[Witches' Horses] Chevalier de Grammont
Title: a beginning.
'Verse/characters: Witches' Horses; Grammont (before she was Grammont), Sinclair
Prompt: 17B "light"
Word Count: 375
Notes: I lost my train of thought at the end; will try to continue at a later time.
She threaded past the shattered izba, took a colt en passant, shooed it back to the herd with a light brush of crackle along a flank. This far away from their normal grazing grounds, she kept them closer together, swooped herself farther out and about to watch for coming danger.
She paused to pull a particularly good looking chunk of ice and fused metal in, let it rest against her belly as she started processing, tasting--
She tried to spit it out, kick it away with her drive, anything. That wasn't ice and metal, that was ice and polymers and heat she hadn't produced--
There was something alive in her, moving in her, and she'd never needed so badly to be able to turn a crackle on herself. This, this was how horses died, how they were stolen by witches or by that --
"Shhhhh," a voice said, nearly in the right register to be the chatter of static to a colt.
She blasted every channel inside her at the highest volume she could.
When she let it die down, paused to listen, she could hear male chuckling.
As soon as she could figure out how she was going to kill it, test it for poisons, and then eat it.
She flipped her internal gravity. It grunted, banged against her ceiling right by an internal eye.
She flipped the gravity again. "OUT!"
"Stand with your back to the woods and your front to me?" it tried, and then she knew it for human, and if it was a ridden the human-rider had developed a sense of humour in the last hundred years.
"Oh, don't even," she told the human. "I'm not a witch."
"I didn't think so, but I'm not paste yet, so it did something. I'm not here to steal you."
"Witches and demons you're not," she retorted, "You're inside me."
"Unarmed, unarmoured against anything but the cold, and I'll bet you can check that."
She paused. Considered that. As she reached out, sniffed at the chemicals inside her, of her own making and foreign, "Human, why are you here?"
"Lady, are you content?"
"What?"
"Are you content? Have you everything you wanted from your life, and are you happy with what you have?"
'Verse/characters: Witches' Horses; Grammont (before she was Grammont), Sinclair
Prompt: 17B "light"
Word Count: 375
Notes: I lost my train of thought at the end; will try to continue at a later time.
She threaded past the shattered izba, took a colt en passant, shooed it back to the herd with a light brush of crackle along a flank. This far away from their normal grazing grounds, she kept them closer together, swooped herself farther out and about to watch for coming danger.
She paused to pull a particularly good looking chunk of ice and fused metal in, let it rest against her belly as she started processing, tasting--
She tried to spit it out, kick it away with her drive, anything. That wasn't ice and metal, that was ice and polymers and heat she hadn't produced--
There was something alive in her, moving in her, and she'd never needed so badly to be able to turn a crackle on herself. This, this was how horses died, how they were stolen by witches or by that --
"Shhhhh," a voice said, nearly in the right register to be the chatter of static to a colt.
She blasted every channel inside her at the highest volume she could.
When she let it die down, paused to listen, she could hear male chuckling.
As soon as she could figure out how she was going to kill it, test it for poisons, and then eat it.
She flipped her internal gravity. It grunted, banged against her ceiling right by an internal eye.
She flipped the gravity again. "OUT!"
"Stand with your back to the woods and your front to me?" it tried, and then she knew it for human, and if it was a ridden the human-rider had developed a sense of humour in the last hundred years.
"Oh, don't even," she told the human. "I'm not a witch."
"I didn't think so, but I'm not paste yet, so it did something. I'm not here to steal you."
"Witches and demons you're not," she retorted, "You're inside me."
"Unarmed, unarmoured against anything but the cold, and I'll bet you can check that."
She paused. Considered that. As she reached out, sniffed at the chemicals inside her, of her own making and foreign, "Human, why are you here?"
"Lady, are you content?"
"What?"
"Are you content? Have you everything you wanted from your life, and are you happy with what you have?"