Wild Roses fic prompt 046 "Star"
Title: conclusion not foregone
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Sean, (Ian)
Prompt: 046 "Star"
Word Count: 650
Rating: all ages; mention of past deaths but no details
Notes: after both wars by several years. The beginning, I think, of what I've been referring to as the future-forward arc.
He'd laid the icons out one by one, spread out across his father's desk like some fortune-teller's arcane spread, sorting his family out by age and relationship. More than half the cards were back-up, turned so to mark those he'd seen buried or burned with his own eyes, still recognizably themselves even in death. The backs were painted with different hands, some ornate as the clothes from the Sun Queen's era, embossed in gold and copper in star patterns. Others were stripped down to washes of thin colour and suggestions of river-bends and cloud formations, and he knew even without looking at the people on the other sides that those were one of his nephews' work. The nephew who'd lived.
The process had left a distressingly large number face-up, their deaths reported second-hand and third hand or only lost, as Winter was. But he'd known that, going in, and the itch of barely-there contact that had prompted this exercise in sorrow was still there. So he gathered himself, and touched the oldest of the icons, pressing with his mind alone.
His father's card was dead as the man himself; he'd known that, had touched the man's bent-back black steel torc in the hours after the ending of the first war, but he'd never seen the body, and so had left the card face-up. He turned it gently over, wondering again who'd painted the icon. His father as a young man, laughing, and the icon's power tied for all appearances to the sign of rank wrapped already around his father's neck, even then.
He didn't follow any true pattern, after, just brushed his fingers and his awareness across the face-up cards, turning them face down with his other hand as they one by one failed to even hum a heartbeat in response, or a negation in answer to his query, the will of the person iconned holding the power closed off.
A few startled hisses and one cut-off curse washed across him as he brushed against the cards of the living, known, listening for a hint of familiarity in the contact. His half-sister's card shocked him slightly, tiny spark of her displeasure arcing between the icon and his finger, and he laughed, knowing she could hear him as the contact closed. Her son's icon gave him a heartbeat, nothing more--I am alive--and he wondered if he would have gotten even that, before the wars, knowing now what he hadn't then. His father would have forced the contact through, spoken to his grand-nephew in a rumbling baritone, secure in his power over his Hands. He himself asked, where his father had ordered. It threw many people off, some wrongly concluding that he wasn't secure on his throne and thus afraid to attract attention to himself.
They were learning.
He stopped moving when his hand touched an icon, the man depicted on it one of the long-missing. Nearly stopped breathing, as the back-of-mind feeling of presence blossomed, briefly, in recognition of a sort.
"Ian?" he breathed out, into the stillness of the study still his father's in the details.
The presence didn't reply, and he wondered for a moment if his long-gone half-sister's long-gone son even knew he was reaching out. "Ian," he said again, and pressed a little harder.
The desk went away beneath his hand, and he fell forward as the chair beneath him went too, yielding to a bedspread beneath his hand, and a hard floor beneath the knee he caught himself from falling on.
The room was twilight-dim, lit in pulsing flashes by the machinery hooked up to the man in the bed he was touching. He blinked a few times, adjusting to the dimness, and moved to the chair the lights eventually revealed to the side of the bed, to think.
--------
"What do you mean, 'The King's not here'?"
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Sean, (Ian)
Prompt: 046 "Star"
Word Count: 650
Rating: all ages; mention of past deaths but no details
Notes: after both wars by several years. The beginning, I think, of what I've been referring to as the future-forward arc.
He'd laid the icons out one by one, spread out across his father's desk like some fortune-teller's arcane spread, sorting his family out by age and relationship. More than half the cards were back-up, turned so to mark those he'd seen buried or burned with his own eyes, still recognizably themselves even in death. The backs were painted with different hands, some ornate as the clothes from the Sun Queen's era, embossed in gold and copper in star patterns. Others were stripped down to washes of thin colour and suggestions of river-bends and cloud formations, and he knew even without looking at the people on the other sides that those were one of his nephews' work. The nephew who'd lived.
The process had left a distressingly large number face-up, their deaths reported second-hand and third hand or only lost, as Winter was. But he'd known that, going in, and the itch of barely-there contact that had prompted this exercise in sorrow was still there. So he gathered himself, and touched the oldest of the icons, pressing with his mind alone.
His father's card was dead as the man himself; he'd known that, had touched the man's bent-back black steel torc in the hours after the ending of the first war, but he'd never seen the body, and so had left the card face-up. He turned it gently over, wondering again who'd painted the icon. His father as a young man, laughing, and the icon's power tied for all appearances to the sign of rank wrapped already around his father's neck, even then.
He didn't follow any true pattern, after, just brushed his fingers and his awareness across the face-up cards, turning them face down with his other hand as they one by one failed to even hum a heartbeat in response, or a negation in answer to his query, the will of the person iconned holding the power closed off.
A few startled hisses and one cut-off curse washed across him as he brushed against the cards of the living, known, listening for a hint of familiarity in the contact. His half-sister's card shocked him slightly, tiny spark of her displeasure arcing between the icon and his finger, and he laughed, knowing she could hear him as the contact closed. Her son's icon gave him a heartbeat, nothing more--I am alive--and he wondered if he would have gotten even that, before the wars, knowing now what he hadn't then. His father would have forced the contact through, spoken to his grand-nephew in a rumbling baritone, secure in his power over his Hands. He himself asked, where his father had ordered. It threw many people off, some wrongly concluding that he wasn't secure on his throne and thus afraid to attract attention to himself.
They were learning.
He stopped moving when his hand touched an icon, the man depicted on it one of the long-missing. Nearly stopped breathing, as the back-of-mind feeling of presence blossomed, briefly, in recognition of a sort.
"Ian?" he breathed out, into the stillness of the study still his father's in the details.
The presence didn't reply, and he wondered for a moment if his long-gone half-sister's long-gone son even knew he was reaching out. "Ian," he said again, and pressed a little harder.
The desk went away beneath his hand, and he fell forward as the chair beneath him went too, yielding to a bedspread beneath his hand, and a hard floor beneath the knee he caught himself from falling on.
The room was twilight-dim, lit in pulsing flashes by the machinery hooked up to the man in the bed he was touching. He blinked a few times, adjusting to the dimness, and moved to the chair the lights eventually revealed to the side of the bed, to think.
--------
"What do you mean, 'The King's not here'?"