rix_scaedu

The fairy sipped her tea and smiled in appreciation. “I must say that you do know to provide a genteel refreshment. I do like that in a person.” Her purple lips, lipstick surely, were making a perfectly friendly shape. “Now it was curses you wanted to know about, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The hostess was a skinny girl with a multitude of large freckles and skewwhiff hair. It was obvious that no good fairy had been summoned to her christening to grant her insipid beauty. “If you please.”

The dark-haired, purple-garbed fairy drank some more tea. “The oldest curses are revenge curses, payback for injury. Those are the sort of thing that can wipe out an entire family or doom a kingdom, and the layer of the curse doesn’t care or is even glad. You might have heard of the city of Lancart?”

“Only in once-upon-a-time stories,” the girl offered her guest a plate of biscuits.

The dark fairy took one, “Thank you. Lancart used to be reality, not a story, and it was a curse that brought it down. Of course, what I do is a variant of revenge curse, with lack of respect as the trigger. It may seem cruel, the gifts I give to those children, but some of them - how else are they supposed to develop any character or backbone? Good fairies, in my opinion, can be a little too eager to smooth out life’s potential rough spots.”

“But not all curses are about revenge.”

“Indeed no, particularly these days.” Another sip of tea. “You can trust a witch or even a sorceress to retain a sense of, well, appropriateness and connection when they deal out curses but get a wizard involved and it usually comes down to money. The fancier the title he gives himself, the more willing he is to provide curses in return for cash, in my experience. Want to disadvantage you rival in love? A wizard will sell you a spell to make warts grow. Want to get an inconvenient prince out of the way? A mage will turn him into a frog for you. In return for gold, of course.” She fumed into her tea for a moment then asked, “So, why do you want to know about curses, my dear?”

“There’s someone I…really like,” the girl blushed, “and I want him to be happy, but he’s in love with this other girl who’s under a curse…”

“Ah, well,” the fairy put down her cup and patted her hostess’ hand, “every curse has its remedy. It may be obscure. It may be unpalatable, but it does exist. Even mine have an out, if you’re devious enough.” A thought occurred to her, “Is it one of mine?”

“I don’t believe so, ma’am. I heard that it was supposed to be a blessing.”

“That could be awkward,” the dark fairy picked up her teacup again. “Blessings aren’t required to have escape clauses.”

I wrote this to aldersprig's 12th prompt "The darkness we didn't expect."

We expected the monsters, we’d sent them here, after all. We expected the monsters to be pissed off that we’d followed them, or to be pleased that we’d come so they’d have victims again. We didn’t expect a warning buoy in orbit above the planet with a list of precautions. We didn’t expect the reception committee we got, but it had been easy to forget that some of the monsters look just like us.

Coglan and Caruso were the first we lost. They went out to scout the northwest sector and never came back. Caruso in particular had been dismissive of the precautions the monsters warned us were necessary for our own safety. The trouble was, the monsters didn’t explain the danger, not clearly.

They’d brought us inside their stronghold but not to hold us as prisoners, because they made it clear that we could go anywhere we liked, during daylight. The catch was that, if you stayed out after dark, you could never come back inside. Ever. We saw them do that to one of their own children.

We hadn’t expected the monsters to have kids, they’d been pretty vicious to ours, but they cherished these and this kid in his teens didn’t come home from the forest one night. His mother, one of the Huntresses, was distraught. He turned up outside the gates after sunrise, but before the sun had hit the ground, and claimed he was okay, that he’d spent the night in a tree. They turned him away, told him that if what he said was true then he knew enough to make himself a safe place – outside their boundaries. The other kids weren’t allowed out into the forest until they were certain he’d moved on. His mother was a pillar of walking grief, but she didn’t object, and no-one told us why.

Now I know why. The precautions they gave us weren’t complete. It should have included “Don’t go into deep valleys where the sun doesn’t shine.” That’s where we found Coglan and Caruso, or rather where they found us.

Coglan took out Tyrrell from behind and broke his neck. Caruso caught Findlay, put his face up to hers and something black oozed out of his mouth and nose into hers. Then Coglan caught me, but he only tied me up, he didn’t do the black stuff thing. Then they ate Tyrrell while they looked at me with their solid black eyes. I can’t help wondering if I’m still alive because they like their meat fresh…

It’ll be sundown soon. Help!

