Tulip's Writing Practice Tumblr

Sideblog of moonlit-tulip. Intended as a receptacle of experimental writing, optimized more for my own learning process than for readability to others. I make no guarantees regarding the quality, consistency, or any other positive characteristics of what I post here; read at your own peril.

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

Updated my icon, because I wasn't totally happy with my prior one and have gotten better at the craft since then.

Before/after, for archival purposes:

[moonlit-tulip]

Tunnel Vision

Tunnel Vision

Reyna and Liz have fought together for some time now, battling wraiths and shadows to protect their hometown and each other. And yet tonight

I wrote a story!

More precisely, I wrote it more than a year ago, planned to edit it a bunch, and then never got around to doing more than a tiny amount of that. I've finally given up and decided to just post it as-is, mostly unedited. Hopefully people will enjoy it.

Synopsis:

Reyna and Liz have fought together for some time now, battling wraiths and shadows to protect their hometown and each other. And yet tonight, on what should have been an evening of shared victory, they find themselves in conflict. For Reyna's reason for fighting, above all else, is to defend Liz's happiness; and the greatest threat to Liz's happiness, now, is Liz herself.

Full-resolution cover art below the break.

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

The first things Flore perceived of Isartea's presence, as she stepped out into the alleyway, were an arm clamped about her torso from behind and—in the same moment—a hand over her mouth.

It took less than a second for her to suppress her first instincts and go still, as her mind caught up with her body. Isartea's low chuckle, just behind her right ear, produced an involuntary shiver.

"Am I truly so hard to predict, my dear Flore?"

Flore shook her head weakly, the motions limited to make clear—she hoped they made clear—that she wasn't trying to free her mouth to scream.

(—a single clawed fingertip sliding, ever so slowly, across her chest, while she screamed and screamed and screamed her heart out into the anechoic void—)

"No? I'm glad. I would hate to think you understood so little of me, still, after all our meetings." Isartea's tone was teasing, Flore thought.

Their surroundings began to fade away. The streetlight down the street grew hazy as though smoke clouded the space around it, and darker with each passing second, as the sounds of the city faded into inaudibility. Only a dim sourceless light—lavender, like a particularly poisonous frog—remained.

When the city had gone completely quiet, Isartea finally unhanded Flore, before stepping around to face her directly. Flore itched to run, in that moment of freedom. She closed her eyes—just in time to seal Isartea's beautiful face into her memory as the last thing she saw—and breathed deeply, letting the impulse slip by her untouched.

"And so here we are, once again. Do you have any requests, before we proceed?"

Flore's head shook, slightly, but after a moment she spoke nonetheless. "You... could do it painlessly this time? I mean, could you?"

Isartea thought for a moment, at that. It was more consideration than Flore had expected her request to be given. But: "I don't believe I could." Flore's briefly-burgeoning hope cracked once more.

Isartea stepped forward. Flore stepped backward, just once, but made no effort to keep pace as Isartea continued closing the distance between them. Isartea's arms wrapped once more around Flore, and she was swept off of her feet, kicking uselessly in the air as Isartea held her against her chest. By the time Flore regained her sense of up and down, she felt Isartea's breath on her neck.

"I would apologize," Isartea said, "if I believed it would mean anything to you."

And then she bit.

Pain tore through Flore's body. More than she, two months ago, would have believed it possible to feel in such a narrow place as the patch of neck Isartea's fangs had torn open. Distantly, she sensed her body clenching, flailing, gasping for breath; but she couldn't pay any of those things attention, with that pain there. It was all-consuming, tearing through her consciousness just as Isartea's fangs had through her flesh.

Isartea's bloodsucking continued. The pain slowly faded from being all-consuming to being merely almost all-consuming, enough that Flore could form words. "Please please please please please—"

Isartea's bloodsucking continued. The pain faded further still. Flore's body, whose every limb had been pulled tight from her flailing, felt like it was melting into a heap as she finally found the presence of mind to let herself relax.

And then, finally, Isartea's bloodsucking came to an end, and she removed her mouth from Flore's throat. A pleasant numbing sensation spread through Flore's body as Isartea worked her healing magic on the spot.

Flore found herself being set down on the rough surface which passed for ground in this realm of mist, her head in Isartea's lap.

Minutes passed. The silence was broken only intermittently as Flore sobbed. Paradoxically, she found herself leaning into Isartea's touch more in those moments.

Eventually, she asked: "Is this going to keep happening every week? Forever?"

"'Forever' is too long for even me to speak of," Isartea said. "And you are mortal, even if more vital than most. Time will claim you eventually, just as it will me."

"...but?"

"But I do not plan to stop drinking from you for the foreseeable future, at least."

A half-nod, broken by another sob. Flore turned herself over and buried her face in Isartea's leg.

"Yes," Isartea whispered, so quiet that Flore didn't know if she was meant to hear it at all. "If you want it to stop, the only way forward is to fight."

They stayed like that for what felt like another half-hour, but which may—for all Flore knew—have been only a few minutes, before the sound of the city faded back into her awareness and Isartea out of it.

