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Prompt: Pride of Place
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Tilsie knew what she looked like.
She as a short, chubby cook, with hair that was fluffing out of her flour-dusted braid. Her shoes were sensible, and her dress was simple, with only a little embroidery around the hems to mark her position as the pastry cook of the whole castle. Her arms were thick with muscle, and her face was closer to round than it was to fine-featured.
When one was the chosen lover of the most beautiful woman in the world, such comparisons were inevitable, and while Atteila had made heropinion on Tilly’s body very clear, others were not so kind. Tilly knew she was a pretty woman, but she was the kind of pretty that married the miller down the road and put out a dozen children, not the kind that fell in love with a princess and spirited her and a prince out of a castle.
Now, however, it seemed that there was no time to indulge her own insecurities. Atteila and Hanver were counting on her. She couldn’t let them down.
So Tilly hastily pulled her hair free of her braid, shook as much of the flour out as she could, and shook out her skirts. There were some benefits to being clearly of the peasant stock. No one would mistake Tilly for a royal. She never thought she would be grateful for that.
The stables weren’t deserted. A pair of ragged men were rolling dice on a barrel, lazily guarding a handful of soldiers who sat in a line, bound and bruised from what had clearly been an attack they could not withstand. Tilly made eye contact with the nearest, a man named Nezza, who sometimes came to the kitchens when he had a free moment. Tilly slipped him the pastries that weren’t nice enough to serve the nobles, and in return, he went with her maids down to meet food deliveries for the kitchens.
His eyes went wide, but Tilly put a finger to her lips and eyed the two men, who hadn’t noticed her yet.
She wasn’t a fighter, but for Atteila, she would fight anyway.
Serving girls were never a threat. She didn’t walk like a soldier, or wear armor that would clank along as she walked. Skirts weren’t terribly convenient, but they were quiet.
The stove that warmed the stables was close to hand. The stove itself was cold, which was normal for summer, but there was always a small stack of firewood beside it. She took up a hefty branch, took to long steps out of hiding, and brought the branch down on the head of the nearest man. He dropped, unconscious in moments, and his friend staggered back, his eyes wide. He grabbed for his sword, but Tilly, armed and strong with terror, bashed him too. He tried to block, but bakers had strong arms, and he was off balance.
“Remind me never to annoy you, Miss Tilly,” Nezza said when she dropped her branch to untie him. “How did you get here? What are you doinghere?”
“No time, are there more of them in the stables?” Tilly asked hurriedly and moved to the next soldier as soon as Nezza’s hands were free. He got to work on his feet and was soon raiding the two fallen men for their weapons. “How many came in the gates?”
“Close to fifty. A proper fighting force,” Nezza said grimly. He moved to the door and froze. “Get down; There’s someone in the bushes!”
“I know!” Tilly said and yanked him back inside before she hesitated. “You’re loyal, right? To His Majesty and the princess?”
Nezza narrowed his eyes at her but nodded slowly. Tilly waited another moment until the rest of the soldiers nodded too.
“Right,” she said, and whistled, three short notes that carried further than anyone expected. Perfect for catching the attention of a maid in a noisy kitchen. Or for calling two royals out of hiding. “I brought some friends from the kitchens.”
“Princess Atteila,” Nezza whispered, and knelt when Atteila and Hanver ducked into the stable. Atteila reached for Tilly’s hand and pulled her close when Tilly took it. “We feared you lost. How…?”
“We were in the kitchens when the attack came,” Atteila explained and pulled him to his feet with her free hand. Hanver joined the soldiers in getting everyone untied. “Tilly took us out through the scullery and into the gardens before we could be captured. Is there word of my father, the king?”
“None, your highness,” Nezza said, clearly uncomfortable but the highest-ranking soldier in the room. Two of his fellows dragged the men Tilly had knocked out into one of the stalls and tied them tightly. “We were taken before we could raise the alarm. Please accept our humblest apologies for our failure.”
“I would not expect any ten men to hold against fifty,” Atteila told him kindly, and squeezed Tilly’s hand. “We must retake the castle or escape, but I know nothing of war. Is the castle lost?”
