Writemas event by @agirlandherquill - join in, if you like; it's an open invite! 😊
My chosen prompt: A throne room
Ivah's hand is cold where it holds her face, thumb pressed to her jaw, fingers curled under her chin, tilting her head back. Her grip isn't hard enough to bruise, just hard enough to keep her from looking away. To keep her attention, hold eye contact.
"Repeat what I just said back to me."
It's not a foolproof method.
When Lark just looks at her blankly, Ivah drops her face with a huff, one long fingernail catching slightly as she turns away.
"As we seem to have reached the end of your attention span this morning, you are dismissed."
Lark is out of the training room almost before Ivah has completed the sentence.
Breakfast was hours ago. She knows where she'll find her father at this time of day.
Fleetfooted, and with just a touch of subtlety magic, she makes her way to the throne room.
No one turns around when she walks in, and the only person who seems to notice her entrance is the one she wants to see her.
King Sorin Alires -- he makes eye contact with her briefly before returning his full attention to the person talking to him.
She finds a spot in the back and makes herself comfortable.
My chosen prompts: a forest, the silence of nature/He whistled to the darkness, and for the first time in his life, the unknown whistled back/the stirring of darkness.
Thorn has never walked in a forest so silent.
It's unnerving, wrong.
Silence means predator, means danger.
He ducks into the hollow of a tree, hopes that the plant life growing around the roots will hide him a bit. Instinctively, he starts to hold his breath, but makes himself breathe quietly, so quietly, through his mouth instead.
Now that he's all but silent himself, he hears what he hadn't before: footsteps.
Something brushing through branches and across tree trunks. Something else swishing through the ground cover.
He almost starts holding his breath again when a dragon trods into his line of sight.
It's not as big as he'd always expected one to be. Its tail is about as long as its neck and body combined, and it's kind of ... leafy looking. Verdant green, with wings that look like they're meant to spread at least as wide as it is long.
It's pretty.
***
Jade doesn't remember how or why they all got separated.
All she knows is that she's alone, in a dark, cold, damp cave, and she has no idea where her friends are.
She whistles into the darkness, an exercise in keeping her breath steady and calm.
For the first time in her short life, the darkness whistles back.
She stops walking, hardly daring to breathe for a long minute. Then, she whistles. Two notes: high, then low.
Two notes back: low, then high.
She sounds four notes, this time: high-low, low-high.
Low-high, high-low.
Jade steps forward again, cautiously. "Hello?"
Something in the darkness stirs, and she can't make out anything except big, and spikes, as if the cave itself is moving.
She takes a deep breath, forces herself to plant her feet. Whatever this is may be bigger than her, but she will not let herself be cowed. It obviously has some level of higher thought processes, to communicate with her through whistling like that. It can take a second and decide not to eat her.
How ... Interesting.
She looks up -
And up -
A dragon, black as night and flecked with luminescent spots that look like stars.
Writemas day 5!!! (I know it's late, shhhhhh xP I will get back on track with these at some point, maybe lol)
My chosen prompt: "...What have you done?"
It takes him far too long to realize that something is wrong.
But he has an entire country to run, and Lark has always been a bright, cheerful kid.
Paltry excuses in the face of his kid's wellbeing, but that's what he's got.
As long as it takes him to realize, though, he's not nearly so slow to confront the cause.
"What have you done to my daughter?"
Ivah pauses what she's doing to look up at him, one eyebrow arched. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."
"Don't play your games with me, Ivah. What is wrong with Lark?"
She puts down her pen and folds her hands on top of whatever she'd been writing, tilting her head just slightly to the side. "There is no game here. Why do you think there's something wrong with her? She seems ... cheerful. Happier than she's been in a while."
And that's exactly the problem. She's just returned after having been abducted, taken from her home and brought to a foreign, potentially hostile land. The only thing that kept her from harsher treatment was her age.
Yet she doesn't seem to remember any of it. The abduction itself. How her time away from home was spent. How she got home. Anything at all.
Something here is terribly wrong, and he doesn't know how to fix any of it.
My chosen prompts: "Can we fix this?", an empty road, the dead of night/"Can you forgive me?", the cusp of dawn/the strength of a supporting hand
(Just to be clear: I am Aware I don't need to go back & do days I've missed (though I am gonna go & do days 5 & 6 at some point), but it drives me up the wall to have skipped/missing days & my intention has been to figure out one particular WIP at least partially through this challenge, so I'm going to, at least, do my best lol)
The road is long, and dark, and empty. Thankfully.
Lark stumbles, nearly taking herself and Kit to the ground before regaining her balance. "Sorry, are you okay?" Voice just a bit too loud.
Kit hushes her, not quite harshly. After a moment, she says: "I'm good. Let's keep going."
The others are a way ahead of them. No one particularly wants her leading them anywhere. Especially not in the dark.
She can't find it within herself to blame them.
She adjusts her hold around Kit's waist, takes a deep breath, and starts walking again.
"Do you think you guys will be able to forgive me? Can I ... can I fix it?" She doesn't try to look at Kit's face as she asks.
They walk in silence, focusing on their feet. What they can see of the road in the light of the partial moon.
Eventually: "I don't know what the others think, but ... I don't know that you need to fix anything. You kept secrets for a long time, but ... everything that just happened wasn't on you."
Lark blinks. Almost stumbles again, caught between the instinct to pause and the knowledge that she can't. "I lied to all of you. I don't know what I told them." I still want to go home.
The arm Kit has over her shoulders flails a bit before it manages to shift, pat her shoulder, kind of. "You're thirteen, and they're the ones that raised you. She ... what did she do, actually? What kind of magic was that?"
"I don't ... I can guess, but ..." She hesitates. "It's not anything I'm really familiar with."
Vague. Shoddy. Shady. Not entirely dishonest, but far from truthful.
They should stop. Leave her behind. Go back to Floya without her. Tell Raz and Flynn that something went terribly wrong.
Tell them the truth.
"We'll just have to research, then." Kit sounds far too cheerful for someone who has to be in so much pain. "I know we're not as big on magic as Dascua is, but there've gotta be some resources. Mind magic, yeah?"
Lark sighs. "Yeah. Mind magic."
They walk until the horizon starts to turn pink, then move to find a place to rest.
My chosen prompts: His knuckles were bruised and bloody & a dungeon
They woke up slowly, one at a time, in a dark, dank room.
A cell.
No guard outside the bars keeping them in. The only windows too narrow and too high to see out of, let alone fit through. The light coming through is pathetically dim, sad and blue-grey.
Mac kicks at the bars before wrapping his hands around a couple of them. That's when he notices: his knuckles are bruised and bloody.
"Uh. Guys?" He lets go of the bars and turns around to face the others. "What exactly did we do before they threw us in here?"
Kit scoffs, folding her arms over her chest. "We tried to get Lark back. I have no idea what they did to hr, but she acted like she had no idea who we were!"
He holds his hands up to show off the state of them. "Who did I punch?"
