Introducing Blueberry Yogurt!
IAuthor: C
Rating: PG13? Talk of death and Carrion kind, which are the Cil equivalent of zombie brainwashed indentured servants so yeah.
Wordcount: 460
Story / World: pre-For the Love of Words
Title: Anywhere But In Between
Prompts: Boysenberry #17: gossamer wings. Strawberry #23: boots.
Characters: Seven.
Toppings / Extras / Other: Malt: Stocking Stuffer 2009 [Teeny // on gossymer wings, I fly]
Notes: I can't really say anything about this without spoilers, but note that Seven was never entirely human to begin with and I guess work from there? In other news, I swear I associate everything ever born that has even seen a Cilnar with the song this is named for (Rain King, Counting Crows). (Cristian got most of his character development because of it. Er.)
In the stories they are helpful, sort of kindly tricksters with wings like wrinkled light, and also the dead stay dead unless gods intervene. In actual fact they are benevolent unless it costs them or they don’t feel like it, with plots entirely their own; those glittery things couldn’t hold a child’s breath up and they don’t need wings, most of them, to fly; and the dead, well...
Hello, it’s nice to meet you, she’d mention her name but she’s afraid she doesn’t really have one anymore and can’t remember what it used to be when that sort of thing would count.
Once the battle was over no one was so thoughtful as to go through and separate the wounded from the dead so she stayed there, half-under some dead idiot’s dead horse, and deliriously wondered if anyone would come around for corpse-counting or corpse-robbing purposes and get angry at that she was actually a woman.
Then again they’d probably not even recognize her. Maybe by her boots.
It was really quite ridiculous; her upper body was pretty much mincemeat and horse-induced broken bones, and her face had been laid open from forehead to chin at some point, but her legs were fine and apparently things had gone badly enough that nothing came and scavenged meat or belongings.
Which was all very nice, she was sure, except for the leaving her to die of bloodloss and dehydration part.
But at least no one was going to execute her for the whole impersonating a man for soldiering purposes bit.
- - -
If anything she’s less recognizable now, even - especially - to herself. Any memories she had before that battle, including answers to questions such as why or whose side, are a vague suggestion of color and light. She’s told she’ll heal eventually and maybe being able to see herself will help, but for now she’s so heavily bandaged that clothes are pretty much a formality.
She’s still got the same boots, though.
Also wings, and she’s not too certain why or where they came from. They’re great feathery things; there doesn’t seem to be a posture where they don’t pull on her back, she has no idea if she can use them to fly, and lately they’ve been shedding feathers and itching madly so she’d guess she’s molting.
For some reason she still rather likes them.
- - -
Quite a lot of things have changed and she’s no way of knowing what they used to be, but at least there’s an easy explanation, and a name she can call herself with all her mind and whatever bits of soul are still there.
Now and forever, even until - unless - she dies again, she’s Carrion kind.
That’s all.
Author: C
Rating: PG13! Death and things.
Wordcount: 483
Story / World: post-LEC 3, pre-Amethyst Sky
Title: And Day After Day (It's This Again)
Prompts: Boysenberry #16: juggernaut. Blueberry Yogurt #18: negotiation. Strawberry #29: rope.
Characters: Jonathan Epikaste and the guy in his head.
Toppings / Extras: Cherry for second-person and for patterns and for starting with "you wake up", which just made me think of Fight Club.
Notes: Aaaand this is how we get our Necromancer out of this equation. Also, he's going to get blisters eventually, walking that much. *deadpan*
You wake up somewhere else.
It was often enough, before, that you’d open your eyes on somewhere and you had no idea where it was, but then memory would trickle back. These days it doesn’t; these days you’re pretty much always lost.
You wake up dusty and tired without reason, maybe dripping blood if you’re unlucky.
With no idea where you are or where you’ve been it’s really very hard to figure out what he’s been doing. You can’t reach him, he can’t reach you, but you’re trading this body back and forth as if you’re playing catch and you wonder absentmindedly if such as you are need sleep to stay sane (are you that even now, though?) or something and you keep walking. You don’t know where you’re going, he doesn’t know where he’s going; it’s pretty much a completely laughable situation.
You wake up in the corner of a dark room with five dead people for company.
