[Meme] 10 first lines (and/or WIP excerpts)
I gacked this from ladylisse (and then tweaked it a fair bit). The idea is to post the first lines from ten of your recent or in-progress stories. I decided (since I won't have anything ready to post in the near future), that I might throw up some slightly longer excerpts. Fanfiction only.
---------------------------------------------
The first nine are all from various segments of "The Transient and the Eternal," a series of connected shorts that I'm writing for thirtyforthree.
1a. Lucifer held out his hand, and she placed her fingers in his.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Giving up"
1b. "Your granddaughter stopped by yesterday afternoon, Tendo-san," the security guard said as Sara opened her post box in the lobby.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: If only"
1c. They decided against children.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Babies"
1d. "I'm going to cut my hair," Sara told Setsuna one Sunday afternoon as they sat on a bench in Ueno Park, bundled in jackets and scarves against the late winter chill.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Snowfall"
1e. "They're getting divorced."
Kira shrugged and lit a cigarette. "So? You've been expecting that for years."
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Stop that"
1f. "Are you planning to retake control of the Cherubim?" Alexiel asked.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Far away"
1g. Death was familiar: dull shock as his heart stopped and his thoughts faded, an instant of tearing as her soul separated from flesh, a flash of light as the gate to Hades opened, a sharp pain as the curse dragged her down...
Wait. Down?
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: If it wasn't you..."
1h. "You'll never guess who I ran into today," Setsuna announced as he kicked off his boots and hung his jacket by the apartment door.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Looking" (This one is likely to change, since I keep having POV and plot issues.)
1i. Tendo Setsuna and his wife Sara moved into an apartment complex in Nagasaki with as little fanfare as possible. Neighbors were somewhat taken aback by their friends -- a tall, dark man with a tattoo over his eye; a peculiarly androgynous person with face paint, flaming red hair, and an extravagant top hat; and a cute young woman with prematurely silver hair and cat-pupiled contact lenses -- but Setsuna explained that they were part of the Tokyo punk rock scene, which he had also belonged to in the past, and weren't likely to visit often.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Fluffy things"
---------------------------------------------
2. First there was warmth, and floating, and an intangible wave of love, tinged with sorrow but nearly solid enough to touch. Then there was cold, and darkness, and blinding light, and something thin and harsh forced into damp lungs.
A voice spoke from above. "Belial. Your name is Belial."
The voice was other, not-self, like the source of the warmth and love. The child reached, yearning... and found nothing.
A hand came down from the light to silence the heartbroken wail. "Stop that. You serve God now, and there's no place for crying."
Then there was nothing.
--from "Ephemera" (my attempt to give Belial coherent backstory)
---------------------------------------------
3. The minute after she shut Tom out, Ginny collapsed onto her bed and only barely managed to crawl under the covers before falling asleep. She slept straight through until noon the next day, panicked, and rushed to the hospital wing for a checkup. "There's nothing wrong with you," said Madam Pomfrey, "but if you don't stop wearing yourself down, this may well happen again. Eat more, dear; you're still too pale."
Ginny mumbled agreement and hid in the library until dinner.
"We nearly thought you had been Petrified," Apple told her that evening. "Susan shook you and even slapped your cheek, but you didn't so much as blink. I had to call in a prefect to keep them from saying the Heir had put you under a spell."
"Thanks, I suppose," said Ginny. The irony, of course, was that she'd just broken Tom's spell... unless he'd tricked her again. What if he was only hiding, waiting for her to let down her guard?
Paranoia could go around in circles forever, Ginny decided as she sliced up a section of roast beef. She'd shut the door on Tom -- for the first time in weeks she didn't feel tired -- and there was no sense driving herself mad over maybes. She'd just wait and see, and try to get on with her life.
--from "Secrets" (Chapter 12: Into the Dark -- in which Ginny is lulled into a false sense of security, and then things go to hell in a handbasket.)