I wrote this to aldersprig's tenth prompt "Waking up someone else."

She remembered feeling sick, running a fever, and stumbling out of bed to answer the door. She had a vague impression of opening the door to a posse of locals and then, nothing…

Well, she was in her own bed, that was a start. The curtains were open though, and she always slept with them closed. Her mouth was dry and she was lying on her side, her orange-furred and clawed hand resting on the bed sheet in front of her face.

She was human. She didn’t have fur. She didn’t have claws. Her visible hair was dark brown, not orange – none of her hair was orange!

She threw off the covers and swung her feet onto the floor. They were delicately arched and padded, with orange claws neatly protruding from orange fur at the end of each of her toes. They were very elegant, but they were not human feet. They were not hers. But they were. Eyes and orange, velvet-furred hands told her that those elegant feet were on the end of legs that joined to the body that led to the neck that supported the head her eyes sat in. Somehow more disturbing was the discovery of her old war-gotten scars, nestling in her new orange pelt; thin, pale lines of not-fur.

Her bladder was making demands of her now, so she stood to walk to the bathroom and discovered that her feet seemed to work differently with their changed shape. She had a tail too, and it had a mind of its own, but that mind seemed inclined to be helpful in terms of balance and where it should go at any given time. Fortunately, if she tried to tiptoe, then she could stalk and that was how she made it to the bathroom where she saw to her bladder’s needs and spent an informative session in front of the mirror.

She was, it seemed, still herself, but she’d somehow been changed. She was human and had, she’d previously thought it needless to say, always been a human. Now she was a sawaab, a native of this world where she was her family trading company’s representative. She’d served in a mixed unit with sawaaba during the late war, which was why her cousin had given her this job, but nothing she’d heard then had ever suggested anything like this transformation.

When she left the bathroom two female sawaaba in nurse’s dress were waiting for her. One was holding a bed table with food while the other was carrying clothes. “You’re awake and walking,” the nurse with the elegant dun pelt, who was carrying the clothes, said brightly. “Now you need to eat a little, then we’ll get you clean and dressed. You have some important visitors coming shortly to talk about what’s happened to you.” With that they put her back into bed and fed her.

After she’d eaten they took her back into the bathroom and took her through her ablutions, including washing under the shower. Normally, she would have objected to being treated like a child but she had no idea how to look after her pelt and was grateful for the instruction. The thing was though, they were treating her like a child, using the non-adult pronouns and honorifics. That was a step up from the past three years of being addressed as an ‘intelligent’ non-sawaab, and that had been a hard fall from the equal-and-close-colleague mode she’d become accustomed to from her sawaab warband-mates. She didn’t complain though and was grateful, too, for the help in getting dressed.

She did have a question. Her pelt was feathered, something she’d not seen in the sawaaba. “Excuse me, Nurse,” neither of her helpers had given their names, “should I be trimming these tags off?” She held up her arm to show what she meant.

“On no account,” the grey-green pelted younger nurse admonished. “It’s a grace note, a distinguishing mark. You must keep them!”

“I thought I had my pelt colour for that.” She’d never seen or heard of a sawaab with this bright a pelt. This intense, yes for dark browns abounded, but nothing in this shade.

“A grace note is a thing you cannot help which distinguishes you from others,” the nurse told her charge. “I’m sure that once you are declared an adult, you will have many suitors.”

On that note the two nurses took her downstairs to meet her guests.

Her receiving room was crowded. The room was only small for, as an alien, she went about her business cloaked outside her home and thus had only a small acquaintance and would not need to entertain large numbers of sawaaba. The administrator of the district was there, with two assistants and his body guards. The head of the district merchants’ guild was there too, with an assistant, perhaps called in as she was an associate member of the guild so her family’s business could operate here. There was another male sawaab, of the same apparent rank as the guild head, whom she did not know but whose hard eyes and presence made her want to flatten her ears in submission. There was a knot of three older female sawaaba who were lower in status and whom she characterised in her mind as “aunties.” The final group were the surviving sawaaba from her unit, and they looked friendly but formal.