It’s impossible to keep him from taking control, it seems. Whenever you fall asleep there he is, and it’s only a mercy that he can’t use your magic or even touch it. Maybe if he did he’d die. Maybe you could work on that, but you don’t - can’t - kill. The idea that these people died to his use of your hands is enough to make you think your heart will stop.
You wake up and you bring them back.
Red and gray and black, splattered across your sight like paint, really don’t seem to be productive sorts of colors. Your mind’s too haggard and bleeding slowly at the edges to realize that this should not be possible, that it might be dangerous.
You wake up, hoping it’s only the next day, and you pull rope out of thinner air than you might strictly like and start tying your ankles together.
He notices immediately and demands to know what’s going on with just this slightest flare of controlled panic. You don’t answer until you’ve pulled the last knot around your wrists as tight as you’ve ever been able to manage with only our teeth. He might crow that he can just untie himself but, really, you’d like to see him try fumbling at ropes made out of magic with gloveless hands. You can’t quite keep your voice emotionless when you say, words coming out in white puffs of lukewarm air, “We need to talk.”
You wake up and maybe it’s tomorrow.
For the first time in weeks or months you know who you are and exactly where you’ve been. The idea of having only a whisper in the back of your mind, instead of that violent takeover every single night, the end to that guerrilla war in your head - well, it’s wonderful.
You wake up every day and you wonder how long this good bit’s going to last.
And you walk.
Author: C
Rating: PG, mild PG13?
Wordcount: 957
Story / World: Amethyst Sky
Title: You Said You Wanted Proof, You Said
Prompts: Blueberry Yogurt #5: on edge. Strawberry #11: apron.
Characters: Ama, the Storyteller (Jon). Some mention of Andy.
Toppings / Extras: None! Isn't that neat? I'm actually doing straight canon here, insofar as AS has canon. (Blood, bad luck, and boiled cauliflower: this is around when I was working out who Ama is.)
Ama has this apron, which she dislikes. She’s never been sure why; it’s a perfectly decent piece of clothing, a good chunk of cloth even if one doesn’t want an apron specifically, and anyway it’s rare to own something with no patches and this little fraying so by all rights she should be vaguely proud of it. She does wear it more often than not, for the pockets, but for some reason the thought of it feels like a spotted pink rash in her head.
(It also smells like blood, bad luck, and boiled cauliflower, but everyone else says that’s her imagination.)
Being able to humor random dislikes that way would be a luxury, but it still takes her a bit of effort to get the rage she’s working on now. The confusion and annoyance and ticking feathery fingers of panic, though, those are easy.
The cloth’s turning to ash pretty quickly in that barely-necessary fire, and there’s a full-fledged flare of panic that doesn’t go away - that just stays there, not growing or ebbing, a bright flat line in the timeline of her mind - when she realizes there’s a gap in what she considers to be the past (it’s like a gaping hole in her head, really).
It’s not that there’s a completely blank spot where she might as well have been asleep or, were she someone else, unconscious. She can remember seeing perfectly fine. It’s actions that she’s missing.
This, she thinks briefly, will be very hard to explain.
She knows she must have untied it (and in her mind the eyes just stared straight ahead), must have knelt (those eyes don’t move, but everything she can see rises suddenly and with a jerk) to lay the cloth on the other assorted kindling and strike a match. Her hands always fumble with matches. Always. Those smooth brown fingers she saw didn’t shake at all.
And she doesn’t remember doing any of this. She saw ti happen, though, and how ridiculous the situation is cuts through her mind like the peal of a bell, even blurs the panic for a moment.
“What the hell was that?” she asks evenly, but in a whisper so low she’s surprised the man sitting casually across from her even looks up.
He does, though. “You asked for proof,” he says, pleasant as anything, one hand tapping restless patterns on his knees.”
That she can remember. “And what was that?” (It was a voice that sounded like his speaking all the truth in the world--)
“Proof.” He waves a hand over the fire and it goes out all at once, burning wood now black and cold, her apron gray ash and the occasional patch of cream-colored cloth. There’s no way of showing that the flames weren’t extinguished five hour sago, not a single piece of fuel still glowing red-orange or white this single second later. Ama stares. “You satisfied?”
