[Wild Roses] a not-quite fairytale
Title: black of night and white of bones
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; n/a
Prompt: 81C "victim"
Word Count: 515
Rating: not for young children
Notes: The first sentence wandered past my brain as I was trying to fall asleep a few nights ago. Not a children's fairytale.
The Bone-Witch* wasn't real.
There were stories about her, many of them, with varying places of origin and end, but the main thread was always the same.
She'd been a mage, first. Until a mage who'd worn black took her tower from her, broke her fingers so she couldn't weave her spells against him to take her tower back, and kept her, years in the dark alone.
He'd left her thumb and forefinger on each hand, in the event she'd work for him. The rest of her fingers had healed crooked, gnarled as old vines or apple branches.
One story held that she'd killed him with mouse bones, built a threshold across the doorway of her prison and a noose where one of his paces would end on the floor, white dry bones coiling up from the patterns on the stone floor to jerk tight against his skin.
Another held that she'd let him think her broken to his heel--and perhaps she'd told him truth, at first, until she saw what he'd done to her tower as he'd done to her--and that she'd slipped powdered snake's bones into his drinking water, driven him mad first and to the dark last.
A third held that she'd sharpened a bone from the meat he fed her, to keep her alive--she'd built foolishly, this story said, based her tower's stones not on her degree of freedom or her will, but on her breathing and her blood--and stabbed him with it, bone held as tightly as her broken hands would let her.
He took her tower and her hands. She took her tower back, and his life and colours besides. She wore black--his colour, all the stories agreed--and white. Most stories held this not as Death, but the bones of the magic she created in his wake. Traps built of splintered birds' bones, small workings with mouse-bones, great with dragons, and the worst with the bones of humans.
Her story always ended with another mage--a leRoux, a few stories held, and not her sister, too young to have known her before the mage in black, much too young to have heeded or ignored a cry for help--who wore brown and gold. The other mage always looked at her hands and her bone-workings and the colours she wore with equal horror, always spoke in soft tones 'No more'.
The Bone-Witch always fought, every femur and rib and skull flung to the battle, metacarpals flying like hail, dry-splintered and still wet with marrow alike.
She always lost.
Bone burned.
At the end, a few stories held, the other mage kissed her forehead and the backs of her broken hands, whispered goodbye, and gently stopped her heart. Rebroke her fingers after she cooled, laid her hands as straight as possible across her belly as she lay in the highest room of her now-crumbling tower, and from outside set her and her tower alike alight.
The Bone-Witch's tower can't be found in the depths of the Trickwood, stones charred black and tangled in the roots of reclaiming trees.
*: not quite the right word, but not 'mage'.
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; n/a
Prompt: 81C "victim"
Word Count: 515
Rating: not for young children
Notes: The first sentence wandered past my brain as I was trying to fall asleep a few nights ago. Not a children's fairytale.
The Bone-Witch* wasn't real.
There were stories about her, many of them, with varying places of origin and end, but the main thread was always the same.
She'd been a mage, first. Until a mage who'd worn black took her tower from her, broke her fingers so she couldn't weave her spells against him to take her tower back, and kept her, years in the dark alone.
He'd left her thumb and forefinger on each hand, in the event she'd work for him. The rest of her fingers had healed crooked, gnarled as old vines or apple branches.
One story held that she'd killed him with mouse bones, built a threshold across the doorway of her prison and a noose where one of his paces would end on the floor, white dry bones coiling up from the patterns on the stone floor to jerk tight against his skin.
Another held that she'd let him think her broken to his heel--and perhaps she'd told him truth, at first, until she saw what he'd done to her tower as he'd done to her--and that she'd slipped powdered snake's bones into his drinking water, driven him mad first and to the dark last.
A third held that she'd sharpened a bone from the meat he fed her, to keep her alive--she'd built foolishly, this story said, based her tower's stones not on her degree of freedom or her will, but on her breathing and her blood--and stabbed him with it, bone held as tightly as her broken hands would let her.
He took her tower and her hands. She took her tower back, and his life and colours besides. She wore black--his colour, all the stories agreed--and white. Most stories held this not as Death, but the bones of the magic she created in his wake. Traps built of splintered birds' bones, small workings with mouse-bones, great with dragons, and the worst with the bones of humans.
Her story always ended with another mage--a leRoux, a few stories held, and not her sister, too young to have known her before the mage in black, much too young to have heeded or ignored a cry for help--who wore brown and gold. The other mage always looked at her hands and her bone-workings and the colours she wore with equal horror, always spoke in soft tones 'No more'.
The Bone-Witch always fought, every femur and rib and skull flung to the battle, metacarpals flying like hail, dry-splintered and still wet with marrow alike.
She always lost.
Bone burned.
At the end, a few stories held, the other mage kissed her forehead and the backs of her broken hands, whispered goodbye, and gently stopped her heart. Rebroke her fingers after she cooled, laid her hands as straight as possible across her belly as she lay in the highest room of her now-crumbling tower, and from outside set her and her tower alike alight.
The Bone-Witch's tower can't be found in the depths of the Trickwood, stones charred black and tangled in the roots of reclaiming trees.
*: not quite the right word, but not 'mage'.