magistrate | Crowdfunding Open Prompt Call

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Shared Worlds prompt call!

This prompt call is:

Closed

Prompting closed at: 11:59 PM PST, Monday, June 23, 2014

Thank you everyone for coming by! I will continue to write prompt responses until every prompter has received at least one response, and will hopefully complete a response for every prompt. However, prompting is now closed.

Sponsoring is:

Closed

Sponsoring remained open until: 11:59 PM PST, Friday, July 4, 2014

Thank you to everyone who contributed!

Wait. What is this? Briefly, please.

Leave me prompts, and I'll write you snippets of fiction. Donate $10, and get 500-word flash fiction or complete scenes on a prompt response of your choice. These funded scenes will become part of the Shared Worlds canon.

Who are you, anyway? Why should we care what you're writing?

I'm an author and editor of short fiction, with a number of professional publications, including appearances in various "Year's Best" compilations. You can read almost all of my short fiction for free online, and decide whether or not what I'm doing works for you.

So tell me about prompting. How does that work?

You leave me a prompt. I'll try to write a snippet of fiction for you. These will just be me jotting down bits of the story as they occur to me, which is how I approach writing generally; what you get will probably be a bunch of illustrative lines without any real connecting bits. A taste of what I'd be doing with the story. (Check the link for an example of how that formatting looks.)

I will try to get to every prompt – or at least one prompt from every prompter – but cannot guarantee that I will.

Prompts can be whatever you feel like. "A girl-in-tower-guarded-by-dragon story from the dragon's perspective" could be an example, as could "something riffing off Sappho's You May Forget", or even just "a F/F/M poly triad fights crime". There's a Bingo card below with some prompts – this time, I generated the card using the "worldbuilding" and "end of the world" lists that

ysabetwordsmith worked up – but those are just jumping-off points, and should not be considered restrictive. Feel free to suggest anything.

(I reserve the right to refuse any prompts, though only expect to exercise this right if I've got too many prompts on my plate, or if I find prompts offensive. Additionally, you can't prompt for stuff in universes I've already written, unless they were written in this prompt call or are otherwise part of the Shared Worlds canon.)

Okay, and what do I get if I pay you? And why $10?

If you donate $10 (USD) toward a prompt response I've already written (whether or not you were the one to prompt for it), you will get a minimum of 500 words (of new writing) of non-patchy fiction expanding on the response or continuing to flesh out its potential story. Could be a 5x drabble or flashfic, could be a complete scene in a potential short story. You may get more than 500 words – you may get substantially more, depending on how the mood strikes me and how engaged I am with the universe of the prompt response. But 500 words is the guaranteed minimum.

$10 for 500 words works out to 2¢/word. This is lower than I usually aim my fiction, but I'm hoping that it'll be an accessible price point for people, which in turn would help build up a canon of works in the Shared World universes.

For this prompt call, I'll release these flashfics/scenes into the Shared Worlds canon, which allows authors to write and sell derivative, transformative works (including fanfiction) based on the stories, so long as they release them under a similarly permissive license. My eventual hope is to create a body of works which can offer people the community benefits of a fandom while still nurturing and encouraging a culture of rewarding creative folk for their work.

Gamma Ray Burst	Dominant species	Magic
Local cuisine	Overpopulation	Extreme weather
Honors & insults	Sex / gender dynamics	Divine intervention

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dominant species: two species share a planet, one dominant on land, the other in the water or air. How do they conflict or cooperate?

Gamma ray burst: These are very brief events, so imagine what would happen if a nearby planet received heavy damage on the facing side but the other side was sheltered.

Magic: What would it be like if the same techniques which develop enlightenment and compassion also nurtured magical ability?

I really connected with this prompt! Hardly any jump scenes, and... whoop, 650ish words. One of these days, I'll get the hang of this "flash fic" thing, but it may not be today.

Content warning for dysphoria.

Miah's skin was too tight, and clung to his muscles in the wrong places. This was a bad day for it. He wanted to tear up his hips and scratch out his cracking voicebox, and he could feel Teacher Leoh settling down across from him as though the man's presence was a hand on Miah's intestines. Leoh took a deep, demonstrative breath.

