atmo-graphia

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Reminder that today starts our slow NaNoWriMo. 820 words a day for two months. Good luck!

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morgan-le-cray replied to your post “last line meme”

Hey, guess what. I just figured out how to see things I've been tagged in! Haha, is 200 days too late to participate in this? I think probably it is

never to late! esp considering it took me 10 days to notice your reply =P

[atmo-graphia]

She was Shaksanal-en-Meriyah, Minister on the East, Second General, Daughter of na-Ulukili-ar-Rayeth, and she was stabbed through the heart with all the glamour of a piglet to a spit. She didn’t scream like a piglet might before it dies. Her mouth was silent at least, her throat. It was the rest of her that screamed.

The sword went between her armor with a sound that made no sense. It should have made sense. She’d heard swords through armor before.

The sword went through her skin, point small, then blade wide. Yes, she’d felt swords do this, too.

It slipped through her flesh swiftly.

She didn’t feel it in her heart.

Little mercy. Hearts were not designed to feel swords, but feel other things.

In the white sunlight of the mortal world, in a place far from the forest where she was born, people might stab each other through the heart, and all of nature—swirling well of trees and broken ruins to the sky, birds singing in voices that she never noticed were unpleasantly shrill—wouldn’t pause for a moment. Not pause nor blink. As Shaksanal-en-Meriyah’s fingers in thick gloves picked at a sword hilt and struggled to hold it back one tiny inch of foreign purchase.

It would be perhaps unfair to begin her story here.

Minister on the East.

Second General.

Daughter of Ulukili.

~

Mortal tales often end when a man and a god fall in love. If a story begins this way, it is a tragedy.

Wo Kumada was his name. He was poor and had charcoal on his face and hands, and he hunted the white hind of her mother’s forest. He had thrown himself down on the ground at the sight of her. But he had clutched the deer’s body to his breast.

Her mother commanded him to lift his head, and he did. Meri never asked her mother what she had seen, and for many years Meri never understood what might have been there in his charcoal face. But the death of her mother’s hind brought the heart of her father. Her father brought Meri.

In the realm of heaven, she was made to understand that she was only half her kind. Half-heaven, half-earth.

But in her youth, this idea never occurred to her.

With the sword driven in her, this thought occurred to her.

~

It is more fair to begin when she was fourteen. She was sitting on top of one of the face-stones that circled her mother’s ruined temple. She was sitting with her knees at her chin. It was morning before dawn. The sky and trees and the depths between them were blue. The temple—she didn’t look—but it was just as blue.

Ten hours ago, without any sleep since, she, feeling very grown up, had said to her mother, “I’m fourteen now, and it’s my right to visit heaven.”

And her mother, who had been tending the ferns that sprang about the fallen door of the temple, replied, “Is that so?” Her mother didn’t look away from the ferns when she said this. Her voice didn’t ripple or react. Her golden-brown fingers slipped among the fiddleheads, plucking some and stroking others like one of her deer.

Meri didn’t answer at first. When her mother stood up, all grey cloak and ease, Meri finally said, “It’s the law of heaven. You said it was.”

“Which law?” her mother said. She slipped soft-footed to the next patch of ferns. The sun was starting to tangle in the taller trees. It was starting to glow orange and red. The white walls of the fallen temple were orange and red.

“You know which law, Mother, why? Why can’t I?”

“I never said you couldn’t.”

“Then I can? How soon?”

“I never said you could either.”

No number of appeals on Meri’s part produced a ‘yes,’ but neither did any number of pleas produce a ‘no.’

She had been to heaven once before, and, though she was so young at the time as to only remember it in bare flashes now, she did remember that her mother had not been happy afterwards. There were few things that made her mother unhappy.

So even in the middle of an argument, it hurt to disagree with her mother. Whenever her mother could get away with it, she preferred to let Meri learn something through mistakes. She never simply said, ‘Dear, you shouldn’t eat that,’ or ‘Beloved child, that animal wants you to put it down.’ Arguing with her felt like it was another mistake.

The view from on top of the face-stone lay below the treeline that ringed the temple and its collapsed roof and its hole-pocked walls. Meri never came to sit here because she wanted to see something.

She had said, “You always do this to me! Father would let me.”

“If your father were in my position, he would know better than to simply let you.”

Her father was the one who had planted the seed of longing in her. He told her stories of the Queen and her vast, shining kinsfolk. The gods in heaven were heroic and terrifying in their beauty. “A hundred gods like your mother,” he had said, which sparked the strange ember of doubt in her heart which had singed in her chest ever since.

In the mortal world, her mother had taught her the paths of the stars, the strength of them. She taught her how to charm animals and make the flowers bloom out of season. Meri had learned from the nymphs how to hide herself thinner than a shadow and how to lead mortals through the woods with only a whisper—or to confound them deeper and deeper into the wilderness.

But in the mortal world at her father’s side, she had seen an infinite list of the natural cruelties. She understood now what death was. Not rabbits whose deaths fill your stomach. Not trees whose deaths fall into the earth and invite a new generations of growth. She understood death as humans understood it. That people could die at any time. That Hidara had died.

(Hidara was black-haired and black-skinned and had a smile that flashed and held brighter than the moon, and she was only a year younger than Meri. She wanted to grab fish out of a river, and Meri watched paralyzed with awe as she did. She wanted to learn bird songs, and Meri felt no arrogance when she told Hidara that she could teach her. She wanted much and took very little from the forest or the mortal family she wandered through the woods with once a year in winter. And outside the forest, Meri understood, this is the habit of mortals, to want much and be snapped at by gods or each other when they wanted more.)

This was hard to explain to her mother. She knew without trying because she could hardly explain it to herself. When Hidara had died, her mother had been as sullen and wise as could be expected. But she hadn’t been surprised, and that was the first time her mother’s godhood had terrified her.

As the first glimmer of warmth radiated in the dawn sky, Meri heard her mother’s footsteps behind her and below. It was only ever when she wished to be heard that she would be heard.

