Peanut Butter Week : Earth
Peanut Butter #4. Earth and Soft Serve 17/50 : Pear #16. The Birds & the Bees
with Cookie Crumbs and Gummies
Story : knights & necromancers
Rating : R
Word Count : 1667
Gummy Prompt : 500themes 163. You must sow what you cannot reap.
Gummy Prompt : origfic_bingo August Card - Baby
Cookie Crumbs : Happily Ever After and assorted other pieces
Yay! I'm caught up again!
Wedding montage theme and rampant spoilers continue.
1260
Tristan can’t take his eyes off of Ski, even as Tess is pressing the ring into his hand. Decked in blue blossoms and ribbons, softly blushing and smiling from ear to ear, she’s more beautiful still than she’s ever been before.
“From this day forth,” he says, fumbling with the cloth that binds their wrists to slide his free hand beneath it, “I give to you my body.”
Her hand lies draped across his arm, and he feels for a moment for the right finger before sliding the ring into place. “That love take root and foster bloom,” he finishes as his hand slides away.
1251
Reida’s lying on her back on the table, counting the cracks in the ceiling and trying not to think about the paint stick making a slow, deliberate trail down her bare stomach.
“So, what would you do with this body?” she asks, only half expecting an answer.
The paint stick halts. “I would think that should be obvious,” says Ephram. “Who wouldn’t want a form that will not die?”
“And you want yours in the shape of a fifteen year old girl?” she says, as he picks up the line where he left off.
“You’re convenient. And most amusing,” he adds. She stiffens at the hand that curls around the inside of her thigh.
1260
“So, just when are you going to take me up on my offer?”
Leaning back in his chair, Sethan gives Reida a look that he sincerely hopes communicates that fact that he has seen and is in no way moved by the amount of cleavage she is presenting. “What offer is that?”
Reida grins. “The one that involves you and me and a bed. Although, you know, I’m not really all that particular about the location,” she adds, perching on the corner of his desk. “I mean the desk or the floor or anywhere else that does it for you is fine by me.”
“I am not using you for this.”
“Oh?” Reida’s calmly sifting through the pages on his desk, swinging her legs over the side. “You have other options? I don’t need to remind you that you can’t use Kairn, do I?” She has a page with an earth form in hand now, and she turns it over slowly, frowning at it. “What is this?”
“I thought you came here with a purpose?” says Sethan, plucking it out of her grasp.
“Ah, yes.” She rights herself, none too subtly adjusting her breasts before frowning at him and at them. “Not much point to these, is there?”
“No.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“A curiosity that will have to be satisfied elsewhere.” She opens her mouth to protest, but he continues. “Think, Reida. If you turn up pregnant, where’s the first place anyone will look?”
“In all the closets to see where I have Kairn tied up?”
“Very funny. I am not risking you. End of discussion.”
She ignores his gesture that she should vacate his desk. “I could leave. No one would have to know.”
Sethan sets his papers straight along the far edge and retrieves his pen to start working again is if she isn’t there. “And never see the child again? I think not.”
“You don’t trust me to come back?” Reida pouts.
“I am well aware that there are five more of me out there. I see no reason why you would.”
1260
“Kairn?” Suddenly, Shasa’s standing in the doorway, one hand to the frame to support herself, the other pressed to her swollen belly.
He snaps to attention, but then it’s as if time has frozen, leaving him gaping at her impotently. “It’s time?” he says.
Shasa gives a wince and a shaky nod. “It’s time.”
1261
“She looks just like her father, don’t you think?” She’s rocking Mara in her arms and peering down at her tiny face with that exhausted but adoring look she’s had since the baby was born.
Lyssa leans over her shoulder to frown at the softly snoring little bundle in her sister’s lap. “I don’t know,” she says. “Looks like a baby, if you ask me.”
Ski peels the blanket back from the girl’s face as if a better view were necessary. “Look at that smile and tell me it’s not his.”
Lyssa quirks a brow at the urgency in her voice. “Does she really make that much better a keepsake if it is?”
1260's
“If they’re gods, what do they need with bodies?” Tristan asks one day over the latest pot of gelatinous pink glop. “I mean, aren’t they above that?”
Sethan gives him a stern look over the metal rim and the bubbling ooze, pausing for a moment in his stirring. “Regardless whatever you’ve heard from preachers on the matter, the gods have little control of this world. They don’t call on us; we call on them. They’re little more than an energy source.”
