Allie | Days With a Knight

February 29th – The Day John Gray Went Mad

February 29, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Here’s the last one, it’s been a great month! The other participant’s stories can be found here: Allie, Tara, Pinky, Olivia.

Prompt: Take a character from a story of someone else participating in FFFFTTD and a character from one of your own stories, what happens when they meet at the end of…something?

It was the end of the month when it happened, and it happened because sometimes parents are kind. A man named Uther brought his son to the door, because all the neighbors said he knew things. Knew everything. That was the kind of reputation a man like John Gray had. Because, in a way, it was true.

Uther was dressed in a very smart suit, that had been very much loved by the man who made it. He was something of a pagan, though his family had raised him like a Catholic, and so he had some strange ideas about himself running all to the root. It was confusing in the way that John didn’t like. When Uther touched his door, John knew this, but he only knew it briefly – because there was something else.

The boy, the boy, there wasn’t a name. It was a boy, the idea of a boy, the hope of what might have had a name. It had been hollowed out for star sign and ill omen and death and apocalypse. In that minute, in that tick of a second in which Uther’s son was near enough to his door, John Gray knew nothing at all. And then it was over, and all of his everything became too much. Those stars made sense, the world made sense, and he cried.

There was so much light.

February 28th – The Chupana

February 29, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Okay, So I’ve been a bit haphazard. Done thinking, done writing – but haven’t posted up. Gonna be a slight flood today as I put them up. The other participant’s stories can be found here: Allie, Tara, Pinky, Olivia.

Prompt: Draw a picture of a creature, then write an encyclopedia entry about that creature.

Any ruminant and hollow horned paradae* related to the mundane genus Capra. Similar to the goat devils of the lower Stygian rungs, Chupana are characterized by their fine hair, curving horns and heavily padded feet instead of horns. Male Chupana are often bearded, the hair smoldering with age, and are called heads. Females produce thicker layers of wool and are called coats. The young are called teeth.

Chupana are descended from the primitive Agregarus* paradae, which were known for their great size as they aged and the vivacity of their borrowed mundane forms. During the first daemon wars, the agregarus were utilized as weapons. The species was wiped clean, but many Agregarus offspring with mundane species produced viable new strains. The Chupana were one such and, when relocated into the Tanaden hells, flourished.

Chupana are kept for their silken wool, which takes well to enchantment and providds considerable natural protecrion against most elemental threats. Unlike mundane goats they do not produce milk, instead requiring an outside supply which mothers mix with blood and holly – smearing the mixture into the grooves of their horns* and presenting them to their teeth for feeding. Adult Chupana feed primarily on grass soaked in or risen from blood, and wild specimen can frequently be found near battlefields.

*Paradae- Morally ambivalent creatures made entirely of spiritual matter grounded in corporeal, mundane based, forms.

*Agregarus- One of the three ancestor paradae species, a wormlike creature that bonded to mundane or semimundane animals – enhancing them to abnormal extremes.

*Chupana Coat Horns – Coat horns from certain species of chupana are sought after for use in sorcerous devices, particularly wands. Their use in defensive, healing and blood magic make them versatile and well rounded magical tools.

February 26th – To Learn the Day

February 26, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Theme: Forbidden Knowledge.

To learn of the day Elliot read a book of skulls and slithering. Donnova saw a monster, like the ones from under your bed – but real. Uther’s nameless son was just unlucky, star-hated, witness to things his father couldn’t understand.

It was Saturday, the third Saturday in September, Elliot’s birthday. He spoke seven words before he died. It was a mid-afternoon in the first week of July, Donnova’s graduation from the sixth grade. She saw something in the corner of her eye, half blurred by the bedroom window. They gagged her to stop the screaming. It was a Monday night sometime in Winter, with strange stars overhead, Uther’s son had just been born and the boy wouldn’t stop crying. He never did, though never wasn’t long.

It was behind them, and in their mouths. It was in their bellies, twisting from the food they ate. It was the taste of apples and the scent of almond, it was the falling of the last age. And its name was Bright.

February 24th – The Ladder Men

February 26, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Prompt: Write a science fiction story about your own ancestors.

They cared for El Cantar De Mio Cid with the bravery of the newly noble, read it to their children as often as the Holy Bible, speaking it to them with the fervency of preachers. They were the Escalante, the siege-brothers, the Ladder Men.

Family did not question, friends were few enough to be killed in war, their officers soon replaced, their King trusting. They were the men that rushed beneath the walls, that leaped against them with rungs of wood and metal on their back. Only the brothers were never burnt, never fired on, never cut down.

The Ladder Men were the heroes unseen, achieving nobility and speaking little of it, loyal faultlessly to the ideal of the Cid and to their lord. This is how they lived. When it was that their children achieved favor amongst different circles, they were uneasy. When fealty was given in different places, they spoke in hushed tones. In the war of Communities, they were not allies. They whispered to each other on night before the battles came. Before the siege.

There were no ladder-men in the morning. No walls broken, no rungs bravely lifted without those two. It was a lost battle without victors, and their families found themselves alone. Their lords, who they had counseled against war, woke to tattered copies of the Cantar in their beds.

On the outskirts Madrid, inside a ring of broken ladders, lingered two patches of scorched earth and the scent of the written word.

February 23rd – Watcher of the Bridge

February 26, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Prompt: Translate a character from myth/fable/legend into a sci fi setting

Light bent to the pupils, filling them with luster. Those eyes of his that captured rainbows once. It was more like the world was seeing him, than he saw the world. His eyes stared through and past solidity, lingering on things in the air. Like a blind man, but never running into things. Like a wise man, but seeing too much.

I recognized him out of a story book. My mother kept an ancient old paper-back of Bullfinch’s Mythology that I read to tatters as a kid. It made it easy to see him, I think, with how much I’ve lived in the Asgard of my mind.

It hurt to realize that Asgard was fallen as a child, fallen a handful of centuries ago on Earth That Was. How could the gods of Earth survive, with people so changed? Now there are gods of Titan, and meteors. Cultists of the outer stars and of Jupiter’s thousand named rings. There are religions of the void, and star namers and ship-watchers. There is no room left for Asgard.

Yet there he sat, stooped and fiddling with gold plated crafts, eye-bots and guard-drones hovering over him like dogs, or vultures, or both. Heimdallr, guardian of the bridge, watcher for the end, blower of the horn. I thought his name.

He looked at me, and Saw.

My sins, though there were some he did not see as sins. My pride, and some of that which he did not understand. He Saw my mother holding me as a child. He witnessed humiliations, my triumphs, he judged, and never judged. He was the watcher, his gaze ringing like a trumpet, like a horn. I felt him in me like the last, when you see a sunset before you leave home, when you see the water on way to a desert, the silhouette of a hero on a hill. A god saw me, saw me into the end, shining light through me. Ending me.

Except I wasn’t dead, hadn’t died, he saw that too, I haven’t – but he knows. I want to ask him, wanted to call out as he looked back down. Want still to be Seen again, though he is aware of my entirety. A shining, metallic eye approached me, bumping into my chest to nudge me away. I struggled with myself, and left.

Maybe him looking away was a kindness, letting me into shadow once more. A god has seen me, and there is a little of Asgard remaining in the world.

Days With a Knight

February 29th – The Day John Gray Went Mad

February 28th – The Chupana

February 26th – To Learn the Day

February 24th – The Ladder Men

February 23rd – Watcher of the Bridge

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