Miah hunched inward. "I can't do this," he said. Just getting the words out was challenge enough.

"You can," Leoh said. "As you do every day, Miah. Be present with your body. Observe–"

"I can't!" Miah yelled. His body was crawling over his awareness; it was like being present with quicksand or stinging ants. He couldn't observe when it tried to close his throat, when his hand, desperate for some escape, found the clay cup with its lukewarm tea and shattered it against the tile, when that violence wasn't enough and Teacher Leoh had to catch his wrist before his hand slammed down on the shards. Leoh frowned, and picked up one clay piece.

He was capable enough to put it back together. But magic slipped out of Miah's grip like lights on the surface of water.

Leoh looked at him, not with reproach, but with an endless, infuriating patience. He held Miah's hand, and placed the shard into it. "Consider the world from the perspective of the cup."

> (Miah throws a punch. Miah gets sent to be disciplined.) >

The halls outside Scholar Alam's chamber were full of light and breezes, lined with couches. On another day, they might be dotted with those waiting for her attention. Today, though, they were empty.

>

standing at the window, the light painting her in shades of earth and crimson, her hands open to a trail grapevine which hung down from above the window. Her back was turned enough that she couldn't see him, and even he could feel the faint resonance of magic in the air.

Scholar Alam could place herself in the role of anything. She could assume the energy of a charging bull and bring it calm. She could feel the dance of an unlit fire and will it into life.

Miah would have cut off his hand just to feel that connection with his own cursed body.

He retreated to the hall and curled up on a couch, trying not to feel the flesh between his legs, shutting his eyes hard to block out the world.

>

a hand on his shoulder.

He startled and looked up to see Alam there. "You could have interrupted me," she said, mildly.

>

and a bowl of fresh grapes on her desk. She nudged them toward him, and he took on, holding it cradled in all his fingertips: fragile skin, a perfect curve.

"I hit Teacher Leoh," he said, and steeled himself for the admonishment: Can you place yourself in his experience? Can you feel as he would have felt?

Instead, Alam gave him a soft, sad smile. "You must have been hurting," she said.

Miah stared at her for a moment. He had nothing to say to that.

"Can you tell me what's wrong?" she asked. "Is it something you feel capable of, right now? If not, we can play a game of Pattern, or I can play the flute, or you can rest for a while or watch the sun go down outside." She gestured to the divan in the corner.

>

why Leoh was a brilliant academic, but Alam was the more powerful mage. Leoh tried to teach him how to feel as another subject felt, but for Leoh, teaching distracted him from practice.

Alam, on the other hand, picked another grape from the bowl and said, "the clouds are beautiful this evening."

Wow! This is a wonderful portrayal of dysphoria
(and possibly sensory processing disorder too). I
also like the contrast between Leoh and Alam, because
people are good at different things.

Thanks for sharing this.

I've expanded this prompt into a 2000-ish word piece, Lessons of Flesh and Water, which has been released into the Shared Worlds canon!

Thank you again for prompting and funding this! Here's hoping that the setting and characters will seed many stories to come.

>> I've expanded this prompt into a 2000-ish word piece, Lessons of Flesh and Water, which has been released into the Shared
Worlds canon! <<

Yay! This is beautiful. I love the way it turned out, now that it's fully developed. I have linked.

>> Thank you again for prompting and funding this! Here's hoping that the setting and characters will seed many stories to come. <<

You're welcome, and thanks for creating both the story and the Shared Worlds project. I've encouraged other people to get involved; maybe some of them will give it a try.

This is wonderful :)

There's a lovely short story about a gamma-ray burst that I read some time ago: "Finding Joan", by David D. Levine. So, with that being the first thing I think of when I think of fictional treatments of them, I tried to find a way to approach this prompt that wouldn't be re-writing that.

Bay Ald was a clatter of horsehooves, seagulls, and barter, even in little tearooms whose windows couldn't see the water.

>

Dense breads, laden with nuts and fruits and heavy grains, through the morning. Airy breads which had risen and been painted with herbs and rolled and risen again, for the crowds eating fish at the close of day. And through the small of night there was hot spiced tea and bumbo and mulled wine, made from some secret mix of plants. (Cacille could taste lemongrass, perhaps fig, but the fig notes seemed to come and go with the season, and the vintners kept their secrets well.)