“Mougain,” the administrator used her given name with the sound changes his language required, “we must apologise for the discomfort you have been put through. When your kin advised that your posting here would be indefinite, we had to take steps to allow your integration into our society, hence the virus you were given to effect the changes you have undergone. Your species, like ours, is a social one and to insist on an extension of the conditions under which you have been living would have been an unconscionable cruelty. The head of your trading house gave permission for your integration.”

“I suspect, Esteemed Administrator,” she was surprised how easy it was to flatten her ears in the appropriate submissive gesture, “that my elder cousin did not understand how extensive an integration he was agreeing to.”

“That is true,” the administrator conceded graciously. “I have heard that your people do not have the ability to integrate others in this fashion. I was surprised to discover, however, that you were a warrior among your people and not a merchant.” There was an accusatory note to that and Morgan could read sawaab body language well enough to know that she needed to explain this truthfully.

“In the war many humans were called into the military who would otherwise never have been warriors, myself among them. When I returned home, my elder cousin had already given the security jobs in our business to other cousins in the same position. As I was the only one who spoke siawaab, he sent me here to be the company’s agent.”

“Ah!” His mood lightened and the unknown male with the hard eyes relaxed. “That explains matters. Now, we have arranged for you to have tutors to teach you how sawaab behave.” He indicated the “aunties.” “Your old warband has volunteered to drill you to pass the tests for the warriors’ guild to the guild master’s satisfaction.” The previously unknown male inclined his head and Morgan bowed back as she had learnt to do to senior sawaab officers. The administrator continued, “Now all you need is a use name to replace your milk name.”

“Excuse me, Esteemed Administrator,” that was Swasza from her warband, “but she has a use name. We call her Miikwa.” The administrator’s body guards and the Warriors’ Guild master smiled.

“I don’t understand,” the administrator said carefully.

“The miikwa is the smallest blade in a Warrior’s traditional arsenal,” the guild master explained, his smile in his voice.

“And you have seen that I am quite short,” added Morgan known as Miikwa. “It’s also better than Tunnelrat, which was my human nickname.”

“I am enlightened,” the administrator stood with a smile, “and now I will leave and allow all your training to be organised.”

After he’d been bowed out of the room and the house, Swasza seized the floor. “I think I speak for everyone, little sister, when I say that the first thing you need to do is learn how to walk properly.”

I wrote this to aldersprig's eighth prompt "The moon and what's wrong with it."

Sometime in the far future, when the seasons are stable and human civilisation has become capable of things Tarrascotti, Capalini and the others of their time could never imagine…

The space capsule was tiny on the inside. Weight was at a premium and that meant extra crew space was a luxury they couldn’t afford. That made the identity of the third crew member surprising. When the religious community had insisted that a priest of Lunifer had to be on the first craft to orbit the Moon, the Space Agency had refused because they could launch and return home three men, not four.

“You misunderstand,” the senior military chaplain, a priest of Aschaer, had explained patiently. “Not as well as, instead of. He can go up as the third crew member.” He placed a plain file on the table. “Here’s a list of Luniferan priests who meet the physical, educational and psychological parameters of the programme.” As it happened, some of them were better qualified than astronauts already in the programme.

Thus, the co-pilot, back-up engineer and guy-in-charge-of-the-cameras on this historic trip was a Luniferan priest. No-one mentioned that he had a better degree than the crew’s official engineer or most of the engineers on the ground. He sang beautifully and his short, wiry frame was a good fit for the capsule. He was such a good fit for the job that everyone had almost forgotten that he wasn’t the Agency’s choice. His team mates barely remembered that when he’d first arrived and they’d asked him why he was there he’d said, “Because you’re likely to have a crisis of faith when you pass the dark side of the Moon.”

Fabiano, the priest and co-pilot, started the cameras rolling as they went past the planet-facing side of the Moon the first time. Sartarelli, the pilot, had the flight controls while Radovic, the engineer, hummed over his readout dials. Cameras one and two busily transmitted live to the watching world while cameras three and four recorded so there would be a record of their flight over the dark side.

They passed the imaginary line that marked the edge of the full moon as seen from home, seeing new features for the first time, then Sartarelli gasped in horror.

“Keep on course,” advised Fabiano. “Our plotted orbit is still good. Do you need me to take over?”