“Blasphemy,” says Tristan, with a scowl of his own.
Sethan shrugs. “Reality,” he says. “Now, this hardly means they lack wills of their own. Perhaps Ephrian didn’t want a fire here.” He gestures the sigil-induced flame beneath their pot. “Perhaps she wanted it there, on the curtains, and twice as large. Well, that’s too bad for her, she can only come where she’s called.”
Tristan’s got his arms crossed and the smug look of one who thinks he already knows the answer to his own questions. “What of fires from sparks against tinder?” he says. “What of the rains and the winds?”
Sethan laughs. “There is a bit of the gods in everything in this world, and each and every thing can call them in its own way.”
Tristan thinks this over for a minute. “So, if the gods want to change this world, they need to become part of it?”
“Exactly.”
1272
Reida’s got Kairn by the shoulder, staring him down, pearly grin in place. “You know, it’s about time he lives up to his purpose, don’t you think?”
Kairn tenses. “You lay one hand on him and I’ll-“
“You’ll what?”
He pulls away. “I-I don’t know. Something. You won’t like it.”
Reida laughs. “This is not the time for you to grow a pair.”
Without another word, he turns to stalk back down the road the way he came.
“You owe me, princess,” Reida calls after him. “Don’t think the last twelve years have been a gift.”
“I’m done talking to you, Reida.”
“Oh, you’ll come around,” says Reida, more for her own benefit than his, as she fingers the sigil-lined scarf in her pocket. “You’ll come around.”
1270's
Is this your idea of a joke?
You stuck me with her. It seems only fair that I return the favor, don’t you think?
Your little friend will not approve.
All part of the plan. He’s not quite sold on this whole bodies for gods business yet. I would not put plans of sabotage past him. But Kairn is a sentimental fool. He won’t lay hands on a construct that looks like his dear, departed sister.
1270's
“What do you suppose they’d do with me if they did get their hands on me?” Sham asks out of the blue one day.
Lyssa looks over to find him studying a map. “Who are we talking about now?”
“The wizards, necromancers, whatever they are.” He’s got a few points marked in red. “The ones that took Uncle Kairn.”
“Nothing good. What are you thinking?”
“Nothing,” he says, far too quickly for her liking.
“That’s right, nothing,” she says, whisking the map out from in front of him and folding it up. “Your uncle spent his life protecting yours. I’m not about to let you throw it away.”
1278
Reida kicks the base of the central altar. It only earns her a sore foot, but she still supposes it’s a better choice than kicking the body like she wants to. “We need the cat,” she says.
Shamino and Rune are standing in their places along the arcs, frowning at the still lifeless construct on the floor.
“The cat?” says Rune.
“The damned spotted thing that’s always slinking about around you,” Reida clarifies. “I knew it!” She’d give the statue another kick, but her toes are still smarting. “I knew there was something wrong with that animal.”
“Millie?” says Rune, in the same incredulous tone.
“Wait,” says the boy, looking between them, “what’s Mara’s cat got to do with this?”
“The missing piece of the goddess,” says Reida, turning to address Rune, rather than the boy. “It’s not in you, it’s in the cat.”
1278
“You were never in the stories,” says Mara. And now that she’s said it, it strikes her as an awfully cruel thing to say, but there has to be a reason for it and she’ll be damned if she’s going to get it from her mother.
Tristan just keeps staring at the campfire, unfazed.
“What happened between the lot of you that my mother and Aunt Kari felt the need to tell me lies about Rune and write you out of history altogether?”
“It’s…complicated,” he says.
“Do you have any idea how tired I am of that word? Everything’s complicated, It seems. What happened with you?”
Tristan chuckles at that and she decides then and there that he’s just as infuriating as Rune. “All right,” he says. “I’ll make it simple then. I died.”
1278
The unbearable noise in his head is slowly receding, and Sethan pries one eye open and then the other to find the statues of the temple, bathed in her green light. There’s a focal point around…Reida?
Sethan raises himself up on his hands, but his shaking arms give way and land him flat on the stone again.
In his head, words are starting to emerge from the cacophony. Almost there, she assures herself.
And where does that leave him? A hunk of flesh, lying vulnerable and impotent at the feet of a god?
