because pokemon appreciate my plot twists, yes. *snrk*
Author: C
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 441
Story / World: Seer Trilogy book 1 - Amethyst Sky
Title: (how many of me could there realy be?)
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes.
Prompts: Toasted Almond #8: spitting image.
Characters: Amber. Both of them.
Toppings / Extras / Other: Cookie Crumbs [rewrite of a cryptic first draft of this that referred to them both as Amber].
Notes: I guess duality is a semi-unintentional theme today. No, more so than it always is. Really.
There's two of them.
This is something she could appreciate academically perfectly well, something that seemed obvious: her and an all-human girl to displace made perfect sense, it was just how these things worked. The concept was easy.
The living, breathing, furious example before her, dead-eyed in a way she knows a human wouldn't perceive from a lifetime of mental control, is most definitely not.
It's a tiny little basement room - bed, little table, high-up windows. No bookshelves, Amber notices with a seemingly random pang that reaches up under her ribcage and hits her breastbone sharply; can her counterpart even read?
She blinks and realizes she said some variation on that aloud. Well.
“Yes,” human Amber snaps, furious and just a bit confused. “No thanks to you. Why do you even want to know?”
“Thinking out loud.” Amber blinks more, and rapidly, and most assuredly does not blush. “Sorry.”
They even look more or less alike, which is most assuredly not luck. The changeling's hair is lighter, shorter, and less prone to obeying gravity; the human's eyes are brown. One of them has freckles, one Amber's likely taller though the hair skews things. But that's all.
Human Amber, as Amber thinks of her - real Amber - for lack of a better term, waits for a second and then goes on, “So what do you even want to tell me?”
“I'm fscking terrible at this,” Amber says, sounding maybe just a bit desperate. (In the back of her mind, though, she's quite proud of her pronunciation.) “For what it's worth. For thirteen years I really did think I was you. But if I apologize you'll just think I'm mocking you.”
Her voice is a lot clearer than Amber's, really, though there's that flat undertone again that a human would never hear the difference to. “No. I'd know. You stole my life. That's not the kind of thing you apologize for.”
The incredibly obnoxious thing that won't leave Amber's ribs alone is that she's right.
Amber shrugs.
“You can go,” she tells Amber. “Anywhere you want. None of my people will touch you. You have my word.” The Fei pushes the hair out of her eyes with one hand and doesn't notice that it then sticks straight up. “And I do apologize. I am sorry. Whether you care or believe me or not.”
Arms crossed, the human girl says nothing, but then she turns and walks away at least.
It's a long time before the Cilnar version of her does the same thing.
And Amber goes to see the Oracles.
Author: C
Rating: PG13 at the very least.
Wordcount: 1,129
Story / World: Seer Trilogy book 2 - Black Sunset
Title: Absolutely Constant
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Oh yeah.
Prompts: Toasted Almond #12: pins and needles.
Characters: Caroline Garza, Marcia Garza, Tasmin Sorchal, Finneas Ian Iscariot (Finneas, Ian, Iscariot. No, really), Ama.
Toppings / Extras / Other: I still cannot has!
Notes: And here is one of those revelations that goes back and makes the whole book before it Fridge Creepy! I like those things, much like mudkips. (Yes. Mudkips like my plot twists. That is totally what I was saying.) The first part, if you missed it, is here. (Honesty time: My characters would probably get beaten up a whole lot less if I actually could remember to take painkillers. Eheh.)
The washes of feeling don't just keep themselves to her outstretched hands. Of course they don't. Heat and terribly sharp pinpricks sink in at her fingertips, linger wrapped around the joints like little bands of burning iron, and shoot up to her elbows, but if it was only that Ama could deal with it. Her hands have been asleep for fifteen years. It's time enough that she start feeling something.
But the pain's also streaming up from the floor barbed wire pressed into her shins and knees, and it's hitting her spine and freezing her in place and coming around from there to pull her ribs tight against her lungs.
Ama can't move: this one fact has a perfect tiny universe of fear inside it. Fear, and pain, and rising panic.
There's also still a universe outside, though, and she likes that one better.
If she could move, she'd say, "Ian - Finneas, I don't think I can do this."
Since she can't, Ama just does it.