From behind them Radovic asked, “Holy what?”

The moon had been a sphere, once. Now it was more of a hollowed-out cup, filled with jagged splinters that gave a vague indication of its original shape. The planet-facing shell didn’t look terribly thick.

“This doesn’t shock you?” Sartarelli would have indicated the scene, but his hands were busy. “Mission Control, are you seeing this?”

“Copy that, Moon Sweep One. We’ll have revised second orbit instructions for you when you come out from behind the lunar shadow. Good luck.”

“Copy that, Mission Control.” The radio went dead.

“It shocks me, but I was expecting something like this. It’s been a matter of doctrine for a very long time.” Fabiano smiled and began to recite a very old prayer. “Lord, let me lend thee of my strength while thou art weak and recovering, for I loved thee and thou became my shield and because of thee, I live.”

Back in Mission Control the senior military chaplain was saying, “And that is why Lunifer is accounted first of all heroes, before Aschaer Himself, all other gods and every man who have ever lived.” Then he recited, “For when he who had been Aschaer’s warleader fell, Lunifer took up the Shield of Invulnerability and slung it across his back, then turned his face from the enemy, wrapped his cloak about himself, braced and took a step backwards. And the Moon swayed backwards in its path with the step of its god and the killing bolt aimed at the world struck the Moon instead. The Shield of Invulnerability fell from Lunifer’s back in two pieces. He staggered and fell to his knees. The alien world approached, fast as screaming thought. Then the three child goddesses took up the reins of their dead mother, the Earth Queen, and joined hands in a circle with Lunifer. Then the four of them swayed in unison and the world and the Moon swayed with them, and the alien world missed. Thus both worlds lived and when they straightened again, the child goddesses were children no more but adult and in their glory.”

I wrote this to aldersprig's sixth prompt "The Storm that Changed Everything."

It was Old Mother Bel who raised the alarm. The shoreline families had evacuated to the church on the leading edge of the ridge for the night in the face of a storm coming in on a rising tide. The gale was ferocious outside but the old woman had insisted in ducking out to the privy when her family’s backs were turned. There had been a break in the clouds while she was outside and she knew what she was looking at when she saw the moonlight on the water and charged back inside, her walking stick moving faster than anyone thought it could, and made her grandsons start ringing the church’s bells in alarm.

That alarming jangle, so different to the harmonious call to services, brought the new parson out of his bed to see what the refugees were doing in “his” church. He hadn’t been happy about the fishermen, beachcombers and others staying in the church for the night but had conceded the point on the grounds of common sense. When he was made to understand the severity of the problem, he dashed back into the parsonage behind the church to get dressed just as the first of the villagers proper began to climb the hill.

Lord Halpfiger, who‘d built his fancy house only a little beyond the outskirts of the village, sent his running footman to complain about the noise. The running footman was sent back with the message, “The sea’s flooding!” The man went faster than he came, the lord having bought a tract of land that was no higher than most of the village.

In the end, the village was lucky. No-one died, although there were some narrow escapes. Lady Halpfiger is said to have had hysterics when the sun rose and she saw what the sea was doing to her beautiful house. There was lost livestock and property but it could have been worse.

South along the coast the land is higher and it’s not so easy for the sea to roll in over the shore. To our north, well our immediate neighbours have a hill too so most of them are safe, but beyond that it was flat beaches backed by salt marshes. The villages are all drowned and the sea hasn’t retreated back within its borders. Baumkirke used to be five miles inland and now it’s on the sea. Trombolt was the biggest town in these parts, with a fine port, and now it’s gone beneath the waves.

Lord Halpfiger is poorer than he was before the storm, much of his wealth was in land that’s now sea bottom, but he’s more important than he used to be because there are far fewer nobles now. It seems the loss of his house doesn’t matter so much because he spends so much more time in attendance on the King,

Here? Here we’re deciding how far back along the ridge we should go to rebuild.

I sometimes write stories set in a polytheistic world where angels are a theological and objective physical reality, created by the gods as their servants. The Benarians are convinced that they are the favoured people of the gods, while angels recruit and drop a word, or a scroll, in the ears of the wise to influence events and outside the bounds of creation the vard plot to undo everything. This is the home of Tala, the angel in service to Thaladaneth, The Thirteenth Swordlord known also as The Black Scabbard.