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

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[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

Groceries were an obligation. A necessity. But they weren’t, truly, a part of Marin’s life. Time spent visiting the store to acquire groceries was a break from living, rather than a part of it; she performed the actions mechanically, consulting her shopping list—reordered, before her trip, to list goods by aisle rather than by culinary category—in lieu of any in-the-moment thought regarding her cooking plans.

Her mind… wandered, she might say, if she were speaking to a stranger. Or rested, if she were speaking to a friend or acquaintance who she wanted to inform without driving them to worry about her, as people so often seemed to when she spoke more bluntly. But, while both of those options may have carried fragments of the truth, neither was how she truly would have described it. If she were talking with Claire, or simply to herself, she would instead describe it as: her mind paused. Oh, there was perceptible cognition occurring—something had to be reading the shopping list, after all—but to describe that cognition, that shopping-list-reading thing, as her would be a stretch.

The thing waited through the checkout line, and left the store with her bagged goods, and walked home. The thing placed the food in the appropriate places, freezer and cupboard and refrigerator and shelf, and Marin was forced to rouse slightly to determine where the items belonged, the information not noted on the shopping list and not so obvious as to be accessible thoughtlessly in the absence of such a note. (She resolved to correct this mistake, next time she compiled a shopping list for herself.) And, finally, the chore was done, and Marin could arise fully back into herself.

Mealtime in four hours. She’d have to start cooking in perhaps two-and-a-half. But until then she would be free.

Marin entered her room, and sat down at her desk—scribble-filled research spellbook already at the ready, and bookshelves to either side of her for easy reference—and, as she resumed her studies, broke out into a smile.

Here, finally, she was again truly alive.

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

"Scheming? Me? I've never designed a single sorting system in my life."

"And yet nonetheless you are scheming. For I refer, not to your development of sorting schemes, but to your development of plots."

"I'm not particularly a writer either. I suppose I did that one creative writing class, back in college? But that was a long time ago. I don't really think of that as particularly defining me nowadays, you know?"

"Not plots such as those, but—actually, please disregard all that I have been saying. I see now that this has been willful misunderstanding on your part, rather than mere accidental misinterpretation of my words. As such, I gather that you understand my true meaning. Now, have you anything to say in your defense before I cut you down?"

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

The clock counts down, and yet I'm no closer to finding an answer now than I was twenty minutes ago.

Across the board, my opponent leans back, smiling placidly.

Whatever threat she may once have felt from my challenge is long past, now. All that remains is the slow crawl of the clock as I try to find my way out of a position from which neither of us sees any escape.

Finally, pressed for time, I make a move I know is going to take me one step closer to my defeat. A turn where I can't see the right move after nearly thirty minutes isn't one I should waste my time on.

But then, what is? Taking my time on turns where the right move is obvious will help even less. The fundamental problem isn't with time-use, but with skill.

My opponent makes her move in a mere thirty seconds or so, and we exchange pieces twice, and then it's my turn yet again. The clock winding down still farther towards the match's inevitable end.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

I only have a total of ten minutes left. Not enough to think at length. Not any more. If I want any chance at victory at all, I need to move quickly and decisively. Accept the (high) chance I'll blunder a piece away and lose even sooner; it's not as though losing was ever not the likeliest outcome here. Toss myself head-on into the few cases where I avoid egregious errors, where I do something strange and unpredictable enough to give me a true chance.

I move. She tilts her head—apparently my change of mindset is visible—and responds. I move again, this time giving it a mere five seconds' thought. We fall into a new rhythm, one where I take less time per move than her, rather than more.

...and then I move my rook to threaten her king, and she captures it, and I have no response, and I'm reminded of exactly what the likeliest outcome here always was.

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

“You’re all going to die, you know.” Merafa’s voice rang out clearly from the crowd, audible even over the din of the trucks’ engines. “You know that, right? Every one of you. You’re throwing your lives away for nothing.”

She was talking in generalities—Lyra understood why, from a rhetorical standpoint—but they both knew that, when Merafa talked about ‘you all’ here, she really meant: “you specifically, Lyra”.

And it was true. Lyra did know that. Rayla did her best to fill her crew with grand visions of miraculous survival, of mastering the magic behind the rift as no human had done before and turning it into a true two-way gate, of using that magic to carve out a paradise which would be the envy even of the richest here on Earth. Lovely images. But Lyra knew better to believe them. No one had come back alive, yet, or even found a way to send back a message. The only way they knew that anyone had even made it through the rift intact at all had been through the mockery of the beings which came through the rift in the other direction, in the months after each of the first three expeditions. It wouldn’t have been reasonable for Lyra to expect anything different from Rayla’s expedition, and so she didn’t.

And yet, nonetheless, she continued to prepare for departure, as did her five companions. (Four companions and one leader, her sense of propriety tried to correct her; but she ignored it. Five companions was correct, however unconventional it might have been.) Because she wasn't in this to get rich, or to make a difference for everyone back on Earth, or even to survive. Not really. She was here for one reason only, and that reason was Rayla. Rayla, who offered a vision of hope for the future. Rayla, who seemed so self-assured, despite the air of sadness Lyra could occasionally see in her eyes when their crew was out of the public eye and she could let down her mask partially. Rayla, who was, even now, cheerfully shouting back at Merafa, correcting her that they were only probably going to die.

