Tag Archive | prompter: wyste

CHIVES! (A blog post)

One of the first things I planted here – at House Thorn – were chives.

I got them off a freecycle or plantcycle (same idea), back in the days when those lists were doing well here in Ithaca.

(The concept of either is that you post “I have this thing I don’t need anymore” or “I have this thing I need, does anyone have it?” I’ve used it to get: a scythe, cat litter buckets (Our cat litter comes in sort of cartons and I wanted to try cat litter bucket planters), air mattresses, a broken breadmaker… We’ve gotten rid of a safe, a burn barrel, a turtle sandbox…)

I also went and got the earliest-blooming crocuses that were available.

Of course, since we moved into the house in mid-September, we discovered the next Spring that the people who had owned the house before us had been of a similar mind – there are spring blooming bulbs all over this place, so it’s a riot of color from the first thaw through the end of day-lily season.

But CHIVES.

I hate March, I’m afraid. Really dislike the month. (T was explaining why to a friend and he summarized it as “the color.”) It’s grey and muddy! And it’s a tease; you want to plant but you can’t.

The last freeze date in our area is mid-May, just for reference.

But CHIVES. Chives are food. They are fresh and they really taste good only fresh. And when the snow is just starting to melt, when it’s just thinking about melting, then you have chives.

This little bit of green pops up in your garden (I have an “invasives” bed I’ve mentioned before, where I let various chives and mints duke it out. I tried oregano once and I ended up with hybridized mint-regano.) and it’s like All Is Not Lost. Things Will Grow Again. Here, have some Food.

It’s amazing. Alliums are a gift and we should cherish them forever.

🧅

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🧅

Other Chive Posts:

Gardening! March 23, 2012

Life in the Country, Tuesday edition (Actually Monday edition, just really late). March 21, 2012

On Chives April 9, 2014

Spring! Chives – May 16, 2013

Reformed?

Apr30

Okay, this was supposed to be short. It is not short. It is a riff off of a comment from a request for dark fic prompts from like 2 months ago.

It took a while.

Damon Rudd had not meant to reform. He had been living a perfectly happy life destroying anything at that pissed him off, thwarting people who got his way (heroes with overdeveloped moral senses usually, Golden Hawk and Wise Ibis and the like), being amazingly rich and getting richer, and more or less doing whatever he wanted to do. This had been working fine, until, walking behind one of his businesses, he found a woman and two children digging for food in his dumpster. This, Damon found, pissed him off. But because he was not an idiot, he was able to see that what pissed him off was not the woman. Continue reading →

Beepocalypse 2: Up

Dec16

First: The Testers

Written in part to prompts from Wyste and Lilfluff

🐇

The elevator doors opened into a white room with only one door out of it. Three people in masks and white suits were waiting to greet her. The air smelled of antiseptic and some floral-like scent Kelly didn’t recognize.

“Come this way.” The voice – from the central of the three people – was muffled but understandable. The figure pointed. Continue reading →

The Testers

Nov26

Written in part to prompts from Wyste and Lilfluff, clearly not finished.

🐇

“And when you turn twenty,” Thomas whispered, “the Testers come and they take you away. And if you’re very very lucky, they take you to a good place, and if you’re not, they take you to a bad place.”

The younger children shivered. Kelly was supposed to be watching them tonight, but she was letting Thomas tell his stories, even if they weren’t at all helpful.

She’d be twenty tomorrow. She remembered when they’d taken Aaron. And before Aaron, Jennifer, and before Jennifer, Keisha and Min and Lad and Petyr Continue reading →

The Pauper Princess and the Tallest Tower, Introduction

Aug15

The wedding had been a fete to be spoken of for generations; the entire capital city had been invited. The Princess Zsófika was resplendent in her gown of pearls and sapphires, and if anyone noticed that her vows did not allow for the possibility of refusal, no-one mentioned it. She was marrying the Emperor, after all, poor girl. She was marrying the Emperor and tying her natal kingdom finally and entirely into the Empire.

