As I do. It’s really lovely to be able to hang out with my Wrimo crew from a few years back again, and it’s showing in my writing! (That may also be the procrastination talking, though...what final on Monday?)
Project: Stonecast
Status: Complete Draft 1
Word Count: 10 232/50 000
Excerpt:
The minutes count down to midnight, one year to the day after she had made her fateful Casting. Zolenna stares, hypnotized, at the hourglass sand as it trickles through and down, each grain another second of time she had not expected to have. She listens fiercely, as though she will hear the crackling of the flame and the screams of the dying, as though the blood and torment in the vision would not have taken hours to cause…
The last few grains of sand trickle into the bottom of the glass, and nothing has happened. She lives in a room alone now, after spending most of the last year dedicating herself only to her craft and being granted a higher status because of it. But she imagines that in her old room, the other girls still breathe evenly in their sleep. There is no fire. There is no blood. It has been one year, and she is alive.
And this...cannot be possible. The hourglass has run out on the year she had left, and she is still breathing. No smoke fills the air. No screams shatter the quiet of the dark hours. There are no crackling flames, no spreading blood on the stone floors of the library. The keep is the same as it has ever been, and she does not know what to do.
---
It’s pretty rough but it’s there, is the thing.
Tag list: @writekaywrite @tinbramble (I don’t think I’ve been tagging anyone else in this? I’m not sure? idk.)
Good morning! I have literally nothing to say for myself.
Project: Stonecast and other various writings
Status: Draft 1 complete
Word Count: 153,902/50,000
Excerpt:
Where is Li?
She sits up, or tries to--her body barely lets her shift a few inches up before it gives out on her and she collapses back down. With a surprised hiss, she tries again. This time she can’t really force herself up at all.
“Shh,” says a voice from an angle outside of her range. Zolenna’s body doesn’t even move, but the shock of the unexpected sound--it’s not Li. It’s a stranger.
“You’re all right,” the voice continues, a little too patiently. “Your friend is here, too, worrying themselves sick about you. Everything is fine. You just need to stay still and be quiet.”
The owner of the voice appears in the corner of Zolenna’s vision, closing in until she can finally make out features. Sharp, is the first thing that comes to mind--the jut of her chin, the blade of her nose, the prominent cheekbones and darting smile. Her hair is short and as black as Zolenna’s own, though it has more curl than hers.
She looks...familiar, somehow. Not her actual face. Zolenna knows she does not know this girl. But her features, the way she looks. She looks like many of the students Zolenna has known in the past.
“Your friend says that you’re travelers here, and that the desert is outside of your usual range. I would say that sounds about accurate.” She smiles again, but there’s no humour in it. “If you weren’t, you would know better than to go out and fiddle with the night cactuses. They don’t take kindly to it.”
Her lips part slightly, but what comes out instead of a question is really more of a breath. The stranger seems to understand, though, because she smiles and shrugs. “You’re not going to die,” she says, which wasn’t really what Zolenna wanted to know--after all, she is going to die, if all goes as planned. It’s just a question of when. She wants to know if Li is all right, what happened to them, how they got here. Those sorts of things.
“That’s just how night cactus works,” the stranger says calmly, completely ignoring Zolenna’s pointed mental questions in a way that seems very rude. “It starts with hallucinations. Then paralysis. Then muscle weakness. I saw you move a little, so I know we’re getting through to the last part. Once that’s over, you should start to feel like yourself again.” She briskly adjusts the thin sheet before resting a hand just above Zolenna’s forehead. Not actually touching her. Li must have asked them not to.
She has never appreciated Li enough.
--
Tag list: @writekaywrite @tinbramble @toboldlywrite (I think?)
I’ve finished Stonecast so my last update will probably be on some other writings I am doing, but hey, we’re moving!
So things have been...rough, lately. I’ll continue to do these when I can but my twice-a-month schedule (what is weekly? never heard of her) may be disrupted for the next little bit as I deal with family things and school suddenly getting mean again.