“My sweetest,” her mother called.

Meri wouldn’t have answered if the sound didn’t ache so much. “Yes, Mother?”

There was another sound of soft toes on stone as her mother climbed up beside her. Meri saw her out of the corner of her eye as she knelt beside her. She said, “I know it will be impossible to dissuade you. As you have said, it is your right. But please quell your mother’s anxiety and tell me why it is you wish so much to go?”

She did want to make her mother understand. “I have to... I want to see it, and I want to know about who we are, what I am.”

“You are what you wish to be, my clever, patient daughter. No one in heaven can make any difference of that.”

She thought, I don’t have enough time to think like that, and I am frightened because you can’t understand that I don’t. But she was fourteen, and her mother would say she had more than enough time.

She looked at her mother now over her shoulder, but her mother was looking into the depths of the trees.

“Do you understand where heaven is?” her mother asked.

Meri shifted her hands. She put her palms against the grey scalp of the face-stone. She looked into the sky. “Beyond everything. Above it.”

~

But more than anything, it would be fair to begin when she was twenty-two and knelt one knee in heaven. Everything above her. She put the knuckles of Sayah’s hand against her lips. She put them against her forehead. Then made the worst and most beautiful decision of her life. “I am yours to command, my Queen.”

[atmo-graphia]

The God was cold, and ‘Íp Tæs' cheek should never have been so close. In the night of Dùn Temple, her hand braced against the stele, the other tender on the God's pocked face, she swept chrisms onto Its brow. In the night of Dùn Temple, the high ceiling paneled and arched above her, the floor lingered somewhere below in tessellated hematite. And so big was the cold air and so silent, she could hear her breath and feel its unsacred touch reflecting on the God’s face. The scent of iron through the lavender, the oil through the silk rag. And the sweaty cold on her cheek.

Each swipe of her bare, wrinkled fingers sighed withered in the air, soft hiss of slick oil and stone.

Her bare, wrinkled face in the dark, too, she could feel the air. If anyone should see her face, let a piece of God see her face. If anyone should feel her face...

And the space between them was so close, air motes and silk, she might lean forward and press her cheek against It. No one was watching. Save the attarect and pontifects, no one but Dùn's sacrist had earned the right to be so alone with the God and so close to the God.

For thirty-three years, ‘Íp Tæs had never touched It. Each ministration, impatient weeks apart, each ministration brought her face closer and closer. The smell ached more intimate and maddening each inch closer. And the sound.

There was no sound.

Only this soft-soft of her fingers and the silk.

That silence more maddening still.

Since Prodocent Cál Bìáll laid by divine mistake their head on the God's form in the mountains, no one had heard God's voice in the God at Dùn. Not even ‘Íp Tæs in thirty-three years. No matter how close she drew, _no matter how close she drew_ it was still only her own breath she felt, her own heart she felt, but the dispassionate, unseeing, gazeless, eyeless God unmoving moved her each inch closer. Calling, but silent. It must have been calling.

Because what would she do if it wasn't? What would she do when her cheeks slipped that last breath forward, and the God said nothing?

The chrisms covered the God's face now. Dark in the darkness, the stars and slips of moons plying at the window, it glittered softly.

‘Íp Tæs lowered her hand and her cheek fell away with it.

This week, let us all procrastinate with a new character in your world! Side character? Character you made just to kill off because fuck this? Character you meant to write but then totally didn’t? Sure.

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last line meme

tagged by @halo-n-wings thank you for thinking of me, dear <3

Rules: Post the last sentence you wrote (fanfic/original/anything) and tag as many people as there are words in the sentence. “Most of Urn is sulfur yellow--its sky, its flesh and breath.” (honestly no clue if that’s the last thing I wrote, but it was at the end of a section I was working on haha) I’ll tag whom I can and hope it’s not cheating to tag everyone in writers’ group even though they don’t post @catinacrabsuit @paging-dr-doctor @zombriehallowed @morgan-le-cray @wilybrodysseus @veneciamoriah14 @rodserlingsmoking @silvermp (whoops that’s only eight i tried)

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prompt: John, the architect from Minnesota with a fear of heights, takes up cooking. // They called it the nightmare house for, more or less, obvious reason. One glance was enough to make you never want to glance again. The shapes, the heights, the nameless seething colors that probably shouldn’t exist. The sort of thing that you wouldn’t expect in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota (what’s in Minnesota?). This house was John’s baby, the culmination of his desperate, lifelong struggle with the occult. His entire heart, volumes and volumes of bad angles, scary geometry, the non-Euclidean crap that other architects would chew their lips at and nod slowly because it was impossible not to sound ridiculous when talking about it. On paper, it had seemed perfectly reasonable. Well, not reasonable. The numbers didn’t add up, the walls didn’t match, there were doors where the shouldn’t have been doors. But reasonable because it only seemed a bit worrisome when you really started looking at it. While it was being built, it felt, at worst, a little eerie, a bit confusing. Only one or two workers got completely lost and were never heard from again. It was only when the final shingle was placed that something happened. John’s baby, his child. It transformed, it became... not quite real. Not quite a house anyway. Not quite a cozy, little home, at least. And even John, spying the highest point of its highest tower (he didn’t put any towers in the design), did he feel... his stomach? He had a stomach, he was pretty sure. He couldn’t look too long. But that night, after it had been completed, he lay down to sleep feeling not completed and satisfied, but stomachless still and craving it back. In the darkness of the middle of nowhere, Minnesota, he went back, he went in, he went up. He couldn’t remember the inside. He was at the highest point, where the world should be cold and clouds, yes, even inside a house. Which he couldn’t remember. Just that it smelled too hot and smelled too high and low, and it smelled like his heart was outside of him, roasting and delicious and made of bad angles.

[atmo-graphia]

Definitely forgot to post @morgan-le-cray​‘s witchy fanfic. Still kind of eh about it, but here it is at any rate, complete with bonnet snatching action.

