[Wild Roses] You can blame Michelle Branch for this.
Title: towers
’Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Hazel
Prompt: 45B "belief"
Word Count: 924
Rating: all ages
Notes: Hazel's mine. The place she goes, the lady she talks to, and the half-brothers they discuss are merditha's. This experiment in first-person present can be blamed squarely on iTunes flinging Michelle Branch's song "Everywhere" at me. Hazel's somewhere after meeting Lin but before marrying him.
Additional note - in Hazel's worldview, it's not maidens who live/are imprisoned in towers, but mages, metaphorically thumbing their noses at the elements that would tear a tower down.
I'm not one of Ian's beloved, and no-one who's seen one of them would ever mistake me for one. I'm far too much my father's daughter for that, and people look at me and see morning glories sometimes, and they've the right for it. For all I never met her, aunt Hilaire's shadow is long.
But I'm Phoebe's grand-daughter, and I'm good at what I do. People forget that, and forget that I came out of the space of time people just call the Wars.
They look at me, and see my father, see aunt Hilaire. They don't see my Cousin Madeleine, who laughed the way I do, and who came out of another war.
Madeleine was mad, the stories say, bright sharp smiles and dark laughter, fire and sunlight and the lingering smell of smoke. I can't remember meeting her, though I must have, before she died.
She liked words. Liked to gesture with her cigarettes to illustrate ideas, to exhale magic beside curls of smoke, before she moved.
Me, I move. I trust to gravity and balance, to the kinetic energy of a leap and a spin.
So I don't speak words, when I need. I reach out, words in my head but not in my mouth, and I step forward.
It's a beautiful house, someplace that gets enough rain to be forever green.
The layers of spells across the grounds are enough to choke on, breathless airless quality to the air I'm breathing. They know I'm here, that I've got power enough to do damage, whether or not I've got enough to break through to the threshold, to meet the one who cast the spells that keep his house safe.
I'm not here to fight. I've seen too much of wars to start another one, and one I'd lose. I've no illusions about what I am, and what the one who holds this house is.
That's why I'm here.
I need.
Not him, though. His wife.
And so I walk forward along their paths, my hands empty at my sides. The spells let me past, grudgingly, because for all my power I've no threat, no spells up my sleeves, no knife at my side.
I knock, and the door opens, something tricky in the hinges that make it light enough for a child to open if they needed to, but feel solid to an adult's hand.
She's taller than my aunt and my grandmother, smaller than me by a long space. This is her tower, though, ringed 'round by another's spells, and the air around her seethes with sparks.
I call her a title in French--she stiffens to correct me as soon as the word's out of my mouth, but she stops, mouth not yet open, when I finish "I need advice on how to deal with your husband's family."
She blinks at me. The sparks around us have to be whispering to her that I'm not of her husband's blood, that I'm not what she is, and that by her standards I'm only something like human.
She steps aside to let me in, and I can feel the sparks in my throat, implicit threat, as I cross the threshold of her tower.
She is the wife of my lover's brother. She is dangerous, not only for her status and her power, but for her thinking.
But she serves me tea, gestures me to sit, and speaks with me, answers my questions and asks her own of me.
I don't tell her that her daughter is very much her mother's child. For all I know her daughter doesn't exist yet. For all I know, I may be speaking to a goddess true, wearing a human face because she still thinks of herself that way.
I don't tell her that my lover is her husband's half-brother; she might know already, or she might not even know her husband has another sibling. In either event it doesn't matter much--I need to know the family, the legends, the way they think, not how my lover looks through someone else's eyes.
I don't tell her she acts like my grandmother the once-Queen. For all her status, all her power, she's always been 'just a human woman', according to every story I've ever heard about her.
I don't need a Queen. Don't need a mage of her very specialised variety--my entire family knows fire, if not exactly as she does. I don't need a war's lynchpin, don't need a war's survivor.
I need an elf's human wife, need the lady of the tower ringed 'round with a powerful mage's spells not to keep danger from her, but to warn away fools before they meet the dragon in the center of the maze.
I need someone who's farther up the path I mean to tread.
And it's that she speaks to me as, and it's that I send gifts to, eventually, dark clips that will be nearly invisible, that lessen the weight of long thick hair, that lessen snarling, that hold up the short hairs that cluster around faces and get in one's eyes. A few pages of my uncle's music. A pair of earrings, garnets and tiny blackened steel beads set in gold.
My note says only Thank you.
Her reply comes the way my package went, carried by irascible human hands.
I won't wish you good luck. Neither of us believe in it. I will instead tell you never to forget what he is. No matter how much you love him.