For now, enjoy the moment Ebony knew she fucked up.
From Part 2, Chapter 3.
----
The minute she’s back within the great walls of Novus Aevum, Ebony makes a beeline for the great black stone. If she’s fast, maybe she’ll make it there before Ayra does. They’re supposed to meet there anyway, but Ebony wants to talk to--
the Saint--
--the woman in the stone first.
It looks just the same as it had before, but to Ebony’s ear it seems to hum softly on her arrival. Pulses of warmth seem to leak from it as she gets closer; it moves, subtly, beating like some great heart. That should be creepy. (It is, a little.) But she knows why it’s happening and tries not to think about it.
She approaches slowly, as though it might startle and flee if she moves too fast, the way deer in the forest had when she was a child. She’s always too fast, everyone says so. Gently, she lays a hand on the warm smooth stone. Hello? she thinks, experimentally.
I am here, says a voice, soft and far away. It’s both like and not-like the one from the desert; it’s the woman who lives in the stone now, not the one who’d lived in the world then. Smoother. Colder. A little lower, like she hasn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time. What do you wish to ask?
There’s so much she wants to ask that she doesn’t know where to start. But she’s been given a quest now, hasn’t she? She has a duty. I have to find him, she says, for Aza to be safe. Her free hand curls around the flute that she’d shoved into a pocket.
It takes a little while, but when the Saint speaks next, her voice comes through much more clearly. She says, Where you saw him first will give you all the answers you need. I’m sorry. That’s all the Timescape can tell me. The rest is up to you.
That is some bullshit. Is that what you said to them? Ebony demands, her stomach tightening as she thinks of the youngest of the Visionaries, the only one who’d looked her in the eye that whole day. Why didn’t you stop him? They were your chosen! Why didn’t you save them?
There’s an even longer silence. The Saint’s reply, when it comes, is slightly hesitant. She sounds, Ebony’s afraid to think, confused. The Shards are my chosen. I would have saved her, had she not saved herself first.
Not her. I know you’d have saved her. The Visionaries--the ones who died--the Order says... She trails off, abruptly afraid of what she might hear.
The...what?
Ebony is rapidly getting a very bad feeling. Well, it’s been a long time since the Saint spoke to anyone. Maybe the name changed, or the language is different now--anything to explain why the Saint doesn’t seem to know what she’s talking about. Your worshippers?
My what.
---
...oops.
Tag list: @writekaywrite @toboldlywrite @tinbramble @scribble-dee-vee @lady-redshield-writes
(as always, let me know if you’d like to be tagged or untagged!)
I’m just not even going to try to explain myself anymore. I am a Mess of a human and that is just how it is sometimes.
From Part 1, Chapter 4.
---
“We’ve known each other twelve years.” Ebony rocks back on her heels, tilting her head back to look more easily up into Aza’s face. “I’ve seen you in my dreams for most of my life.”
“We’ve known each other for three days,” Aza corrects gently. “The church saw to that.” She slides off the edge of the bed so that she and Ebony are once again closer to level. It’s like the time she’d made light in the dark hallway as a child--natural, unthinking. “You deserve to be free, if leaving here is your wish. I would not hold you down.”
“You weren’t listening.” Ebony realizes she’s still holding Aza’s hands, but she can’t bring herself to let go, not until Aza hears her. “I was waiting. I didn’t know it, but I’m sure now that I was waiting for you. I didn’t remember meeting you when we were kids, not until I saw you again, but I’ve dreamed of you for years. I never believed in that kind of stuff, but I--I think I’m supposed to be here, to help you get out, to do whatever comes next. I don’t think you could hold me down.”
That feral quality has left Aza’s eyes, and now they just look sad and haunted. “Well,” she says softly, “we have time to decide all of that. For now, I think your plan is a good one. We have to deal with the Visionaries first, and then...and then we can talk about what happens after.”
It’s not a yes, but it’s not exactly a no either. Ebony decides to leave it for now, but plan as though she’ll be coming. Even if they don’t end up sticking together once they get there, it’s not as though she knows where else to take Aza if it comes down to it.
