Across the open lawn between the front of the castle proper and the white stone wall, the snow has been cleared away in large rings. At the center of each is a bonfire, roaring away without any apparent source of fuel. Hot drinks and small treats are available, as always, balanced on the trays of servants who wander the crowd. The walls themselves ( Read more... )

The night after the feast, after a day of being restricted to the atrium, the palace opens to its guests once again. The garden they might wander into is fashioned from various shades of colored marble and what might be purple grass (hard to tell, as the light is low and most of it is covered in snow), is marked out in four colors. Red, green, ( Read more... )

Some time in the evening, a musical chiming starts in the atrium. A soft grumble, and then a roar, and one entire wall descends slowly on gears into the floor. Beyond it lies a resplendent marble plaza, walled on its remaining three sides in glass ( Read more... )

She had been working for a while on doing her part to be useful around the barracks. For the past few weeks she had been repairing empty cabins as best as possible, and she had found a nice mixture of mud and leaves that patched up holes well enough and also found coverings to keep the cold air out of broken windows. She had even created a ( Read more... )

Cats ( Read more... )

Inky blackness and then nothing - that was the last thing Charlie remembered. It should have been the last thing he ever saw but it wasn't. He awoke to find himself face down in the dirt. The man squeezed his eyes closed for a moment before daring to move. His head was killing him and his whole body felt stiff. He was either still alive or in Hell ( Read more... )

Animal instincts, Murphy has decided, are overrated. Way overrated. She's up in the branches of the Giving Tree, cat-shaped and trying to look inconspicuous and simultaneously find a way down. She had been looking for Gabriel after the whole botched discussion about Why You Do Not Insult Powerful Fae, until she thought she saw something tucked ( Read more... )

The end of the world, Kamui surmised, never started with the beginning of a forest.

-- or, more precisely, the end shouldn't be heralded by birdsong. It's just wrong. But Kamui doesn't know how else to take this: a quiet canopy of leaves, the smell of grass and mud, the birdsongs. The wind that hums through his fingers. It's not the end that he ( Read more... )

[backdated to the Carnival]
The night of the full moon was hectic enough on its own, with the Carnival in full swing, and it certainly didn't need any more craziness, but that didn't stop Drusilla from appearing in the Wood, and finding her way to the Carnival by following the sweet melodies of the trees, and the owl's wise directions. Whatever area ( Read more... )

To walk through one doorway and end out a wholly different one was not something that particularly bothered Dante. That is, unless you were planning to be somewhere else. Something he had been doing more or less all night now. Dante had just arrived and he'd about had it with this bullshit all ready. Now what. Seriously... a forestBlacking out and ( Read more... )