---------------------------------------------
4. The swirl of pink in the corner of his eye caught Tsukimaru's attention first.
He turned, curious, and saw a girl with cherry blossom hair sitting on the side of the canal, looking lost. Her light green dress was shabby and thin; the fabric hung limply in the thick, hot air. As his boat skimmed past, she raised her head and met his gaze for a second before shyly looking away. Her eyes were mint-green, innocent as new leaves, but something dark and wounded lurked behind them.
Tsukimaru held his breath until she was out of sight. Then he motioned his guard to approach his seat.
"Tsukimaru-sama?" the guard asked as he knelt, ragged black hair shading his respectfully downcast eyes.
"That girl," Tsukimaru said. "The one with hair like sakura in spring. Find her."
The guard nodded.
--from "Undertow" (the semi-sequel to Tides, in which we follow Team 7's mission to assassinate a River Country lord and his heir, from the heir's POV. Atmospheric, and one of these days I really will get around to finishing it.)
---------------------------------------------
5. At the beginning of August, Harry got a new room.
--from "Strange Likenesses" (chapter 6)
---------------------------------------------
6. "I'm not going back," Sasuke said.
Yukiko blinked. Huh?
"Of course you're going back," she said after a moment of pure disbelief. "I'm not asking; I'm giving you an order."
"You're not my guardian. And if Naruto's not a ninja yet, I'm not either -- we're both only students -- so you're not my commander or team leader. You can't give me orders," Sasuke said, still showing that eerily calm surface. Yukiko had no clue what was going on in his head, and she wished it weren't unethical to use genjutsu to pull him under and make him talk.
"For all practical purposes, I am your guardian, and in any case, I'm an adult and you're a kid. But we're not arguing about that." Arguing over authority meant you'd already lost -- she'd learned that from Naruto. "At least two villages would love to kidnap you, and you don't want to know what Mist-nin and Cloud-nin would do to you to get their own version of Sharingan. You're going back to Konoha where you'll be safe."
"No."
Yukiko folded her hands and stifled the urge to scream. "Okay, so you're going home tied up and under protest. I'm sure Naruto will have lots of fun drawing on your face and otherwise making you look like a complete idiot. That's your choice. Seichi and I will take you to the guard post in the morning."
"No," Sasuke said again. "I don't need to be safe. I don't care what happens to me as long as I get strong enough to kill Itachi. I don't care about Konoha either -- you couldn't protect my family, and you didn't even tell me my cousin was alive. I'm not going back." He folded his arms and glared at her, in a miniature version of his clan's typical disdain.
Yukiko sighed. Then she set her hands in a rat seal, flicked a delicate network of chakra around Sasuke, and said, "Yes, you are. Now go to sleep."
--from "The Guardian in Spite of Herself" (chapter 13)
---------------------------------------------
7. The door shut with a halfhearted click, but it felt ominously final.
Faith waited for her eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness. Luckily, Slayers tended to have good night vision; after twenty seconds, she could see Duo and Sasuke as darker shapes against the faint light seeping through the timber ceiling.
"Shit, we forgot to plaster the roof," she muttered.
Duo sat down against the door. "Too late now. As guardian of this perilous gate, it falls upon me to forbid passage until such time as the present danger has passed away and joy returns to this benighted land!" He added something short in Japanese; Sasuke grunted.
"I swear to God, if you keep talking like that, I disclaim all responsibility for my reaction," Faith said, and slid down to sit on the hard-packed dirt. Her right hand landed on the blanket, and she pulled it over just to make sure the others didn't steal it.
"I see. In that case, this is probably not the best moment to stick out my tongue and say, 'Nyah nyah, can't touch me!' is it?" Duo said, sounding thoughtful. "On the other hand, I doubt you can see if I'm sticking out my tongue or not, so as long as I don't say anything... well, the sky's the limit. Oh, the opportunities to practice silly faces! Fear my newfound freedom to cross my eyes without social disapproval! Mwahahaha!"
"Your maniacal laughter needs work," Faith said after a moment.