But what Cacille stewarded, tucked inside a locked shelf with expensive glass doors, were the little folios. Curiosities, maybe: poems from this or that great poet, local fables, rules for predicting the seasons. All of them on the sturdy local paper stock which would hold up to the salt and humidity of the sea.

>

when the door swung open and someone came in with a cajoling "Come on, mama, it's a good place. Very clean; you'll like it. I promise. I ate here twice a day when I came late for the boat home – remember that?"

The woman coming in the door wasn't so pale, but her skin had that particular cast to it that said she'd been tanned by the sun, not born dark as a local. She was young. Over her shoulder was slung a bookbag; she'd probably come from the Academy inland at Mendam. The woman she was ushering in, though, was pale as someone from the other side of the world – and old, old enough that Cacille thought she might the woman's grandmother or great-grandmother, hunched and small with age, live spots covering her face and hands and forming a kind of skullcap under her wispy hair. She gripped the young woman's arm, and whispered something Cacille couldn't hear.

Cacille would have let them find their own chairs, as she let everyone else, but the pair intrigued her. Not that there were any shortage of foreigners in this bay city, with the ships sailing in and out.

>

and spoke in a language Cacille didn't know. The young woman listened to her, responded with warmth, and put her hand over the older woman's.

"My grandmother hasn't ever been this far from home before," she said, and Cacille nodded. "But my family – well, I'm the best one to take care of her, with my father's new prospects."

"Is she all right?" Cacille asked.

The woman looked over at her grandmother, and Cacille recognized two things in her eyes: an abiding love, and fear. The fear of someone knowing that a loved one's days were numbered, knowing that they seemed fine but fragile today, wondering when the end would be and if they'd see it coming.

"She's strong," the woman said, and said something to her grandmother in her own tongue. They exchanged a flurry of words, and the woman turned to Cacille again. "Did you study the Time of Storms?"

Cacille shrugged one shoulder. "I know as much as anyone knows, I suppose." She'd had little formal schooling. She knew it was a time when crops struggled, when the sky roiled and often spat without rain, when people grew ill. Her parents' parents remembered it. Months-long nightmares, years-long hard times. But not so hard that it stopped the Confederacy from building a navy, sending explorers out across the seas, signing treaties and growing in influence and power.

"Where I come from," the woman said, "it was worse than it was here. My grandmother... she's one of the ones who lived through it. Her brother – God rest him – he actually saw the glint in the skies."

>

wishing that she had the paper-maker here, her dark hands made dusky by ink and flecked with paper pulp, to record this. To press it into the curiosities bought by the travelers who came into Cacille's tea room, and took them on their journeys across the seas.

I like seeing these little glimpses of what was
lost and what was saved, from the world gone before.

Thank you!

Wonderful glimpses, full of possibilities!

Thanks for posting this.

(Here via Ysabet.) Interesting, sad... But I don't understand the
>
lines and the
>
middle of a sentence.

Typo:
• live spots covering her face and hands
→ liver spots

Thanks for pointing that out! Unfortunately, Dreamwidth won't let me edit the comment after it's been responded to, but I'll make a note of it.

The > bits are an artefact of the way in which I write. I write in an extremely nonlinear fashion, hopping back and forth and writing bits here and there at various parts of the story; the >s are the way that I track that something is missing. There's an explanation here: http://magistrate.dreamwidth.org/35835.html , which was linked in the prompt post proper, but unfortunately that context isn't well-preserved when the responses themselves are being linked to. :)

Fascinating! I also write in a nonlinear fashion, using snippets of description or dialog as a quasi-outline. But I haven't seen anyone else posting samples like that, so it's hard to tell how rare or common this is. Thanks for sharing.

I figured it was supposed to be "liver spots" but "live spots" would be fascinating. Maybe they're like freckles that creep across the skin, a relic of the gamma ray burst?

Euhhh!! Yeah, could be, but sheesh.

Hey, I like creepy things and I like weirdness
inspired by typos. You've seen some of what *I* write!

Yeah. But that was my reaction. I didn't mean it should be yours, too. I like to think of myself as being open-minded that way.

