NaNo-ish Thing #2
I dislike text limits.
The storehouses were all the way on the opposite side of the estate. Mother and Father did their actual crafting there, so they needed to be a safe distance from the manor and the stables. The two of them ran across the recently mowed lawns, down the sloping hill towards two squat buildings. Adelai’s feet were green by the time they got there but, she was relieved to notice, only from the crushed grass.
Luca held his breath as he fit the key into the lock. The well-oiled mechanism popped open without so much as a click. The door swung open a crack, inviting them into the gloom beyond. Luca tucked the folio under his arm and pushed his way inside.
“Come on Addy!” he hissed over his shoulder. “Hurry up!”
She stepped past him, imagining she felt a tingle as she crossed the threshold. The inside of the shed was cool, the air heavy with the scents of ozone and cinnabar. Hazy sunlight filtered through tiny, dust-choked windows under the eaves. Crates, boxes, bags and bales of supplies were neatly labeled and stacked around the edges of the room, leaving the center clear for Artifice. A spring bubbled in a bricked-off pool at the back of the storehouse. Their parents chose this location for the ready availability of all four elements. Luca locked the door behind them and stuffed the key into his pants’ pocket.
“Right,” he crouched down and spread his sketches and notes out around them. “I need you to help me find and measure the materials.”
Adelai carefully doled out small amounts of minerals from their boxes, pouring them into separate mounds on the floor. Luca hauled out the sacks of leftovers from his skeleton building exercises. Adelai stood back to assess the supplies.
“That doesn’t seem like a whole lot,” she said.
“Yeah, well over half of any mammal is water,” Luca grunted as he poured out another sack of potassium. “We’re squishy. Go sit down out of the way, okay? I’m gonna start soon and I don’t want you to get caught up in anything.”
Adelai nodded and shied back against one of the walls, planting herself between crates of silver and copper ingots. She watched as Luca built a fire in the middle of the mineral piles, lit with the help of a matchbook he carried in his pocket. The warm glow lit the storehouse in ruddy reds and oranges, lighting the tension in the air. She held her breath, watching Luca, watching his skin for signs of change.
Her brother exhaled sharply, raising his hands level with his ribcage, palms up, elbows out. Adelai stared intently at his hands; they were the key to construction. Luca gestured sharply to the deposits of calcium, potassium and trace minerals, streaming them towards the fire. They followed his movements, absorbing the heat, merging together, liquefying and solidifying, stretching and twisting like taffy. He sketched the outline of an equine skeleton through the air with sharp, clean swipes of his hands, laying the general shape. The un-ossified bone hung in the air, waiting to be further shaped, molded, hardened. Having laid the groundwork, Luca rolled up his sleeves and took the gesture of a skeleton in hand, sculpting the details into place.
Adelai knew how it worked, at least in theory. Luca had to keep the overall picture in mind, even as he concentrated on the minute details that would make up the whole. She noticed sweat beading on his forehead, saw the faintest tremor in his chin. He was visualizing the inside of the bone as well, hollowing it where it needed to be hollow, willing tiny chambers and matrixes into place. He completed work on the legs and made a cranking motion with both hands, as if hauling on a giant wheel. The entire structure rotated ninety degrees to lie on its side, presenting Luca with the spine. He swayed as he worked, every motion fluid, every carving precise, slowly working his way up towards the skull.
It seemed hours before Luca stepped back from the completed skeleton to take a breath. Adelai breathed with him, dizzy from holding the air in her lungs. She’d been afraid to distract him, even the tiniest bit. It might have been the firelight, but his legs seemed to be shaking. She hugged her knees to her chest and stared intently as he wiped his forehead and moved on to the delicate traceries of nerves and organ tissue. Not once had his skin changed color.