"Yeah, it never sounds right when I'm not actually killing people," Duo agreed. "Me, I think that's a good thing; it fools people into thinking I'm sane."
--from "Lemonade" (chapter 15)
---------------------------------------------
8. The most irritating thing about Telemain -- beyond his habit of talking in incomprehensible technical jargon and his assumption that Morwen shared his obsession with wizards -- was his complete inability to recognize subtle hints.
"After marking the circle and laying out her ingredients, the witch casts the spell and waits, alone, for the first animal to answer her call," Morwen said. "The solitude is very important, so that she isn't distracted and the familiar isn't scared off."
"Fascinating," said Telemain, kneeling to touch the bare dirt of the circle with his index finger. "Would the resonance change if you marked the circle with colored sand or a piece of string, rather than drawing a line of bare earth in the leaves?"
"No, it's the idea of a circle that matters, not how you draw it," Morwen said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. The woods outside Tolchester were tame and small as forests went, and the longer she spent arguing with her friend, the more chance a farmer or hunter would stumble across this clearing. She was new as the village witch; she didn't need gawkers giving away her secrets.
"Telemain, go away. I need to do this spell properly. It's bad enough that I won't grow warts or let my cottage eaves go to mold and cobwebs the way the old Tolchester witch did. Aunt Grizelda vouches for me, and everyone from Stokey's Academy knows I can cast spells, but nobody will ever take me seriously as a witch if I don't have a proper animal as a familiar."
People might even start thinking she was an enchantress instead, and then she'd never get any peace. She was already tiptoeing close to that fate by letting Telemain visit so often. Witches weren't supposed to have romantic interests in handsome young magicians, or so the gossips told her every time she ventured into town.
"I don't see why a familiar's species matters so long as it can assist with spell-casting," said Telemain, "and in any case, I won't distract you. I simply want to observe; no magician has ever studied familiar contracts before." He reached into one sleeve, and then into the other, frowning as he fumbled around. "Where did I put my notebook?"
"In your left sleeve, along with the hand mirror and the collecting jar," Morwen told him. "And you will distract me. You'll forget yourself the minute something interesting happens, you'll ask a dozen questions, and I'll lose control of the spell. You don't want to be here if I accidentally summon a manticore, do you?"
Telemain scowled. "You and I together are perfectly capable of dealing with a manticore. Even if our other spells failed, we could always use Ribeault's Displacement Theorem and send it elsewhere." He pulled his notebook from his sleeve and began searching his sleeves for a pencil. "Your storage spell leaves something to be desired in its organizational capacity."
"You're just not concentrating hard enough," Morwen said as she moved a sprig of parsley two inches closer to the bowl of moon water.
"My concentration is more than sufficient," Telemain said, shaking his sleeve as if hoping the pencil might fall out. "The trouble is remembering what I put where. This would be much easier if I had a number of pockets; then there wouldn't be any confusion about reaching into a space and having no idea what might be inside."
Morwen sighed. "If you can't remember where you put your pencil -- it's behind your ear, by the way -- I don't think adding more places to look will help. Telemain, please go away. This is a private kind of magic."
Something about her tone of voice finally seemed to reach him; he lowered his arm, stared at her for a long moment, and then shrugged. "Oh, all right, if you insist. I'll go stand behind that oak tree and cast a muffling spell on myself to make sure I won't say anything by accident. I won't even look until you tell me you're done, I promise. But there's no reason you can't let me record the spell's effects on the local magical fields."
It was as much of a compromise as she was likely to get from him. "Fine," Morwen said. "This shouldn't take more than an hour."
--from "A Question of Familiarity" (an attempt at Enchanted Forest Chronicles fanfiction, which purports, among other things, to explain why Morwen and Telemain waited over twenty years to get married, though their relationship never seemed to change from the first moment Cimorene and Mendanbar saw them together. This was one of my false starts for last year's femgenficathon, which I dumped onto the backburner because not even the wildest contortions could make it fit my theme quote. I do intend to finish this someday.)