- - -
It's mostly children. An outsider is better, and they are adults, but of the natives it is almost always children, and the sick, and the old, who are given to their god.
They don't want it to happen, and it is this which keeps them from being monsters. If they had a choice they would be monsters. If they had chosen their god, shaped it with their tales and their libations to be one like this, they would be monsters.
But this is not the case; and they will die if the livestock turn diseased again, start giving birth only to mutated freaks again; they will die if their crops fail, or if there is another deadly rain. Not one of the townsfolk, or two, or fifty - all of them.
They have learned, through trial and error, how close they can get to the edge.
- - -
Ama pulls her hand away for an impossible second, cradling it to her chest as if it has been broken. She swallows, hard, and the bile that had risen up in her throat hurts quite a lot going back down.
Finneas glances at her nervously, ghostly Ian mirroring the movement, but Ama slashes her other hand through the air when he looks like he's going to speak. The message is perfectly clear - 'don't you dare', maybe, or 'shut up'.
She probably looks half-dead, Ama thinks. He has a reason to be worried.
Then she drops to her knees and leans forward, both palms and one ear flat to the ground. She has to know for sure, now, since she wants so badly to be wrong.
- - -
So there's a kind of lottery.
No one wants to volunteer. No one would forgive themselves if they put forward another. No one wants to draw the names out, either, but Tasmin does; she is the town's Speaker, priestess-of-sorts, and the only one who can read or write, so she has to. It is she who puts down the names as well, and she's the only one ineligible.
(Soon she will choose her successor, and then, until she dies, there will be two who are untouchable, not one, feared and envied by the rest. The girl - it's likely that it'll be a girl - she chooses especially; every peer she has will wonder why her and not them, and none of them will ever voice it. Tasmin knows this, and for a reason.)
This time she was seen to glance at Marcia Garza before the draw; and surely that meant nothing, but the name that came out was that of her daughter.
Marcia cried and pleaded, as some do; she was a widow, she argued, and Caroline her only child, while others had three or seven and could live without them, though in terrible grief.
Tasmin spoke calmly before the onslaught of Marcia's rage, and said that while she understood, and while she would change it if she could this was not permitted, even to her; that she understood Marcia's sorrow and anger and the cruelty of the draw but that the god must be appeased, everyone knew that.
She said she was sorry.
The debate continued dangerously long, until Caroline Garza put herself forward as a volunteer, against her mother's will. Volunteers could not be denied, even over the draw itself; and in this way, this time at least, they were saved from the god's impatience.
But it was, though no one saw, that Tasmin hesitated; and the killing blow fell limp, so that the girl bled and struggled and cried for her mother. With the second blow she was silent, but only at the third did she die.
A week after her daughter died Marcia Garza killed herself; it is hoped that the god sees this as a second sacrifice, that it will be merciful and not ask yet another of them for much longer.
So the townspeople have been saying; some have been praying, even, that it is true, and some asked her. Tasmin didn't answer. In her experience, hope and the god do not go together very well.
- - -
Ama sits up slowly and with difficulty; she thinks she's going to be all right but then her hand twitches the scarf at her throat and she has to lean forward and be violently sick on the dirt-and-stone floor after all.
When she's done she looks to Finneas, expecting him to be asking her what she saw; but his face is blank, staring straight ahead with his eyes closed, and he seems to be barely breathing.
Struggling to her feet, Ama says, "Finneas? Ian?" It comes out too loud, a panicked yell, and when she glances down again she sees a dark mist with the same sickly kind of glow as Ian has rising to her knees.
Her feet are deathly cold already.
"Ian!" she shrieks, crossing the room to shake him before realising that touching Finneas is a bad idea. "Ian, please, he needs you."
But Ian is frozen as well; she can see him behind Finneas' face, see his colours show through his body's skin and hair. Ian's eyes are open, she realises; she can see him better with one eye closed. His mouth's open too. He's trying to scream.
The mist is halfway up her thigh now. On a sudden, desperate hunch, she shouts, "Iscariot! Where are you? You idiot! They need you!"
Finneas' eyes open.
He grabs Ama's hand hard enough to bruise and pulls her up the stairs - she doesn't know how she kept up with him, probably she was mostly dragged - and out, stumbling with the desperate adrenaline speed of it, faster than the roiling mist can go.