//

All the way from London, it seemed rain had been following him. The miserable, soul-slicking kind. Not quite dangerous or terrifying but endless and hopeless. Across land, across water, the night he’d spent in Dublin. The next morning was sunny with only a few clouds. He’d smiled when he’d climbed into the carriage.

They’d been travelling for only an hour when one of the horse threw a shoe  and tore its hoof in the process. His coachman had shaken his head and asked if they intended to press on.

“Well, I don’t want to lame it,” he answered.

The look on his coachman’s face was dark when he peered into the east, back towards Dublin. “It looks as though there’s a bad storm coming.”

“No, a storm?” He bit his lip. The sky was as bright and sunny as could be. If only he could have one day on wretched trip without a drop of rain.

“Most certainly.”

When he looked the sad creature in the eye, though, and looked down on its shredded foot, he told the coachman to ride back for a fresh horse. He’d stay with the carriage to ensure its (and his luggage’s) safety.

An hour passed, then another. Sitting on the carriage’s bench, he felt the temperature dwindling colder and colder. Grumbling, he crawled inside and attempted to puff out his coat the way a bird might. No one had ridden by. No one had walked by. All around the horizon, the world had been abandoned, left to the odd crow and the green hills.

He’d never been to Ireland before, but the reports he’d received on his holding had always implied that at least some people lived there. He was never coming back. There was plenty of rain in England.

He closed his eyes.

A sharp scream woke him. Banging his ear against the casement woke him further. Feeling his heart in his ears and his throat, he leaned out of the carriage.

It was just thunder. It was still echoing over the green hills. Not so green, he thought—they were blue and grey below the churning clouds. He watched as another tendril of lightning curled through the air. The following cry was only a moment behind. The wind was growing quite vicious now.

With a shiver, he started to lean back into the carriage. He’d barely twitched when something came into view down the road in the east. It looked like a person.

“Finally,” he muttered.

He pinched his cheeks, rubbed his eyes and straightened his coat. The wind swallowed him when he stepped out of the carriage. He tugged the edges of his sleeves over his fingertips and drew his chin lower in his collar.

The figure moved slowly.

He’d asked them if they’d passed his coachman.

It grew wider.

He’d complain to them.

When the figure was nearly close enough to make out, he started started down the road toward it.

It was a young woman, maybe twenty years old. She was dressed in a green redingote and a bonnet with a black ribbon. There was massive, shaggy grey dog at her side. Her comportment conveyed nobility, and her dress was far too fine for a country girl. As she walked, she looked straight ahead. The fierce winds at her back didn’t so much as tousle the black hair pinned on her head.

He was so enchanted by her appearance that he didn’t say a word as she passed him by. With a start, he took a few steps after her. “Hello, um, miss!”

The woman stopped, turned slowly. The dog circled around her, leering, tail low. Her eyes were dark green. He felt the current in the wind and the fire of the storm.

“Miss?”

Chin raised, she said something he didn’t understand. The wind gusted feverishly.

He laughed, wincing. “Don’t tell me you don’t speak English...”

      (under his breath – “This ridiculous country.”)

The woman’s hard face cracked in a menacing smile. “Of course I do, sir,” she answered in a thick, rolling accent.

“Ah—oh.” The man glanced away. His cheeks were a little red. “Well, that’s good. But, miss, why on earth are you out here all alone? There’s a storm coming—”

“Oh?” she said, peering over his shoulder dramatically.

Deep in his chest, he felt the longing to ask her, ‘Please, did you see a short man in a red coat ride by?’ but instead he more or less mumbled, “If you’d like, you might join me in my carriage. We’ll weather it out.” His face grew warm again when he remembered that (aside from the dog), he was totally alone with this woman and several leagues of apparently uninhabited countryside.

With the same unkind smile, she said, “That’s so kind of you, sir.”

“Not at all, miss.” He glanced at her dog. He’d never seen such a sinister beast. It was so still and haunting, like the impression of a specter burned against the darkening hills. “Hey, doggie-doggie,” he clucked, holding out a hand for it to sniff.

The dog’s sides heaved with breath, but it stared unblinking.

“You’ve a... fine animal there.”

“Thank you, sir, I do.” She gave the beast a firm pat, and still it stood unmoving.

“Hmm.” He considered repeating his offer. He considered silently dropping all decorum and scrambling back into the carriage on his own.

Before he could weigh his options, the sky pounded with light and heat. His own voice roared out of his mouth as he covered his ears. The rain fell. In huge, weighty drops. Blinking through the water, he saw that the woman and her pet were unperturbed.

“Miss!” he cried, pulling his coat up, hobbling toward the carriage. Blinking even more, he saw that woman didn’t even look wet. He fumbled with the handle as he gestured to her, but she was looking west. Dazed, hand still ready to open the door, he turned, too.

A white figure was standing there. White and bleeding white against the darkness of the storm, with streamers of light (no, clothes?) reeling. He tried to brush the rain from his eyes. It was another woman.

He said, “Oh my...”

And the second woman approached.

He found his hand had slipped off the handle. His back was pressed against the carriage door.

This woman was dressed strangely, like some cheap actress in some cheap Shakespearean staging. She had wild blonde hair which seemed to glow in the stormy shadows.

The woman in green waited as the white newcomer approached her. The latter was totally drenched, but still she kept her brow lowered and her hands on her hips.

In the middle of the road and rain and screaming thunder, the two women stared at each other.

The woman in white spoke first, “Le Fey.”

“Ryan.”

The dog growled deeply and pawed at the muddying ground.

“Cúchulainn,” the woman in white said.

The dog yipped in response but didn’t relent its teeth baring or lower its hackles.

In the following pause, the hungry sky growled with another stroke of lightning. Then, the white woman said, “You slaternly little wagon!” With one clawing hand, she snatched the green woman’s bonnet right off her head and cast it into the mud.

Gasping, the green woman shoved the other backwards. She was saying something in that language, again, and it was something very angry.

In response, the white woman trod directly on the crinkled bonnet.

