Tag Archive | prompt: seventh sanctum

Poaching in the Bear Empire

Feb15

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Dying in the Bear Empire

🐻

They left the wagon near the front of a farmhouse, making sure the horses were comfortable and had plenty of grass to munch on, and set off on foot, each of them carrying a bag.  As soon as they reached an intersection, they turned off the wagon-road, heading towards the foothills.

Dusk came on them sooner than they’d have liked, the air turning cool as the sun ducked behind the mountains. Deline began looking for a reasonable place to stop for the night. Continue reading →

Dying in the Bear Empire

Feb4

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Traditions in the Bear Empire

🐻

“You might thank me for saving your life along with my own.”

Carrone snorted and bowed in his seat.  “Thank you kindly.  but what makes you so important that the Deklegion would want to risk the wrath of the bounty guild?”

She smiled enigmatically.  “You’ll see eventually.  The thing is… as far as they know, right now, I’m an agent of the Empire. And that much is true.” Continue reading →

Traditions in the Bear Empire

Jan4

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Hiding In the Bear Empire

🐻

Carrone was unsurprisingly quiet as they left Teshone’s.  Deline let it go as they strode down the avenue, but when they got to the carriage house, where the next outbound carriage would soon be heading towards the Imperial Seat, she broke the silence.

“Do you know what happens if someone bound with a Bear-stone bracelet kills the holder of the bracelet – or if the holder dies through other means?”

She noticed the way his shoulders tensed.  She couldn’t bring herself to feel bad about that. Continue reading →

Hiding in the Bear Empire

Dec21

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Moving through the Bear Empire

🐻

“…a bodyguard who is happy with his work is more effective.”

Carrone snorted at that answer, but took the moment to open a door in the wall that was so effectively sandwiched between two other buildings she’d almost missed it.  “I should go first, in case Teshone is in.”

“As you wish.”  She gestured up the stairs.  Was he leading her into a trap?  She had one hand on her knife-hilt as they navigated the narrow stairs, her senses on high alert.  There was nobody moving upstairs.  Something like a mouse scratched in the wall to her left.  To the right, the sickly smell of a hatter’s seemed to leech through the wall.

“Here.” The staircase terminated in a narrow landing with three doors; he unlocked the one to the right.  Over the hatter’s, then.  From there there were three more doors.

“This is beginning to look like a puzzle box,” she muttered. Continue reading →

Moving Through the Bear Empire

Dec18

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Caught, in the Bear Empire

🐻

Deline slept more soundly than perhaps she should have, with a bounty hunter in bed next to her and, presumably, several more on her tail.

She woke in the early morning to see Carrone pacing back and forth in the small floor space of the inn.  He wasn’t talking, but he was gesturing as if he was having an argument, and every few steps he’d glare at the Bear-stone bracelet and the bloody welts the spell-rope had left.

“Time to get on the road.  We can get a bath at the next inn.”  She was pleased to see that he was startled and more pleased to see that he didn’t jump but just twitched a little.  “I’m going to leave you with your weapons, because your job now is to keep me alive.”

He worked his jaw.  “I’d rather stab you.” Continue reading →

Caught, In the Bear Empire – a continuation

Dec14

First: Running in the Bear Empire

🐻

The bounty hunter took a couple breaths, studying her.  “You know what they say about the Bear-stone bracelet in Halor, right?”

“I can hazard a guess or two.”

“They say it eats your brain.  They say that when you take it off, there’s nothing left of you.  And they say only certain people in the Empire’s hierarchy are allowed to use them.”

“I did say I could kill you without compunction, didn’t I?”

“Who are you?” Continue reading →

Running in the Bear Empire – a beginning of a story

Dec12

For Rowyn.

🐻

Someone was on her trail.

Deline knew it.  She could feel it in the prickle on the back of her neck, the way that sometimes it seemed like there was an extra shadow to her shadow, the unsettled feeling that left her leaving her bed in the middle of the night and hitting the road again.