---------------------------------------------
9. Upon her return to London, Arabella Strange's first desire was several days of solitude. Her husband's absence struck her more forcefully in familiar surroundings and she wanted privacy to come to terms with the new shape of her life and with the final realization that, despite her rescue, she had not reached an unequivocally happy ending. But society was relentlessly curious and there were all the rumours to refute: that Jonathan had murdered her, that he had bargained with the devil, and even that he had requested the fairies to take her away so he should have no distractions during his duel with Mr Norrell.
Therefore, she called upon Sir Walter and Lady Pole that same evening.
--from "Twilight" (an attempt to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fanfiction, which will almost certainly never be finished. I suspect it was intended to be Arabella/Flora Greysteel femslash, but I'm not certain anymore. I include the opening as a curiosity.)
---------------------------------------------
10. Alethia was never certain, afterward, whether it was good luck or bad that led her to commune with the Darkness at that exact moment.
Power swelled up from the abyss, spiraling like a hungry whirlpool, and Alethia broke her shock in time to send a frantic call to everyone in the village. *Witchstorm! Shield, shield!* Her hands clenched around her Summer-Sky pendant as she clawed her way free of the abyss; Mother Night, she'd never seen anything like this!
*Alethia, what are you talking about? There's nothing here.* Her sister's mental voice was waspish, the way it was more and more often lately.
There wasn't time to argue. *It's coming up from the Darkness, Amalthea. Tell your court: shield or die.*
*Alethia--*
*I love you.*
The dark wave crashed over her mind, smashing her shields to psychic shards that pierced and tore, and Alethia's last thought as she sank into blackness was that she couldn't feel her sister anymore.
--from "Eyes of Stone" (an attempt at Black Jewels fanfiction, which I'm also probably never going to finish. You see, it's set in Hayll after the end of Queen of the Darkness, includes no canon characters, attempts to 'correct' some of Anne Bishop's world-building that I find annoying and/or badly thought out, and would likely be at least 25,000 words long. I figure I'm much better off channeling that amount of work into either completely original fiction, or fanfiction that has a higher chance of attracting readers. *grin*)
---------------------------------------------
Am now off to read serious arguments about theodicy.
---------------------------------------------
The first nine are all from various segments of "The Transient and the Eternal," a series of connected shorts that I'm writing for thirtyforthree.
1a. Lucifer held out his hand, and she placed her fingers in his.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Giving up"
1b. "Your granddaughter stopped by yesterday afternoon, Tendo-san," the security guard said as Sara opened her post box in the lobby.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: If only"
1c. They decided against children.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Babies"
1d. "I'm going to cut my hair," Sara told Setsuna one Sunday afternoon as they sat on a bench in Ueno Park, bundled in jackets and scarves against the late winter chill.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Snowfall"
1e. "They're getting divorced."
Kira shrugged and lit a cigarette. "So? You've been expecting that for years."
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Stop that"
1f. "Are you planning to retake control of the Cherubim?" Alexiel asked.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Far away"
1g. Death was familiar: dull shock as his heart stopped and his thoughts faded, an instant of tearing as her soul separated from flesh, a flash of light as the gate to Hades opened, a sharp pain as the curse dragged her down...
Wait. Down?
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: If it wasn't you..."
1h. "You'll never guess who I ran into today," Setsuna announced as he kicked off his boots and hung his jacket by the apartment door.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Looking" (This one is likely to change, since I keep having POV and plot issues.)
1i. Tendo Setsuna and his wife Sara moved into an apartment complex in Nagasaki with as little fanfare as possible. Neighbors were somewhat taken aback by their friends -- a tall, dark man with a tattoo over his eye; a peculiarly androgynous person with face paint, flaming red hair, and an extravagant top hat; and a cute young woman with prematurely silver hair and cat-pupiled contact lenses -- but Setsuna explained that they were part of the Tokyo punk rock scene, which he had also belonged to in the past, and weren't likely to visit often.