It was hell after that. The woman in green’s very body sparked with lightning, the white one’s hand’s flashed brightly. In the blinding, strange fury of these apparently wrathful and uncanny young ladies, he shuddered and curled closer the carriage. His eyes closed against the light. The air roared with their screamed chanting and the hound’s gurgled baying.

And, though he felt compelled to intervene, he couldn’t move. His heartbeat was a nail through his chest into the carriage wall.

The ground shook, the carriage trembled. The wind grew freezing then hot, and his eyes were still quite closed.

(“This ridiculous country. This ridiculous country.”)

“You, sir, what’s your name?”

Suddenly, he realized that the crackling of the storm had ceased, the rain was just a patter. He blinked. Both women were eyeing him. The dog, too. There was no weird shining, but the world glistened in a slash of sunlight that had cut through a layer of clouds.

It was the woman in green. She said now, “Where are you from?”

Name? Where? “L-London,” he managed. “Please, go about your business, ladies, I’ll just—” His hand scratched at the door.

“London! I told you.”

“Sasanach!” the woman in white muttered. He was relatively certain he knew that one...

A glimpse of brilliance shone in his mind. “Ladies, there’s no need to fight. Whatever your differences are—”

“Sister, mine,” the white one said. “Even he agrees.”

The dog swerved around the green one. When he looked at it now, its gruesome sneer looked almost like a grin.

“There’s no need to fight,” the white one said, “amongst ourselves.”

His face felt hot, even in the chill wind that still scrambled down the road. Well, if nothing else, he could broker at least a sliver of peace in this miserable place. That’s dog’s face, though.

He shivered.

The one in white went on, “We should celebrate our shared heritage by slaughtering our homeland’s enemies.”

He felt his voice in his throat, “S... slaughtering...?”

From one horizon to the other, the green grass and the black sky roiled. The two witches (and one dog) stalked up to the carriage.

[atmo-graphia]

I am still trying to figure out the best way to upload @rodserlingsmoking‘s fanfic that will maintain formatting and sound, so for now here’s something set in @wilybrodysseus‘ world of demons, magic, pumice-colored stains, airships and horrible things.

//

The world like a shield, laid out in a circle between the horizons, stretching bare and brass. Cleft by a straight, silver river, a bullet across the wastes. And in a single meander, a hill rises—the shield’s boss—flecked with dingy buildings. A windmill sputtering.

Below the sky shredded with clouds and razors of light, through the wind and the rattling stalks of frail trees. He comes from the wastes the way anyone comes from them—silent, horse heaving, the grim memory of cool water and shadows engraved on his face.

He is a man all in black, armed, eyes glowing with the dark spark of flint.

The sun is high and hot, painting the world in piercing grey and white. He rides to the hill.

At the first building—a malnourished house—his horse balks, trots its feet backward and forward. He pulls gently on the reins and scans the empty, curling, climbing street.

The odd, soundless openness of nothing. Where the only noise is wind hissing along corners.

This place is old beyond its years, worn and enduring. The walls are all chipped paint, and the rooves are red and silver-striped.

He swings out of the saddle, checking the pistol at his side, pulling a rifle from his packs. The horse hardly waits to be swatted away.

His time in a saddle hasn’t hindered his gait. He stomps up the road, spurs beating, the tip of his rifle spinning in front of him. Empty building after empty building, he passes. Halfway up the hill, the windmill is groaning here. And halfway up the hill, between a squat general store and a squat tailor, bodies pave the road.

The whine and ache of rust, of torn blades spasming in the wind.

Seventeen bodies. Seventeen ratty sets of limbs, strange and hungry-looking. With skin paled by death. The man watches them expectantly. But the seventeen bodies lay still.

Kneeling amid them, though, a live one, breathing. Who or what this person is, with its back to him, remains locked beneath a layer of powdery dirt, scabbing mud and matted hair.

He toes through bulging corpses, his rifle at his waist. The figure doesn’t move. He drops the barrel against its shoulder.

It answers with only a shudder.

The barrel slides lower, and he says, “Are you human?”

A laugh wet with blood. A woman’s voice answers, “I hope so.”

Though he still holds the weapon in his careful, trained hands, there’s an easiness in his stride as he circles around the kneeling hopefully-human.

When he comes to a stop in front of it, the figure looks up. She’s a woman with each wrinkle on her face highlighted in dirt and brown blood. “A hunter?” she says, hopeless eyes cast in grey.

He nods.

He says, looking over the bodies, the way they hold nothing in their hands, “This creature’s done its work here.”

She shakes her head, a trembling twitch. “No. Not done. Not—” She rubs her face in her hands, then lifts one finger to indicate a house farther up the street.

He observes it and the wind that passes by it with an unchanged expression.

He puts a hand on her shoulder. The strong hand of a man sure of everything and its purpose and its destruction. “Just wait,” he says.

A black tower on the greying dust, he advances up the hill. On the left, the building is yellow-painted with black letters above its broad, wooden lintel. ‘Town Hall.’ One hand, he pushes open the door. The barrel of his rifle slides in first, and he steps in behind it.

Darkness. Ethereal. The low creak of wood like a boat rocking in whale-shaped waves. Drifting dust in panes of light.

And no smell.

He sniffs, adjusts his grip on his firearm.

In the phantom and light, he stands in a large room with overturned chairs. At the far wall, a door beside either corner waits. He pauses for only a moment before crossing over. His spurs a muffled whir and slink. Once he reaches the left door, he presses it open slowly. Behind it, a staircase rises to the second floor.

This time, he pauses in earnest. His lips churn. On the trigger, his fingers on them when if—a.

He shakes his head with a tiny wince.

Then, he lowers his head, gravely, like a man in prayer, but eyes looking up, up the stairs. And he marches. The way is fogged by odd shadows. Each step wheezes under his feet. The sound of his breath has become the wind that hissed along the corners. If there are windows above him, they’ve been blocked out.

The top of the staircase. His breath holds.