Lyra climbed into the truck, and Rayla climbed in after her and sat next to her, and the clock slowly ticked down towards the end of her final minutes on Earth.

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

When Caelius stepped into Prince Remori's cabin, he found himself pausing momentarily in surprise at its appearance before entering further.

On one side of the room sat a bed, and on the bed was a set of plush-looking sheets, haphazardly bunched up towards the middle of the bed and no longer quite covering its corners.

At the base of the bed lay a box of clothes—traditional princely garb, the type which required ten minutes and a servant just to put on or take off—but half the clothing laid scattered on the floor next to the box, gathering dust.

Along one wall, a desk sat, and upon it sat a book which looked to be the prince's journal; but it was empty, when Caelius flipped through it, and beside it sat no pen or inkwell, but only an unannotated map of the local coastlines, which, with its crude pensmanship and its lack of notation of militarily-relevant structures, looked fit more to the sensibilities of upstart merchants than of princes.

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

Pointing my gun down at Livia where she lies fallen on the ground, I ask her, "Any last words?"

She's silent, for a few moments, thinking, before she turns her head up to me and replies.

"I could, I suppose, tell you that I didn't want to die. And it would be true enough. But it wouldn't convince you not to kill me.

"I could tell you that I love you. Also true, and perhaps it would sting, killing me right after I finally admitted it. But that wouldn't stop you either."

She slowly moves her arms as she speaks, her rhetorical instincts unbowed even while stuck lying on the ground facing her imminent death, although she at least has the sense to do so slowly and carefully, without making any motions I might mistake for an attack.

(Focusing on this—on her physical movements—helps me to stay grounded, to hold on to my convictions in the face both of her immediate barbs and whatever larger traps she's no doubt building around me as she speaks.)

"In the end, I don't believe there's anything I could say that would convince you not to kill me, at this point. Not after what you've learned, not given who you are. So I suppose there's nothing left to say except this."

She leans back and closes her eyes, the tension going out of her body, as if in acceptance of her defeat. I almost believe her, even.

Then I feel a surge of magic, and a smirk appears on her face.

"There are more ways to talk a person out of killing you than just by persuasion."

I shoot, but it's too late; my bullet ricochets off of a magical barrier, briefly making the previously-invisible shield flicker red around the point of impact.

"And it's not a good idea to focus too exclusively on the person doing the talking, when you haven't yet confirmed that she has no allies left in the area who might be able to help her given a minute's time to react."

A second barrier, this one dimly visible, appears under Livia and lifts into the air, carrying her away from me and towards the binocular-wielding mage I now see atop a hillside a mile away. I try to give chase, but slam into a third barrier, which repositions itself to remain in front of me as I try to run around it.

"You had me truly worried, for a moment there. But I suppose it was, at least, the final push I needed to get those words off of my chest.

"Thank you. And I'll see you again soon."

Livia flies away from me, across the smoking wreckage of the battlefield.

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

In the year 3376, the Grand family built a house. Befitting their name, it was vast, assembled through the combined resources of four generations and with space for each and every one of them. The style was, to an unusual extent even by the standards of that era, labyrinthine: at least three different secret passages were described in the memoirs of different visitors, each floor contained rooms inaccessible from one another except via multiple flights of stairs, and, in a particularly infamous architectural decision, one of the house's contributors insisted that her third-floor bedroom be accessible only via a catwalk winding its way up from the second-floor sitting room to her balcony.

Over the next century, the house's residents slowly drifted away—the eldest killed by disease one by one, the youngest setting out to find their fortunes—but a sizable core contingent of the family remained. But the war in 3472 finally marked the end of the family's time in the house: fearful of the advancing army of the Thalans to the north, they collectively packed up and moved south to the capital, hoping to wait out the war, and there were caught in the great tsunami which heralded the war's end. Ironically, had they remained in the house, they would have been fine: neither the Thalan army nor the tsunami ever touched it, in the end.

The house lies, now, abandoned and yet carefully preserved. The Grands, before leaving for the capital, left in reserve almost two decades worth of funds for housekeeping, and the company they hired out is nothing if not fastidious in their performance of their duties, even following the deaths of their clients. (To be any less fastidious, after all, would be to lose the opportunity to continue drawing on those funds; Yasma & Sons Gardening Co. is nothing if not adherent to the word of its contracts.)

[ten-thousand-clay-pots]

Lana swung her sword with all her might, and there was a great crashing sound as it collided with the barrier behind which Mary was hidden. And yet the barrier held, nonetheless.

More blows followed, each stronger and more precise than the last, each aimed to fell the pillar of magic once and for all, to allow Lana inside. The barrier began to flicker, dimming slightly with each blow.

And yet it held, nonetheless, returning to full luminosity in between Lana’s swings of her sword. And it continued to hold, even as Lana’s breath began to turn labored and her swings ceased to increase in effectiveness.