“We outnumber the ragged lot a dozen to one if we can get to the barracks,” Hanver suggested, the only one of them who had actually been to war, and who had, despite his father’s opinion, a decent head for tactics. He shrugged one shoulder when Nezza looked at him questioningly. “The castle has a large number of soldiers assigned here on rotation. They must have been blocked into their barracks or they would have already taken the castle back. So where are the barracks?”
Her part done, Tilly wrapped her arms around Atteila and held on tight.
Perhaps it wasn’t so bad to be the one who faded into the background. Now, they might just have a chance to fight back.
Question after question. Answer after answer, a stutter-stop staccato. Ward’s hands moved as he spoke, a twisting, then stretching motion, drawing out the long thread of his memories to mark the distant path back home. Too often, his fingers bent at an angle foreign to their muscles but continued to move nonetheless, a dizzying array of shapes and symbols formed transient in the air. He told us of the diamond sunlight which broke through hexagonal windows, freezing the dust in the air; of emperors and ambassadors in the annals of unearthly nations; of corridors which twisted and broke, stone forever falling from their ceilings; of books which, once opened, never closed, a furious storm boiling upon their pages. He told us all this with rigid glee, occasionally slamming his hands against the walls in protest that he was not allowed back, trapped in our slow bounded world.
Valnessi’s thoughts were further gone—she’d been the linguist of her expedition, tasked with understanding the lexical tangle of any books they might recover. She bore the scars, too: when she spoke, we saw her tongue had been split in two by some inhuman tool. In the languages we recognized, she spoke of cathedral floors and bells which continued to toll, even then, inside her head; of words which perfectly encapsulated their subjects, a one-to-one match between language and reality; and of the great mechanistic clockwork at the library’s center, the hands which swept around in greater dimensions than our own. She paced as she talked, a complex pattern relying upon sound and direction, and shrieked in apparent agony when our wardens were forced, bringing food and water, to disrupt it.
This isn’t from any story I have currently, but a final assignment I had to do for a writing class! The story as a whole involves an infinite library and two explorers who have returned from it slightly…off…
This kind of reality bending is my cup of tea right now…fantastic descriptions!
Thanks for the tag @ratracechronicler! I’m not quite sure I can match the # of titles you provided…
The rules: list the titles of your WIPs. Then folks can ask for snippets and/or ask questions about any of your WIPs without knowing anything other than the titles!
All the ones which are currently (or possibly) active:
Empty Space
Compliance with Health and Safety Regulations at the Intersection of Extraplanar Dimensional Sites
Midnight Salvage (or Midnight Under The Ocean)
The Dead Letter Department (which has bled into:)
The Department of Letters (or Description Goes Here)
and a couple ones I’ve neverposted about here, and which have only working titles:
The Ends of the Earth
That One Pilot Story (I know the pilot’s name—Sasha Semiramis—just not that of the story)
Tagging, if you’d like, @albatris,@note-katha, and @cabaretofwords if you’re interested, & anyone else who sees this and wants to participate
I continue to be very interested in The Dead Letter Department–how has it bled into the other one? Are they still separate but similar entities, or has one become the other? How’re they related? (Plus cool snippets would be appreciated if possible)
Ah, well, mostly they’ve bled into each other by both featuring secretive government agencies and civil-service main characters who are rather unequipped for the action they find themselves in—otherwise, they’re two separate stories.
The Dead Letter Department, aka the Office of Conceptual Intrusions (OCI) deals with the half-formed nightmares of an unknowable faraway intelligence which stalk the desert; the Department of Letters deals with the English language itself (like the Académie Française), and the fact that somebody has, in fact, stolen the adjective.
Stealing the adjective??? Now, that is an act that, while I can’t fully understand it or approve, of course, I can marvel at. Your imagination continues to impress!
TRAITS:Paladin of the Vale Knights, Adviser to the Northern Vale, Mentor of the Champion
STRENGTHS: Knowledgeable and Influential
WEAKNESSES: Tradition and Dismissive
EXTRA: The Vale Knights are the only humans who still know True Speak, although it is learned rather than inherent and limited
FIRST IN TEXT INTRODUCTION;
The first time Connor had stepped foot in the Valelands, his mentor, Harlas had been there to greet him. Safety was what the man had given him when he was younger, with his neat beard, large hands and gruff assurance; the only adult in Connor’s life who had ever looked at him like he was meant for something.