He can barely feel his own legs, but he forces them beneath himself and charges towards the light.
with Cookie Crumbs and Gummies
Story : knights & necromancers
Rating : R
Word Count : 1667
Gummy Prompt : 500themes 163. You must sow what you cannot reap.
Gummy Prompt : origfic_bingo August Card - Baby
Cookie Crumbs : Happily Ever After and assorted other pieces
Yay! I'm caught up again!
Wedding montage theme and rampant spoilers continue.
1260
Tristan can’t take his eyes off of Ski, even as Tess is pressing the ring into his hand. Decked in blue blossoms and ribbons, softly blushing and smiling from ear to ear, she’s more beautiful still than she’s ever been before.
“From this day forth,” he says, fumbling with the cloth that binds their wrists to slide his free hand beneath it, “I give to you my body.”
Her hand lies draped across his arm, and he feels for a moment for the right finger before sliding the ring into place. “That love take root and foster bloom,” he finishes as his hand slides away.
1251
Reida’s lying on her back on the table, counting the cracks in the ceiling and trying not to think about the paint stick making a slow, deliberate trail down her bare stomach.
“So, what would you do with this body?” she asks, only half expecting an answer.
The paint stick halts. “I would think that should be obvious,” says Ephram. “Who wouldn’t want a form that will not die?”
“And you want yours in the shape of a fifteen year old girl?” she says, as he picks up the line where he left off.
“You’re convenient. And most amusing,” he adds. She stiffens at the hand that curls around the inside of her thigh.
1260
“So, just when are you going to take me up on my offer?”
Leaning back in his chair, Sethan gives Reida a look that he sincerely hopes communicates that fact that he has seen and is in no way moved by the amount of cleavage she is presenting. “What offer is that?”
Reida grins. “The one that involves you and me and a bed. Although, you know, I’m not really all that particular about the location,” she adds, perching on the corner of his desk. “I mean the desk or the floor or anywhere else that does it for you is fine by me.”
“I am not using you for this.”
“Oh?” Reida’s calmly sifting through the pages on his desk, swinging her legs over the side. “You have other options? I don’t need to remind you that you can’t use Kairn, do I?” She has a page with an earth form in hand now, and she turns it over slowly, frowning at it. “What is this?”
“I thought you came here with a purpose?” says Sethan, plucking it out of her grasp.
“Ah, yes.” She rights herself, none too subtly adjusting her breasts before frowning at him and at them. “Not much point to these, is there?”
“No.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“A curiosity that will have to be satisfied elsewhere.” She opens her mouth to protest, but he continues. “Think, Reida. If you turn up pregnant, where’s the first place anyone will look?”
“In all the closets to see where I have Kairn tied up?”
“Very funny. I am not risking you. End of discussion.”
She ignores his gesture that she should vacate his desk. “I could leave. No one would have to know.”
Sethan sets his papers straight along the far edge and retrieves his pen to start working again is if she isn’t there. “And never see the child again? I think not.”
“You don’t trust me to come back?” Reida pouts.
“I am well aware that there are five more of me out there. I see no reason why you would.”
1260
“Kairn?” Suddenly, Shasa’s standing in the doorway, one hand to the frame to support herself, the other pressed to her swollen belly.
He snaps to attention, but then it’s as if time has frozen, leaving him gaping at her impotently. “It’s time?” he says.
Shasa gives a wince and a shaky nod. “It’s time.”
1261
“She looks just like her father, don’t you think?” She’s rocking Mara in her arms and peering down at her tiny face with that exhausted but adoring look she’s had since the baby was born.
Lyssa leans over her shoulder to frown at the softly snoring little bundle in her sister’s lap. “I don’t know,” she says. “Looks like a baby, if you ask me.”
Ski peels the blanket back from the girl’s face as if a better view were necessary. “Look at that smile and tell me it’s not his.”
Lyssa quirks a brow at the urgency in her voice. “Does she really make that much better a keepsake if it is?”
1260's
“If they’re gods, what do they need with bodies?” Tristan asks one day over the latest pot of gelatinous pink glop. “I mean, aren’t they above that?”
Sethan gives him a stern look over the metal rim and the bubbling ooze, pausing for a moment in his stirring. “Regardless whatever you’ve heard from preachers on the matter, the gods have little control of this world. They don’t call on us; we call on them. They’re little more than an energy source.”
