Share the first line from each chapter of your current Work In Progress.
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Spoilers for Stolen, Book One of the Stolen Stories beneath the cut...
Taglist for Takeover/Stolen Stories Content:
@josephinegerardywriter and @strangerays
A gold coin pulled from the nobleman's pocket.
It had been a long couple of weeks for Stella.
Toss... catch.
The pre-arranged meeting point Hawk had told her about wasn't easy to get to when you weren't familiar with the winding back streets of Antillune, but Hawk had insisted Stella memorised the route before she left her room at the inn.
If someone had told Reilly that morning, that the thief who broke into his guild would walk into his tavern the same afternoon, prepared to sell the plans they'd stolen back to him, he'd have laughed in their face.
After Mosswolf had left the previous evening, Stella had only stayed upright long enough to unstrap her new weapons, lock the door and shed her clothes before collapsing into the soft mattress and clean sheets.
Reilly had left Stella and Dara having breakfast, more convinced than ever that there was a Vine agent inside his guild.
Stella hadn't planned on creating a routine for herself, but when she woke for the second day in a row, huddled in warm, soft sheets with the rising sun glinting through her window and waking her slowly, she began making plans for the day that looked suspiciously like a routine.
The moment Stella walked into the training room, Andy made a beeline for her, startling the blonde by wrapping her in a hug.
The door that Nilion had told her about was easy to find, but she hesitated.
Stella woke with the sun the following morning, and for several long minutes simply let herself lay in the softness and warmth.
As was his habit, when falling asleep on one of the window seats scattered around the guild building, Reilly woke when the sun moved low enough in the sky to stop soaking him in warmth.
Reilly wasn't really asking, his voice demanding an answer to his question.
Stella had found Dara quickly.
Reilly woke slowly, and issued a soft groan at the aches he could feel in his body before he even attempted to open his eyes.
The door that Dara's room was situated behind looked, to Stella, no different than any of the dozen others in the same hallway, but Reilly knocked against it confidently and it quickly swung open to reveal the part-ogre glaring down at the guild master.
Working together, it was only took Myris and Stella a couple of weeks to finish putting together a completed alchemical formulae and, as she had promised, Stella let Myris take charge of their notes to brew and test the concoction, instead of handing the information straight to Reilly.
The three of them moved through the shadows of the city quietly, and entirely unseen.
The speed Stella had moved out of the path of the arrow had stunned Reilly into inaction.
When Andy and Stella stepped back through the doors of the guild, the moon was high in the sky, and Dara was pacing the front hall anxiously.
When Myris opened the door, the first word that sprang to Stella's mind was 'drained', quickly followed by 'exhausted', but the wizard summoned a small, genuine smile when he laid warm brown eyes on her face, and quickly beckoned her into his lab.
Andy and Stella went straight for the Verdant Hound tavern the first night, securing the property so that they'd have some warning if anyone tried entering the building while they slept, and then the first day the two women began testing the limits of the Leaves.
"It's really simple Mosswolf," Jabe continued, and the crackle of energy in the air again made Stella shiver, "I ask you questions... you don't even have to answer because my spell's going to capture all the information that flows into your head... then, when I go through the questions for the second time, the spell will compel you to speak the information it captured the first time, and you won't be able to stop yourself."
Reilly's injuries meant that it took them longer to get back to the Verdant Hound than the small blonde beneath his arm had predicted, and all three of them had consumed another Leaf of Tidak before they were finally able to stagger into the tavern.
It had taken close to two hours, and several breaks for food and warm teas while with wizard rested, before Myris declared Reilly as healed as he was going to get, hands shaking with exhaustion even as he signed the message to the room, Tanar translating while stepping forward and helping his husband into the second chair.
[Skipped for Spoilers]
Reilly's jaw clenched tight, anger pushing him to advance again, but [Redacted's] grasp on Stella's arm tightened and the woman hissed sharply, the sound instantly stilling Reilly's movements before he'd even made a conscious decision to stop and reconsider.
Stella hadn't seen much of Reilly since their sick-bed discussion when he'd invited her to officially join the guild, and if she was being honest with herself Stella hadn't gone out of her way to look for the elf either.
Stella didn't need to look particularly hard at [Redacted's] face to know he intended to kill her, and she shifted one foot back prepared to run once more, but it was Andy that halted her movements.
Dara hammering on the door to his rooms should have been Reilly's first clue that all of his plans were about to get cast to the watery depths of the Tillune Ocean.
Reilly swallowed hard, staring at the scarring for a long moment in silence, questions bubbling up in his mind like a volcano preparing to erupt.
Stella was relieved to have Dara join them a short while later.
