Tag Archive | prompter: clare

Thorny Disposition

Feb26

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt.
Addergoole has a landing page here and a wiki here.

Addergoole, Hell Night Year Eight

The halls were dark and creepy, and Phillipa had gotten horribly turned around. She didn’t know where she was, or even how she had gotten there, and she didn’t really know, now, where she wanted to go.

Some giant minotaur had been bearing down on her when she’d slipped and gone twisting down some sort of slide. She’d barely avoided something that looked like a mechanical monster and gotten hit with three squirt guns of stinky, gooey something, and now she was sitting in a tiny box that had the pleasant advantage of being quiet and well-lit but the disadvantage of letting her know exactly how badly she’d gotten drenched. Her heart was still pounding, and her palms and butt felt as if she’d scraped them really, really badly. She really should move, but she knew, if she went back out there, it would just get worse.

The door to her box opened, and a short, cheerful girl stuck her head in. “Phillipa, right? I’m Caity. We’re in the same PE together, remember?”

Caity, unlike a lot of the students here, still looked mostly like Caity, if a bit sharper-edged. Phillipa nodded uncertainly. “Yes? What’s going on?”

The tiny girl was looking at her sharply. “Are you in pain?”

“I think I scraped myself a little bit…”

“I’d say so! Here, stand up, you look like you’re bleeding.” Caity took her hand, very gingerly, and tugged her out of the box. “You’ve fallen into our protective custody trap. I hope you don’t mind too much, but it looks like it stressed you out a bit?”

“A bit,” she winced. “It shows that badly?”

“Well, here.” She reached behind her and took a mirror from… Phillipa wasn’t really sure from where, actually. “Look for yourself.”

“What? I know I’m all coated in goo… oh.” In the mirror, she saw a stranger. Her eyes, but greener than hers had ever managed except with contacts. Her nose, but narrower, her lips, but redder, her hair, but… tangled with vines, somehow. And her fingers were longer, sharper, or something, and along her arms…. “Are those thorns?”

“Technically, on a rose, they’re called prickles. I wonder if you’ll be able to hold onto things better with them?”

“I… rose, what?”

“Well,” the tiny girl smiled, “it makes sense. You’re pretty, with a bit of a thorny disposition.”

“I am not…. am I really?”

“A little.” Caity patted her shoulder. “But it’s okay. we’re all a bit victim to our biology.”

next! Planting Seeds (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/284018.html. You can comment here or there.

Finding Comfort

Aug12

To [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt “Rozen/Kai” in this flash-fiction meme (LJ).

This is Addergoole post-apoc, just after Retirement 2.

Short non-AdderHooligan summary: Rozen is, in main timeline, a Big Bad Wolf style bully of the Addergoole school, and Kai nearly becomes his victim. 50 years later, nearly 4 decades after the apocalypse, he becomes her captive and possesion after being starved and poisoned.

Kailani, Dean Storm, came home to her room, locked the door, and dropped her Mask, dropping with it fifty excess years of age, the weight of responsibility, the urge to solemnity.

Rozen was waiting for her, sitting on the floor by the door as if he’d meant to drape himself there, trying to hide with Mask and force of will how exhausted he was. His ribs still showed, his cheeks were still gaunt, but he was slowly filling out. Slowly. Hawthorne poisoning was a horrible thing.

Kai, looking at him, struggled with the conflict between her rage – he had had such a lovely body, and it would take such time to rebuild – and gratitude – every day he had to focus on rebuilding his strength was one more day for the Bond to work on him, make him more comfortable with the status quo and less likely, when he was up to full power, to fight her.

“I brought you broth.” She set the broth on the table, ignoring the small prickle in her spine at having her back to him, then came back, to present him with her hands. “Let me help you up.”

“I’m fine,” he grumbled, as he took her hands.

“I’m sure you are,” she lied. “I like helping you.” That part, at least, wasn’t a lie. She hauled him to his feet and shifted her hold to his waist. “You’re getting further along every day.”

“In a month, I’ll be able to make it to your office,” he quipped tiredly.

“By then, I’ll be ready for you,” she murmured back.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/106660.html. You can comment here or there.

Devil’s in the Details

Jul18

Thisis a short story in response to [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s commission in my Giraffe Sale: “More of that Rozen and Aviv”

Addergoole/Fae Apoc. After Devil Deals (LJ Link) and before Into the Woods (from Sugar Cat) and the subsequent events in Retirement and Retirement 2

Fish Gotta Swim explains what Aviv is up to.

One year, six months after Devil Deals

Aviv left Rozen to the terrified girl, a lovely sorrel brunette, careful not to let his disgust show on his face. “I’ll take the other one back to her home, and see you next year.”

“Pleasure doing business with you.” Of course it was. Rozen delighted in making people uncomfortable. Aviv picked up the unconscious blonde, last year’s victim, and, carefully working an invisibility, carried her home. He left her on her father’s doorstep – her father who had sold her to a monster for a year of peace – tucked in a blanket, and went home, almost holping Rozen would break their deal.