Quickly, he whirls into the small office. Searchingly and still he rakes the room, but there’s only one shade-shape after another. For the first time, his grip on his rifle flags, the look on his face grows less grim, less stone. Then, as if by candlelight, a human. Shape. Against one wall. The shadow cast long and tall. Gritted nails clawing.

In the moment he lifts his rifle against his shoulder it—

That the world is. Screen to screen, and he lifts. He doesn’t fire.

Instead, but quakes.

The Demon drips the wall. In wafting. In shapes. Still he’s only quaking, and sensing fingers where? There is on him tall and always with hands like humans in—the grip of runes on his arm. In his arms this grip bites. With teeth, this Demon holds. With and by wrists. Through black, white spiralled arms so.

And no smell.

For struggling, he. Upon the ground, there thrown, clattered. A huff. It’s the breath of him. This Demon within his face.

So—

Pull.

Between the explosion, drapes of red the hammer.

Then silence, ringing with gunshot, prevails. He breathes the desperate gasp of a man undrowned. Human blood spills out before him, down through the floorboards, down to the shield of the earth.

In the bright greying of the world outside, the sun is still high and hot, and the windmill still groans. Now when he walks, his spurs spin with his haggard gait. He blinks. The light sparkles its razors. Down the street, the woman is standing where all the corpses lay. So, one more time, he nods.

She doesn’t move as he approaches her.

“It’s dead, then...” she says. And she looks at the chafed, yellow walls, unchanged. She looks at her miserable hands. “What now?”

In the sky—and the man gazes up with the woman—the clouds move slowly and grey.

[atmo-graphia]

(Belated) NaNo update 4

I guess I forgot to post the last of what I wrote for NaNo. I didn’t finish, but I did get a better feel for some of the characters (and realized that I as of yet have absolutely nothing interesting to say about some of them...). Anyways, some gay navigator baby and her girlfriend follows.

//

Day 16 and 17 (Anakayya)

Her father used to keep her on his knees. He could add, subtract, write, chat, scheme, drink and sing without ever forgetting to bounce her up and down. He would put some foreign trinket in her hands—a shiny scrap of lapis, a horse with wheels for feet, whistling toys that growled when she twirled them. So by the time she could stand on her own two feet, she already knew the world was wider than a thousand hands could hold.

Even a single city was too large for a god to hold in his hands. And Milawanta was a great city indeed. At the place where the world met the sea, she was born, surrounded by a hundred kingdoms. In the South, the river people of Kemet tilled sand into black, hearty soil. Their merchants dressed in white, and wore graceful black wigs. In the West, the sea people of Kaptor and Akhaia tore the loud-roaring sea to pieces and sowed it with the blood of men. The East was the infinite land of the Nesha, the Galzu, the Akkadi, spring of silk and turquoise.

Everything that touched her hands, she knew if it has been born faraway and felt the distance it had traveled, the distance of everything.

Day 18 (Anakayya)

Starlight was everything. In the cloak of the night, above rooves, above the city, the earth. Starlight and Branowind were everything.

That the shape of one hand could never be committed to a map. That Branowind’s voice was as filled with depths as the sea that drowned sailors.

Day 19 and 20 (Anakkaya)

“Don’t...” Branowind whispered. “Don’t try to stop me.”

Anakayya squeezed more tightly now. “But—”

“You can come with me, Ana, but I can’t—or won’t—I don’t... I want to go home.”

Anakayya felt Branowind’s heart beating in her face. She felt the girl nestle her nose in her hair, heaving out steady, warm breaths.

Branowind’s homeland was beautiful. Anakayya had never doubted this. It was green and blue with forests, darker and denser than any Anakayya had ever seen. There were a thousand flowers and cold mornings and more than anything, there were people like Branowind. People who spoke her lonely language, wore fur and praised simple things like wheels and knives.

But when Anakayya though of this place, this phantom behind the horizon, she realized that for all the sweet things she’d said to Branowind, she’d never felt any desire to see it.

Branowind was smoothing out her hair, letting her fingernails slide over her scalp.

“I love you, Anakayya.”

More than anyone else, she loved Branowind. Her lips moved to say it, and stuffy breath came out. Panting tears were forming.

Branowind wanted to go home. Why couldn’t her home have been Anakayya?

//

Day 23 total - 21208

[atmo-graphia]

@zombriehallowed has recorded my legacy

[atmo-graphia]

NaNo update 3

Struggling to get through these characters. Iolaos really sucks~~

//

Day 11 (Iolaos)

When his uncle was upset, he never frowned immediately. His brow creased first, then the rest of his face. Before that, though, the world reminded Iolaos how infinite and deep and wounding it could be. He remembered the story of how his uncle had crushed a man’s skull between his palms, and how he had injured Ares himself. He remember the fiercest storm he had survived, the color of the clouds before a battle.

Day 12 (Iolaos)

The soft ground peeled away to reveal teeth of stone. Men chewed the edges of Gaia’s flesh to pick out tin and copper and fine agate. Caves seemed to him like wounds in her lovely skin. And when he was four years old, he fell into one.

Earth smell enveloped him. Deep roots tangled him. Centipedes and worms cushioned his knees. Through the narrow gash in the ground, the white sunlight gleamed like the flash of a blade.

When the earth ate him, he could never look at sunlight the same way again.

Day 13 (Kastor)

The sound of swans wailing fascinated and terrified him. When a flock passed overhead, beating the air and the wind, ever since he was little, he’d fought the urge to run and hide. When the flocks passed and left roaring, blinking storms behind them, he stared at the window, waiting for the lighting to come close enough to smell. Close enough to tear the palace in two.

Day 14 (Kastor)

His mother had hair the color of carnelian, eyes like a fawn’s pelt and freckles over her cheeks and nose. The same freckles that covered his brother’s face. The same freckles that covered his. His mother had held a mirror up to his face while he was perched in her lap. His skin was transformed into bronze. He clawed at his reflection, and his mother traced his freckles with one fingertip.