“What? No!” she snaps half-incoherently, and takes three fast, uneasy steps backward. The fourth step is a misstep actually, and sends her more or less sprawling.
He watches, the slightest trace of a smile wandering around his mouth.
Scowling, Ama rocks herself into a more purposeful-looking sprawl and scrambles for what she’d been saying - “What am I supposed to tell my brother?”
Eyes can’t be empty, Ama knows, but they can be awfully flat sometimes; the man she’s taken to calling Smith is staring in earnest now, and his fingers aren’t moving any more. “Tell him whatever you like.” Part of her mind notices with a frisson of relief that he’s holding the messy booklet she’s been writing in, until she thinks to wonder how it got in his hand. “Tell him you lost it. Or don’t tell him anything, if you’d rather.” He fishes around with one hand in the ashes as if they are a sack, and somehow these pull together and there the accursed apron is in her lap. Ama looks at him blankly, then reverse-trips - about as clumsily as the normal way - to her feet.
“I,” she says, breathing harder than she’d like and wishing he wasn’t standing so close with an expression like all this was something completely normal, “I have no idea what that was and I think I’d like to keep things that way.”
The man whose name is probably John something looks hurt, and his voice seems changed for the better or at least for the less unnerving in a way Ama can’t put her finger on. “Why’ve you been listening if you’d rather not believe anything I say, then?”
“You tell decent stories,” she replies.
He actually smiles, and Ama stares again. “Well.” Then, without an apology for the bizarre chunk of minutes that was or thanks of any sort, he walks off, quickly leaving Ama standing there dumbfounded and shivering, apron in one hand, glaring at the dead fire.
“What,” she says as quietly as she can.
- - -
It takes her until she’s back at home, having slammed the door (which does not appreciate being slammed) behind her and slumped against one wall, to realize that he’s still got her notes on his story. On all the stories. To be specific, the notes that she is not supposed to be taking, and that are a violation of a law whose consequences may or may not be some manner of death.
Things seem to have reached enough reasons to let self-control go off some remote cliff, at least for now, she thinks distantly.
Ama pulls her knees to her chest, pushes her face against one leg and starts to wail.
Rating: PG13? Talk of death and Carrion kind, which are the Cil equivalent of zombie brainwashed indentured servants so yeah.
Wordcount: 460
Story / World: pre-For the Love of Words
Title: Anywhere But In Between
Prompts: Boysenberry #17: gossamer wings. Strawberry #23: boots.
Characters: Seven.
Toppings / Extras / Other: Malt: Stocking Stuffer 2009 [Teeny // on gossymer wings, I fly]
Notes: I can't really say anything about this without spoilers, but note that Seven was never entirely human to begin with and I guess work from there? In other news, I swear I associate everything ever born that has even seen a Cilnar with the song this is named for (Rain King, Counting Crows). (Cristian got most of his character development because of it. Er.)
In the stories they are helpful, sort of kindly tricksters with wings like wrinkled light, and also the dead stay dead unless gods intervene. In actual fact they are benevolent unless it costs them or they don’t feel like it, with plots entirely their own; those glittery things couldn’t hold a child’s breath up and they don’t need wings, most of them, to fly; and the dead, well...
Hello, it’s nice to meet you, she’d mention her name but she’s afraid she doesn’t really have one anymore and can’t remember what it used to be when that sort of thing would count.
Once the battle was over no one was so thoughtful as to go through and separate the wounded from the dead so she stayed there, half-under some dead idiot’s dead horse, and deliriously wondered if anyone would come around for corpse-counting or corpse-robbing purposes and get angry at that she was actually a woman.
Then again they’d probably not even recognize her. Maybe by her boots.
It was really quite ridiculous; her upper body was pretty much mincemeat and horse-induced broken bones, and her face had been laid open from forehead to chin at some point, but her legs were fine and apparently things had gone badly enough that nothing came and scavenged meat or belongings.
Which was all very nice, she was sure, except for the leaving her to die of bloodloss and dehydration part.
But at least no one was going to execute her for the whole impersonating a man for soldiering purposes bit.