Still it was hard to believe that she might not be an Artificer, not while watching Luca gather bunches of fibers into muscle and anchor it to bone. Water soared overhead, drawn from its spring towards the whirl of construction. She could barely see him past the flying components, spinning in a haze around her brother as he infused organs with miniscule amounts of minerals. He’d replicated blood, red, white, and hemoglobin, built off a sample he’d taken from Partner and reproduced with proteins and water. Once he infused the equine form with it, only the brain, the eyes and the skin would remain. Adelai leaned forward on her hands and knees, trying to see the work past the blur of activity and the gale-force winds it kicked up. How could he keep so many things in the air all at once? She couldn’t imagine the concentration…
“LUCA!” the storehouse shuddered under their Father’s roar and the weight of his shoulder against the doors. Adelai fell on her face, arms over her head. She heard the sound of heavy metal clunking: Father tearing at the lock. Mother’s voice rose over the din, shouting for them to open the door immediately.
Though the weather improved, the two of them spent the following weeks cloistered in the library. Mother and Father assumed Luca was convinced that Adelai would come into her talent at any time, so they let it slide. They did insist that the two of them attend their other lessons, but didn’t try to push them outdoors as they normally would have. When the two of them did go outside, they hung around the paddocks and watched the horses. Luca filled pad after pad of paper with charcoal sketches of the animals grazing, trotting, whisking flies and rolling in the dust. Sometimes he’d send Adelai in to chase them around a bit. They were sedate beasts, not given much to senseless running, but he insisted on seeing them move.
“There’s a difference between ponies and horses, y’know,” she flopped breathlessly beside him, pulling the sketchpad over for a look.
“I know,” Luca shrugged, “But I don’t want to just double Partner.”
Adelai grinned. “Why, ‘cause he’s fat?”
“He’s not!” her brother snatched the paper back and bent over it. “Anyway, I’m making yours a boy pony. Is that okay? The reproductive stuff is simple with a male, and I don’t have to think about stocking him with, y’know, a set number of eggs or anything. I could do a girl if you want one, though.”
She’d already seen his diagrams of the reproductive system, so she shrugged. The whole thing was completely out of her hands, anyway.
“Hey Luca? How’re you going to get the material for this? Didja think about that?”
Luca dropped back onto his elbows and grinned at her. “We’re going to use Father’s reserves.”
Adelai gawked, then narrowed her eyes in disbelief. “No way. Even if we could get in, and we can’t, how d’you even know he’d have what you need?”
“Because I asked him to show me how to construct skeletons. We’re working with cats. He said I should practice my imaging and I said that those would be good to work with, since they’re pretty complex,” his smirk oozed confidence. “It’s great, ‘cause I get the practice I need in proper ossification, and he ordered plenty of extra components for mistakes.”
Adelai’s hands flew to her mouth. “You lied to Father!”
Luca flopped onto his back and rolled his eyes at her. “What did you think we’ve been doing?
“…not telling him everything?”
“Don’t be stupid, Addy. No matter what happens, he’s going to be mad at us for sneaking behind his back. But if this goes right he’ll be too impressed to be angry!”
“At you, maybe,” Adelai nibbled nervously at a curl, “I’m just your…uh…”
“Accomplice,” Luca provided, “Yeah, but he’s never mad at you for long. Mother either. This was my idea and I’ll take the blame if it doesn’t work.” He still seemed convinced that there wouldn’t be any consequences so long as he succeeded, and that worried Adelai. It was almost enough to keep her from worrying about potential failure. She pulled the soggy lock of hair from her mouth and nodded reluctantly.
“I guess you’re right.”
“Good,” her stomach sank as Luca’s grin widened. “Because I need you to get the key to the storehouse.”
“What?! NO!” Adelai leapt to her feet, arms akimbo. “That’s stealing! Even if I wanted to, an’ I don’t, Father keeps it in his desk drawer! He’s always in his office working on something, he’d notice me coming in!”
“So wait until he gets up for a drink, or the bathroom or something,” Luca said, propping himself up on an elbow.
“He’d see me in the hall!”
“Come on Addy, you’re really good at hiding! I can’t ever find you, I swear I’m not lying!” he grabbed a fistful of her skirt and tugged. “I promise, when Father asks how we got in, I’ll say I took the key. He won’t be mad at you. Come on. Please?”
Adelai wobbled, sinking down next to her brother, who put a solid arm around her shoulders and smiled.
“Just give me another week to work on it,” he said.
They’d been so stupid. Even if Father hadn’t noticed the missing key, he and Mother would have felt the rising pressure of an alien power in the area. They mustn’t have realized how far along he was in the construction process, or they wouldn’t try to intervene. So much unstable mass could fold back in on itself and implode.
