was killed for heresy.

“Here.” Here, in the deep back hills of Callenia, Engot was as much a stranger as she was. But in every corner of this land, you could find the sturdy wayfarer’s cabins of those who had come first. And this one, though the roof was beginning to fall, was still mostly intact. “This will be enough for tonight.”

“Tonight.” She knew he couldn’t see her smile, not through the gloom, the rain, and her hood and veil. “And then…?”

“Once we go through this pass, we’re out of land that the Emperor’s Army patrols. Then…” she couldn’t see his smile, either, but she could hear it. “Then we do as we please, Krynia.”

“As we please.” It was a new thought, but a nice one.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/357130.html. You can comment here or there.

Faries in the Church

Jun9

For flofx‘s commissioned prompt, a continuation of

⛪
“There are fairies in your church.”

Bishop Macnamilla was of an older school of thought, practically antediluvian. Most of the time, Father Nehemiah avoided conflict by avoiding the Ninth Street house where the Bishop kept his residence. The Father’s church was new, and not entirely conventional, and not near Ninth Street, and the Bishop’s body as well as his mind were old, and did not move easily.

But someone had said something, the Father was certain. The jowls on the Bishop were shaking in the way the once-fat man only did when he had been being yelled at by a parishioner who Didn’t Like Something. Probably not one of Nehemiah’s regulars. But sometimes the gossips from the other churches liked to stop in and visit.

“There are fairies.” Sometimes he could get away with just agreeing with the Bishop until he went away. “Margaret and LaKeisha are in there now. They’ve been helping Mrs. Bao with the cleaning, as it’s almost Easter time.”

“You have fairies in your church services, Father Nehemiah.”

He wasn’t going to be able to dance around this. “Better than having them standing outside the gates, glaring.”

“Do you know what happens when you allow – INVITE the fair folk into consecrated ground?” He was bellowing, or trying to. He must have been an impressive man before the long waste of age started eating him away.

“I’ve heard the stories. Mrs. Bao told me some of them. The kirkevaren told me others – and the fairies told me another set.”

“Ruin and ruination is what you get. Sin and sinners. Filth and the filthy.” The Bishop shook his head. “It leads to nothing but badness.”

“And blood?” Nehemiah drew himself up. He was tall, taller than the Bishop’s shrunken form by nearly a foot. “I know why there were no fairies in the church before, sir.”

“There are no FAIRIES in the church,” the Bishop shouted the word as if it were an obscenity, “because to allow them into out sanctified ground taints not only the ground but the entire city.”

Father Nehemiah was boggled enough by this to lose the edge of his anger, although he did remain standing straight, staring down at the top of the Bishop’s head. “You are aware, sir, that you live in the densest population of fae in the country, correct? The city is teeming with fairies.”

“The city is rotten with them. The elders did not listen to me. They were squeamish.” The older man’s voice finally dropped. “No. It was me. I was squeamish. I knew what needed to be done, and I could not do it. I failed my superiors. I killed them, Nehemiah, I killed those fairies you have heard of. I spilled their blood in the name of the city and its sanctity. I scrubbed the floors with the blood. I blessed the altars with it. But, in the end, I could not do what needed to be done.”

He didn’t have to ask, although he wished that he did. He’d already heard enough to put the rest together.

“You killed them before you buried them, you mean.” It hadn’t been meant to be another lamb under the church at all. “You blessed their deaths, instead of leaving them to roam.”

“I could have saved us all. I could have protected us all from what’s in the wind. But they look human, Nehemiah. They look human. And that was my undoing.”

Icon Flash: The Shooting Star Problem

May26

Continuing flash series! I’m going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

Today’s icon:

Shooting Star

Icon by [personal profile] later_tuesday

Yeah, the first one of the Asteroid-hits took us by surprise. I mean, shooting stars didn’t hit the earth that hard very frequently, and when they did – crater, some rock, that was it.