“You know,” she said, pinching his cheek. The smell of wool and sunlight bright enough to make you sneeze. “They look like pretty little stars on your face.”

Day 15 (Kastor)

Kastor had always loved the tense thrill of pulling back a bowstring and the sharp breath when he let an arrow loose. He and Polydeukes would hunt together. He got used to the smell of blood. It smelled like sacrifice—like the gods. It smelled like a feast—the smell of riches.

Human blood smelled no different.

//

Day 15 total - 18255

[atmo-graphia]

NaNo update 2

What a horrible week. Exhausted, and now my word count is way behind. Yay!

//

Day 6 (Laertes)

Laertes tried to remain stoic, but his lower lip quivered. “I don’t want to hurt you, but if you won’t return what you stole, I will resort to the use of force.”

“Muscles, I doubt you could hurt me if you tried.”

His his chest puffed, and when he let the air fly out of his lungs, he felt as hollow and delicate as a clay urn. That is, he felt how he usually did.

Day 7 (Laertes)

He thought of all the wrongs he had committed, especially that morning when he’d said something a bit cruel to his mother. Or three years ago when he’d made Klytie cry so hard that she wouldn’t speak to him for two days. He remembered some of the right he had done. When his father had praised him down at the beach. He’d skipped a stone over the ocean.

He’d told Klytie he was sorry. He’d told her so often that she eventually just got mad.

Day 8 (Kaineus)

Kaineus had traveled across kingdoms. He’d slept in caves and in trees. He’d eaten scorpions and any half-withered thing he could find. He felt his journey laid out over his body, the dirt like scars, the despair like a shroud.

But this was the first time he had kneeled before another human being.

The fire illuminated strange patches of the forest. Shadows that looked like faces and crossed arms loomed around them.

Day 9 (Kaineus)

Amid the corpse of the olive grove, he wandered until his feet became accustomed to the soft grit of ash. Here there was no place where he’d caught a green lizard in his hands. There was no place where he’d gone to whisper to the gods, just to see if they would answer.

Within this corpse, he finally sat down. In the sky, the stars pulsed as the clouds took them in their strangling grip and then released them.

The stars were still the same.

Day 10 (Iolaos)

He screamed.

He screamed without any sense or words.

But the madness in the creature’s eyes was unmuted. It stalked forward. Raining blood. It was coated in blood. Melted, streaked, it rained its insides onto the ground. This creature was a fury, a plague.

//

Day 10 total - 14512

[atmo-graphia]

NaNo update 1

Trying to find stuff to post, I realize there’s barely anything salvageable so far haha

//

Day 1 (Alkestis)

No matter how hard she tried, she could never quite remember death. She felt it sometimes, when she breathed too deeply, when her heart was soft and still. But the faint sensation—like a sky rolling across her, other times like worms kissing the soles of her feet—drove her heart wild, beat it, thrilled it, then flew off like a terrified bat.

Day 2 (Alkestis)

It was when she was nineteen that they married. Her father had sheep and cattle slaughtered. In that way, she supposed, every princess’ marriage was anointed in blood.

She and Admetos ate a pomegranate, and her brown fingers were slick red.

“I would die for you,” he said. And how romantic it had sounded.

Day 3 (Amphiaraos)

Finally, he squeezed between two rocks and saw—nothing. The sound was behind him now. He twirled. Nothing. Before him, only more trees and rocks with soft moss.

His heart felt tight and his lungs like tattered sails. He sank to his knees. He set his bow aside, ripped his quiver over his head, spilling every arrow in the process.

The sound was fainter now, though maybe that was because the pulsing in his ears had been replaced with a breathless drum beat.

Day 4 (Peleus)

So now, the white grasses and grey stones were inscribed with his blood, and Peleus was sitting with Telamon on a bare, knife-backed ridge, looking down at the palace. Yes, blood had spilled on them, too. It felt like it was everywhere. In Peleus’ hair, in his heart.

It was strange that, though he felt coated, stained, touched with warm blood, he was perfectly calm. The world seemed absolutely content, soft, breezy, quiet. Only the black clouds lilted awkwardly down, as though struggling to hold back a storm but begging to simply weep.

A few seagulls wailed.

Day 5 (Peleus)

Aigina had seemed infinitely large when he was small. The patches of grey fields and black trees, the sea-sky wounded by a thousand stars at night and tossing white, sailing clouds in the day.

He didn’t remember a time before Phokos. A time when his father might have looked at him like precious stone. What did he care? He thought this often. Better to be common bronze or graceless iron.

//

Day 5 total - 7998

[atmo-graphia]

It was when hearths were cooling and children began yawning and wilting in their seats that the queensmen came to cover up the dolor light lamps.

Yútse stood checking her pocket watch where the streets of Gilt and Mourning crossed. A queensman pressed by her. The streets were of course wide and empty at this time of day, but god forbid someone stand in a queensman’s way. She eyed his grey-clad back as he hooked a hood on top of the lamps.

A steady, artificial twilight was falling over the city. When she glanced up, the black void of the sky seemed even wider, even blacker and deeper, almost seeing, knowing. In the daytime, you sometimes didn’t notice.

Yútse flipped the watch closed as the queensman turned the corner. The little dolor light inside—the one that illuminated its face even in the darkest places where the city’s light didn’t touch—seemed to go out. But dolor light never went out.

From the same corner, Sivaka’s snaking form peeled out of the gloam. She glanced around. Her hands were in her pockets. She must have been looking at the queensman. There was that tiny bit of strain in her shoulders.

Yútse waited until the young woman was right beside her. She didn’t look at her.

“Hey,” Sivaka finally greeted.

“Don’t ‘hey’ me. We said an hour until sunset. What time is it now?” She flipped open her watch to illustrate her point.

“I don’t know,” Sivaka said, struggling to shrug with her hands still in her pockets.

“For Sun’s—never mind. It’s an hour into the shadows from here.”

“Right.”

“You’re ready, then?”