- - -
If anything she’s less recognizable now, even - especially - to herself. Any memories she had before that battle, including answers to questions such as why or whose side, are a vague suggestion of color and light. She’s told she’ll heal eventually and maybe being able to see herself will help, but for now she’s so heavily bandaged that clothes are pretty much a formality.
She’s still got the same boots, though.
Also wings, and she’s not too certain why or where they came from. They’re great feathery things; there doesn’t seem to be a posture where they don’t pull on her back, she has no idea if she can use them to fly, and lately they’ve been shedding feathers and itching madly so she’d guess she’s molting.
For some reason she still rather likes them.
- - -
Quite a lot of things have changed and she’s no way of knowing what they used to be, but at least there’s an easy explanation, and a name she can call herself with all her mind and whatever bits of soul are still there.
Now and forever, even until - unless - she dies again, she’s Carrion kind.
That’s all.
Author: C
Rating: PG13! Death and things.
Wordcount: 483
Story / World: post-LEC 3, pre-Amethyst Sky
Title: And Day After Day (It's This Again)
Prompts: Boysenberry #16: juggernaut. Blueberry Yogurt #18: negotiation. Strawberry #29: rope.
Characters: Jonathan Epikaste and the guy in his head.
Toppings / Extras: Cherry for second-person and for patterns and for starting with "you wake up", which just made me think of Fight Club.
Notes: Aaaand this is how we get our Necromancer out of this equation. Also, he's going to get blisters eventually, walking that much. *deadpan*
You wake up somewhere else.
It was often enough, before, that you’d open your eyes on somewhere and you had no idea where it was, but then memory would trickle back. These days it doesn’t; these days you’re pretty much always lost.
You wake up dusty and tired without reason, maybe dripping blood if you’re unlucky.
With no idea where you are or where you’ve been it’s really very hard to figure out what he’s been doing. You can’t reach him, he can’t reach you, but you’re trading this body back and forth as if you’re playing catch and you wonder absentmindedly if such as you are need sleep to stay sane (are you that even now, though?) or something and you keep walking. You don’t know where you’re going, he doesn’t know where he’s going; it’s pretty much a completely laughable situation.
You wake up in the corner of a dark room with five dead people for company.
It’s impossible to keep him from taking control, it seems. Whenever you fall asleep there he is, and it’s only a mercy that he can’t use your magic or even touch it. Maybe if he did he’d die. Maybe you could work on that, but you don’t - can’t - kill. The idea that these people died to his use of your hands is enough to make you think your heart will stop.
You wake up and you bring them back.
Red and gray and black, splattered across your sight like paint, really don’t seem to be productive sorts of colors. Your mind’s too haggard and bleeding slowly at the edges to realize that this should not be possible, that it might be dangerous.
You wake up, hoping it’s only the next day, and you pull rope out of thinner air than you might strictly like and start tying your ankles together.
He notices immediately and demands to know what’s going on with just this slightest flare of controlled panic. You don’t answer until you’ve pulled the last knot around your wrists as tight as you’ve ever been able to manage with only our teeth. He might crow that he can just untie himself but, really, you’d like to see him try fumbling at ropes made out of magic with gloveless hands. You can’t quite keep your voice emotionless when you say, words coming out in white puffs of lukewarm air, “We need to talk.”
You wake up and maybe it’s tomorrow.
For the first time in weeks or months you know who you are and exactly where you’ve been. The idea of having only a whisper in the back of your mind, instead of that violent takeover every single night, the end to that guerrilla war in your head - well, it’s wonderful.
You wake up every day and you wonder how long this good bit’s going to last.
And you walk.
Author: C
Rating: PG, mild PG13?
Wordcount: 957
Story / World: Amethyst Sky
Title: You Said You Wanted Proof, You Said
Prompts: Blueberry Yogurt #5: on edge. Strawberry #11: apron.
Characters: Ama, the Storyteller (Jon). Some mention of Andy.
Toppings / Extras: None! Isn't that neat? I'm actually doing straight canon here, insofar as AS has canon. (Blood, bad luck, and boiled cauliflower: this is around when I was working out who Ama is.)
Ama has this apron, which she dislikes. She’s never been sure why; it’s a perfectly decent piece of clothing, a good chunk of cloth even if one doesn’t want an apron specifically, and anyway it’s rare to own something with no patches and this little fraying so by all rights she should be vaguely proud of it. She does wear it more often than not, for the pockets, but for some reason the thought of it feels like a spotted pink rash in her head.
