Also, somewhat more pressingly, I feel - even if you ignore that that the Alpviehwirtschaft, the intensive production of rennet cheeses from cows' milk for export, came as a consequence of the Reformation, even if you take the most concerningly romantic view of Swiss history, accept the 1291 Bundesbrief date as given, claim continuity of identity from then to now (tbf, the centennial was a good excuse for a party); even if you argue that the Waldstätte may have had an earlier alliance...
... the existence of the moon is definitely attested before the 13th century.
(And in any case I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed if the Alti Eidgnosseschaft had a space program. Possibly because they'd have used it to Thor-shot the French Revolutionary Army mid-invasion. Or, er, more likely each other. As a kid who was taken to a lot of museums where I could only half-read the placards, I was convinced that the mercenary tradition boiled down to 'send the young hot-heads to go fight over someone else's farmland, ffs' and honestly, yeah it's an oversimplification but I'm still not sure it's 100% wrong.)
strange & grimm, which btw sounds like an urban fantasy affectionately parodic hardboiled detective agency. probably queer.
It was a hot, muggy night in the Enchanted Forest. Everyone with a lick of sense was down in the fairy glens, hoping the Winter Court would put in an appearance and bring a breeze on with them. Lucky me, I’m the sucker who fingered the Snow Queen for the missing persons case last winter, so I’m persona non grata in the fairy glens these days.
Just as well. I couldn’t afford to leave the office, not when it’d been so long since my last case. Though on a night like this, I might as well not bother. It was too hot for crime. Even the leaves on the enchanted trees were drooping in the heat.
I was just about to call it a night when a dame walked in my door. Tall, blonde, legs for days, with an air of tragedy that could put an unloved stepchild to shame. I looked her over suspiciously for any cheery woodland creatures hidden in her golden ringlets. If she was a princess, I’d turf her right back out of the office, case unheard. Princesses paid well, but they were more trouble than they were worth.
No mice poked their adorable little noses out of her pockets as the dame sank into a chair and fixed me with a hard look. “I hear you’re the best in the business,” she said without preamble. “And I need the best.”
I leaned back in my seat. “Baby, I’m the only one in the business. It’s not a good genre for private dicks.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes, far too child-friendly for any sort of dicks.” Before I could recover from that little gem, she went on, “It’s a child I’m here about. My sister. She’s…she’s gone missing.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Please, Detective, you’re my last hope. The royal courts won’t hear me out, they think she’s gone on the lam!”
I nodded grimly. “One of those Bo Peep situations, huh?” I get a depressing number of those. All it takes is one wolf in sheep’s clothing—you’d think the kids would learn.
The dame glared. There was enough cold iron in her gaze to put a fairy off her ambrosia. “On the lam, Detective. On the run. My sister has…something of a record.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Your sister the child? She some kind of crime prodigy?”
The dame fidgeted, looking away. “She’s…” She sighed explosively. “My sister is Goldilocks.”
I whistled, low and long. Crime prodigy indeed—Goldilocks was wanted in five kingdoms for the most impressive string of burglaries the Enchanted Forest had ever seen. No one could ever prove she’d done it, but the circumstantial evidence had piled up higher than mattresses on a pea. No wonder no royal court would take this case.
The dame’s shoulders hunched defensively, but she bulled on without trying to defend her wayward sister. “She’s gone missing, and I know it’s not another one of her sprees. Something is wrong this time.” She turned back to meet my eyes, her lovely features harsh with poorly-suppressed fear. “It’s her first crime come back to haunt her, I just know it is. They’ve always wanted revenge—especially the baby of the family, and he’s all grown up now. What they’d do if they got hold of her—“ She cut herself off with a watery gasp; her eyes were wet with tears. “Oh, it doesn’t bear thinking about!”
I handed her a handkerchief and gave her a minute to compose herself. It gave me a minute, too, to decide if I was really going to be this stupid. You don’t tangle with the big predators, not if you know what’s good for you, and especially not a whole family of them. Families are a dangerous thing in any genre.
But I was her last hope, and I’m a sucker for lost causes. And if I didn’t get paid soon, this business would become a lost cause itself. I said a silent farewell to my good sense as it packed its bags and left for kinder climes. “Alright,” I told the dame, “Give me the facts. We’ll see what kind of a story they tell.”
The story they told was grim, and not just because of the fancy family history. The Grimms had been one of the most notable houses in the Summer Court...a thousand years and several unhappily ever afters ago. Now, the dame Gilda and her little sister, Goldina "Goldilocks", eked out their living in a little house on the edge of the Woods, with the rest of us peasants and goblins. They had a couple pennies to rub together, thanks to Gilda's laundry and Goldie's rap sheet, but only a couple. Orphans, of course.