“I guess.”

Yútse only shook her head. Behind them, where the city fell apart, past where a few hostile farmers lived with only fire and handfuls of dolor, in the deepest emptiness of the night, there were things that hand forgotten what light and warmth were. One day, maybe, Sivaka would figure out the gravity of that.

Hey guys! We began NaNo in earnest with TWO sprints and a writing exercise. And we are all up to date on day 2.

The exercise: Take an info dump (or expository lump (ew)) and undump it in a scene. “It is sifted, where as a dump is mashed.” For added fun, use an info dump you didn’t write! Or stick to your own world because it is NaNo after all.

I can’t wait to see what everyone’s working on this month. Ursulancé was also welcomed to the group vocabulary.

[atmo-graphia]

Our assignment from @properdispersion was to write fanfics for each other. So here is my attempt to write something in @aenophious‘ magical beer world.

//

Sometimes she thought the world was a flower. In the city, the rising buildings—mismatched brick and concrete—flourished like stalks of wheat. The sky was a rosy orange poppy in the evening and the sun a bright little wormwood blossom, tucked amid the white leaves of the clouds.

The park air was stiff with smog. Even here where the trees lifted up over most rooves, where the buildings grew sparser. The spring smoke made graceless clouds some days. Today you just felt it stroking its palms across your lungs.

She sat on a bench, silently turning the pages of a novel. It was hard to read at a time like this. The beaming daffodils shook in the wind. She was looking more at her fingers than at the pages.

At intervals varying from thirty seconds to sixty five seconds, her gaze drifted to her wristwatch. Her gaze would then drift up to the well appointed building facing her across the park, visible through the trees. Three stories. Apparently a small, polite office.

But her fingers were far more intriguing.

They were pale this time.

As she glanced her seventeenth glance at the office—it was six past five—two young men strolled past her. They didn’t so much as look at her. There was a strangeness in the way they moved. They were both holding bottles. It was something of the norm nowadays, even if the authorities glared at young people, even if people liked to say it wasn’t.

But you couldn’t live without magic. She couldn’t live without magic. Even if it was getting expensive, even if it was getting dangerous.

And since they couldn’t live without it, so many people were driven to drinking shoddy products. Piss-poor beer that made you lose your sense, your hope, your dreams. Over-strong potions that beat your heart faster, too fast, gave you magic but controlled it as it swam through your veins. Obviously, these were the sort of people you didn’t want wandering around the streets at night.

The men strolled on.

There was no bottle in her hand. Desperately sometimes, she wanted to carry it with her, always the power to change, to be—better. But she wouldn’t drink in public. She couldn’t afford to.

Whenever she drank, she could feel every inch of herself, the deepest pulsing of her heart and nerves. Her body felt real, her face felt real. Not the little mask that she’d been born with. The little mask that had grown with the rest of her. Grown its listless eyes—they were grey, maybe���narrow lips—they weren’t full at least—and a small nose—unassuming or shapeless or upturned—she’d remember to check in the mirror the next time she passed by.

For now there was just the plants around her, shaking in the wind. Plants were what made her like this.

The nineteenth time she looked up, a figure was exiting the building. Quickly, she thrust the novel into her purse, stood up and dusted herself off. It was nine past five when she reached the office building door. One deep breath was all she needed to prepare herself at this point.

This was her second job.

There was a silent swoosh as the door opened. She felt the air pass over her face. Inside, it was stuffy but clean and well-groomed; there were a few green plants.

A woman stared at her from behind the counter, tapping a pen anxiously.

She’d never thought herself particularly good at speaking. After all, it was her job—her first job, her real job—to copy other people’s words. Don’t think more than ‘a comma,’ ‘the spelling...’ Stare and type.

When she drank, though, when her face was real, she said whatever came to mind. It was easy. At first, she’d had trouble not laughing when her enemies failed to suspect a thing. But the more she did it, the stranger the thought of laughing felt.

“Hi, M—,” she said to the woman behind counter.

She couldn’t remember how she knew the name.

The woman gave her a short, uncertain look. “Oh, A—. You... forgot something?”

“Yes, sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

She wasn’t sorry. She fled up the stairs to the location of her—not her—office. The blank wall of the stairwell and the hallway were unrecognizable. Of course they were, she’d never been here. But she followed her own feet to the second door on the left and calmly turned the handle.

Vaguely, she understood what it was she was looking for. Documents, words. More than what they said, she felt in her heart where to look for them. Some inaccessible part of her knew the information on those pages already. She felt like if she could just scratch away pieces of herself—her skin, her muscles—she’d be able to reach it.

It was a small office but messy and dark brown as the evening sun struggled through the blinds. There was a desk, unadorned aside from the scattered pens and papers.

The documents were in the first drawer she yanked open. She skimmed them to be sure, remembering the bad, drizzling weather when she’d typed them.

She didn’t type them.

Rubbing the back of one hand across her forehead, she creased the handful of papers with the other and stuffed them into her purse.

Out the door, closing the door, down the stairs, quick salute goodbye to the woman behind the desk, onto the street, away, home, she was already home.

Good, she was feeling dizzy. She wanted another drink, but she told herself she’d have water.

Unlike her, the apartment never changed. She listened to the sound of the key grinding in the lock. Inside, the pale yellow walls lit up sickly when she flipped the switch, threw off her shoes, tripped out of her stockings, undid her hairpins.

There was nothing comfortable about her furniture, though it looked nice. She found herself draped over one of her two boxy, brown chairs, the dense armrests poking its corners at her wrists.

Water, she remembered, but she didn’t want to get up. More magi brew was just as far.

Many long minutes passed like that. Slowly, the magic faded out of her veins, and the feel of being someone else—of being the right someone else faded, too. She was that same little mask she’d been born with. Same but dizzy. Finally, she managed to lift herself out of her seat, wander into the dainty thing that was her kitchen and pour herself a glass of water.

It cooled her throat, but her brain still felt like an enormous, aching tumor.