“Not now!” Luca howled back, hands scrabbling at the air. The interruption had clearly shocked him out of his concentration; bits and pieces of the horse’s anatomy flaked away like debris in a monsoon. Adelai gawked as a kidney flew past her to splat against the wall. Luca groaned through his teeth, wrenching his arms around as if to pull everything back by centrifugal force.
Too much matter had already been stripped away. Adelai peeked through her arms, watching Luca’s thoughts fly across his face. He was determined to come out of this with something for his efforts, even if it was something smaller, something different. Father had had him crafting cats for weeks. Even with the panic hammering inside her lungs, she was confident he could salvage it.
“Dammit, Luca! Open this door! Adelai! I know you’re in there with him! Open up!” She couldn’t tell which of her parents was shouting anymore, or if they were raising their voices together. What she heard, loud and clear over the roaring wind, was the heavy shriek-clunk of metal being torn apart and cast aside.
Dying sunlight flooded the room with red, outlining their parents against the open door. Adelai scrambled backwards on her hands and knees, fitting herself back into the space between the crates. She always knew they’d get caught, had been against this part from the beginning! She wished she were an Earth Worker, so the ground would open and swallow her up.
Her feet went first, the skin reddening to reflect the light thrown throughout the storehouse. Halfway up her legs the color cut to black, following the path of the shadow cast by the crate. Adelai stared in morbid fascination as the rest of her faded into the dark.
Father started towards her brother, but Mother grabbed his arm and held him back. He could only watch, mouth set in a hard, grim line, as Luca hastily restructured the model, shrinking overall mass, discarding organs and joints, rebuilding it here, detracting from it there, falling back to a familiar, much practiced form. His hands blurred through the air, the last of the materials spiraling off the floor to join the mix. The remnants circled him like water down a drain, spreading skin and thick fur over the much, much smaller muscle structure.
Luca exhaled, a long, drawn-out sigh that seemed to fill the room. The expelled air hung between him and his construct, a shifting, luminous cloud. He gasped sharply, like a swimmer surfacing for air, but the breath drew back out in wisps of glowing smoke. Adelai could track the light down his throat, could see it glowing in his chest and the pit of his belly. She clapped dark hands to her mouth as the light continued to spiral out his mouth and nose. Luca bent at the middle, keeling over an invisible blow to his stomach. She could hear the breath hitching in his throat as he tried to breathe around the force drawing up his windpipe.
Mother was no longer restraining Father, but clinging to him with a desperate cry. They wanted to stop it, Adelai could see, but they hadn’t been involved in the construction, they had no influence. This wasn’t right. It had to be the animation, the part she’d warned and worried about. The Ether wasn’t just running through him, it was…it was running out of him. The light in his stomach flickered weakly. Luca’s words echoed in her mind: We’re made up of it before we’re born and we go back to it when we die. What he hadn’t said, because everyone knew, was that it made up life in between.
Adelai broke from the boxes, the colors on her skin jumping as if startled by the sudden change. They shifted wildly, in full view of her parents but all that could wait until later, when Luca didn’t need her help anymore. She wasn’t an Artificer. That much was clear now. But she’d watched the experiment from the beginning and she had some sort of talent, something little and maybe not much use, but she had Ether and she could share it.
She hit the glowing cloud and stopped short, all the air knocked out of her. Her lungs clamped down and her stomach heaved, painfully squeezing something up and out of her. All her momentum and strength bled away, leaving her feeling very old, or maybe very little, but altogether feeble. She was dimly aware of a rust-red light leaking from her mouth, tinging Luca’s gold like sunset.
It was enough. She saw the glow inside her brother flare, saw him wrench away and clamp a hand over his nose and mouth. Adelai felt an answering surge in her own gut, a sharp yank as the Ether stopped short at the back of her throat. She puffed a little bit of light out her nose, watching as it to join the spinning sphere around the lifeless creature. For a moment, it hung like a self-contained atmosphere, shifting lazily. Then a storm seemed to kick up within it, the spinning picked up hurricane force, and the orange glow spiraled down the construct’s mouth. The tension in the air folded in on itself and vanished with a pop.