Nobody expected there to be sentient life, not in that first one. And, because the government did a quick and thorough job of covering it up (I know, I was there), the rest of the world wasn’t expecting the second one, either, or the third.

By the thirty-seventh of these Shooting Stars, everybody knew. Hobos who lived in shacks in the desert knew (and I’m not counting that guy who got superpowers because the asteroid almost landed on him). People with no TV knew. Everyone knew about the Star People, the Asteroid Aliens, the Palondeze refugees.

I knew, of course. I’d been working with them since the beginning, since we first hid the skinny-furry-strange thing that, I swear, looked like an anthropomorphized anorexic platypus. I knew when they learned ASL (English was beyond their beak), and I knew when our linguists figured out their language.

I knew the first thing that one of them said to us, too:

We are here to help.

And what an older one, weaker and smaller, said in counter:

We are here for help.

By the time we’d worked out what they’d really meant, there had been fifty-three Shooting Stars in the course of a year and a half, and we started watching the sky, nervously, for the long blue contrails across the twilight.

Their definition of help, we were beginning to understand, was not quite the same as ours.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/347128.html. You can comment here or there.

(MoarPls) Learning the Bones of the City, a continuation

May22

After Rediscovering the City, from the January Giraffe Call.

It was the job of a lifetime. My lifetime. My apprentices’ lifetimes. And the handsome scientist from SUNY Geneseo with the blue, blue eyes – his lifetime, too.

The City out of Nowhere was becoming the state project. More than that, it was a state revitalization. The Parks Service had, after a good deal of arm-wrestling with every other department and bureau in the state (as well as a bunch of three-letter-acronyms), claimed the city, set up a perimeter, and started regulating who could go in and out.

Lucky me, as a stonemason, I got to keep going in. The place was in pretty good shape, for its age, but it needed work, a lot of work, and my team had already surveyed most of it. So we stayed.

We stayed while the tourists came, while the photographers and the paper-writers and the linguists came. Us, and then the pipefitters, and the landscapers, and the bricklayers. And the brains. And the scientist from SUNY Geneseo with those stupid blue eyes.

All the brains wanted to talk about how best to restore the buildings, whether we should at all, whether this was an artifact that should be left pristine and un-touched. They wanted to talk about how we should best honor the former inhabitants, but whoever that had been, they left nothing.

(Almost nothing. When repairing what we were calling a church, we found their ash-urn storage, and the biologists went to town on tiny, tiny bone fragments.)

So we went from living outside the walls in a kind of tent city, to living in the walls, in what could sort have been an apartment building closest to the biggest gate, and we went from just-fix-the-really-broken-stuff to actually renovating the place, and then they started talking about tourist housing. Because damn were we getting tourists coming out of the stonework.

We can make her live again, I’d said, when I’d first touched the city’s ancient bones. And we were. I just hadn’t realized quite how literally that would turn out.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/344931.html. You can comment here or there.

C.A.K.E., a superheroes story for the May Giraffe Call (@Rix_Scaedu)

May15

For Rix_Scaedu‘s second prompt. After Creation Story and When the Storm Came.

Names from Fourteen Minutes and Seventh Sanctum, human name from @Anke

“…and the rest was cake.” Fusefauna leaned back in her chair, making an expression they had learned to interpret as a smile.

“C.A.K.E, she means.” Chloroshining had never really gotten over being paternal over his daughter, which, at the moment…

“Which sounds exactly the same, spoken, unless you’re being an asshole.” Switchphase glared over his wife’s head at his alien father-in-law. “Seriously, Chlor. Give her a break.”

“Do not presume to tell me how to…”

“Father. #’$hi*sth.” Fusefauna clicked out the short Thundesitioni admonition. “Daniel, please.”

Modificationnaut listened to the three of them and silently vowed to never marry. “So C.A.K.E?” he prompted. “It’s an interesting acronym.”