--from "The Transient and the Eternal: Fluffy things"
---------------------------------------------
2. First there was warmth, and floating, and an intangible wave of love, tinged with sorrow but nearly solid enough to touch. Then there was cold, and darkness, and blinding light, and something thin and harsh forced into damp lungs.
A voice spoke from above. "Belial. Your name is Belial."
The voice was other, not-self, like the source of the warmth and love. The child reached, yearning... and found nothing.
A hand came down from the light to silence the heartbroken wail. "Stop that. You serve God now, and there's no place for crying."
Then there was nothing.
--from "Ephemera" (my attempt to give Belial coherent backstory)
---------------------------------------------
3. The minute after she shut Tom out, Ginny collapsed onto her bed and only barely managed to crawl under the covers before falling asleep. She slept straight through until noon the next day, panicked, and rushed to the hospital wing for a checkup. "There's nothing wrong with you," said Madam Pomfrey, "but if you don't stop wearing yourself down, this may well happen again. Eat more, dear; you're still too pale."
Ginny mumbled agreement and hid in the library until dinner.
"We nearly thought you had been Petrified," Apple told her that evening. "Susan shook you and even slapped your cheek, but you didn't so much as blink. I had to call in a prefect to keep them from saying the Heir had put you under a spell."
"Thanks, I suppose," said Ginny. The irony, of course, was that she'd just broken Tom's spell... unless he'd tricked her again. What if he was only hiding, waiting for her to let down her guard?
Paranoia could go around in circles forever, Ginny decided as she sliced up a section of roast beef. She'd shut the door on Tom -- for the first time in weeks she didn't feel tired -- and there was no sense driving herself mad over maybes. She'd just wait and see, and try to get on with her life.
--from "Secrets" (Chapter 12: Into the Dark -- in which Ginny is lulled into a false sense of security, and then things go to hell in a handbasket.)
---------------------------------------------
4. The swirl of pink in the corner of his eye caught Tsukimaru's attention first.
He turned, curious, and saw a girl with cherry blossom hair sitting on the side of the canal, looking lost. Her light green dress was shabby and thin; the fabric hung limply in the thick, hot air. As his boat skimmed past, she raised her head and met his gaze for a second before shyly looking away. Her eyes were mint-green, innocent as new leaves, but something dark and wounded lurked behind them.
Tsukimaru held his breath until she was out of sight. Then he motioned his guard to approach his seat.
"Tsukimaru-sama?" the guard asked as he knelt, ragged black hair shading his respectfully downcast eyes.
"That girl," Tsukimaru said. "The one with hair like sakura in spring. Find her."
The guard nodded.
--from "Undertow" (the semi-sequel to Tides, in which we follow Team 7's mission to assassinate a River Country lord and his heir, from the heir's POV. Atmospheric, and one of these days I really will get around to finishing it.)
---------------------------------------------
5. At the beginning of August, Harry got a new room.
--from "Strange Likenesses" (chapter 6)
---------------------------------------------
6. "I'm not going back," Sasuke said.
Yukiko blinked. Huh?
"Of course you're going back," she said after a moment of pure disbelief. "I'm not asking; I'm giving you an order."
"You're not my guardian. And if Naruto's not a ninja yet, I'm not either -- we're both only students -- so you're not my commander or team leader. You can't give me orders," Sasuke said, still showing that eerily calm surface. Yukiko had no clue what was going on in his head, and she wished it weren't unethical to use genjutsu to pull him under and make him talk.
"For all practical purposes, I am your guardian, and in any case, I'm an adult and you're a kid. But we're not arguing about that." Arguing over authority meant you'd already lost -- she'd learned that from Naruto. "At least two villages would love to kidnap you, and you don't want to know what Mist-nin and Cloud-nin would do to you to get their own version of Sharingan. You're going back to Konoha where you'll be safe."
"No."
Yukiko folded her hands and stifled the urge to scream. "Okay, so you're going home tied up and under protest. I'm sure Naruto will have lots of fun drawing on your face and otherwise making you look like a complete idiot. That's your choice. Seichi and I will take you to the guard post in the morning."