The stories in this universe so far are:

Forewarning;

Choices And Consequences;

Just Curious;

An Angel With A Message;

The Man With The Bucket;

The First Of Her Kind;

The Work

Might Have Beens;

Tala’s Fight;

An Instructive Conversation;

The Need For Vigilance;

How Large Is The Problem;

Some Days Are Worse Than Others;

Afterlife;

Finding Something To Run To;

Correcting Assumptions;

A Philosophical Discussion;

Betrayal;

Moonstone;

Back When There Was Water On The Moon;

Refuge;

A Staff With a Knob On It;

Initial Orders; and

Rainbow Tears.

I wrote this to lilfluff' prompt "The beginning of a journey."  It follows on from Then They Started Making A Plan.

They were going after Spatelli’s Dirividdi stronghold on foot.  Riding and pack animals were expensive and the mountains held too many bears who liked to eat them.  Too, assuming they could find this old stronghold, if they had animals with them then provision would have to be made for them while the ruins were being explored.  Having no animals uncomplicated things.

Of course, the first part of the trip was getting to where they could leave the settled lands of the kingdom for the climb up into the high ranges.  An upland village called Gaglioli, all alpine meadows surrounded by pines and maples, was to be their jumping off point and they needed to walk for a week to get there.  Liana expected Giuffre, the unwell-looking Luniferan priest, to be exhausted by the first half day of walking but he ended the day as steadfast as he started it, apparently happy to have spent his time walking in the fresh, spring air.

They spent that night in a village inn and while Capalini, their drui, was trying to chat up the barmaid, Giuffre was serenading the taproom with a fine, tuned and practiced baritone voice.  He was popular enough to get the party their supper for free from a pleased landlord and in the morning, when they left, he’d gotten them a ride on a wagon that meant that they only had to walk half the way to their planned stop for the next night.  When Liana asked the pale priest about it as they sat on the wagon’s cargo, he shrugged and said, “My Lord Lunifer is a wanderer and a bard, still weakened by his travails,” he glanced up at the white, visible crescent of moon hanging in the blue sky, “but still a model worth emulating.”

When Capalini spent another evening chatting up a barmaid, Liana lost her temper with him.  Quietly and in a back corridor.  “Giuffre is singing for our supper and maybe another ride tomorrow, Spatelli’s working the locals for news on the road ahead, I’m watching everyone’s back and you, you’re chasing skirts!  What do you think you’re doing, Capalini?”

“Picking brains of one person who gets to hear part of every conversation on the floor?  How do you think Spatelli knows who to talk to?”  He was hissing back at her.  “Besides, what do you care about who, if anyone, I sleep with tonight?”

Iphana had a long and lonely winter, despite the microwave link back to town.  She’d read her mail, exercised religiously, made all her microwave contacts and spoken to maybe four people all winter, listened to the plays and music they’d patched through to her, tried hibernating around her schedule for a few weeks, intermittently kept a diary and gazed out an upstairs window into the storm.  Well, peeked through a crack in her bedroom window’s storm shutter.

Peering through that crack, she realised that the stories about a whole different ecology inside the winter storm were true.  Felinoids that could have laired comfortably in her maintenance garage stalked browsers with low centres of gravity across the snow outside as they rooted out whatever delicacies it were that they ate.  Some of the creatures chose to use her outpost as a backscratcher and the building shook with every rub of the larger ones.  Fortunately, it didn’t seem to occur to these great beasts that there could be an inside to the outpost, Iphana didn’t want to try dodging any of these creatures in their own environment.

She asked about them in her daily talks with the town but Sawyl had to tell her that the town never saw the large creatures in winter.  “The grass must be wrong or something,” he added.

“Don’t be sorry,” Iphana told him, “some of these things are big enough to shake the building when they rub against it.” She paused then asked, “Could that be the reason for some of the unexplained winter damage on outpost buildings I was reading about?”

“I can just imagine,” the voice of Auditor Carvell came over the feed, “the expressions on the faces of the engineers back in Central when they’re told that their buildings are inadequately braced for their secondary function of scratching post.”