The celebration went on for a week, the Emperor and his new bride at every event, the bride in a shining new dress every day. Later, women who knew who to talk to would fight each other for the rights to this dress or that, as they would only touch the Princess’ body the once, and they were, both literally and in the more common sense, a king’s ransom, every single one of them.

And then the Princess went into the Tower, the Consort’s Tower, the bride’s Tower, the Tallest Tower, and the Emperor went back to the business of ruling a slightly-larger empire. Continue reading →

Kidnapped

Jul29

Content warning: kidnapping and all that it implies

He was going to fight when he woke up, in all likelihood. They almost always fought.

He hadn’t fought them getting in the car because they’d drugged him. A guy like him, rich father, stupidly influential mother, ought to have known better, but it’d been a closed thing, fraternity gig, and he’d probably thought he was safe among his brothers.

Fraternity parties invited girls.

The sister sorority hadn’t even been hard to join. Cass and Jenn, as they were calling themselves this week, hadn’t had any problem with the initiation rites, and sorority hazing was nothing compared to their actual organization.

He was coming home with them, drugged and happy, and none of his brothers even thought it was strange.

They might find it strange when he didn’t show up tomorrow. They might actually worry the next day.

By then, any reputation he had would be in the process of being destroyed, and the nude pictures Cass and Jenn were going to send the Senator and her husband would leave no question as to what was going on with their darling son.

They had the cabin in the woods already picked out for it. The parents might find him. If they wanted to. If they were inclined to. If they had the resources still after Cass and Jenn and their organization were done with him.

He stirred. Cass twisted to look at him. He was cute, soft lips, an adorable smile. She sort of hoped that his parents didn’t come after him.

The last one, that had been interesting. Congressman Hartford and her doctor husband, their handsome son. The Hartford-Maynards had looked for their son, but Cass was pretty sure they hadn’t looked too hard or too long.

‘They’d been sent the pictures of the corpse. That, of course, had been faked. Their organization was damn good at faking corpses, and if the Hartford-Maynards ever did find the place their son had been kept, they would find enough to convince them they’d found his body.
The son himself, on the other hand, had entered into personal service with Jenn, and was – probably – happily enough in Jenn’s dorm waiting for her right now. Her real dorm, at their real college. He was getting top grades, too.

Jenn pulled off the main road and down a side road that was only very nominally paved. Cass squirmed into the back seat. He was starting to come to, and they were out of the sight of police and random passers-by now.

In a week, there’d be some very compromising pictures sent to the Senator. Jenn and Cass had seven days, then, to have as much fun as they could with the Senator’s son. The pictures could be faked. But it was so much better if they could just get him to agree to play along.


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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1356297.html. You can comment here or there.

Marked – a story of Fae Apoc for my Summer Giraffe Call

Jun28

Written to wyste‘s prompt here to my Summer Giraffe Call.

Content warning: Slavery, suggested violence against said slave. Fire is involved.

The fire was getting very hot. Reis struggled futilely against the chains binding him. He could hear in his head, absurdly, the way she’d sounded when she’d first bought him:

”So. Fire, Water, Plants. And Earth. What about you?”

He hadn’t answered. He’d been working at the ropes, and it hadn’t been an order. She didn’t give a lot of orders, he’d noticed. Even after he’d refused to answer her. Even after he’d run away. Even after he’d run away four times.

Five, now, and he’d gotten further this time than he had before. This time, she’d actually looked annoyed when she caught up to him. And this time, she’d made camp right there, right in the middle of a ruined city, rather than dragging him home again.

“There.” She sat down in front of him and showed him her handiwork: a piece of twisted metal on the end of a stick. “Do you read Old Tongue?”

Not answering her had become a test. Now Reis was wondering if that had been a bad idea. Still, it was too late now to close the barn door. He didn’t reply, not even to shake his head.

“This part is my Name. The Long Run. This part means ‘property of’. I figure…” She stroked his bare neck slowly. He’d gotten really good at picking locks on collars. “…this one will be a little harder to take off.”

Reis eyed the piece of metal. It was kind of pretty… if you didn’t put one and one together and get ow. He swallowed and thought about begging.

She grabbed his hair and pressed his forehead to the ground. Oh, gods no, not his neck, not… He started keening. He couldn’t help it.