"No," Sasuke said again. "I don't need to be safe. I don't care what happens to me as long as I get strong enough to kill Itachi. I don't care about Konoha either -- you couldn't protect my family, and you didn't even tell me my cousin was alive. I'm not going back." He folded his arms and glared at her, in a miniature version of his clan's typical disdain.
Yukiko sighed. Then she set her hands in a rat seal, flicked a delicate network of chakra around Sasuke, and said, "Yes, you are. Now go to sleep."
--from "The Guardian in Spite of Herself" (chapter 13)
---------------------------------------------
7. The door shut with a halfhearted click, but it felt ominously final.
Faith waited for her eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness. Luckily, Slayers tended to have good night vision; after twenty seconds, she could see Duo and Sasuke as darker shapes against the faint light seeping through the timber ceiling.
"Shit, we forgot to plaster the roof," she muttered.
Duo sat down against the door. "Too late now. As guardian of this perilous gate, it falls upon me to forbid passage until such time as the present danger has passed away and joy returns to this benighted land!" He added something short in Japanese; Sasuke grunted.
"I swear to God, if you keep talking like that, I disclaim all responsibility for my reaction," Faith said, and slid down to sit on the hard-packed dirt. Her right hand landed on the blanket, and she pulled it over just to make sure the others didn't steal it.
"I see. In that case, this is probably not the best moment to stick out my tongue and say, 'Nyah nyah, can't touch me!' is it?" Duo said, sounding thoughtful. "On the other hand, I doubt you can see if I'm sticking out my tongue or not, so as long as I don't say anything... well, the sky's the limit. Oh, the opportunities to practice silly faces! Fear my newfound freedom to cross my eyes without social disapproval! Mwahahaha!"
"Your maniacal laughter needs work," Faith said after a moment.
"Yeah, it never sounds right when I'm not actually killing people," Duo agreed. "Me, I think that's a good thing; it fools people into thinking I'm sane."
--from "Lemonade" (chapter 15)
---------------------------------------------
8. The most irritating thing about Telemain -- beyond his habit of talking in incomprehensible technical jargon and his assumption that Morwen shared his obsession with wizards -- was his complete inability to recognize subtle hints.
"After marking the circle and laying out her ingredients, the witch casts the spell and waits, alone, for the first animal to answer her call," Morwen said. "The solitude is very important, so that she isn't distracted and the familiar isn't scared off."
"Fascinating," said Telemain, kneeling to touch the bare dirt of the circle with his index finger. "Would the resonance change if you marked the circle with colored sand or a piece of string, rather than drawing a line of bare earth in the leaves?"
"No, it's the idea of a circle that matters, not how you draw it," Morwen said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. The woods outside Tolchester were tame and small as forests went, and the longer she spent arguing with her friend, the more chance a farmer or hunter would stumble across this clearing. She was new as the village witch; she didn't need gawkers giving away her secrets.
"Telemain, go away. I need to do this spell properly. It's bad enough that I won't grow warts or let my cottage eaves go to mold and cobwebs the way the old Tolchester witch did. Aunt Grizelda vouches for me, and everyone from Stokey's Academy knows I can cast spells, but nobody will ever take me seriously as a witch if I don't have a proper animal as a familiar."
People might even start thinking she was an enchantress instead, and then she'd never get any peace. She was already tiptoeing close to that fate by letting Telemain visit so often. Witches weren't supposed to have romantic interests in handsome young magicians, or so the gossips told her every time she ventured into town.
"I don't see why a familiar's species matters so long as it can assist with spell-casting," said Telemain, "and in any case, I won't distract you. I simply want to observe; no magician has ever studied familiar contracts before." He reached into one sleeve, and then into the other, frowning as he fumbled around. "Where did I put my notebook?"
"In your left sleeve, along with the hand mirror and the collecting jar," Morwen told him. "And you will distract me. You'll forget yourself the minute something interesting happens, you'll ask a dozen questions, and I'll lose control of the spell. You don't want to be here if I accidentally summon a manticore, do you?"