“When can you be ready?” Aza asks even as she finishes thinking it.
She wants to say now, now, let’s go right now, fuck the plan I can get you out today. But some last vestige of common sense rears its head. “I have to make sure everyone’s ready and on the same page,” she says, “and I have to get Petranna the security system schematics. If...let’s say day after tomorrow. Can you be ready by then?”
Aza smiles at her, but it’s sad. She gestures around the room. “What would I possibly have to take with me?”
It’s as empty as it’s ever been, cold and sad behind all the brilliant white of it. For a moment, Ebony thinks she sees what it must have been like, to be here all this time with no one on her side. The urgent need to get her out rises again, swelling, choking her with its desperation. The feeling is her own, mostly, but also somehow not. (She’s not usually this emotional. It’s not usually safe.)
“Day after tomorrow,” she promises instead of letting the rush of emotion out. “I’ll come get you. We’ll find the Visionaries and we’ll handle it. And after that we’ll...we’ll decide what to do. Okay?”
Aza’s hands gently cup her face, touching her with a tenderness she’s never felt before. “After,” she agrees. “I’ll be waiting for you then. Be careful, Ebony. And…” she trails off for a moment, then says, “and thank you for coming to find me again.”
---
remember when I thought it would take most of the book for them to register their Feelings? I remember.
Tag list: @writekaywrite @tinbramble @scribble-dee-vee @toboldlywrite @lady-redshield-writes
With the quarantine situation you would think I’d be writing more. Spoiler alert: I am not writing more. (Let’s blame it on finals season, okay?)
From Part 1, Chapter 8--just a short lil nugget while I try to convince myself that quarantine does not equal sleeping 24/7.
TW: death
---
“I don’t even know who you are.” Aza says the worst part, the saddest part, as the woman suddenly chokes. The knife drops from her hands as she grabs at her chest, sputters, gags.
The Hearrteshard grants her time tricks. Time tricks like separating one part of a person’s body to a different time period than the rest. Time tricks like holding a heart and lungs frozen in time while the rest of the body tries to work without them. She watches what she’s doing even as her heart twists and some part of her mind begs her to look away, to let the woman go and be done with it all. Certainly if she does, she will die, and that—
If she dies, Other dies. If she dies, the woman may still be here when Ebony and her friends come back. She can’t afford to let her go, can’t only freeze her in time for a few minutes and run. She can’t--no, she won’t--exchange the lives of the people who saved her for someone who’d come here to kill.
The woman’s struggles slow, weaken. Cease.
She can kill if she has to. It’s not something she likes knowing about herself, and she likes it less having done it. But she isn’t ashamed. Only sad.
You did what you had to do, Other tells her, and it’s some comfort to know they understand, but it doesn’t really make it better.
“I’m sorry,” she says to the body on the floor, as though that means anything at all, and picks up the ticket she’d copied while she waited.
She considers leaving a note for Ebony, letting her know where she’d gone, but decides against it. It’s too likely that someone else will get here first. Unless…
Quickly, she picks up the paper she’d cut her ticket out of. On the scrap remaining, she writes, I wanted to go with you, but I will still see you there.
Ebony will know what it means.
On her way out the door, she puts Ebony’s ticket back into her bag. No sense in making her look for it. She closes the door politely behind her, and then she’s out. The feeling of the early morning air on her skin is overwhelming; the space around her is so wide that she can see for miles. Suddenly she feels very small, and very scared.
Her Hearrte pulses warm beneath her skin.
She turns right, following the dawn, and starts walking.
---
Aza: is emblem of innocence and purity
also Aza: commits forgery and second-degree murder within literal hours of leaving the church
...the duality of man
Tag list: @writekaywrite @toboldlywrite @tinbramble @lady-redshield-writes @scribble-dee-vee
tox is coming tox is coming tox is coming
I’m fine this is all fine. midterms are going Great, thanks!
From Part 1, Chapter 8.