A week ago, they'd fought, like sisters did. They'd fought because Goldie had brought her boyfriend around again, a no-good boy (Gilda said) called Jack, who Goldie insisted could climb beanstalks and Gilda didn't think was worth the candle he jumped over.
Goldie had stormed out, like teenage girls with wounded pride did. Gilda had assumed she was sulking in the Woods' eaves again, and would come home in the morning. She knew her sister too well to worry, and was still pretty proud and wounded herself. (She didn't say that, but I knew a lion's mane when I saw one bouncing on a dame's shoulders.)
But Goldie didn't come back the next morning. Or the next. Or the next. So Gilda started to worry.
"What about Jack?" I asked, because you had to ask. Hell might hath no fury like a woman scorned, but Hell doesn't discriminate by gender, either.
Gilda snorted. "That good-for-nothing layabout? He's all wit and no will. He sidled out when Goldie started shouting, muttering something about his sick ma. I did look for him, just in case Goldie had taken him and jumped town - he wouldn't suggest it, but she would. But he was playing his name down in the tavern, and smiling at the barmaid just as limply as he smiled at my sister - 'sick ma', ha!"
I jotted it down in my notebook anyway. Gilda didn't seem like a woman who missed much, in judgement or with that knife I noticed tucked up her left sleeve. But there were a lot of "Jack"s in the world, and some of them were suited for the nursery, and others were wanted for murder in the Kingdom of Giants Above the Clouds.
"You think it's the Bears," I said.
"I'm sure of it," Gilda said fiercely. She leaned over my desk and dropped her voice to near a whisper. "I found a paw print. Near Goldie's usual sulking spot, at a big oak tree. I- I'm no woodsman, but it was so big - what could it be but a bear?"
"Wolf," I suggested, because I didn't get this far without learning to jump to the worst conclusion first. "Mountain lion. One of those freaky moose-lions those kids with the elemental powers let loose."
But Gilda's eyes welled up like there was a wish in those dark depths. And I knew better than most that when the cyclical nature of stories met the cosmic balance of karma, sometimes they cancelled out and sometimes they combined into an unstoppable rolling juggernaut that crushed everything in its path with an indiscriminate fury called "vengeance."
Some say that only heroes and idiots go into the Woods. More say that there's no difference between those.
"Alright." I closed my notebook, swigged the dregs of my coffee - bitter like an ending, but the closest thing to lunch I was going to get today - and stood. "I charge 10 good gold coins an hour plus expenses. Show me this paw print, and Goldie's oak tree - she might've started there, before she went missing."
Trees are a lot like people. Each one’s got a life’s tale that matches no other, full of private joys and more private sorrows, borne on the currents of time and change and just trying to keep afloat. Also like people, most of them are common as pixie dust, and it’s a rare specimen indeed that truly stands out from the crowd.
Goldilocks’ sulking tree could claim that distinction. It was a grand old oak as broad as it was tall, with craggy, moss-covered branches that sprawled possessively over the patch of forest it presided over. Gilda led me right up to the base of it, and I felt the damndest urge to tip my hat as we approached.
After a bit of an internal struggle, I gave in. I’ve got my pride, but I’ve got my sense, too, and it pays to be polite when you can. Even to something with no eyes to see it.
Oak trees are self-sufficient creatures, and they like their space. The forest floor is always dark under the awning of their branches, brown with the tree’s own fallen leaves, with only a few guests sharing its shade and nothing at all growing within arm’s reach of the trunk itself. The paw print Gilda showed me was right up in that no-man’s-land, a deep divot in the soft loam.
It was definitely large. It was definitely some kind of footprint. It was not so definitely a paw print, but one look at Gilda was enough to tell me it’d be a waste of time pointing that out.
“You see?” she said, arms folded, an imperious glint in her eye. “It has to be the Bears.”
I hummed, and scribbled down some nonsense in my notebook just to satisfy her. Then I took a turn around the tree, eyes on the ground. “You said your sister comes here a lot?”
Gilda huffed. “Used to be more. Every few days, whenever she got in one of her moods. These days she’s more likely to go crying to that useless lout Jack.”
There were no other obvious disturbances in the leaf litter. I took another turn, this time casting my gaze a little higher. “What makes you so sure she ran off here after your fight, then, and not into his loving arms?”
“I told you, I spoke to Jack. He hadn’t seen her.”
I stopped to peer at a particularly interesting burl on the tree trunk. “And you’re sure he wouldn’t lie to you?”