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 441
Story / World: Seer Trilogy book 1 - Amethyst Sky
Title: (how many of me could there realy be?)
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes.
Prompts: Toasted Almond #8: spitting image.
Characters: Amber. Both of them.
Toppings / Extras / Other: Cookie Crumbs [rewrite of a cryptic first draft of this that referred to them both as Amber].
Notes: I guess duality is a semi-unintentional theme today. No, more so than it always is. Really.
There's two of them.
This is something she could appreciate academically perfectly well, something that seemed obvious: her and an all-human girl to displace made perfect sense, it was just how these things worked. The concept was easy.
The living, breathing, furious example before her, dead-eyed in a way she knows a human wouldn't perceive from a lifetime of mental control, is most definitely not.
It's a tiny little basement room - bed, little table, high-up windows. No bookshelves, Amber notices with a seemingly random pang that reaches up under her ribcage and hits her breastbone sharply; can her counterpart even read?
She blinks and realizes she said some variation on that aloud. Well.
“Yes,” human Amber snaps, furious and just a bit confused. “No thanks to you. Why do you even want to know?”
“Thinking out loud.” Amber blinks more, and rapidly, and most assuredly does not blush. “Sorry.”
They even look more or less alike, which is most assuredly not luck. The changeling's hair is lighter, shorter, and less prone to obeying gravity; the human's eyes are brown. One of them has freckles, one Amber's likely taller though the hair skews things. But that's all.
Human Amber, as Amber thinks of her - real Amber - for lack of a better term, waits for a second and then goes on, “So what do you even want to tell me?”
“I'm fscking terrible at this,” Amber says, sounding maybe just a bit desperate. (In the back of her mind, though, she's quite proud of her pronunciation.) “For what it's worth. For thirteen years I really did think I was you. But if I apologize you'll just think I'm mocking you.”
Her voice is a lot clearer than Amber's, really, though there's that flat undertone again that a human would never hear the difference to. “No. I'd know. You stole my life. That's not the kind of thing you apologize for.”
The incredibly obnoxious thing that won't leave Amber's ribs alone is that she's right.
Amber shrugs.
“You can go,” she tells Amber. “Anywhere you want. None of my people will touch you. You have my word.” The Fei pushes the hair out of her eyes with one hand and doesn't notice that it then sticks straight up. “And I do apologize. I am sorry. Whether you care or believe me or not.”
Arms crossed, the human girl says nothing, but then she turns and walks away at least.
It's a long time before the Cilnar version of her does the same thing.
And Amber goes to see the Oracles.
Author: C
Rating: PG13 at the very least.
Wordcount: 1,129
Story / World: Seer Trilogy book 2 - Black Sunset
Title: Absolutely Constant
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Oh yeah.
Prompts: Toasted Almond #12: pins and needles.
Characters: Caroline Garza, Marcia Garza, Tasmin Sorchal, Finneas Ian Iscariot (Finneas, Ian, Iscariot. No, really), Ama.
Toppings / Extras / Other: I still cannot has!
Notes: And here is one of those revelations that goes back and makes the whole book before it Fridge Creepy! I like those things, much like mudkips. (Yes. Mudkips like my plot twists. That is totally what I was saying.) The first part, if you missed it, is here. (Honesty time: My characters would probably get beaten up a whole lot less if I actually could remember to take painkillers. Eheh.)
The washes of feeling don't just keep themselves to her outstretched hands. Of course they don't. Heat and terribly sharp pinpricks sink in at her fingertips, linger wrapped around the joints like little bands of burning iron, and shoot up to her elbows, but if it was only that Ama could deal with it. Her hands have been asleep for fifteen years. It's time enough that she start feeling something.
But the pain's also streaming up from the floor barbed wire pressed into her shins and knees, and it's hitting her spine and freezing her in place and coming around from there to pull her ribs tight against her lungs.
Ama can't move: this one fact has a perfect tiny universe of fear inside it. Fear, and pain, and rising panic.
There's also still a universe outside, though, and she likes that one better.
If she could move, she'd say, "Ian - Finneas, I don't think I can do this."
Since she can't, Ama just does it.