This time, when Eneja came to the cove, the big Deeper male he called Blackside appeared with a cord of kelp wound around his chest and neck, in which small forms writhed. Eneja was already reaching for his knife, ready to offer to unentangle him, when he recognized the little shapes: he'd seen them drawn in the Marebestium. Deeper young.

Eneja's mouth twisted, but he schooled the expression. He would not have brought his own children to a meeting like this, if he'd had any; and human children did not squirm like fish against their parents' skin. But the Deepers were not human, and Eneja had to temper his distaste. The sailors here negotiated with Deepers as a matter of course, and didn't shudder at their black eyes and slick skin.

Eneja, however, didn't have the benefit of familiarity. His people were from the foothills, and he had never seen a Deeper before coming on this mission.

>

the advice he'd read in the Marebestium: To understand the lords of the ocean is a largely futile task. Their ways are not our ways; their thoughts are not our thoughts. Their world is the world of capricious seas, and it is more brutal than land.

>

"Here," Eneja said, and laid out the samples. He'd brought some of the refined aluminum ore, as well as a few tools he'd asked the metallurgist and blacksmith to make: a poker, a harpoon, a set of hooks. Not things the new-discovered metal would usually be used for. But trade with these creatures was more important than the experiments of chemists and metallurgists.

Blackside hauled himself up on the jutting rock. Eneja pushed the trade wheel toward him; the Deepers could understand the trade language which Eneja spoke only haltingly, but few could understand deeper song. The sailors said they could divine the winds and storms by listening carefully, nestled in the sounding hulls where they could hear the symphony of the ocean. They said that Deeper song carried for miles, and with your ear pressed against the metal, you could feel a part of it.

But Blackside had never sung for Eneja, and Eneja had little curiosity to hear it. He had more pressing concerns.

Blackside took the knife, then retreated far enough to duck below the water. Eneja's shoulders tightened, but after a moment Blackside returned, hauling himself up again to take up the harpoon. After testing that – or whatever he was doing, hidden from sight by the glint of sun on the water – he returned again, and placed on webbed hand on the trade wheel. He turned the circle of interest toward assent, and then the circle of questions to amount.

"You want, how many, what?" Eneja said. "From me? From you?"

Blackside bared his teeth, and ran his dripping hand down his own throat.

Eneja pulled back. The Deepers had too many teeth, by his estimation; even wolves didn't need so many. But Blackside repeated the gesture, and Eneja made a guess as to its meaning.

"From you," he said. "We come – large boats. Many. You lead – you show us a place. No man there. Empty land. You understand this?" He hoped he used all the words correctly. The word for show – did that only mean teach? Report, as on the populations of whales off this coast or that?

Blackside shifted some of the Deeper young away from his chest, and onto his back. Then he pushed off the rock and landed on the beach, clawing his way up until only his hindclaws and his long, muscular tail trailed into the water. He smoothed out a patch of sand and drew a wide circle, with a smaller circle in front of it. Outside the large circle, on its edge, he drew glyphs of houses. Then he took his claws and raked them from the houses to the smaller circle.

Eneja frowned. With some imagination, he could see a picture of the ocean: a city on the shore, and an uninhabited island in the distance. He said, "Yes," and hoped he was correct. Then showed his fingers. "Four boats. Large."

>

Eneja took the trade wheel, and turned the circle of considerations to trade this only with us. "Four boats," he said. "None after. None."

Blackside took the wheel, his hand brushing Eneja's – hard and smooth and cold as the ocean. He turned the circle of interest toward assent, and spun the circle of payment toward his price.

>

>> This time, when Eneja came to the cove, the big Deeper male he called Blackside appeared with a cord of kelp wound around his chest and neck, in which small forms writhed. Eneja was already reaching for his knife, ready to offer to unentangle him, when he recognized the little shapes: he'd seen them drawn in the Marebestium. Deeper young. <<

Awww! Water babies, so cute!

>> placed on webbed hand on the trade wheel. He turned the circle of interest toward assent, and then the circle of questions to
amount. <<

This is an awesome piece of xenolinguistics and I love it. Thanks everso for sharing!

Ooh! I like this! Is there more of this verse?