Luca dropped to his knees, sucking in deep, hungry lungfuls of air. Adelai staggered a bit, wobbling on her feet like a newborn foal. Mother swooped them both into her arms and crushed them to her chest. Adelai realized, as though from far away, that she was crying, crying and running her hands through their hair and kissing them both frantically. She sank into the flurry of attention and wondered where Father had gone.
As if summoned by her thought, he crouched down next to them, unfolding his arms to show them what Luca had done.
It was small, the size of a toddler, with had a feline face and long, rabbit-like ears. Each of its four legs ended in clever, four fingered ‘hands.’ Its long tail, nearly as thick as her arm, was wrapped around its waist. Its fur was mottled, gray and cream and dense. It reached out and snatched for Mother’s necklace.
“What is it?” she asked, hugging them away from its grasp.
“I dunno,” Luca slurred. “It’s Adelai’s. She gets to say.”
Suddenly all eyes were on Adelai, even the unnamed thing’s round yellow ones. Mother’s tear-filled eyes were wide with something other than fear and relief. Shock. Alarm? Adelai looked down at her hands, curled against her chest, and saw the blue of her dress through them. She was too badly shaken to try and force them back.
“What in-” Father started, his voice hushed. He was cut off by Luca, who grabbed his sister’s hands and pulled her into a protective hug. She saw his face just before he hid her against his neck. His mouth was a thin, trembling line, but his eyes were hard and sad.
“It’s not her fault,” he rasped. “It’s not.”
“Luca…” Mother touched his cheek, Adelai’s shoulder, “Did you know? That she’s-”
“I wondered,” he said, his voice slurred as if his tongue were too thick for his mouth. “She’s so good at hiding, and once I thought I saw…But I didn’t know,” his voice dropped. “I didn’t want her to be.”
To be different, he didn’t say. She heard it anyway, and it settled like a stone in the pit of her stomach. He was holding her instead of pushing her away, but that didn’t help the heaviness, didn’t change the way they were talking around her.
Something pulled at the hem of her skirt, and she looked down at the little Thing. It tugged, pointed to her brother, and tugged again. She reached down to it and it crawled up between her and Luca, butting its head beneath her chin
“It’s smart,” she said, attempting a smile. “You’re really amazing, Luca.”
“Amazingly lucky, perhaps,” Father grunted, reaching over Mother’s shoulder to cuff his son over the head. It was not a gentle blow. Adelai felt a flash of guilt at her relief that they were mad at him now, not her.
You went behind our backs,” Father said, “You misappropriated supplies, you stole from me in order to break in here and attempt something far beyond your skill level! You could have gotten yourself and your sister killed!”
“It was going fine until you interrupted me,” Luca pointed out. Adelai flinched.
Mother smacked him before Father could. He raised a hand to his cheek, eyes glazed over in surprise. Only then did Adelai notice his sunken cheeks and the gray tinge to his lips. She wondered if she looked the same.
“There are limits, Luca, that you do not test,” Mother said, taking Luca by the shoulders and shaking him once, sharply. Father pulled Adelai out of the way. His fingers dug almost painfully into her shoulder, and he stared fixedly at the lecture when she looked up at him.
“It isn’t the Artifice that’s the dangerous part with animals, it’s animating them.” Mother was saying. “There is no “spare” Ether lying around to create life. Babies feed off their parents. Constructs feed off their creator. You are eleven years old, Luca, you don’t have enough to share!” she smoothed her hands over his hair and cheeks as though she could make him whole by her own talent. “Look at you. In the end you breathed life into one small thing, and you can barely sit up.”
“Adelai helped,” Luca croaked.
The vice-like grip on her shoulder eased. Father looked down at her at last, but his eyes were distant. She hugged her animal, the one she could name because Luca said it was all hers, and did not notice that her hands disappeared against its fur.
“So she did,” he said, as if it were nothing, nothing at all.
I don't write children very well...they always come out sounding thirty-something.
All that amounts to 7047 words, but I have no idea what that translates to in WriMo-status, and most of it was pre existing anyway. I did this and the first two chapters for the Seminar, but chapter 2 never got the revisions it desperately needed.
