#snowspring

[flameclan-clangen]

fireshiver, what were your parents like?

[oakantony]

Since I may be self publishing, I’m trying to pick up making personal character art again. It’s been over 3 years since I’ve done something like this. Rusty but not hopeless, I suppose 😭

(left: Ren, right: Bram. They’re brothers!)

[oakantony]

Do y'all wanna know more about Snowspring :3

[oakantony]

This book is so complicated too. I'm weaving in so many things together. Different characters, different threads, different times. The book takes place 20 years after an initial explosive incident (the scene from my last post) and then we get flashbacks as we come to understand how this event changed the lives of everyone living in the kingdom.

Ahhhhhhhh.

[oakantony]

Aro snorted. “You’ve got greed in your soul.”

Cole didn’t want to disagree, but if any part of her contained greed, it was her elven half. “I don’t understand.”

“You asked a guard for Bled. They reported it to me, of course. I guess you already miss smoking Flower?”

Cole tried to keep her brows from pinching together. “No. But the deal with Oberon meant—”

There was a great and sudden ringing and Cole only understood she’d been struck when a wash of blood filled her lips. A cough burst out from her and she found herself laid out upon the craggy stone ground, too stunned to feel the blow at first. “You’ll call him Godking in and out of my presence,” said Aro from above her, hovering to look into Cole’s face. She winked. “Say yes.”

Cole tried to speak and another cough sprayed blood into the air. She nodded, however, and managed a wheezing and weak, “Yes.” She sat up at the same moment the pain erupted between her eyes. Her nose bled sluggishly and she pressed fingers against her nostrils and winced immediately at the pain the glancing touch caused. 

“You heal quick like an elf or slow like a mortal?” asked Aro, holding out a hand for Cole to take.

Cole coughed again, sniffed, and felt blood rush down the back of her throat. She gagged and Aro sighed in obvious impatience. Cole slammed her free hand into Aro’s. “Fast,” Cole said, once on her feet.

“Huh. Oli too?”

“No,” Cole said. “Not Oli.”

“He really is human, huh?”

“Yes,” Cole said. Already her nose began to slow its deluge. She sniffed hard, trying to keep from splattering even more matter across her stained white dress, and winced at the pain. 

“Your grandmother hit you like that, right?” Aro started to walk again, and though she didn’t tell Cole to follow, she did so, obediently.

“That’s right,” Cole said.

“I could tell. You react like someone that’s been hit before. No tears.”

“Maybe it just didn’t hurt that much.”

Aro’s laugh squealed through the hall. “I really do like you. Funny, pretty girl.” She said, “You’ve been with an elf before, right?”

“In the presence of one? None before Calbram the Crow,” Cole said.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Aro, slowing as she reached an arched wooden door. “I was just thinking it’d be pretty funny for me to fuck Agnault’s daughter.” She swung it open and made a sweeping motion for Cole to enter. “Since I’m the one that beheaded him all those years ago. But I guess elves aren’t your type.”

Cole could no longer walk. She couldn’t enter the room. She could do nothing but stare, wide-eyed, into Aro’s half-hidden face.

Aro made another gesture, instructing Cole to move. “This is one of our studies. Guards use it to test weapons or isolate prisoners. We’re gonna use it to test your gift. You don’t need to be afraid. It shouldn’t hurt, unless you do something to make me punch you again.”

Cole felt a detachment that normally came from a high dose of Bled. “You killed my dad?”

“Yeah. Do you know what he said to me when he died?”

Cole’s vision blackened everything until she saw only a tall, gray-haired elf. 

Do you know what he said to me when he died?

Her father had a sword—Godkiller—buried in his gut, pinned to a tree. Aro stood opposite him and breathed heavily, weakly. She was hurt, perhaps gravely. But this was long ago, in the past, which meant she would live on. Nonetheless, her smile flagged from the pain. “You could have been great,” she choked out between bloody teeth. “You could have just given him what he wanted and lived forever more.”

The sound of them both breathing heavily filled the icy air of the near-silent woods surrounding them both.

“Your father’s sorry,” said Agnault, breaking the quiet. And then he captured Cole with a very direct stare. Black eyes to black eyes, in a moment frozen in time. And while they shared a similar smattering of freckles across their faces and the soft wavy texture of their hair, his smile—that was all Oli. His quiet, pained laugh, too. “I’m so sorry you got all this from me. Peppermint will help with the feeling. Okay?”

The world slowed. Snowfall paused midair. Aro, too, was unnaturally still. “Dad?” asked Cole, voice foreign to her own ears. 

“Peppermint candies. It’ll help with the nausea. I'm sorry I couldn't tell you before now.”

The Aro in the vision suddenly moved again, pulling the sword free, and Agnault released a pained gasp. As quickly as he and Cole shared a moment frozen in time, it was gone. His body trembled and twitched as it slid down the trunk of the tree.

“Your father’s sorry,” he said again, gently this time.

“Yeah, well. He can say that to me when I kill him, too,” Aro barked back, patently unaware of Cole's presence. She swung her sword up—

Cole looked away.