---
Before they can begin the ritual that will allow her into the Timescape, she’s interrupted.
Aza, deep in the middle of her meditation, has no reason to be afraid of this presence. “I wondered if this would be enough to bring you here,” she says, most of her attention still in the Hearrtespace. He won’t see it. He never does.
“I come to warn you—” His voice booms through the Hearrtespace with the sort of godly presence that she thinks would probably drive his followers to their knees. He has such a love of showmanship, she thinks with annoyance that would normally be more fond, but she has no time to spend on him today. Why waste it on her when he could reach out to his Rhetorics, who would be suitably impressed?
“Oh hush,” she says. “We’ve known one another too long for that, have we not, Morce?”
“Do you think they have stopped hunting you?” he demands, but the booming presence has reduced itself to a more ordinary male voice. “Why are you here?”
She and Morce, the Defuists’ Artificial God, have at best an uneasy relationship. She’s still not entirely sure how he can reach her at all, what ability of his allows him to speak through the Hearrtespace and to her. (She resents it sometimes, wonders why he speaks to her occasionally when the Saint never does.) He, on the other hand, has always been very insistent that she should escape, should free herself from the confines of the Order and the church and all the rest of it. What she should do once she’s out, he’s never actually said.
She hopes he’s happy now.
“Isn’t this where you wanted me to be?” she asks, trying not to let the bitterness show and knowing she’s failing. “Out of the Church? Away from all of it?”
“That was only the first step,” he tells her, without so much as an attempt to pretend he’s sorry for her grief. She hadn’t really expected anything more. Gods, real or false, don’t tend to concern themselves with the feelings of mere vessels. The Saint’s silence, Morce’s annoying (if occasional) pressure, it all comes from the same source. But she owes the Saint her loyalty. Morce is another matter.
“I am not your vessel,” she hisses through her teeth. Her emotions are wobbling on a dangerous edge, and she has to take a breath that she shouldn’t need in order to compose herself. “You have vessels, you have--you have the Rhetorics, and your people. You don’t need me. If you have plans ask one of them--”
Morce never actually makes any sounds aside from speaking directly, not like Other does. He doesn’t huff or grumble or sigh, or if he does, she doesn’t hear it. But she gets the feeling of a sigh when he says, “You are the only one who can do this task.”
She doesn’t know what this task is, but she is also very sure she doesn’t want to. There is already too much going on, and she is only one person. Collecting all the grace and poise she has been trained in all her life, she replies, “Then perhaps it isn’t for you to manage. I am not yours to command, Morce. Please leave me alone. I need to See.”
He pauses, then says, “Once you have found your way away from here, we will speak again.” Like she had never objected at all.
---
Tag list! @writekaywrite @tinbramble @toboldlywrite @scribble-dee-vee @lady-redshield-writes
I have been. so good at this. /s A smaller snippet today as I am busy panic studying.
From Part 1, Chapter 2.
---
Of course. Speed-training a girl rather than seeing if an older, more fully trained boy might have the ability, all to preserve the Saint’s purity, Ebony thinks with a roll of her eyes. The Saint is dead; do they really think she cares who she talks to in the afterlife? What would it matter to a being thousands and thousands of years old? Why would she care, after all this time? Do they think she’s isolating herself from others in Crai, too, just to keep herself pure?
(She does not think about Aza, trapped in a white stone room for the majority of her life to keep her pure and safe. She does not think about the way Aza’s eyes lit up when she’d asked if she wanted to go outside.)
The priest’s attention shifts away, apparently having decided that Ebony and Petranna are just being annoying rather than actively harmful by whispering in the back. So Ebony takes a quick breath and shifts her head so that her lips can’t be easily seen by anyone else in the room. “So, this heist,” she begins, and sees Petranna roll her eyes.
“I thought we were done with that.”
“I’m not done with it until it happens.” She means for it to come out like a joke, like she’s teasing, but it doesn’t sound that way. It’s too flat, too terrifyingly earnest. Petranna must hear that, because the joking light leaves her face.
“Tell me.”