She had been moving for days – no, weeks.  She had left Dekleg behind more than five days ago, and with it the laws that she’d broken.  And Dekleg did not talk to the Elherion Empire, nor the Empire to Dekleg, much less exchange prisoners.  Deline was not even sure if they had any laws in common – which, since she’d spent the last ten years before Dekleg in the Empire, was how she’d gotten in trouble in the first place.

But someone was tracking her, and she didn’t imagine they were doing it to ask her to work for them or to shake her hand for the fine things she’d done in deep Dekleg, where she had dealt with some frankly horrible things. Continue reading →

The “A” Warehouse

Mar30

Written to 2 prompst from this page, which are the bold-italiced sections of this ficlet

Yes, I owned the “A” warehouse. “Owned,” you see, because while I still hold the deed to the property, the property itself is gone, and where it’s fallen, I don’t think there’s anyone who cares about things like deeds.

This is a story about infamy, marriage, and being an arch-mage, although I’m forced to admit that the arch-mage part is still in the future – in the hopeful, potential future at that.

The infamy part, unfortunately, is very much in the “now,” and in all potential futures available from here, too. And the marriage – well, here’s fingers crossed and hats off to Marvipost and Tannibaun that that doesn’t turn out to be in the past.

But you were asking about “A” warehouse. Down in the lettered streets, which are now quite a bit more “down” than “streets”, may Tannibaun and Ornigzar have mercy on the souls of those poor denizens. I owned it. I kept it stocked. I understand the regulations, maybe better than most people. I helped write half those regulations, after all – and now we get back to the infamy part.

Now I see that you recognize me. I’m told my face isn’t done justice by those portraits, and I’ve never been the public one in our marriage.

But I owned the “A” warehouse – and the “C” and “F” as well. And I stoked them all. What the inhabitants of the belowland will be doing with them, now that the entire sector has fallen, I do not know. What they will do to any survivors, I can only guess. I know only that they are gone, may Marvipost and Ornigzar forgive me.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1081812.html. You can comment here or there.

Freewriting to 7th Sanctum Prompt: Martyr

Mar29

Written to a prompt from this page, which is the first sentence of this storylet.

I will be a noble, with my weapons and my bracelets, and it is disgusting.

I had planned to be a martyr. A martyr was an honorable thing to be, even if it made one’s father weep and one’s cousins nervous. Martyrs’ names were written on the great wall – or so we called it, though it was sun-baked mud and when the rainy season came, the names tended to bleed away down into the gutter. But so did we, and so we pretended it was poetic.

And yet when the fight came, I found myself doing the unthinkable. I saw a noble, a man no more than twenty years old, barely worthy of either the words “noble” or “man” and I threw myself over him, protecting him from the blast. I had meant to die on their soldiers’ bayonets, and instead I lived, and he lived. And worse, he thanked me, thanked me publicly.

I would never be able to show my face in the slums again, and so when his mother offered me a bayonet by the handle and not by the blade, when she offered me the wristlets of service, what could I do? I will be a noble, no matter how disgusting it is, and I will serve this man whose life I saved.

I might have meant to be a martyr, but there is no point in dying at the hands of my own people, and so my sacrifice will have to wait.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080292.html. You can comment here or there.

She Understood… a story beginning written off of a 7th Sanctum prompt

Feb17

From this prompt generator: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=writeprompt

There, in the hyperspace beacon, she understood evil. That woman, with her statues and her beautiful desks, filled with beautiful pens and inkwells, that woman, who surrounded herself in the handicrafts of bygone eras and far-flung worlds…

…she stood in the glaring radiation of the most modern thing she could find, and understood what every piece of every culture she could touch could not explain to her.

The Ruler, for it was she, stood in the cold blue light, staring out at the new world they had found, and felt chilled to the bone. She had found what she’d been looking for. At long last, she had reached understanding.

She reached out towards her desks and her statues, her pens and her rag paper, but there was nothing there that could cleanse the stain from her mind.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1067397.html. You can comment here or there.