Post by max on Sept 19, 2010 17:38:04 GMT 10
Title: Sanguinary
Rating: PG-13
Summary: This is my truth, tell me yours. Starns' worst years, through the eyes of those who survived them.
Warning: Suicide mentioned, albeit obliquely.
Notes: In honour of talk like a pirate day (though, y'know, the whole thing's about to be pulled apart by the insta-pirate edit, which is slightly ironic, but hey. Read it tomorrow or something.) and it won't make any kind of sense unless you've read Melting Stones.
One day, I'm actually going to write actually decent-length stories which will explain what I'm angling for, properly.
__________________________________
That was the year the gods cursed us: the winter long and bitter, storms and frosts destroying crops and leaving the lambs dead across the meadows, and then the summer and autumn with their lack of rain so the whole parched earth would havescreamed if it had enough moisture to.
She had always been special, with her golden hair and seashell eyes, will keeping her alive when all her food had gone to her little girl (though like all kids that year the scrap had cried from hunger anyway; silently, until her ma had seen and smacked her for losing water so) the fear intensifying her beauty all the more, all that was left under her bones that defiance not to die, not to give in where so many others had before (and it was so much easier for them, the farmers who stood in the lofts of empty barns and skeletal beasts and took soaring leaps right out of the world, but she had her baby and her man and like most of the wilder creatures, she'd have eaten them herself before leaving them alone in the world) so it had been all she could do when he came back with the power in his fingers and a story on his tongue of a quake that had broken down the barriers across the ocean (I'd seen the wave burst against the cliffs, but Tahar hadn't been able to tell me anything other than what I'd already known: it wasn't the moon bringing them over) not to leave with him then and there.
In the end, the only one left was her girl, that liquid rag of sunlight and sad brown eyes, and it was up to me to explain to her that her ma had never hated her, had loved her more than anyone else could ever love anyone, but that once upon a time, her ma had had a little sister, lost in Capchen, and that had done something to her what couldn't ever be undone (not even after she and Enahar had made a charnel house of a merchant family in Ninver, and them only thirteen and fifteen) but then she looks at me, the defiance pumping under her skin with the rose her heart brings to her cheeks when she's at her saddest and says, 'But my world died. I don't go around chasing bloody gold' and she isn't old enough yet to be told of the spells that tie bloods too tightly together to ever be split and pull empires apart across the sea. (Whether she ever will be is another matter entirely.)
For the moment Nory fights and loves and lives, and this is all Pauha ever wanted.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: This is my truth, tell me yours. Starns' worst years, through the eyes of those who survived them.
Warning: Suicide mentioned, albeit obliquely.
Notes: In honour of talk like a pirate day (though, y'know, the whole thing's about to be pulled apart by the insta-pirate edit, which is slightly ironic, but hey. Read it tomorrow or something.) and it won't make any kind of sense unless you've read Melting Stones.
One day, I'm actually going to write actually decent-length stories which will explain what I'm angling for, properly.
__________________________________
That was the year the gods cursed us: the winter long and bitter, storms and frosts destroying crops and leaving the lambs dead across the meadows, and then the summer and autumn with their lack of rain so the whole parched earth would havescreamed if it had enough moisture to.
She had always been special, with her golden hair and seashell eyes, will keeping her alive when all her food had gone to her little girl (though like all kids that year the scrap had cried from hunger anyway; silently, until her ma had seen and smacked her for losing water so) the fear intensifying her beauty all the more, all that was left under her bones that defiance not to die, not to give in where so many others had before (and it was so much easier for them, the farmers who stood in the lofts of empty barns and skeletal beasts and took soaring leaps right out of the world, but she had her baby and her man and like most of the wilder creatures, she'd have eaten them herself before leaving them alone in the world) so it had been all she could do when he came back with the power in his fingers and a story on his tongue of a quake that had broken down the barriers across the ocean (I'd seen the wave burst against the cliffs, but Tahar hadn't been able to tell me anything other than what I'd already known: it wasn't the moon bringing them over) not to leave with him then and there.
In the end, the only one left was her girl, that liquid rag of sunlight and sad brown eyes, and it was up to me to explain to her that her ma had never hated her, had loved her more than anyone else could ever love anyone, but that once upon a time, her ma had had a little sister, lost in Capchen, and that had done something to her what couldn't ever be undone (not even after she and Enahar had made a charnel house of a merchant family in Ninver, and them only thirteen and fifteen) but then she looks at me, the defiance pumping under her skin with the rose her heart brings to her cheeks when she's at her saddest and says, 'But my world died. I don't go around chasing bloody gold' and she isn't old enough yet to be told of the spells that tie bloods too tightly together to ever be split and pull empires apart across the sea. (Whether she ever will be is another matter entirely.)
For the moment Nory fights and loves and lives, and this is all Pauha ever wanted.