“There’s…” she trails off. How best to explain Aza? “There’s something, something in church.” Why not tell her everything? “Someone in the church.”
“That’s not a heist, Ebony,” Petranna says, frowning. “If it’s like a teenager or something who wants to leave the Order but whose parents suck, that’s kind of above our pay grade, isn’t it? I can look up contacts, I guess…”
Ebony shakes her head. “I don’t think she has parents. At least not any that are still around. They keep her here.”
“No one lives in the church—”
“She does. I’ve seen the room. There’s not even a fucking window in there, Petranna. She never gets to leave. She’s asked to. They won’t let her. She’s our age and she’s never been out of the church.”
Petranna looks deeply troubled. For a second, Ebony is afraid that she’s going to open her mouth and her father’s words are going to come out, you’re crazy, there’s something wrong with you, how could you think I’d believe there’s some kid locked up in the church? Her shoulders creep up slightly, the defensive words already leaping their way to her mouth, but before she can actually say them Petranna tucks away the bit of hair that’s come loose from her neat braided bun and says, “If she lives in the church, and you want to take her out of it, where will she go, Ebony? Assuming you can actually make a plan, stick to it, and it works, where are you going to take her to?”
She hasn’t thought about what happens after. “I don’t know if she wants to leave forever,” she admits. “I haven’t...asked.”
“So you want to steal her out of the church using some undoubtedly highly convoluted and ridiculous plan, and then you want to use an equally convoluted and ridiculous plan to put her back?” Petranna sighs and lifts her eyes to the heavens as though asking for guidance. “Ebby, you know I love you terribly. But this is the exact reason you should never be allowed to plan heists. Or anything else.”
-----
...but will you do it though, that’s the real question
Tag list: @writekaywrite, @tinbramble, @toboldlywrite, @scribble-dee-vee, @lady-redshield-writes
...it’s fine this is all fine. (Who knew being social would be so exhausting.)
From Part 1, Chapter 1.
-------
“Go into the office,” her father directs, his voice stretched taut with a frustration that’s as familiar to her as the words themselves. “I will speak to you there.”
Ebony grins carelessly, shrugs, and says, “What’s the point?” She can risk it now, because he has to go in to services and doesn’t have time to rake her over the coals for it. With an insouciant little wave, she turns away and strolls down the hall, tucking her free hand into the pocket of her jeans. Once she’s turned the corner, the lazy grin curls into a small, hard, angry smile. She’s not going to go sit in the office and wait for him. She doesn’t know why he bothers to tell her what to do anymore.
Six months, three weeks and four days until her twentieth birthday. Then she’ll finally be old enough to be out on her own, and no one will be able to tell her she can’t go. Oh, maybe they’ll try, but she’s got her route planned and her escape hatch ready. Maybe in time she’ll write Aaron, let him know where she’s settled. Or maybe not. Most of the closeness they’d shared as kids is gone now, as Aaron grows more and more like their father every day, and Ebony…
She shrugs to herself. She grows farther and farther away.
The steps, oddly-shaped and broad as they are, are easy for her to navigate even when her thoughts are miles and miles away--across the country, in fact, in Novus Aevum where the Order of the Saint has no particular foothold and the city spreads so wide that she could fade into the background there all her life if she wanted. She doesn’t want, of course. In time she’ll make herself something, she’ll make a name for herself, she’ll be more, she’ll show them all--but first, she’s smart enough to know she needs some time to heal. Novus Aevum seems right for the purpose.
Tucking a bit of her loose hair behind her ear--she’s long since given up tying it back or doing it up as is appropriate for the church--she turns left instead of right towards the offices, heading towards the relic room. She’s in and out of there all the time now, in direct defiance of her father’s orders. Words are just words, and he can’t lock her out; she’d learned how to pick these old locks by the time she was twelve. He can say that she’ll destroy them all he wants; she doesn’t think the Saint is so fragile that an unhappy teenager can erode Her presence, and it’s the only place in the church or the town that gives her any sort of peace or happiness.