Telemain scowled. "You and I together are perfectly capable of dealing with a manticore. Even if our other spells failed, we could always use Ribeault's Displacement Theorem and send it elsewhere." He pulled his notebook from his sleeve and began searching his sleeves for a pencil. "Your storage spell leaves something to be desired in its organizational capacity."
"You're just not concentrating hard enough," Morwen said as she moved a sprig of parsley two inches closer to the bowl of moon water.
"My concentration is more than sufficient," Telemain said, shaking his sleeve as if hoping the pencil might fall out. "The trouble is remembering what I put where. This would be much easier if I had a number of pockets; then there wouldn't be any confusion about reaching into a space and having no idea what might be inside."
Morwen sighed. "If you can't remember where you put your pencil -- it's behind your ear, by the way -- I don't think adding more places to look will help. Telemain, please go away. This is a private kind of magic."
Something about her tone of voice finally seemed to reach him; he lowered his arm, stared at her for a long moment, and then shrugged. "Oh, all right, if you insist. I'll go stand behind that oak tree and cast a muffling spell on myself to make sure I won't say anything by accident. I won't even look until you tell me you're done, I promise. But there's no reason you can't let me record the spell's effects on the local magical fields."
It was as much of a compromise as she was likely to get from him. "Fine," Morwen said. "This shouldn't take more than an hour."
--from "A Question of Familiarity" (an attempt at Enchanted Forest Chronicles fanfiction, which purports, among other things, to explain why Morwen and Telemain waited over twenty years to get married, though their relationship never seemed to change from the first moment Cimorene and Mendanbar saw them together. This was one of my false starts for last year's femgenficathon, which I dumped onto the backburner because not even the wildest contortions could make it fit my theme quote. I do intend to finish this someday.)
---------------------------------------------
9. Upon her return to London, Arabella Strange's first desire was several days of solitude. Her husband's absence struck her more forcefully in familiar surroundings and she wanted privacy to come to terms with the new shape of her life and with the final realization that, despite her rescue, she had not reached an unequivocally happy ending. But society was relentlessly curious and there were all the rumours to refute: that Jonathan had murdered her, that he had bargained with the devil, and even that he had requested the fairies to take her away so he should have no distractions during his duel with Mr Norrell.
Therefore, she called upon Sir Walter and Lady Pole that same evening.
--from "Twilight" (an attempt to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fanfiction, which will almost certainly never be finished. I suspect it was intended to be Arabella/Flora Greysteel femslash, but I'm not certain anymore. I include the opening as a curiosity.)
---------------------------------------------
10. Alethia was never certain, afterward, whether it was good luck or bad that led her to commune with the Darkness at that exact moment.
Power swelled up from the abyss, spiraling like a hungry whirlpool, and Alethia broke her shock in time to send a frantic call to everyone in the village. *Witchstorm! Shield, shield!* Her hands clenched around her Summer-Sky pendant as she clawed her way free of the abyss; Mother Night, she'd never seen anything like this!
*Alethia, what are you talking about? There's nothing here.* Her sister's mental voice was waspish, the way it was more and more often lately.
There wasn't time to argue. *It's coming up from the Darkness, Amalthea. Tell your court: shield or die.*
*Alethia--*
*I love you.*
The dark wave crashed over her mind, smashing her shields to psychic shards that pierced and tore, and Alethia's last thought as she sank into blackness was that she couldn't feel her sister anymore.
--from "Eyes of Stone" (an attempt at Black Jewels fanfiction, which I'm also probably never going to finish. You see, it's set in Hayll after the end of Queen of the Darkness, includes no canon characters, attempts to 'correct' some of Anne Bishop's world-building that I find annoying and/or badly thought out, and would likely be at least 25,000 words long. I figure I'm much better off channeling that amount of work into either completely original fiction, or fanfiction that has a higher chance of attracting readers. *grin*)
---------------------------------------------
Am now off to read serious arguments about theodicy.