- - -
It's mostly children. An outsider is better, and they are adults, but of the natives it is almost always children, and the sick, and the old, who are given to their god.
They don't want it to happen, and it is this which keeps them from being monsters. If they had a choice they would be monsters. If they had chosen their god, shaped it with their tales and their libations to be one like this, they would be monsters.
But this is not the case; and they will die if the livestock turn diseased again, start giving birth only to mutated freaks again; they will die if their crops fail, or if there is another deadly rain. Not one of the townsfolk, or two, or fifty - all of them.
They have learned, through trial and error, how close they can get to the edge.
- - -
Ama pulls her hand away for an impossible second, cradling it to her chest as if it has been broken. She swallows, hard, and the bile that had risen up in her throat hurts quite a lot going back down.
Finneas glances at her nervously, ghostly Ian mirroring the movement, but Ama slashes her other hand through the air when he looks like he's going to speak. The message is perfectly clear - 'don't you dare', maybe, or 'shut up'.
She probably looks half-dead, Ama thinks. He has a reason to be worried.
Then she drops to her knees and leans forward, both palms and one ear flat to the ground. She has to know for sure, now, since she wants so badly to be wrong.
- - -
So there's a kind of lottery.
No one wants to volunteer. No one would forgive themselves if they put forward another. No one wants to draw the names out, either, but Tasmin does; she is the town's Speaker, priestess-of-sorts, and the only one who can read or write, so she has to. It is she who puts down the names as well, and she's the only one ineligible.
(Soon she will choose her successor, and then, until she dies, there will be two who are untouchable, not one, feared and envied by the rest. The girl - it's likely that it'll be a girl - she chooses especially; every peer she has will wonder why her and not them, and none of them will ever voice it. Tasmin knows this, and for a reason.)
This time she was seen to glance at Marcia Garza before the draw; and surely that meant nothing, but the name that came out was that of her daughter.
Marcia cried and pleaded, as some do; she was a widow, she argued, and Caroline her only child, while others had three or seven and could live without them, though in terrible grief.
Tasmin spoke calmly before the onslaught of Marcia's rage, and said that while she understood, and while she would change it if she could this was not permitted, even to her; that she understood Marcia's sorrow and anger and the cruelty of the draw but that the god must be appeased, everyone knew that.
She said she was sorry.
The debate continued dangerously long, until Caroline Garza put herself forward as a volunteer, against her mother's will. Volunteers could not be denied, even over the draw itself; and in this way, this time at least, they were saved from the god's impatience.
But it was, though no one saw, that Tasmin hesitated; and the killing blow fell limp, so that the girl bled and struggled and cried for her mother. With the second blow she was silent, but only at the third did she die.
A week after her daughter died Marcia Garza killed herself; it is hoped that the god sees this as a second sacrifice, that it will be merciful and not ask yet another of them for much longer.
So the townspeople have been saying; some have been praying, even, that it is true, and some asked her. Tasmin didn't answer. In her experience, hope and the god do not go together very well.
- - -
Ama sits up slowly and with difficulty; she thinks she's going to be all right but then her hand twitches the scarf at her throat and she has to lean forward and be violently sick on the dirt-and-stone floor after all.
When she's done she looks to Finneas, expecting him to be asking her what she saw; but his face is blank, staring straight ahead with his eyes closed, and he seems to be barely breathing.
Struggling to her feet, Ama says, "Finneas? Ian?" It comes out too loud, a panicked yell, and when she glances down again she sees a dark mist with the same sickly kind of glow as Ian has rising to her knees.
Her feet are deathly cold already.
"Ian!" she shrieks, crossing the room to shake him before realising that touching Finneas is a bad idea. "Ian, please, he needs you."
But Ian is frozen as well; she can see him behind Finneas' face, see his colours show through his body's skin and hair. Ian's eyes are open, she realises; she can see him better with one eye closed. His mouth's open too. He's trying to scream.
The mist is halfway up her thigh now. On a sudden, desperate hunch, she shouts, "Iscariot! Where are you? You idiot! They need you!"
Finneas' eyes open.
He grabs Ama's hand hard enough to bruise and pulls her up the stairs - she doesn't know how she kept up with him, probably she was mostly dragged - and out, stumbling with the desperate adrenaline speed of it, faster than the roiling mist can go.