Post by max on Jun 16, 2012 6:26:50 GMT 10
Series: Firebirds
Title: Common courtesy.
Rating: G.
Event: 400 word dash.
Words: 400.
Summary (including warnings): Some foundations are laid in childhood.
Notes: Hurrah extensions! Though it’s still not going to be particularly helpful to me, now. But maaan. I have exaaams.
.
.
The first person you ever meet at the palace is the only one who will ultimately matter.
You are nine at the time, though; don’t think of anything this way, so instead there’s the dim hallway outside the training-master’s office, your baba’s hands on your shoulders and the clammy damp of the north on your skin (to which you won’t acclimatise the first six months, frost claggy and keening in your bones. To which you’ll have to rehabilitate yourself each summer’s end you leave the desert and until your squire years, when you cease going back altogether), and then a strange, irregular echoing reaches you, rhythm too broken for you to grasp.
And although Faleron is ten at this point, and war brews across three worlds (the reason your father brought you here at all, reading the blood-smoke tangling through the southern winds for what it would become) you realise when he comes into sight that the percussion is his footsteps – because he is skipping.
Skipping, when the stars themselves are feverish with the terrible imbalance of the realms. You don’t know you stare until a pair of eyes both darker and brighter than your own turn to regard you with gentle curiosity, then he smiles.
It’s a strange kind of smile; one which won’t be explained to you until he champions the eldest princess, facing a boy as coolly inhuman as the morning, appalled by her brother’s diplomatic silence, when he’ll say, ‘Kalasin of Conté is thrice the marksman you’ll ever be’, and spend the next two weekends in the palace tailors for the ensuing brawl. One which will be explained to you along lines drawn a year before Keladry of Mindelan is ever heard of, and later and because of this disjunct you will try to forget it altogether – but in this one caught moment apart from all the years ahead, there is no Kalasin, no Joren, only a boy in white and red who offers you his hand and his friendship and his startling kindness, a greeting in your own language, a wistfulness you don’t yet understand.
(Deeper than memory he will weave in and out of the flash of light glancing off the first Stormwing you ever see, the terrifying wonder)
At this point there is no reason not to, so you take his proffered hand: and smile back.
Title: Common courtesy.
Rating: G.
Event: 400 word dash.
Words: 400.
Summary (including warnings): Some foundations are laid in childhood.
Notes: Hurrah extensions! Though it’s still not going to be particularly helpful to me, now. But maaan. I have exaaams.
.
.
The first person you ever meet at the palace is the only one who will ultimately matter.
You are nine at the time, though; don’t think of anything this way, so instead there’s the dim hallway outside the training-master’s office, your baba’s hands on your shoulders and the clammy damp of the north on your skin (to which you won’t acclimatise the first six months, frost claggy and keening in your bones. To which you’ll have to rehabilitate yourself each summer’s end you leave the desert and until your squire years, when you cease going back altogether), and then a strange, irregular echoing reaches you, rhythm too broken for you to grasp.
And although Faleron is ten at this point, and war brews across three worlds (the reason your father brought you here at all, reading the blood-smoke tangling through the southern winds for what it would become) you realise when he comes into sight that the percussion is his footsteps – because he is skipping.
Skipping, when the stars themselves are feverish with the terrible imbalance of the realms. You don’t know you stare until a pair of eyes both darker and brighter than your own turn to regard you with gentle curiosity, then he smiles.
It’s a strange kind of smile; one which won’t be explained to you until he champions the eldest princess, facing a boy as coolly inhuman as the morning, appalled by her brother’s diplomatic silence, when he’ll say, ‘Kalasin of Conté is thrice the marksman you’ll ever be’, and spend the next two weekends in the palace tailors for the ensuing brawl. One which will be explained to you along lines drawn a year before Keladry of Mindelan is ever heard of, and later and because of this disjunct you will try to forget it altogether – but in this one caught moment apart from all the years ahead, there is no Kalasin, no Joren, only a boy in white and red who offers you his hand and his friendship and his startling kindness, a greeting in your own language, a wistfulness you don’t yet understand.
(Deeper than memory he will weave in and out of the flash of light glancing off the first Stormwing you ever see, the terrifying wonder)
At this point there is no reason not to, so you take his proffered hand: and smile back.