(It also smells like blood, bad luck, and boiled cauliflower, but everyone else says that’s her imagination.)
Being able to humor random dislikes that way would be a luxury, but it still takes her a bit of effort to get the rage she’s working on now. The confusion and annoyance and ticking feathery fingers of panic, though, those are easy.
The cloth’s turning to ash pretty quickly in that barely-necessary fire, and there’s a full-fledged flare of panic that doesn’t go away - that just stays there, not growing or ebbing, a bright flat line in the timeline of her mind - when she realizes there’s a gap in what she considers to be the past (it’s like a gaping hole in her head, really).
It’s not that there’s a completely blank spot where she might as well have been asleep or, were she someone else, unconscious. She can remember seeing perfectly fine. It’s actions that she’s missing.
This, she thinks briefly, will be very hard to explain.
She knows she must have untied it (and in her mind the eyes just stared straight ahead), must have knelt (those eyes don’t move, but everything she can see rises suddenly and with a jerk) to lay the cloth on the other assorted kindling and strike a match. Her hands always fumble with matches. Always. Those smooth brown fingers she saw didn’t shake at all.
And she doesn’t remember doing any of this. She saw ti happen, though, and how ridiculous the situation is cuts through her mind like the peal of a bell, even blurs the panic for a moment.
“What the hell was that?” she asks evenly, but in a whisper so low she’s surprised the man sitting casually across from her even looks up.
He does, though. “You asked for proof,” he says, pleasant as anything, one hand tapping restless patterns on his knees.”
That she can remember. “And what was that?” (It was a voice that sounded like his speaking all the truth in the world--)
“Proof.” He waves a hand over the fire and it goes out all at once, burning wood now black and cold, her apron gray ash and the occasional patch of cream-colored cloth. There’s no way of showing that the flames weren’t extinguished five hour sago, not a single piece of fuel still glowing red-orange or white this single second later. Ama stares. “You satisfied?”
“What? No!” she snaps half-incoherently, and takes three fast, uneasy steps backward. The fourth step is a misstep actually, and sends her more or less sprawling.
He watches, the slightest trace of a smile wandering around his mouth.
Scowling, Ama rocks herself into a more purposeful-looking sprawl and scrambles for what she’d been saying - “What am I supposed to tell my brother?”
Eyes can’t be empty, Ama knows, but they can be awfully flat sometimes; the man she’s taken to calling Smith is staring in earnest now, and his fingers aren’t moving any more. “Tell him whatever you like.” Part of her mind notices with a frisson of relief that he’s holding the messy booklet she’s been writing in, until she thinks to wonder how it got in his hand. “Tell him you lost it. Or don’t tell him anything, if you’d rather.” He fishes around with one hand in the ashes as if they are a sack, and somehow these pull together and there the accursed apron is in her lap. Ama looks at him blankly, then reverse-trips - about as clumsily as the normal way - to her feet.
“I,” she says, breathing harder than she’d like and wishing he wasn’t standing so close with an expression like all this was something completely normal, “I have no idea what that was and I think I’d like to keep things that way.”
The man whose name is probably John something looks hurt, and his voice seems changed for the better or at least for the less unnerving in a way Ama can’t put her finger on. “Why’ve you been listening if you’d rather not believe anything I say, then?”
“You tell decent stories,” she replies.
He actually smiles, and Ama stares again. “Well.” Then, without an apology for the bizarre chunk of minutes that was or thanks of any sort, he walks off, quickly leaving Ama standing there dumbfounded and shivering, apron in one hand, glaring at the dead fire.
“What,” she says as quietly as she can.
- - -
It takes her until she’s back at home, having slammed the door (which does not appreciate being slammed) behind her and slumped against one wall, to realize that he’s still got her notes on his story. On all the stories. To be specific, the notes that she is not supposed to be taking, and that are a violation of a law whose consequences may or may not be some manner of death.
Things seem to have reached enough reasons to let self-control go off some remote cliff, at least for now, she thinks distantly.
Ama pulls her knees to her chest, pushes her face against one leg and starts to wail.