It was Harlas who greeted Connor whenever he awoke in a cold sweat, nightmare fresh in his mind. It was the echo of Harlas’s voice that threatened to pull him under.
Your quest is complete, Champion. Well done. He would say, and Connor would lose all air because he knew what was going to happen next, had lived through it time and time again in his dreams. He knew the reward a Champion recieved for completing their quest.
Let us take you home.
They had never lied to him, Connor supposed. But they had known– they should have known– that after everything, how could home be somewhere they were not?
Summary: Being the Chosen One fucking sucks. That’s why Erika is furious when she finds out her brother got picked.
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I find out my parents let the wizards take Ben an hour after I get home for spring break.
“You have to understand, Erika,” my mother says tearfully, “there was a prophecy! What were we supposed to do?”
“You were supposed to stop a group of ancient wizards from dragging off my fourteen-year-old brother to die,” I snarl at her. I dump out my small suitcase on the bed and leave it face open on the floor. I throw open my closet and start tearing all of the hanging things out of my way. “Or, I don’t know, maybe call me?”
“Don’t talk to your mother like that,” my father says. He’d be a lot more convincing if he stopped hovering around the doorway and avoiding my glare. He tucks his terrycloth bathrobe around himself. “You know what they’re like. We couldn’t say no.”
“That excuse is a little tired, Dad.” I flip the latch of the secret compartment at the back of my closet. It swings open to reveal my collection of swords. My mother gasps, but I’m too mad to point out that she knew I kept the weapons, just not where. “I let you use it when it happened to me because I expected you to never fail your children quite so spectacularly again.”
“We’re just normal people, Erika,” Mom wails. She’s dressed in overalls and has smears of dirt from ankle to knee. “We couldn’t stop them! We’re just as upset as you!”
“Are you?” I whirl around, three swords under one arm and a crossbow in my free hand. “Is that why Dad smells like a lavender bath bomb and you’ve been gardening all morning? Because you’re upset?”
Two identical infants lay in the cradle. “One you bore, the other is a Changeling. Choose wisely,” the Fae’s voice echoed from the shadows. “I’m taking both my children,” the mother said defiantly.
Once upon a time there was a peasant woman who was unhappy because she had no children. She was happy in all other things – her husband was kind and loving, and they owned their farm and had food and money enough. But she longed for children.
She went to church and prayed for a child every Sunday, but no child came. She went to every midwife and wise woman for miles around, and followed all their advice, but no child came.
So at last, though she knew of the dangers, she drew her brown woolen shawl over her head and on Midsummer’s Eve she went out to the forest, to a certain clearing, and dropped a copper penny and a lock of her hair into the old well there, and she wished for a child.
“You know,” a voice said behind her, a low and cunning voice, a voice that had a coax and a wheedle and a sly laugh all mixed up in it together, “that there will be a price to pay later.”
She did not turn to look at the creature. She knew better. “I know it,” she said, still staring into the well. “And I also know that I may set conditions.”
“That is true,” the creature said, after a moment, and there was less laugh in its voice now. It wasn’t pleased that she knew that. “What condition do you set? A boy child? A lucky one?”
“That the child will come to no harm,” she said, lifting her head to stare into the woods. “Whether I succeed in paying your price, or passing your test, or not, the child will not suffer. It will not die, or be hurt, or cursed with ill luck or any other thing. No harm of any kind.”
“Ahhhhh.” The sound was long and low, between a sigh and a hum. “Yes. That is a fair condition. Whatever price there is, whatever test there is, it will be for you and you alone.” A long, slender hand extended into her sight, almost human save for the skin, as pale a green as a new leaf. The hand held a pear, ripe and sweet, though the pears were nowhere ripe yet. “Eat this,” the voice said, and she trembled with the effort of keeping her eyes straight ahead. “All of it, on your way home. Before you enter your own gate, plant the core of it beside the gate, where the ground is soft and rich. You will have what you ask for.”