Not yet! But the option to sponsor it into a complete scene or short-short fic (and release it for commercial fanworks) is still open; anyone can fund it for $10.

(I also have a $10 general donation which I've been directed to use to fund whichever snipped I want to see released, and I haven't chosen which that will be yet. Though this one is in the running. I'm just waiting until I fill all the remaining prompts to see which haven't been funded yet, and which speak to me the most.)

Different!

No "universal translator", no centuries of trade history. I /love/ it. i love the increased risk, increased 'alien' percpetions. Much more powerful than anything in Trek.

Thanks for posting this.

(Following

ysabetwordsmith's pointer)

My word! Yes, the low-level contact pidgin rings true, and the setting and the bargaining are intriguing.

Mmmm. And I would guess that the Deepers have a fairly good idea, from trading and otherwise interacting with landfolk, of how "large" a boat Eneja means.

How does extreme weather affect the cuisine (where the character lives)?

You have no idea how much I wanted to make this a story about a colony on a planet with extreme weather, which had to rely exclusively on hydroponics, and then some kind of weather event damaged the hydroponics modules. But I have so many stories in which hydroponics play a central or starring role, already. I probably don't need any more.

The new man paused in the mouth of the cave, red-faced and covered in mud, and Jakob started laughing. Later he'd gather with the other old hands and count out the root cellars again, bemoan the fact that it'd be another long winter without the last squash, the late berries, and the hardy winter greens that grew in the sheltered valley. Wish they'd sent someone up sooner, before they had been mired by the early storms.

But it would be one of many such winters. The forage here, as with forage everywhere, was temperamental.

"Come on," Jakob said, waving him in by the light of the tallow lamps. Fewer hung in the cave entrance now than had even ten days ago; as the winter wore on, the whole settlement's eyes would adjust to the dark. Lights would be faint and far-between, through the deep cold.

>

He was a big man, with those broad ox shoulders that southerners tended to have, and Jakob could see the pride in him. He was a man who would rather be swinging an axe and building his own lodge than following a man like Jakob down into the cave pools.

But he had come from so far south that he knew the storms but not the deep freeze or the torrents of snow that would bury them. And if he had come so far, passing so many other settlements, it meant that the crime for which he'd been excommunicated made him unfit to live in most groups who bothered to ask.

Under these skies, with winter approaching, excommunication meant death. This place was his last refuge from death, and that was why the man lowered his eyes and made himself subservient. It was also why Jakob didn't fear him, whatever he had done.

>

Down this deep, the air was always chill but never frigid, and the water was always icy-cold though it never turned to ice. Jakob set his lamp aside, letting his eyes track over the water.

"There," he said, waving his hand toward a steaming pile on the other bank. "Whatever scraps of food we have, they go there. As it rots, it warms; insects the children have been gathering can live there, quite happily, as though it was summer. We pluck them off at a certain stage of growth, and use them to set lines." He gestured over a few of the water paths, some deceptively deep. "The fish who swim here are blind. Their flesh tastes like mud – like you're eating the cave. But there'll come a time in the long cold where you'll weep at the thought of eating dried meat in stew. Then, these fish will be the sweetest things you'll ever taste."

The man crouched by the edge of the water.

Jakob regarded him for a moment. "I can teach you to watch the lines," he said. "It takes a certain sort. You have to be very quiet, and very patient, and not let your eyes sleep."

The man put his palm down against the surface of the water, then drew it back up, shook it off. "How do you live like this?"

Jakob raised his eyebrow. Of course he knew that other settlements lived differently, but these deep caves and the long, buried winter were in his blood. But that was not an answer to satisfy a man tossed out from his home.

"Because it is better than dying in the cold," he said.

>

Wow... I mean... WOW.

And there's so much potential for expansion here, so much hinted at but not /said/.

Thank you, thank you for posting this!

Last line nails it.

I love the intense terroir of this entry. It's a setting that would be worth exploring further. I really like caves.

I've commented on this earlier, but it is 105F here, and I just /wanted/ to imagine the bitter, biting cold, to see if it would help me feel less like a melted puddle of human.

(Nope.)

But it's still an awesome story!

Local cuisine: The dragon doesn't know what prince(ss)es eat. But it's trying very hard to be a good host!