We'll just see how much I actually crank out.
The storehouses were all the way on the opposite side of the estate. Mother and Father did their actual crafting there, so they needed to be a safe distance from the manor and the stables. The two of them ran across the recently mowed lawns, down the sloping hill towards two squat buildings. Adelai’s feet were green by the time they got there but, she was relieved to notice, only from the crushed grass.
Luca held his breath as he fit the key into the lock. The well-oiled mechanism popped open without so much as a click. The door swung open a crack, inviting them into the gloom beyond. Luca tucked the folio under his arm and pushed his way inside.
“Come on Addy!” he hissed over his shoulder. “Hurry up!”
She stepped past him, imagining she felt a tingle as she crossed the threshold. The inside of the shed was cool, the air heavy with the scents of ozone and cinnabar. Hazy sunlight filtered through tiny, dust-choked windows under the eaves. Crates, boxes, bags and bales of supplies were neatly labeled and stacked around the edges of the room, leaving the center clear for Artifice. A spring bubbled in a bricked-off pool at the back of the storehouse. Their parents chose this location for the ready availability of all four elements. Luca locked the door behind them and stuffed the key into his pants’ pocket.
“Right,” he crouched down and spread his sketches and notes out around them. “I need you to help me find and measure the materials.”
Adelai carefully doled out small amounts of minerals from their boxes, pouring them into separate mounds on the floor. Luca hauled out the sacks of leftovers from his skeleton building exercises. Adelai stood back to assess the supplies.
“That doesn’t seem like a whole lot,” she said.
“Yeah, well over half of any mammal is water,” Luca grunted as he poured out another sack of potassium. “We’re squishy. Go sit down out of the way, okay? I’m gonna start soon and I don’t want you to get caught up in anything.”
Adelai nodded and shied back against one of the walls, planting herself between crates of silver and copper ingots. She watched as Luca built a fire in the middle of the mineral piles, lit with the help of a matchbook he carried in his pocket. The warm glow lit the storehouse in ruddy reds and oranges, lighting the tension in the air. She held her breath, watching Luca, watching his skin for signs of change.
Her brother exhaled sharply, raising his hands level with his ribcage, palms up, elbows out. Adelai stared intently at his hands; they were the key to construction. Luca gestured sharply to the deposits of calcium, potassium and trace minerals, streaming them towards the fire. They followed his movements, absorbing the heat, merging together, liquefying and solidifying, stretching and twisting like taffy. He sketched the outline of an equine skeleton through the air with sharp, clean swipes of his hands, laying the general shape. The un-ossified bone hung in the air, waiting to be further shaped, molded, hardened. Having laid the groundwork, Luca rolled up his sleeves and took the gesture of a skeleton in hand, sculpting the details into place.
Adelai knew how it worked, at least in theory. Luca had to keep the overall picture in mind, even as he concentrated on the minute details that would make up the whole. She noticed sweat beading on his forehead, saw the faintest tremor in his chin. He was visualizing the inside of the bone as well, hollowing it where it needed to be hollow, willing tiny chambers and matrixes into place. He completed work on the legs and made a cranking motion with both hands, as if hauling on a giant wheel. The entire structure rotated ninety degrees to lie on its side, presenting Luca with the spine. He swayed as he worked, every motion fluid, every carving precise, slowly working his way up towards the skull.
It seemed hours before Luca stepped back from the completed skeleton to take a breath. Adelai breathed with him, dizzy from holding the air in her lungs. She’d been afraid to distract him, even the tiniest bit. It might have been the firelight, but his legs seemed to be shaking. She hugged her knees to her chest and stared intently as he wiped his forehead and moved on to the delicate traceries of nerves and organ tissue. Not once had his skin changed color.
Still it was hard to believe that she might not be an Artificer, not while watching Luca gather bunches of fibers into muscle and anchor it to bone. Water soared overhead, drawn from its spring towards the whirl of construction. She could barely see him past the flying components, spinning in a haze around her brother as he infused organs with miniscule amounts of minerals. He’d replicated blood, red, white, and hemoglobin, built off a sample he’d taken from Partner and reproduced with proteins and water. Once he infused the equine form with it, only the brain, the eyes and the skin would remain. Adelai leaned forward on her hands and knees, trying to see the work past the blur of activity and the gale-force winds it kicked up. How could he keep so many things in the air all at once? She couldn’t imagine the concentration…
“LUCA!” the storehouse shuddered under their Father’s roar and the weight of his shoulder against the doors. Adelai fell on her face, arms over her head. She heard the sound of heavy metal clunking: Father tearing at the lock. Mother’s voice rose over the din, shouting for them to open the door immediately.