“Blasphemy,” says Tristan, with a scowl of his own.
Sethan shrugs. “Reality,” he says. “Now, this hardly means they lack wills of their own. Perhaps Ephrian didn’t want a fire here.” He gestures the sigil-induced flame beneath their pot. “Perhaps she wanted it there, on the curtains, and twice as large. Well, that’s too bad for her, she can only come where she’s called.”
Tristan’s got his arms crossed and the smug look of one who thinks he already knows the answer to his own questions. “What of fires from sparks against tinder?” he says. “What of the rains and the winds?”
Sethan laughs. “There is a bit of the gods in everything in this world, and each and every thing can call them in its own way.”
Tristan thinks this over for a minute. “So, if the gods want to change this world, they need to become part of it?”
“Exactly.”
1272
Reida’s got Kairn by the shoulder, staring him down, pearly grin in place. “You know, it’s about time he lives up to his purpose, don’t you think?”
Kairn tenses. “You lay one hand on him and I’ll-“
“You’ll what?”
He pulls away. “I-I don’t know. Something. You won’t like it.”
Reida laughs. “This is not the time for you to grow a pair.”
Without another word, he turns to stalk back down the road the way he came.
“You owe me, princess,” Reida calls after him. “Don’t think the last twelve years have been a gift.”
“I’m done talking to you, Reida.”
“Oh, you’ll come around,” says Reida, more for her own benefit than his, as she fingers the sigil-lined scarf in her pocket. “You’ll come around.”
1270's
Is this your idea of a joke?
You stuck me with her. It seems only fair that I return the favor, don’t you think?
Your little friend will not approve.
All part of the plan. He’s not quite sold on this whole bodies for gods business yet. I would not put plans of sabotage past him. But Kairn is a sentimental fool. He won’t lay hands on a construct that looks like his dear, departed sister.
1270's
“What do you suppose they’d do with me if they did get their hands on me?” Sham asks out of the blue one day.
Lyssa looks over to find him studying a map. “Who are we talking about now?”
“The wizards, necromancers, whatever they are.” He’s got a few points marked in red. “The ones that took Uncle Kairn.”
“Nothing good. What are you thinking?”
“Nothing,” he says, far too quickly for her liking.
“That’s right, nothing,” she says, whisking the map out from in front of him and folding it up. “Your uncle spent his life protecting yours. I’m not about to let you throw it away.”
1278
Reida kicks the base of the central altar. It only earns her a sore foot, but she still supposes it’s a better choice than kicking the body like she wants to. “We need the cat,” she says.
Shamino and Rune are standing in their places along the arcs, frowning at the still lifeless construct on the floor.
“The cat?” says Rune.
“The damned spotted thing that’s always slinking about around you,” Reida clarifies. “I knew it!” She’d give the statue another kick, but her toes are still smarting. “I knew there was something wrong with that animal.”
“Millie?” says Rune, in the same incredulous tone.
“Wait,” says the boy, looking between them, “what’s Mara’s cat got to do with this?”
“The missing piece of the goddess,” says Reida, turning to address Rune, rather than the boy. “It’s not in you, it’s in the cat.”
1278
“You were never in the stories,” says Mara. And now that she’s said it, it strikes her as an awfully cruel thing to say, but there has to be a reason for it and she’ll be damned if she’s going to get it from her mother.
Tristan just keeps staring at the campfire, unfazed.
“What happened between the lot of you that my mother and Aunt Kari felt the need to tell me lies about Rune and write you out of history altogether?”
“It’s…complicated,” he says.
“Do you have any idea how tired I am of that word? Everything’s complicated, It seems. What happened with you?”
Tristan chuckles at that and she decides then and there that he’s just as infuriating as Rune. “All right,” he says. “I’ll make it simple then. I died.”
1278
The unbearable noise in his head is slowly receding, and Sethan pries one eye open and then the other to find the statues of the temple, bathed in her green light. There’s a focal point around…Reida?
Sethan raises himself up on his hands, but his shaking arms give way and land him flat on the stone again.
In his head, words are starting to emerge from the cacophony. Almost there, she assures herself.
And where does that leave him? A hunk of flesh, lying vulnerable and impotent at the feet of a god?
He can barely feel his own legs, but he forces them beneath himself and charges towards the light.