Back in her uncomfortable easy chair, she downed the glass in steady gulps. Next she took out the documents, pausing for just a moment to touch her nose and try to feel it. The words looked like a normal business report. They weren’t. They weren’t; she couldn’t remember at all now how they were coded.

With the glass in her hand, she stared at them, willing her brain to understand, to remember, to be someone else. The empty glass. She filled it with water again. Sat back down.

There was magic in water, too. Just a little. The minerals in the earth ended up in the water.

But she couldn’t see anything other than the words as they were.

She was supposed to hand them off in the morning, on the way to her real job. Real-ish.

~

The next day was gentle, white clouds. The bottoms of their faces were dusted grey like wormwood leaves. She sat in her own office, hands poised over a typewriter. They didn’t look so nice today, bony and cracked. The office itself was barren. The walls were grey, the desk was neat and sterile. She’d been in offices where people kept photographs  on their desks. Or at least some flowers.

Type, type, click, click. Ninety-five words per minute. When she lost herself in someone else’s words, sometimes she didn’t mind her little mask or her bony fingers.

~

Two days later, it was time to steal words again. A different discreet office, a different part of town. The same quiet sitting on a nearby bench, the same deep breath before the door pushed open. Another woman behind a counter.

This time, she had to talk more.

“Oh, how’s D—?”

“Well, he’s just fine. He’s taking up gardening.”

“Really?”

“I know it’s hard to believe.”

And there was too, “Did you hear about that poor girl?”

“You mean L—, don’t you.”

“Yes! I don’t like to gossip, but I hear she’s in the hospital now.”

“I don’t either, but it’s true. I brought flowers just to see if it really was.”

“Ohh...!”

Her chest felt warm when she spoke. The thrill of being, of knowing D— and L— and that he didn’t like to garden and that she was suffering from an ‘accident.’ Knowing these people, and not knowing—

“Anyways,” she said, “I have to go. It was nice catching up.”

The woman smiled at her, like she really enjoyed it, too. Like she liked her, like she really believed she was good.

She walked out of the building with a fresh smile and turned down the street. She was seven blocks away before she realized she was walking in the wrong direction.

~

When she placed the documents in the hands of one of the Corporation’s agents, she didn’t feel much of anything. It was a diner today. The agent was a middle-aged man. On the table where they sat, there was a vase with a single stem of lily of the valley. She counted seven teardrop blossoms. She tried to smile at him as they both ordered coffee. She tried to drink it. He swallowed his in just a few gulps, waved goodbye.

As the bell sang at his exit, she realized. She’d forgotten to look in the mirror three days in a row.

[atmo-graphia]

Whenever I see another person say it's just words -Grab her by the pussy- I think to myself, "Live a day without words. No writing, no speaking, no reading, no letters, no poetry, no news, no questions, no singing. No one says, 'I love you.' No one tells a joke. No one greets you when you walk in or says goodbye as you leave. You can't explain the silence your heart feels when you make just a tiny mistake and can't ask if it's okay, if it's normal, if it's—" I think to myself, "Live a year without words, without your mother saying your name, without a single story, without the power to say 'stop,' to say 'no,' to say 'I want—I dream of—I hope.'" That is what 'it's just words' means. "But," I think, too, "at least you won't hear anymore—hey slut, hey cunt, hey bitch." Maybe those words didn't cut you, didn't slice at your heart, didn't peel back each layer of your stomach, maybe none ever will. Well, lucky you.

[atmo-graphia]

   a lake beneath a mountain an inn waiting the flow of people a march a secret footsteps and the moon is a talon    a woman who waits who flows who towers    seven camels expectant dancing    shuffled steps like an assassin slipping through each shadow to the next the shadows of beautiful flowers on the wall the paintings of beautiful flowers on the wall    white and black and green like a jungle of waiting    still the waves churn in the riverbed    and feet kick sand down into the river and a deer walks by the inn a deer with antlers of precious silver rubies and pawing at the ground where blood love emotion waiting has spilled

September 21, 2016 (The Silk Road Ensemble – Blue as the Turquoise Night of Neyshabur)

   the sea beyond seas strings of stars a boat floating black and grey in the black and greyness    waters churning unchurned spiraling with a finger twirling    knees on fingers hair in face the escape of the sky the black space of endless tunneling down through the boat to the water and the swamp of pure water air    travel through

September 22, 2016 (Azam Ali – The Tryst)

   when the spring is blooming with camellias the sun full of rainbows the wild wind shaking down trees and the storms of summer    hands curled against a breast black raincoats the streaking sky reflected on the streets    running charging in the morning of past rains amid the flutter of green leaves the smell of patience the rain the soft mossy grass where the old ancientness used to walk    i’ll remember a bright flash of quilted colors the soft fingers the smile full of rainbows formal bows the crown of laurel and daisies

September 24, 2016 (Shikata Akiko – Wokashi～Instrumental～)

   maze spiderweb drip tremble on the web racing wrapping blood red grapes    eyes on a cat back and forth    the rise of bubbles in the ocean notes filling air    the flutter down of flyers from the sky    lifting a hand onto your heart swear feeling always feel never feel    memories aching in an ear    slipping into a pocket the fish in an aquarium swimming in the bright white light the maze of pure shining water always lit the unchanged the fish change again and again the wide unblinking eyes    nice fish    scanning the room in the dust of grey and the aquarium lights up the room and the fish are the color on your cheeks

September 28, 2016 (Goddess in the Morning – Ucraine)

   foggy predawn lit with lanterns the blue of the world reflected in your skin    the sun pure white the feeling twist clutching gripping tears    before snow falls the golden sun twisting in the autumn of the leaves    the tiger the lion the greeting of hands held tender afraid of them vanishing feel the nails the rough skin each wrinkle in their knuckle    graveyard quiet old longing in the window before    moths and staggered bees a cloud of buzzing    mud to the knees will continue foot after foot after foot

October 9, 2016 (Kalafina – storia ～Instrumental～)