[Witches' Horses] Chevalier de Grammont
Title: designated meeting point
'Verse/characters: le Chevalier de Grammont; Grammont, Sinclair
Prompt: 44B "blossom", coastal_physics: "a quiet suburb of an industrial town"
Word Count: 458
Notes: This is the other moss-covered slate bit. With some definite expansion from its original hundred-word form.
A sabor is a church.
She dropped them down as quietly as she could, trying to time the noise of her hooves to the rhythmic pounding from the mill in the downtown core and aware that she was only half-successful.
Her human had her land not in the small lake she would have preferred--bed and meal all in one, what wasn't to like?--but perch atop the reinforced foundation of a half-shattered building that crumbled more as her feet touched the remains of the roof on the way through.
They both winced as several human-sized chunks of steel-reinforced concrete hit the main floor with her.
"We have got to figure out some way of wrapping your feet," her human muttered, not loud enough for him to be intending her to hear, then wrapped himself up in his black jacket and took his leave, boots solid across the age-cracked floor.
For her part, she kicked down another piece of roof to keep it from falling on her unexpectedly, and stretched her sensor net, trying to follow him without alerting him to the fact.
He moved faster than she expected humans to be capable of with only their own legs for power, his strides long and even, and he knew where he was going. Which he hadn't shared with her, when they landed.
She had something vaguely resembling context from the notes and lists she'd made, but it took several more cycles than she anticipated to assign the word sabor to the building her human had gone to, his footsteps cracking muffledly on plant-choked stone tiles as he moved along the courtyard and then inside the slowly decaying building.
The plants of the courtyard were wet-loving, their surfaces spongy and soil-marred beneath a fine layer of fallen petals from the trees overhanging them. Close-ups from her external eyes said that they had grown first in the spaces between the tiles, then gradually spread over the surface, tied not to the stone but to the mass of other tendrils of life. Roots of the trees distorted the once-smooth surface of the yard, forming ripples and ridges that nearly looked like an old map to her eyes.
The sabor was old, built of local stones and only partially reinforced with metal, the paint on its surface peeling badly enough to expose its materials.
She wanted to know why the local humans had not cleared the space, set up stills or cisterns to capture the water as it fell from the sky or coalesced from the surrounding air.
But as cycles passed and the building around her popped and crackled as it cooled, what she wanted most of all was for her frustrating human to come back out, even if he was running and shooting over his shoulder, because then she'd be able to see him.
'Verse/characters: le Chevalier de Grammont; Grammont, Sinclair
Prompt: 44B "blossom", coastal_physics: "a quiet suburb of an industrial town"
Word Count: 458
Notes: This is the other moss-covered slate bit. With some definite expansion from its original hundred-word form.
A sabor is a church.
She dropped them down as quietly as she could, trying to time the noise of her hooves to the rhythmic pounding from the mill in the downtown core and aware that she was only half-successful.
Her human had her land not in the small lake she would have preferred--bed and meal all in one, what wasn't to like?--but perch atop the reinforced foundation of a half-shattered building that crumbled more as her feet touched the remains of the roof on the way through.
They both winced as several human-sized chunks of steel-reinforced concrete hit the main floor with her.
"We have got to figure out some way of wrapping your feet," her human muttered, not loud enough for him to be intending her to hear, then wrapped himself up in his black jacket and took his leave, boots solid across the age-cracked floor.
For her part, she kicked down another piece of roof to keep it from falling on her unexpectedly, and stretched her sensor net, trying to follow him without alerting him to the fact.
He moved faster than she expected humans to be capable of with only their own legs for power, his strides long and even, and he knew where he was going. Which he hadn't shared with her, when they landed.
She had something vaguely resembling context from the notes and lists she'd made, but it took several more cycles than she anticipated to assign the word sabor to the building her human had gone to, his footsteps cracking muffledly on plant-choked stone tiles as he moved along the courtyard and then inside the slowly decaying building.
The plants of the courtyard were wet-loving, their surfaces spongy and soil-marred beneath a fine layer of fallen petals from the trees overhanging them. Close-ups from her external eyes said that they had grown first in the spaces between the tiles, then gradually spread over the surface, tied not to the stone but to the mass of other tendrils of life. Roots of the trees distorted the once-smooth surface of the yard, forming ripples and ridges that nearly looked like an old map to her eyes.
The sabor was old, built of local stones and only partially reinforced with metal, the paint on its surface peeling badly enough to expose its materials.
She wanted to know why the local humans had not cleared the space, set up stills or cisterns to capture the water as it fell from the sky or coalesced from the surrounding air.
But as cycles passed and the building around her popped and crackled as it cooled, what she wanted most of all was for her frustrating human to come back out, even if he was running and shooting over his shoulder, because then she'd be able to see him.