Though the weather improved, the two of them spent the following weeks cloistered in the library. Mother and Father assumed Luca was convinced that Adelai would come into her talent at any time, so they let it slide. They did insist that the two of them attend their other lessons, but didn’t try to push them outdoors as they normally would have. When the two of them did go outside, they hung around the paddocks and watched the horses. Luca filled pad after pad of paper with charcoal sketches of the animals grazing, trotting, whisking flies and rolling in the dust. Sometimes he’d send Adelai in to chase them around a bit. They were sedate beasts, not given much to senseless running, but he insisted on seeing them move.
“There’s a difference between ponies and horses, y’know,” she flopped breathlessly beside him, pulling the sketchpad over for a look.
“I know,” Luca shrugged, “But I don’t want to just double Partner.”
Adelai grinned. “Why, ‘cause he’s fat?”
“He’s not!” her brother snatched the paper back and bent over it. “Anyway, I’m making yours a boy pony. Is that okay? The reproductive stuff is simple with a male, and I don’t have to think about stocking him with, y’know, a set number of eggs or anything. I could do a girl if you want one, though.”
She’d already seen his diagrams of the reproductive system, so she shrugged. The whole thing was completely out of her hands, anyway.
“Hey Luca? How’re you going to get the material for this? Didja think about that?”
Luca dropped back onto his elbows and grinned at her. “We’re going to use Father’s reserves.”
Adelai gawked, then narrowed her eyes in disbelief. “No way. Even if we could get in, and we can’t, how d’you even know he’d have what you need?”
“Because I asked him to show me how to construct skeletons. We’re working with cats. He said I should practice my imaging and I said that those would be good to work with, since they’re pretty complex,” his smirk oozed confidence. “It’s great, ‘cause I get the practice I need in proper ossification, and he ordered plenty of extra components for mistakes.”
Adelai’s hands flew to her mouth. “You lied to Father!”
Luca flopped onto his back and rolled his eyes at her. “What did you think we’ve been doing?
“…not telling him everything?”
“Don’t be stupid, Addy. No matter what happens, he’s going to be mad at us for sneaking behind his back. But if this goes right he’ll be too impressed to be angry!”
“At you, maybe,” Adelai nibbled nervously at a curl, “I’m just your…uh…”
“Accomplice,” Luca provided, “Yeah, but he’s never mad at you for long. Mother either. This was my idea and I’ll take the blame if it doesn’t work.” He still seemed convinced that there wouldn’t be any consequences so long as he succeeded, and that worried Adelai. It was almost enough to keep her from worrying about potential failure. She pulled the soggy lock of hair from her mouth and nodded reluctantly.
“I guess you’re right.”
“Good,” her stomach sank as Luca’s grin widened. “Because I need you to get the key to the storehouse.”
“What?! NO!” Adelai leapt to her feet, arms akimbo. “That’s stealing! Even if I wanted to, an’ I don’t, Father keeps it in his desk drawer! He’s always in his office working on something, he’d notice me coming in!”
“So wait until he gets up for a drink, or the bathroom or something,” Luca said, propping himself up on an elbow.
“He’d see me in the hall!”
“Come on Addy, you’re really good at hiding! I can’t ever find you, I swear I’m not lying!” he grabbed a fistful of her skirt and tugged. “I promise, when Father asks how we got in, I’ll say I took the key. He won’t be mad at you. Come on. Please?”
Adelai wobbled, sinking down next to her brother, who put a solid arm around her shoulders and smiled.
“Just give me another week to work on it,” he said.
They’d been so stupid. Even if Father hadn’t noticed the missing key, he and Mother would have felt the rising pressure of an alien power in the area. They mustn’t have realized how far along he was in the construction process, or they wouldn’t try to intervene. So much unstable mass could fold back in on itself and implode.