One year later

Three refugees that had come through his camp had mentioned Rozen’s name; one, a tiny girl with lightning in her eyes, had been escorted the whole way there by the giant man. The beast having kept his end of the bargain, Aviv travelled back to his protectorate to keep his end.

The villagers tended to come up with an excuse to send the girls into the woods when it came time to pay the tithe; since the rest of the year it was safe, kept so by Rozen himself, the girls didn’t seem to suspect anything. This year, one had brought her friend, however.

They could handle two girls. Aviv Worked his invisibility and ghosted out into the path, the trees moving eerily around them, the path seeming to close in from behind. He’d used this trick before, when humans were hunting down Ellehemaei in his territory. But these were innocent girls.

They screamed, all the rumors of beasts in the woods, monsters who eat little girls, coming back to them all at once. One of them tried to run, and smacked straight into Aviv. He wrapped a tentacle around her and held her fast.

The other one was holding her head with fingers that seemed to be elongating and splitting, looking more like tendrils or vines than fingers, while pools of ink spilled out of her pants legs. Behind her, Rozen laughed and picked her up.

“Looks like we trade,” he joked. “This one’s got to be yours.”

Aviv held the girl in his non-arms tighter as he watched Rozen, wondering if the beast was going to go for a deal. But the big man was shaking his head, even as he hauled the weakly-struggling girl across the clearing. His voice was solemn. “The girl I dropped off with you? She all right?”

“Ashni?” He nodded. “We got her settled in. Seems she’s pregnant.” He kept any question out of his voice. He didn’t want to know.

“Good. Here, you take your cousin-niece-granddaughter-whatever here home. I’ll keep an eye on her family. You have my word on that.”

Aviv exchanged girls, murmuring a quick Working to put them both to sleep. “Thank you.” Balancing the sleeping maybe-a-relative on his shoulder, he wrapped invisibility around them and headed for home.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/81020.html. You can comment here or there.

Being Alone

May10

Sometime in September, I posted Two by Two, a fae apoc story set in a travelling show. clare_dragonfly asked:

“As usual though I want more context 😉 Why did Anaca allow herself to be caught? (Or if she didn’t want to, how did they catch her?)”

This is a partial answer to this, from Anaca’s point of view.

***

I’d gotten used to hiding, but I never really got used to being alone.

When my Change had come, I’d been just past my fourteenth birthday, and the world had been mad with wild gods in the skies. My bones had twisted, my thumbs vanished, my tail grew, while I hid in my closet and tried not to scream. When it was over, I looked something like a rabbit, and something like a deer, and only like a human in the silhouette.

A long time past, that, and, that time, my family and I had managed to flee before the lynch mob came to get me. Anything strange was suspect, and I was definitely strange.

I learned to Mask from a travelling biker gang not long afterwards, bikers who mostly didn’t bother, in that age, to hide their horns and tusks. That helped some; it helped hide me from the strangers who were afraid of all things fae. But it didn’t help the real problems. My parents were not fae, and neither were my siblings, and, though they tried to hide it, they were as afraid of the monster in their midst as the strangers we were hiding from were. I ran off in the middle of the night with the bikers, and tried to pretend it didn’t hurt.

So’jers like that had no real place for a teenaged girl who’d barely Changed, so I didn’t stay with them for very long. I bounced from group to group, hiding where I could, helping when I was able, and learning from those who would teach me.

It got harder and harder as time passed. Sometimes, the Mask, the glamour that hid my appearance from humankind, would flicker on me, and sometimes it failed completely. I couldn’t risk spending time in the company of humans, or at least not much time at once, so I found groups of fae that I could live or travel with. But, as the decades passed, those groups got rarer and rarer, and the so’jers were no better company for a fifty-year-old preybeast than they had been for a fourteen-year-old.

I had been living in the Appalachian forest for what I was pretty sure was ten or eleven years, in an area where humans rarely travelled. It was one of those places they called a “twisted zone,” where the magic thrown around during the God Wars had changed the landscape and the animals. Other fae would come through sometimes, but humans found the places scary, and their legends told them that they, too, could be changed, by the air or the water or just contact with the strange creatures there. It made for a lonely existence, but I’d grown a bit tired of running, and here, I’d been able to settle down.

I had a nice set-up, a cave that was dry all year round, with some scavenged furniture from a few falling-down houses. My Change had made me an herbivore, and so I had a nice garden, spread out enough that it didn’t look like a sign of habitation. The weather never got cold enough to really need clothes, and I never saw anyone, so I’d stopped bothering with clothes. It was a comfortable life, if wild, but it was lonely.

I guess I’m really not built for the solitude. When people came through, I’d hide in the trees and watch them, listening to their conversations, imagining talking to them, wondering what it would be like to travel with them. I’d follow them to the edge of my territory, sometimes sleeping nearby just to feel like I was near people again.

When the ringmaster came through, with his cart for catching strange creatures and his bright, chipper, twin companions, they didn’t even have to put forth any effort to catch me. I hate to admit it, but I fell right into their trap.

And sitting there, struggling with the net, hissing and spitting like a wild thing, I have to admit… somewhere in the back of my mind, I was relieved.

***

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/41847.html. You can comment here or there.