You are welcome.
’Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Hazel
Prompt: 45B "belief"
Word Count: 924
Rating: all ages
Notes: Hazel's mine. The place she goes, the lady she talks to, and the half-brothers they discuss are merditha's. This experiment in first-person present can be blamed squarely on iTunes flinging Michelle Branch's song "Everywhere" at me. Hazel's somewhere after meeting Lin but before marrying him.
Additional note - in Hazel's worldview, it's not maidens who live/are imprisoned in towers, but mages, metaphorically thumbing their noses at the elements that would tear a tower down.
I'm not one of Ian's beloved, and no-one who's seen one of them would ever mistake me for one. I'm far too much my father's daughter for that, and people look at me and see morning glories sometimes, and they've the right for it. For all I never met her, aunt Hilaire's shadow is long.
But I'm Phoebe's grand-daughter, and I'm good at what I do. People forget that, and forget that I came out of the space of time people just call the Wars.
They look at me, and see my father, see aunt Hilaire. They don't see my Cousin Madeleine, who laughed the way I do, and who came out of another war.
Madeleine was mad, the stories say, bright sharp smiles and dark laughter, fire and sunlight and the lingering smell of smoke. I can't remember meeting her, though I must have, before she died.
She liked words. Liked to gesture with her cigarettes to illustrate ideas, to exhale magic beside curls of smoke, before she moved.
Me, I move. I trust to gravity and balance, to the kinetic energy of a leap and a spin.
So I don't speak words, when I need. I reach out, words in my head but not in my mouth, and I step forward.
It's a beautiful house, someplace that gets enough rain to be forever green.
The layers of spells across the grounds are enough to choke on, breathless airless quality to the air I'm breathing. They know I'm here, that I've got power enough to do damage, whether or not I've got enough to break through to the threshold, to meet the one who cast the spells that keep his house safe.
I'm not here to fight. I've seen too much of wars to start another one, and one I'd lose. I've no illusions about what I am, and what the one who holds this house is.
That's why I'm here.
I need.
Not him, though. His wife.
And so I walk forward along their paths, my hands empty at my sides. The spells let me past, grudgingly, because for all my power I've no threat, no spells up my sleeves, no knife at my side.
I knock, and the door opens, something tricky in the hinges that make it light enough for a child to open if they needed to, but feel solid to an adult's hand.
She's taller than my aunt and my grandmother, smaller than me by a long space. This is her tower, though, ringed 'round by another's spells, and the air around her seethes with sparks.
I call her a title in French--she stiffens to correct me as soon as the word's out of my mouth, but she stops, mouth not yet open, when I finish "I need advice on how to deal with your husband's family."
She blinks at me. The sparks around us have to be whispering to her that I'm not of her husband's blood, that I'm not what she is, and that by her standards I'm only something like human.
She steps aside to let me in, and I can feel the sparks in my throat, implicit threat, as I cross the threshold of her tower.
She is the wife of my lover's brother. She is dangerous, not only for her status and her power, but for her thinking.
But she serves me tea, gestures me to sit, and speaks with me, answers my questions and asks her own of me.
I don't tell her that her daughter is very much her mother's child. For all I know her daughter doesn't exist yet. For all I know, I may be speaking to a goddess true, wearing a human face because she still thinks of herself that way.
I don't tell her that my lover is her husband's half-brother; she might know already, or she might not even know her husband has another sibling. In either event it doesn't matter much--I need to know the family, the legends, the way they think, not how my lover looks through someone else's eyes.
I don't tell her she acts like my grandmother the once-Queen. For all her status, all her power, she's always been 'just a human woman', according to every story I've ever heard about her.
I don't need a Queen. Don't need a mage of her very specialised variety--my entire family knows fire, if not exactly as she does. I don't need a war's lynchpin, don't need a war's survivor.
I need an elf's human wife, need the lady of the tower ringed 'round with a powerful mage's spells not to keep danger from her, but to warn away fools before they meet the dragon in the center of the maze.
I need someone who's farther up the path I mean to tread.
And it's that she speaks to me as, and it's that I send gifts to, eventually, dark clips that will be nearly invisible, that lessen the weight of long thick hair, that lessen snarling, that hold up the short hairs that cluster around faces and get in one's eyes. A few pages of my uncle's music. A pair of earrings, garnets and tiny blackened steel beads set in gold.
My note says only Thank you.
Her reply comes the way my package went, carried by irascible human hands.
I won't wish you good luck. Neither of us believe in it. I will instead tell you never to forget what he is. No matter how much you love him.
You are welcome.