“Not now!” Luca howled back, hands scrabbling at the air. The interruption had clearly shocked him out of his concentration; bits and pieces of the horse’s anatomy flaked away like debris in a monsoon. Adelai gawked as a kidney flew past her to splat against the wall. Luca groaned through his teeth, wrenching his arms around as if to pull everything back by centrifugal force.
Too much matter had already been stripped away. Adelai peeked through her arms, watching Luca’s thoughts fly across his face. He was determined to come out of this with something for his efforts, even if it was something smaller, something different. Father had had him crafting cats for weeks. Even with the panic hammering inside her lungs, she was confident he could salvage it.
“Dammit, Luca! Open this door! Adelai! I know you’re in there with him! Open up!” She couldn’t tell which of her parents was shouting anymore, or if they were raising their voices together. What she heard, loud and clear over the roaring wind, was the heavy shriek-clunk of metal being torn apart and cast aside.
Dying sunlight flooded the room with red, outlining their parents against the open door. Adelai scrambled backwards on her hands and knees, fitting herself back into the space between the crates. She always knew they’d get caught, had been against this part from the beginning! She wished she were an Earth Worker, so the ground would open and swallow her up.
Her feet went first, the skin reddening to reflect the light thrown throughout the storehouse. Halfway up her legs the color cut to black, following the path of the shadow cast by the crate. Adelai stared in morbid fascination as the rest of her faded into the dark.
Father started towards her brother, but Mother grabbed his arm and held him back. He could only watch, mouth set in a hard, grim line, as Luca hastily restructured the model, shrinking overall mass, discarding organs and joints, rebuilding it here, detracting from it there, falling back to a familiar, much practiced form. His hands blurred through the air, the last of the materials spiraling off the floor to join the mix. The remnants circled him like water down a drain, spreading skin and thick fur over the much, much smaller muscle structure.
Luca exhaled, a long, drawn-out sigh that seemed to fill the room. The expelled air hung between him and his construct, a shifting, luminous cloud. He gasped sharply, like a swimmer surfacing for air, but the breath drew back out in wisps of glowing smoke. Adelai could track the light down his throat, could see it glowing in his chest and the pit of his belly. She clapped dark hands to her mouth as the light continued to spiral out his mouth and nose. Luca bent at the middle, keeling over an invisible blow to his stomach. She could hear the breath hitching in his throat as he tried to breathe around the force drawing up his windpipe.
Mother was no longer restraining Father, but clinging to him with a desperate cry. They wanted to stop it, Adelai could see, but they hadn’t been involved in the construction, they had no influence. This wasn’t right. It had to be the animation, the part she’d warned and worried about. The Ether wasn’t just running through him, it was…it was running out of him. The light in his stomach flickered weakly. Luca’s words echoed in her mind: We’re made up of it before we’re born and we go back to it when we die. What he hadn’t said, because everyone knew, was that it made up life in between.
Adelai broke from the boxes, the colors on her skin jumping as if startled by the sudden change. They shifted wildly, in full view of her parents but all that could wait until later, when Luca didn’t need her help anymore. She wasn’t an Artificer. That much was clear now. But she’d watched the experiment from the beginning and she had some sort of talent, something little and maybe not much use, but she had Ether and she could share it.
She hit the glowing cloud and stopped short, all the air knocked out of her. Her lungs clamped down and her stomach heaved, painfully squeezing something up and out of her. All her momentum and strength bled away, leaving her feeling very old, or maybe very little, but altogether feeble. She was dimly aware of a rust-red light leaking from her mouth, tinging Luca’s gold like sunset.
It was enough. She saw the glow inside her brother flare, saw him wrench away and clamp a hand over his nose and mouth. Adelai felt an answering surge in her own gut, a sharp yank as the Ether stopped short at the back of her throat. She puffed a little bit of light out her nose, watching as it to join the spinning sphere around the lifeless creature. For a moment, it hung like a self-contained atmosphere, shifting lazily. Then a storm seemed to kick up within it, the spinning picked up hurricane force, and the orange glow spiraled down the construct’s mouth. The tension in the air folded in on itself and vanished with a pop.