[oakantony]

My best girl, Cole

[oakantony]

Anyway here's the first scene of Snowspring. Because!

-

Of our savior we sing

He who forever lives on

Our holy Godking

A hero reigns—Oberon!

-

Cole needed to get high, and soon, to feel human again.

Her hands trembled as she accepted the hand-rolled cigarette from Oli, heart racing like she’d already been chased out of the towering white brick townhome and down the cobblestones that made up Siniy Avenue. She glanced beyond him, down the dark, navy carpeted passageway he’d come from, and whispered, “You did it?” 

But she smelled the paper, and the green flecks within the paper, and knew the answer before he even said it.

“No. It’s just reves. It was the only thing I could scrounge up, and the kid hiding it in the kitchen made me give him an entire bogat for it.” Oli struck a match and lit the cigarette’s tip. “Too well-to-do in this household for what you need.”

She still inhaled through her trembling fingers, and spoke from one side of her mouth. “Of course. They all drink wine or smoke this.” She exhaled a warm white plume and looked down the passageway again, like she could feel the advancing servants preparing to throw her and Oli from this place. “And now you’ve garnered suspicion against us for nothing. At the home of one of our very best clients.”

Oli lounged against the ornately wallpapered wall, tucking his hands into the soft wool pockets Cole had mended within his trousers earlier that day. The fresh stitches held, as expected, despite the weight of the coins he now carried, and his own long-fingered hands. “You’ve such little faith in me.” He rocked his head back and forth, thinking, and amended: “Little faith in anything, I suppose.”

Cole took another long drag, comforted at least by the motions even if the paper roll contained none of the edesvet that would make her high. Make her human. She leaned over as she breathed out this time, holding her cramping stomach, willing the muscles to relax. She wasn’t going to be sick; not yet. But… “All we need is for one person to ask one stupid question and we’re made, Oli.” She’d throw up all over Mistress Sumatri’s beautiful new hardwood parquet and go deaf and blind and everyone would know she had magic.

“Smoke your reves and calm your nerves,” Oli said. “It’s Summer Promise. It’s not suspicious for us to celebrate.” He gestured to the gap between the dark gray-blue velvet curtains, at the festival's red streamer—like many others hung from homes last week as forecasters shared the news of warmer days ahead. The words Savior We Sing flashed gold, like colorful lightning, as the streamer spun. “They don’t think we’re elves, Cole. They think we’re degenerates.”

Oli grinned that grin he had; the kind that got him what he wanted, especially from girls, and Cole thought about throwing up on his faded leather boots simply to prove a point. She rolled her eyes instead, stood straight, and finished her cigarette in silence. Her stomach relaxed, as did her nerves. But that wasn’t the reves. That was Oli. 

He jogged to a doorway down the hall, summoned by a butler, and Cole watched as they had a quiet conversation that left them both smiling and laughing in a subdued way as to not draw attention. 

“Cole? Do you mind coming here a second?”

Cole twitched hard, embarrassingly so, as Mistress Sumatri’s voice rang out from behind her. The question frayed her nerves all over again. Her skin crawled as she forced one leg in front of the other, down to the dressing room she’d left earlier, after completing the job. After Oli got paid. They should have departed already, but their neighborhood had been dry of edesvet all week, and Cole held ridiculous hope that someone in Sumatri’s staff was a degenerate too.

Cole peered in from the doorway, reluctant and afraid. “What?" She asked, eyeing Sumatri’s styled silver curls, and her freshly-done and rouge-heavy face paint that sat upon her soft brown skin like a mask.

Elderly Sumatri's even more elderly paramour sat up with a self-righteous gasp, the high collar of his dinner jacket hugging the round, sagging shape of his face. (Cole could have tailored that if given the time.) "How dare you. Suma is not only your client, but your elder. You will address her with—"

"Shush, Adam. Cole's just like that." Sumatri waved him off with a satin-gloved hand, standing upon a pedestal before an ornate wood-framed mirror. “Right here, dear.”

Thick curtains hung all around the perimeter of the dressing room, hiding her existing wardrobe, and bags, and shoes. Cole had peeked at them before, with permission. Sumatri was the kind of rich that had taste; the kind of rich that remained rich despite a century of snowfall.

And even among her extensive collection, this new dress Sumatri wore now was unmatched. It was some of Cole’s best work. “I think I snapped a thread. Can you take a look?"

Cole met Sumatri’s smiling brown eyes in the reflection of her mirror, and then her own. Her face looked like Oli’s, like always. Her black eyes were his black eyes. Her pale skin was his, too. As was their roundish twin noses and lips and chins; the only difference was in their wavy wheat-colored hair, which Cole wore short and Oli wore long. 

They even had the same ears. Just round enough to be convincing.

Inexplicably, there was an ache from somewhere deep within her soul, far-reaching. This Curse had followed Cole her entire life, but it stood especially evident when she saw her brother in her own face, and missed him. But that was nonsense. Oli was standing on the other side of the wall, gossiping with Sumatri’s butler like he liked to do. It seemed as if she borrowed grief from a future she would not let pass. But Cole didn’t want to have borrowed such a thing, and hadn’t the ability to return it to where it belonged. No, the Cursed grief sat inside her gut, followed her always, and she had to pretend she wasn’t sick with it—or anything else. 