“If you have any skill with Body, now would be the time to shut off your pain receptors for a couple minutes. And if you don’t… I’d suggest holding as perfectly still as possible.”

Reis thought fast, swallowed, and pushed up against her hand enough that his mouth was out of the dirt. “Could… could you make that an order?”

As the first thing he’d spoken to another person in over a decade, he figured it made a pretty good surrender.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1133740.html. You can comment here or there.

Second-year magic lessons

Apr18

This is written to a prompt cluudle left back in August, 2015

Luke didn’t like her, and he really did not like teaching her.

Shahin found that a little amusing, but she tried not to antagonize the man too much. She wanted to become better at Kwxe. Everything she found in every vision told her she was going to need it. Everything the teachers didn’t want to tell her enforced that – up to and including the fact that, despite the fact that Luke did not like teaching her, he’d agreed to meet with her three times a week to practice Kwxe.

“What are you going to use this for?” he demanded today. Shahin smiled, a small expression that was as dry and as careful as she could make it.

“I was thinking,” she offered, “that I would use it to stop Dragons. Or – if I can’t stop them…” She would stop them, she knew it. But that would be much later. “…then to stall them.”

She noted that he was surprised, and a bit chagrined, and quite a bit worried. She decided she could live with that.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1089486.html. You can comment here or there.

Dinner, a ficlet for the December Prompt Call for Wyste

Jan5

Written to wyste‘s prompt

There were things Taran expected from Ei. He expected dinner ready when he got home from work. He expected ridiculous movies and cuddling and a certain needy affection that he loved. He expected obedience when they were playing and backtalk when they weren’t, and an eye-searing sense of fashion that made office parties quite entertaining.

He did not expect to come home and find dinner for three on the table, and Ei sitting patiently on the couch with another guy. Ei was smiling, but it was a nervous smile, and the guy – shaggy beard, perfectly groomed hair, terrifyingly blue eyes – was smiling reassuringly and patting Ei’s hands.

“This, ah, this is Joseph.” Ei sprang to his feet. “This is Joseph, and I want to bring him home for dinner.” Taran’s partner jutted out his chin in nervous defiance. “And for good.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1040545.html. You can comment here or there.

Walk Away (a story… beginning)

Aug12

Arlen hadn’t so much run as he’d walked. His owner had died with no children and no nieces, and it had taken over a month for the Crown to find an appropriate heir.

Arlen had been fond of the old bitch, but one of the lovely things about her was that she was old. He had no interest in dealing with a new mistress, bitch or no, particularly not someone young. So he found the key to his collar in a box of the her Ladyship’s jewelry, guessed the password — he had served her since infancy; there was very little he didn’t know about her — and walked.

He brought with him Anje, the cook’s daughter, who was pregnant and did not want her baby to be born a slave. They took the oldest, most broken-down of the old lady’s cars, the sort of thing she might have passed down to a slave on freeing them, had she lived.

The slave revolt found them. They were both lifetime slaves, and did not know how to look free, even if they were now, technically, free. The authorities would have found them if the revolt did not; all things considered, Arlen decided they had done all right being found as they had.

Anje found a place for herself right away. Everyone needs cooks, and she had learned at her mother’s feet. Arlen… Arlen was having more trouble. He was trained in personal service. Sometimes, they had “spa days” for visiting nosy government officials, and Arlen had moments where he could shine. But that had all of the disadvantages of personal service and none of the advantages.

There came a slave, terrified and angry and entirely unsuited, and a master who would not let go, would not give up. The dogs were coming and the psychics, the hunters with their tranq guns and their whips.

Sometimes, they had to give the former owners something. Someone. Sometimes sacrifices had to be made.

Arlen looked at the runaway, at Anje and her little girl. He looked, lastly, at himself in the mirror.

And then he walked away from the revolt and back into slavery.

So, cluudle has been writing some stories today in an AU based off of Tir na Cali.

And in return, I wrote a piece based off of her AU. 🙂

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/970050.html. You can comment here or there.

Alder's Grove Fiction

The Worlds of Lyn Thorne-Alder