The forest had, once, before they’d cut the old trees down to make room for more houses in the area, before they’d uprooted that ancient stone and carted it Goddess only knew where. But that’s long gone now. She breathes through the bitterness that always rises in her throat when she thinks of it, and starts walking towards the door of the relic room.
Then she stops, startled. There’s a crack in the wall of the hallway. She’d been through here a couple of days ago, and there’d been no such crack then. Stranger yet, the crack is straight up and down, a perfect vertical line of only a hair’s width. It’s too perfect to be natural, and only goes up about five and a half, maybe six feet before…
It’s a door. It’s a secret door.
Tentatively, she takes a step towards it, hooks her nails into that hair-thin crack, and nudges it to the side. It gives easily, too easily to be an unused storeroom or something, and slides away to reveal a dark hallway. Her eyes widen as she stares down it, noting the hairpin turn at the far end. Something tugs at the back of her mind, some vague memory long since shoved aside. She shakes it away, trying to understand what she’s seeing. She’s been through all the passageways of the church, has been in and out of parts of the church that no one else even knows about, but this is new even to her. There’s a new hallway! Finally, her adventurous spirit catches up with her surprise. There’s a hallway she hasn’t seen. She’s got to explore it.
Blowing a strand of hair out of her eyes, she pulls a tiny, cheap pocket flashlight out of her pocket and presses it three times, varying the intensity each time, until at last it turns on. She smiles to herself, but it’s a little sad. Her special flashlight still works, and even if it’s a bitter reminder of better times, she’s not willing to give it up. With a deep breath, she heads down the hallway.
There’s no wall sconces, no lights or torches to relieve the blackness that the hall is plunged into, and that’s weird enough in and of itself, but Ebony can’t shake the feeling that she knows this place. That she’s been here before. She takes rights and lefts as though by instinct, her little light sputtering but staying on, and her frown deepening with every step.
She knows this path, after all. She’s been here before. But when, and why? How could she have forgotten it, when she spends so much time wandering the secret passages of the church? What makes this one so different that it’s not even on the blueprints that her father keeps in the church office?
Distracted by the questions she’s posing to herself, she doesn’t look where she’s going, and her thoughts are interrupted when she runs headfirst into another wall. “Ow!” Jerking back, she shakes herself, questing fingers going up to the aching spot on her forehead. She shines the light on the wall that had had the temerity to get in her way. Then her eyebrows lift in surprise. It’s not a wall after all; more of those hair-fine cracks show around the edges, and through them there’s some faint light. It’s another door.
“You will,” suddenly echoes in her mind like the last remnants of some strange dream, and she frowns. What does that mean? Blinking the strange thought away, she reaches for the door with an internal shrug. Might as well see what’s back here, after coming all this way and injuring herself for it.
As her fingers close around the knob, it turns from the other side, and a soft voice says, “Hello?”
She knows that voice. “Um. Hi?”
The door swings inward as someone steps around it, and Ebony has to squint against the light that dazzles her eyes even after only a few minutes in the dark. The voice is almost laughing when it says, “Yes.”
Her eyes clear, and the first thing that crosses her suddenly dazzled mind as she looks at the girl standing in the doorway is oh no, she’s gorgeous.
The second thing is I’ve seen her before.
She’s seen this face in her dreams for years and years, has listened to her tell stories of the Saint and of the history of the world. Seen her translating old words in a fine and careful hand, brows drawn together with concentration as the words whisper between them. Seen her kneeling, head bowed, hands held out in front of her with a long hunting knife laid flat across her palms as though offering it to no one Ebony could see.
But none of it compares to seeing her in real life.
---------------
So school has already overwhelmed me (welcome back Week 1 :D) and I was traveling so I missed last week, but I will be trying very hard to keep up this schedule as best I can!
Tag list: @writekaywrite @toboldlywrite @lady-redshield-writes @scribble-dee-vee (I’m sorry I forgot you’d asked to be tagged in Hearrtesverse!!!), @tinbramble