Though nothing had yet happened to her, or to her brother, she felt as if a poet told her story in the past tense, and nothing would change any word that came next: it had already been written.

Veil take her; she needed to get her hands on edesvet and soon, so that it may suffocate this oracle-damned magic, which teetered on the brink of exposing her and Oli both. 

Cole circled Sumatri’s skirts, chasing the offending loose thread. Indeed, one of her beautiful stone rings had snagged a piece of embroidery on the banded waist. Cole snipped away the offending thread with her small sewing-kit scissors, and used a pearl-tipped pin to fasten the design into place again. "Be careful with your rings," she said. She'd spent weeks on the gown, crafting each stitch with graceful precision, careful to smoke her edesvet outside as to not smoke-stain the gauzy layers. If she had a sewing machine—that is, if she were able to join the Portnoytiska, the seamstress guild, that had a singular monopoly on them—it would have taken half the time. But Cole enjoyed sewing by hand; the repetitive, careful process of it was one of the only other things that made her feel nearly human. Even now, her shaking had settled, and her stomach felt empty again. She might even be able to eat the persimmon Oli stashed for late lunch.

Cole took a step back from Sumatri to appreciate her work one final time. The skirts were layered gold and white, each made from a material that allowed light to filter through and sparkle against the white beaded bustle. The beads, made from ivory sourced by poachers on an expensive illegal hunt out in The Burn, matched the beads also sewn onto the white bodice. Custom green and yellow embroidery of birds and trees lined every hem, framing the whole dress with Cole's specific, talented touch that more than doubled the gown's overall cost. No one had, as of yet, invented a sewing machine that could embroider. That fact alone meant she and Oli were only a few more ball gowns away from the kind of financial stability they’d only ever seen through the open windows of the towering homes of Siniy Avenue, or Risiyk Place, or any of the other well-restored wealthy districts in town. To think that Cole had begun in the crumbling gutter of this place at age ten—

A gutter she’d climb back into if one of the Neerdowil, illegal edesvet chemists, tempted her with a fresh paper roll. Oli was as grown as she was; he could figure out life on his own while she got what she wanted—no, needed—down below. She may wind up in the street, but at least she’d feel human.

That odd and painful guilt-grief made her fingers twitch once again. Cole gave Sumatri one tight nod before departing the room, and she stopped just outside the door to listen to the loudly-whispered conversation that happened in her wake. Oli strode up, smiling and oblivious. “Wondered where you got off to—” Cole held up a finger to signal his silence, and his teeth clicked as he shut up.

Adam’s raspy voice griped and groaned with every word. “I don’t understand why you tolerate the help speaking to you in such a way.” 

“She's not the help, Adam. She's the best seamstress in the whole of Ojor City. Look at this gown."

“Surely not the best. She’s scarcely twenty winters old.”

“I think she’s twenty-one, actually.”

“She’s not even Portnoytiska.”

Sumatri’s twinkling laugh was unmistakably condescending. “Oh, please. Leave the fashion to me, my love. If she was Portnoytiska, any average Rubrish would be able to wear her designs. This one is mine alone. Wait until I arrive at the Osprey Ball tonight. You’ll see.” Then she paused, gasped, and said, “LaVeil bless that girl. Look, it has pockets!”

Oli couldn’t contain himself, it seemed, because he snatched Cole around the middle, off her feet, and spun her around and around as he marched down the hall, towards the entry parlor.

She groaned and said, “I really will be sick if you don’t stop.” That got him to put her back on her feet, at least, but his shiny, happy grin was utterly unwavering.

“Best seamstress in all of Ojor!” Oli cried, too loud for comfort. “My sister, everyone! Come to me to get on her books now, before you miss out!”

There was no one around to clap at Oli’s proclamation but the doorman; a middle-aged man with pale skin and pale blue eyes. He raised one graying brow in response, and opened the door as Cole and Oli approached.

Cole all but sprinted out of the home. “Humiliating,” she hissed, but there was no fire in her words, or in her heart. Because, for now, everyone thought she was simply a girl—a human girl. She wasn’t Colette Black, the half-elven orphan waif. She was Cole, the best human seamstress in Ojor.

But with every click of her boot heels upon the cobbles, Cole could see it; feel it; smell it upon the wind. A sigil that belonged to the Godking impressed upon hardwood floors. A roaring fire. A long, imposing desk elevated upon a dais, with a dozen seated in judgment of her. And Cole, shackled, upon her knees. 

Oli slammed a hand around her shoulders in another generous hug, marching them both forward, to the river train that they could now afford, whisking them from Siniy Avenue to The Garment District. Their home. “Let’s return to our coffers, get changed, and venture out to find you some edesvet.”

“Yes. Let’s.”

Because edesvet was the only way Cole felt human enough—by suffocating the magic that ran within her. It was the only way she could stop seeing a future that spelled doom. It was the only way she truly felt safe.

[sweetbabyprincey32]

snowspring