Post by jazzyjess on Feb 8, 2010 18:02:17 GMT 10
Title: A Child’s Dream
Rating: G
Lenth: 275 words
Competitor: Rikash
Round/Fight: 1/B
Summary: When she was young, he would come in the night.
--
The same year her family returned from the Islands, the Immortals War struck Tortall with a vengeance. While she hadn’t been in the thick of things, Kel had seen the aftermath – the slow reparation of damage to countryside and city alike; the monuments erected in Corus, Caynn, and Legann, commemorating the fallen; the trials of the caught pirates and renegades of Carthak and the Copper Isles.
Perhaps even worse than all of this were those Immortals who remained in Tortall when the war finally ended. On Mindelan land were spidrens – this she knew for certain – and probably a hundred other creatures, malicious and unpleasant, hiding in the dark.
At night she could feel them, sensed something in the forest and along the road, and she prayed that the villagers would remain safe in their unguarded homes. They were bad at night, but they came in sleep too.
His wingspan was the width of her little room, and the moonlight glinted from steel feathers as he paced near her bed. “I died,” he would tell her, “because I am a traitor.”
His hair was long and matted, but Kel knew he was once beautiful, that at some time in the long past his blond braid was smooth and shining and the grime caked onto his body was a figment of imagination. She would dream of him at night, but when the dawn first crept into the kingdom from its slumber he would vanish into the budding light, nothing in her room but a whisper of a promise – “You will be saved.”
But soon she was no child of ten, and pages have no time for dreams.
Rating: G
Lenth: 275 words
Competitor: Rikash
Round/Fight: 1/B
Summary: When she was young, he would come in the night.
--
The same year her family returned from the Islands, the Immortals War struck Tortall with a vengeance. While she hadn’t been in the thick of things, Kel had seen the aftermath – the slow reparation of damage to countryside and city alike; the monuments erected in Corus, Caynn, and Legann, commemorating the fallen; the trials of the caught pirates and renegades of Carthak and the Copper Isles.
Perhaps even worse than all of this were those Immortals who remained in Tortall when the war finally ended. On Mindelan land were spidrens – this she knew for certain – and probably a hundred other creatures, malicious and unpleasant, hiding in the dark.
At night she could feel them, sensed something in the forest and along the road, and she prayed that the villagers would remain safe in their unguarded homes. They were bad at night, but they came in sleep too.
His wingspan was the width of her little room, and the moonlight glinted from steel feathers as he paced near her bed. “I died,” he would tell her, “because I am a traitor.”
His hair was long and matted, but Kel knew he was once beautiful, that at some time in the long past his blond braid was smooth and shining and the grime caked onto his body was a figment of imagination. She would dream of him at night, but when the dawn first crept into the kingdom from its slumber he would vanish into the budding light, nothing in her room but a whisper of a promise – “You will be saved.”
But soon she was no child of ten, and pages have no time for dreams.