It’s time for the theme poll!
This poll picks the theme for the three stories posted each month on Patreon, as well as reposts and possibly other such things.
If you don’t have a DW account, you can vote in the comments.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1331003.html. You can comment here or there.
When I posted The Gardener I was asked (and now I can’t find where, sigh) about Damkina and the apocalypse. So here is Damkina and the apocalypse, considerably longer than I’d intended. 🙂
🏡
The sky was black and red, and in the distance an unearthly howl echoed through the city. But the squash would not forgive her skipping their bug treatment and the weeds in the pepper garden were unseemly.
Damkina muttered wards against bugs as she slammed her hoe into the ground with more force than was strictly necessary.
It was, as fairy gifts went, rather strange.
As wedding gifts go, it was even odder.
It was hot so the ganache frosting melted and my food photography really needs work, sorry!
🍓
When baking chocolate things in my household, there are two things that we almost always do to up the chocolate flavor, and two more we do as we remember to:
Free for all “Recipe Box” Patrons!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1327550.html. You can comment here or there.
More of a vignette than a true story, a bit involving two pure-bred Ellehemaei some time not too long before The War. Verena has appeared recently in “…There is a Military Group in the Area. …”
💍
“I’m sorry, Tancred, but our family is depleted and this was the deal we could make.”
Tancred‘s mother didn’t look all that sorry. If anything, she looked pleased.
That was like her, though. She’d solved two problems with one stone.
She wasn’t allowed at the funeral; ancient ancestral promises banned her from hallowed ground across the continent. So she stood outside, under the branches of the linden tree that had Named her, dressed in mourning as befit a widow, heedless of the scandal, and watched, working the Words of the rainfall into Martin’s eulogy.
Read On!
After Beryl and one Specific Boy, which is after B is for Beryl and her Boys.
🌙
“I know,” Jake admitted, “a cemetery isn’t really the ordinary sort of place to take a girl on a date. But I figured, you’re not an ordinary sort of girl, and, really, I’m not really all that normal myself, so why would we go on an ordinary date?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1326455.html. You can comment here or there.
Now up on Patreon: my first hand-drawn map to actually make it up there! This one is of Desmond’s corner of the world, in mostly black-and-white and a bit of marker.
Available to all $10-and-up Patrons!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1320296.html. You can comment here or there.
🌳
By the time Cartwright had finished pulling prickers out of her hands, Nimbus was struggling to stay awake. “It seems,” he told her, his voice far too quiet and calm, “that the poison in the prickers puts you to sleep when they are pulled out.”
The thought penetrated her fog. “So that the plant could digest me better. If I struggled, I’d run into the prickers, and if I fought the prickers, they’d knock me out.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1319607.html. You can comment here or there.
For those keeping track at home: This is before almost everything in Eva’s timeline except the first few stories (the garage sale, etc.).
🍰
Eva stared at her kitchen.
It was her kitchen now.
That was the first thing.
Available for all Patrons!
Originally posted Sep. 22, 2014
🌹
Eight p.m. on a Tuesday was not when Semele expected a knock on her door, but she opened it anyway. “Jarah, I thought we agreed…. What?”
“One hundred eight white roses, delivery for Semele cy’Sakamoto.”
read on…
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1318358.html. You can comment here or there.
Hello everyone!
It’s May – well, as I’m writing this, it’s April 30th, but when I post it, it’ll be May, so that counts, right?
So far, we’ve had lots of April showers here but no pilgrims.
Welcome to my new Patron! Now we’re to the two serial posts a month part.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1317627.html. You can comment here or there.
Today’s Trunk Story was actually published! In the February 2012 issue of EMG-Zine, no longer publishing.
It follows the further adventures of Ruan.
⚙️
There were many things Ruan loved about having an antiquities dealer and amateur museum curator as a beau: his lovely wit, his beautiful eyes, his way around an aetheric detector. But the thing which she loved the most was his wonderful habit of bring her home toys, gadgets, and devices.
Regarding this particular gadget – perhaps “contraption” was a better word – however, Ruan wasn’t certain if she should be happy, or if disgruntlement was more called for. “What, pray tell, is it?”
She’d shared some of them with her parents-to-be beforehand, but there was a bit of a language barrier, an image barrier. They could understand, through careful, patient relaying of images, that this was not her first life.
Originally posted on Dec. 19, 2011
🗺️
“Are you sure you’ll stay, then?”
Shea hadn’t been looking for the underground facility – hadn’t been looking, at least, for this specific, deep-cavern-system underground facility, with its refugee population hidden there since the Catastrophe. But, having found it, and, more importantly, having found them, Shea couldn’t leave without doing something.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1315844.html. You can comment here or there.
Here’s some more fiction and poetry from 2005, as I clean out my LiveJournal
🌼
Pen between her teeth, she stares into space, muttering snatches of phrase. The words are always there, an ever-flowing stream across her mental meadow…
Ruan wasn’t so much talking to herself as she was talking to the hodgepodge she was looking through. Her Aunt Tansy hadn’t been, as they say, The Aunt – she was a paternal aunt, for one thing, totally not the right sort, and Ruan’s Aunt Elenora was still alive and well – but the family tradition seemed to hold anyway. Her father’s sister had taken a long walk into the ocean, and it was left to Ruan to clean up her mess.
The last war for the nation of Yestern ended not with a bang, but with a complaint.
“We’re out of tea.”.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1315259.html. You can comment here or there.
For today, in honor of looking through my LiveJournal archives, I offer some early-2000’s poetry.
🌸
Unedited Prayer of Sorts
My lady of the verdant green, why have you forsaken me?
When I was a child, your oaken skirts shielded me
From interlopers and observers; simple faith carried me,
and simple ritual. nothing else was needed:
The bowl of petunias plummeted towards the ground, no room in what it could pretend, loosely, was a brain for anything except a vague and dissatisfied sense of what, if you were going to translate it into Galactic Book Standard, would sound mostly like not again.
History and memory did not go past the wall.
It was as tall as anyone could imagine, an unknown width, and it surrounded the Community, giving them room enough to live and grow but no more.
It could not be climbed, being smooth to the touch and unpleasant to be in contact with for any length of time. It could not be drilled through, nor broken. It could not be dug underneath.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1313611.html. You can comment here or there.