“It is a very arrogant acronym,” Fusefauna allowed, “but it was the seventies, and we were very arrogant at the time. This was of course before the explosion of altered beings, when there were only a handful of us on the planet. It stands for Combined Altered Kyrie Elite.”

“Combined…” It didn’t take Modificationnaut long to piece that together. “The altered gods, more or less.”

“Lords.” It was almost nice to know Chloroshining was an ass to everyone, not just his daughter. “The Amalgamated Lords of the Altered Genome… but that was too arrogant even for us.”

“And now… it’s just the three of you?”

“The two of us. Switchphase belongs to another group.” He seemed very firm on that one. “Yes. The others retired, as much as one can do that, or died, or went off-planet.”

“And we are left.” Fusefauna click-churred a Thundesitioni laugh. “To be our C.A.K.E., just us two.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/340552.html. You can comment here or there.

To the Gate, a story of Fairy Town for the April Giraffe Call

May11

For flofx‘s Commissioned Prompt. Fairy Town does not yet have a landing page.

After “Spring”

Anton Barren moved slowly in front of his students. “Fade, look around. Do you see a doorway?”

“None.” He was back to sounding bored. That was good. Anton didn’t want the girls to freak out. He didn’t want Fade to freak out, either… or himself.

“How about an arch or a gate?”

“Over there.” That was Lilah, bouncing a bit. “Mr. Barren, what’s going on? Why are the animals looking at us?”

“I chose an imperfect time to bring us here.” He had chosen an imperfect locale, more accurately, hoping for a small amount of danger to shake them out of their complacency. This was not going to be a small amount of danger, not if the Animals were looking at them the way it seemed they were.

He focused his sight. He could see their shadows, if he looked hard enough. There would be a cost. But he would pay it. He always did.

“The bobcats…” Anya whispered. “Mr. Barren, the bobcats…. they look hungry. And it was a long and cold winter, wasn’t it?”

“Coldest in decades,” Lilah answered. “I was shoveling snow every day and… oh. The deer looks hungry, too. I thought deer were herbivores.”

“Deer are. These are not, exactly, deer.” He reached for their hands, school regulations be damned. “Fade, take Anya’s other hand. You can worry about cooties later.”

“I’m not five.” He could sense the boy moving to obey him, complaints aside. “How bad is it?”

“If we are lucky, even a little lucky, it won’t be too bad. Lilah, where did you say you saw this gateway?”

“It’s an arch. About … mm… thirty feet? To my right.”

“All right.” The deer seemed to be milling closer in their interrupted dance. The bobcats? Probably pacing back and forth in front of them. “When I give the word, children… run.”

“But I don’t understand. I thought they were celebrating.” Lilah did far too well as complainer.

“They are. But every celebration needs food. Now run!”

They ran, Anton herding them in the direction Lilah had pointed, while the bobcats gave chase, lazily, not wanting to catch them yet, and the deer shifted their dance, running ahead, cutting in front of them, only to double back. The Animals were playing with them. Anton could only hope that they would get distracted in the game and forget the gate.

“So, let me get this straight,” Fade panted. “You brought us into another world. To be dinner for a bunch of animals. What kind of Biology teacher are you?”

“The kind that believes in realism?” Lilah joked. She was closer to the mark than Anton wanted to admit.

“The kind that believes in field experience,” he countered. He couldn’t see the gate, but, then again, he never had. If he didn’t know where they were, he had to rely on younger eyes than his to see. “Lilah, that arch…?”

“Just ahead, Mr. Barren. Just ahead. Hee, I always thought that was funny.” Her breathless giggle sounded a bit hysterical. “Barren, the guy teaching about life.”

“Ironic.” Fade’s mumble sounded like he was losing energy quickly.

Anya hadn’t paused, but she was watching Anton’s face far too clearly. “No.” She shook her head, and a bit of panic began to cross her face. “No… it’s not irony. It’s just honesty. The Fae call themselves what they are, don’t they, Mr. Barren?”

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