So I was rooting around on my laptop and...
...I found a thing that I did.
Original fic/gen/short/no warnings except the standard weirdness caveats.
Tangentially About Owls
Near the forests of the north, where the shadows are ice-edged and black, and the winter sky glows green with the dances of the dead, is where the people of the ground live, in buildings long and low.
They crowd only in places where wood smoke and the scent of animal scat intertwine, and they live their lives always with light. They hunt and gather, and farm and find by the pale metallic wash of the sun, and they weave and carve, dance and describe with ruddy fire glow as their stalwart companions.
The people of the ground do not walk in the night. From the death of the sun to the swirl of the mists of dawn, the people of the ground keep to their halls and to themselves. They keep each other close and they make noises to keep the long, haunting cries of the others to the distant high and the far away.
Wood from the forests of the north is fine grained and dense. It lends itself as well to the large as it does to the small and, as a consequence, every piece of felled wood that the people of the ground have contact with is richly and intricately embellished. Their history is written on the horizontal; ceilings and shelves, window ledges and seats all tell of where the people have been and what they did when they were there. Walls and doors and the crossbeams of halls are where the stories stalk and leap, giving their warnings and advice only to those careful enough to heed the abstract lines that mean silence and the swooping curves of the great ones who hunt in the dark.
The people of the ground believe this: In the days of lazy sun, when the ground is harder than iron and robed in ice; when even the trees groan and creak at the cold, the spirits of the sky leave behind their nests of cloud and star. They cast off their green and their glow and they ride their voices down to the world, where they clothe themselves in feathers that touch softer than snow. In this fashion, made all of silence and curves, the spirits search out the people of the ground, and they judge them by what the people have in their minds and in their hearts.
Those who are found wanting-and there are always those that are wanting, because this is the world of the earth and the stone, and the spirits are great because they understand this truth-will find, the next time they venture into the dim and the dark of the forests, that under the tree at which they stop will be scattered around spirit eggs made of bones and mud, and that above them will be a tangle of branches and the sensation of things that watch.
Visitors to the land of the trees and the sky are often captivated by the way that the people of the ground have woven themselves so that they blend with the land so well as to seem to vanish while in plain sight. When questioned on this, the people of the ground will twist one hand up towards the sky and will say no words at all.
A lot of the time (particularly recently), I forget that sometimes I trip up and actually have a degree of facility with the written word. It's...reassuring...to remember?
Also on DreamWidth, comment where you will!
Original fic/gen/short/no warnings except the standard weirdness caveats.
Tangentially About Owls
Near the forests of the north, where the shadows are ice-edged and black, and the winter sky glows green with the dances of the dead, is where the people of the ground live, in buildings long and low.
They crowd only in places where wood smoke and the scent of animal scat intertwine, and they live their lives always with light. They hunt and gather, and farm and find by the pale metallic wash of the sun, and they weave and carve, dance and describe with ruddy fire glow as their stalwart companions.
The people of the ground do not walk in the night. From the death of the sun to the swirl of the mists of dawn, the people of the ground keep to their halls and to themselves. They keep each other close and they make noises to keep the long, haunting cries of the others to the distant high and the far away.
Wood from the forests of the north is fine grained and dense. It lends itself as well to the large as it does to the small and, as a consequence, every piece of felled wood that the people of the ground have contact with is richly and intricately embellished. Their history is written on the horizontal; ceilings and shelves, window ledges and seats all tell of where the people have been and what they did when they were there. Walls and doors and the crossbeams of halls are where the stories stalk and leap, giving their warnings and advice only to those careful enough to heed the abstract lines that mean silence and the swooping curves of the great ones who hunt in the dark.
The people of the ground believe this: In the days of lazy sun, when the ground is harder than iron and robed in ice; when even the trees groan and creak at the cold, the spirits of the sky leave behind their nests of cloud and star. They cast off their green and their glow and they ride their voices down to the world, where they clothe themselves in feathers that touch softer than snow. In this fashion, made all of silence and curves, the spirits search out the people of the ground, and they judge them by what the people have in their minds and in their hearts.
Those who are found wanting-and there are always those that are wanting, because this is the world of the earth and the stone, and the spirits are great because they understand this truth-will find, the next time they venture into the dim and the dark of the forests, that under the tree at which they stop will be scattered around spirit eggs made of bones and mud, and that above them will be a tangle of branches and the sensation of things that watch.
Visitors to the land of the trees and the sky are often captivated by the way that the people of the ground have woven themselves so that they blend with the land so well as to seem to vanish while in plain sight. When questioned on this, the people of the ground will twist one hand up towards the sky and will say no words at all.
A lot of the time (particularly recently), I forget that sometimes I trip up and actually have a degree of facility with the written word. It's...reassuring...to remember?
Also on DreamWidth, comment where you will!