Gilda was silent a moment. When she spoke, the words came out bitter as a witch’s apples. “He does…care about her. She’s been missing for six days. If he knew anything, he’d have told me by now.”
“Unless Goldina swore him to silence.”
Gilda scoffed. “He doesn’t have the spine for oaths.” She came around to where I was still inspecting the tree burl. “Look, Detective—”
“Is your sister in good with the trees?” I interrupted.
I glanced over in time to see suspicion flash across her face, there and gone as quick as a gingerbread man. She replaced it with polite incomprehension, but I just tipped my head and raised my eyebrows, waiting.
She kept me waiting a while. Gilda was not the kind of dame to lose a staring contest. But then, neither was I.
It left us at a bit of an impasse. She finally said, dry as a djinni lamp, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I couldn’t have held back the smirk at that if I’d tried. I do love a dame with the moxie to tell a blatant lie without a scrap of guilt.
She wasn’t going to budge any further than that, either. And I had a case to crack. “Well,” I said, “I’d appreciate it if you applied some of that same selective ignorance to what you’re about to see.”
She frowned, but before she could ask, I leaned in close to the tree burl and whispered a request.
It doesn’t take a lot to befriend a tree. Most of what it takes is patience. The rest of it—the real trick of it—is in learning how to understand that tree, and make yourself understood in turn. Different people have got different ways. Me, I helped a grove of dryads hunt down an arsonist some years back, and then they went and stiffed me on my pay. I learned an important lesson, and now I always get half my fee upfront, no matter how harsh the sob story. But I learned something else, too. Because instead of gold, the dryads gave me the Blessing of the Leaves.
It’s been far more of a boon to me than the gold would have been, I have to admit. That’s why I only demand half up front—there’s a lot to be said for getting paid in favors, in a place like the Enchanted Wood, so long as I get enough hard cash to keep the lights on.
The Blessing of the Leaves is what let me befriend the trees near my office. Trees love to gossip, it turns out, and if there’s one thing a private detective has in spades, it’s gossip. They tell me all the best rumors, and in exchange, I go track down the truth of them when I can.
Being in good with the trees isn’t any sort of magic power. Not for me, at least. All it means is the trees like me well enough, so they’re apt to do me favors when I ask, long as I do the same for them.
And as luck would have it, this old oak had heard of me, and was in an accommodating sort of mood. So at my whispered query, the gnarled burl cracked along a dozen fault lines, and then it shivered and unfurled like an opening flower.
The space it revealed was almost as wide across as the tree trunk itself. The walls were perfectly smooth and followed the shape of the tree, vanishing off into shadowed recesses where branches forked off the trunk. Diffuse sunlight glowed from a dozen openings high above, no doubt hidden from outside view by careful ridges of bark. It wasn’t a particularly large room, but it was cozy, and someone had installed a battered old armchair with a generous stack of cushions, a reading lamp, a tiny table, and a cramped little bookshelf. There was just barely room for it all.
Hollow-heart trees are rare things. This was only my second time meeting one. No one knows how they’re formed, or if they do, they’re not telling. The space at the center of one is hidden from all manner of scrying, and there’s no way to get in or out except by the tree’s own leave.
I watched Gilda out of the corner of my eye as the oak tree opened up. Her eyes went wide, her mouth fell slightly open, her whole face went slack—she was as sincerely gobsmacked as Cinderella's family watching her try on that shoe.
Something else pinched her face. Hurt, I thought, and maybe anger. “Little sister’s got some secrets, huh?”
She shot me a dirty look for that. “So it would seem.”
I canted a grin at her. “Let’s go find out what they were.”
strange & grimm, which btw sounds like an urban fantasy affectionately parodic hardboiled detective agency. probably queer.
It was a hot, muggy night in the Enchanted Forest. Everyone with a lick of sense was down in the fairy glens, hoping the Winter Court would put in an appearance and bring a breeze on with them. Lucky me, I’m the sucker who fingered the Snow Queen for the missing persons case last winter, so I’m persona non grata in the fairy glens these days.
Just as well. I couldn’t afford to leave the office, not when it’d been so long since my last case. Though on a night like this, I might as well not bother. It was too hot for crime. Even the leaves on the enchanted trees were drooping in the heat.
I was just about to call it a night when a dame walked in my door. Tall, blonde, legs for days, with an air of tragedy that could put an unloved stepchild to shame. I looked her over suspiciously for any cheery woodland creatures hidden in her golden ringlets. If she was a princess, I’d turf her right back out of the office, case unheard. Princesses paid well, but they were more trouble than they were worth.