Luca dropped to his knees, sucking in deep, hungry lungfuls of air. Adelai staggered a bit, wobbling on her feet like a newborn foal. Mother swooped them both into her arms and crushed them to her chest. Adelai realized, as though from far away, that she was crying, crying and running her hands through their hair and kissing them both frantically. She sank into the flurry of attention and wondered where Father had gone.
As if summoned by her thought, he crouched down next to them, unfolding his arms to show them what Luca had done.
It was small, the size of a toddler, with had a feline face and long, rabbit-like ears. Each of its four legs ended in clever, four fingered ‘hands.’ Its long tail, nearly as thick as her arm, was wrapped around its waist. Its fur was mottled, gray and cream and dense. It reached out and snatched for Mother’s necklace.
“What is it?” she asked, hugging them away from its grasp.
“I dunno,” Luca slurred. “It’s Adelai’s. She gets to say.”
Suddenly all eyes were on Adelai, even the unnamed thing’s round yellow ones. Mother’s tear-filled eyes were wide with something other than fear and relief. Shock. Alarm? Adelai looked down at her hands, curled against her chest, and saw the blue of her dress through them. She was too badly shaken to try and force them back.
“What in-” Father started, his voice hushed. He was cut off by Luca, who grabbed his sister’s hands and pulled her into a protective hug. She saw his face just before he hid her against his neck. His mouth was a thin, trembling line, but his eyes were hard and sad.
“It’s not her fault,” he rasped. “It’s not.”
“Luca…” Mother touched his cheek, Adelai’s shoulder, “Did you know? That she’s-”
“I wondered,” he said, his voice slurred as if his tongue were too thick for his mouth. “She’s so good at hiding, and once I thought I saw…But I didn’t know,” his voice dropped. “I didn’t want her to be.”
To be different, he didn’t say. She heard it anyway, and it settled like a stone in the pit of her stomach. He was holding her instead of pushing her away, but that didn’t help the heaviness, didn’t change the way they were talking around her.
Something pulled at the hem of her skirt, and she looked down at the little Thing. It tugged, pointed to her brother, and tugged again. She reached down to it and it crawled up between her and Luca, butting its head beneath her chin
“It’s smart,” she said, attempting a smile. “You’re really amazing, Luca.”
“Amazingly lucky, perhaps,” Father grunted, reaching over Mother’s shoulder to cuff his son over the head. It was not a gentle blow. Adelai felt a flash of guilt at her relief that they were mad at him now, not her.
You went behind our backs,” Father said, “You misappropriated supplies, you stole from me in order to break in here and attempt something far beyond your skill level! You could have gotten yourself and your sister killed!”
“It was going fine until you interrupted me,” Luca pointed out. Adelai flinched.
Mother smacked him before Father could. He raised a hand to his cheek, eyes glazed over in surprise. Only then did Adelai notice his sunken cheeks and the gray tinge to his lips. She wondered if she looked the same.
“There are limits, Luca, that you do not test,” Mother said, taking Luca by the shoulders and shaking him once, sharply. Father pulled Adelai out of the way. His fingers dug almost painfully into her shoulder, and he stared fixedly at the lecture when she looked up at him.
“It isn’t the Artifice that’s the dangerous part with animals, it’s animating them.” Mother was saying. “There is no “spare” Ether lying around to create life. Babies feed off their parents. Constructs feed off their creator. You are eleven years old, Luca, you don’t have enough to share!” she smoothed her hands over his hair and cheeks as though she could make him whole by her own talent. “Look at you. In the end you breathed life into one small thing, and you can barely sit up.”
“Adelai helped,” Luca croaked.
The vice-like grip on her shoulder eased. Father looked down at her at last, but his eyes were distant. She hugged her animal, the one she could name because Luca said it was all hers, and did not notice that her hands disappeared against its fur.
“So she did,” he said, as if it were nothing, nothing at all.
I don't write children very well...they always come out sounding thirty-something.
All that amounts to 7047 words, but I have no idea what that translates to in WriMo-status, and most of it was pre existing anyway. I did this and the first two chapters for the Seminar, but chapter 2 never got the revisions it desperately needed.
We'll just see how much I actually crank out.