No mice poked their adorable little noses out of her pockets as the dame sank into a chair and fixed me with a hard look. “I hear you’re the best in the business,” she said without preamble. “And I need the best.”
I leaned back in my seat. “Baby, I’m the only one in the business. It’s not a good genre for private dicks.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes, far too child-friendly for any sort of dicks.” Before I could recover from that little gem, she went on, “It’s a child I’m here about. My sister. She’s…she’s gone missing.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Please, Detective, you’re my last hope. The royal courts won’t hear me out, they think she’s gone on the lam!”
I nodded grimly. “One of those Bo Peep situations, huh?” I get a depressing number of those. All it takes is one wolf in sheep’s clothing—you’d think the kids would learn.
The dame glared. There was enough cold iron in her gaze to put a fairy off her ambrosia. “On the lam, Detective. On the run. My sister has…something of a record.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Your sister the child? She some kind of crime prodigy?”
The dame fidgeted, looking away. “She’s…” She sighed explosively. “My sister is Goldilocks.”
I whistled, low and long. Crime prodigy indeed—Goldilocks was wanted in five kingdoms for the most impressive string of burglaries the Enchanted Forest had ever seen. No one could ever prove she’d done it, but the circumstantial evidence had piled up higher than mattresses on a pea. No wonder no royal court would take this case.
The dame’s shoulders hunched defensively, but she bulled on without trying to defend her wayward sister. “She’s gone missing, and I know it’s not another one of her sprees. Something is wrong this time.” She turned back to meet my eyes, her lovely features harsh with poorly-suppressed fear. “It’s her first crime come back to haunt her, I just know it is. They’ve always wanted revenge—especially the baby of the family, and he’s all grown up now. What they’d do if they got hold of her—“ She cut herself off with a watery gasp; her eyes were wet with tears. “Oh, it doesn’t bear thinking about!”
I handed her a handkerchief and gave her a minute to compose herself. It gave me a minute, too, to decide if I was really going to be this stupid. You don’t tangle with the big predators, not if you know what’s good for you, and especially not a whole family of them. Families are a dangerous thing in any genre.
But I was her last hope, and I’m a sucker for lost causes. And if I didn’t get paid soon, this business would become a lost cause itself. I said a silent farewell to my good sense as it packed its bags and left for kinder climes. “Alright,” I told the dame, “Give me the facts. We’ll see what kind of a story they tell.”
It wasn’t a sound that made Nancy look up. It wasn’t anything she knew how to name. If she’d had time to sit and analyze the feeling, she would have said it was a perfect certainty of death. Not that she was about to die, not that someone had died here, not anything so tied to cause and effect or to any specific person. Just death. The fact of it. The absoluteness of it.
The presence of it.
There was a massive black wolf standing just fifteen feet in front her, framed between smooth-barked trees of impossible girth. Its yellow eyes were trained on her with unblinking stillness, twin embers in its coal-black face.
Nancy’s breath caught in a strangled gasp. The wolf’s ears pricked forward at the noise.
Nancy’s mind went blank with fear. The whole world narrowed down to the wolf, poised in front of her with hunter’s stillness, watching her as intently as she was watching it.
It lowered its head, a hunter fixing on its prey, and took a step forward. Where its paw fell, a ring of blackness spread, eating at the leaf litter like a vicious acid, leaving behind a pitch-black circle of nothingness on the cold ground.
you KNOW I'm asking for more dark prince Sizhui, beloved son of my heart and also of the Burial Mounds.
p.s. re: tags I think you should continue posting random snippets rather than in order. It creates more of an effect like clips in a movie trailer, you know?
that's an extremely charming image, I love that, ok I will keep posting random snippets!
here is a snippet for you:
Jin Ling’s uncle was the greatest living expert on fighting demonic cultivators. Jin Ling knew without having ever quite been told that this was something his uncle hated, but felt obligated to maintain. What Jin Ling didn’t know was why exactly he felt this obligation, though he had a number of very good guesses.
He’d tried asking his mother, more than once, why Jiang Cheng spent so much time doing things that made him so angry. Whenever he did, she would just give him a small, tight smile, the kind he knew concealed a great well of old, old anger, and say something about duty. (Except one time, just after Jin Ling had turned ten, when his mother and his uncle had been fighting—on that day, Jin Ling’s mother had snarled with rare sarcasm, “Such a generous inheritance our mother left behind for her children.”)
time to get some writing done! you know the drill, pick a wip from the list and I'll write 3 sentences or 15 minutes, whichever takes longer. if you want to join the game, make your own post and tag me, and we'll trade writing back and forth!
blakekathryn
pixelskylines
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