Nhasa-whose-name-was-scoured-stone did not want the ape in her den to die. But the ape was being obstinate. She would not eat the aging meat brought up from Nhasa's larder – fair enough. But she also would not eat the fish that Nhasa snapped up from the pond, or the mouse – small enough even for her mouth! – that Nhasa skewered with one deft tailspike as it scuttled along the edge of the den. And when Nhasa bit the flesh behind one talon, so her dark blood welled up, and offered it, the ape recoiled. Only then did Nhasa remember that a dragon's blood would burn her.

So Nhasa took to the skies and turned her path toward the dirt path that would become cobbled road, hoping to catch a glimpse of

>

stupid human animal. Nhasa was young enough that she hadn't much dealt with them. In this age, dragons kept their own territories and humans kept theirs, and there were no great gold-paid treaties, no great crusades.

And yet this human had shown up, horse half-dead (and now thoroughly eaten), gold in her possession, blood-crusted, panting, hindlimb broken, and pursued. It was not unlike the way the treaties of old started, if the shards of wisdom Nhasa had gathered from the others dragons truly reflected their history.

>

She could carry water up in some of the old clay, at least, and the ape drank that up eagerly. River grasses such as the deer ate, though? No. Nor the hard, green fruits the birds pecked over, nor the river reeds. Nhasa suspected that humans feasted on chatter and sunlight, though the light in the antecavern did nothing for this one.

Two days after the human ape's arrival, Nhasa caught a man riding a horse down the path, and tore him to pieces. She carried all his bags up to the human girl, who picked through them, and ate of something hard with very little smell, which Nhasa had never seen growing in all the places she'd looked. But the human also made noises which Nhasa could guess at: she was not pleased to have the bloodied bag laying against her side.

And Nhasa recognized something else, as well: a premonition of rotting meat, its odor wafting up from the ape's leg.

Nhasa hadn't clutched, and hadn't found a male who seemed likely to brood with her. But she knew, bone-deep, how to care for hatchlings, and what other knowledge was she to guide herself by? She went to her larder, where the cave itself seemed to hold a memory of what items had been tossed into this pile, which had languished in that. The gold of the human ape's saddlebag gleamed in her awareness, fresh and bright.

>

The ape said something. Nhasa couldn't understand it; some among her kind undoubtedly knew what this utterance meant. Nhasa, though, hissed a stay-still warning and planted one hand on the human's leg, above the break. Then she selected one of the shards, dark and iridescent, and drove it into the skin.

The ape's screams were enough like a dragons screams of rage and pain. Nhasa understood them.

But she also understood that the poison of her wound drained into the gryphon-talon shards, and the smell vanished, and the limb smelled like fresh meat again, and not rotten.

Nhasa, of course, would have eaten either. Both nourished her. But that was food, not body, and body should not smell like that. She took the shard between her teeth and slid it out, then leapt from her den to bury it far away.

>

Wow! This is terrific.

I really like stories with a language barrier. It annoys me when authors handwave that in situations where it should clearly prevail. But I also like ones such as this where the barrier is placed by choice and used well.

Awww, I love this! Really neat details of biology and Nhasa's POV.

Here's my prompt:

One of my favorite things in stories is the discovery of ancient stuff: ancient ruins, ancient texts, ancient remains, ancient doodads. Old wrecks. Identifiable or complete mystery.

–Pam

Woo! Clocking in at around 2300 words, this... may or may not be the first scene of a novel. But it's also the first work to be officially released into the Shared Worlds canon!

Thanks for the prompt, and thank you so much for donating!

Jem brought her battered old Solarnik to rest on the side of a road. At least, it had been a road once; now the prairie grasses were tearing into it, their insistent roots crumbling the ancient asphalt into grit.

Part of her admired them. They were dead-grass brown and more sunbeat than she was, but they covered the land here. Their roots kept the dirt held down. Look any way toward the horizon, and except for the fading scar of the old highway, there was nothing but that waving tan.

She pushed the door open, though the breeze was hot. Swung her feet out from the car and put them on the ground, leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees. Her phone searched for a signal and the sun fell on her shoulders, her bare arms, the back of her neck; she could feel her hair soaking up the heat like it was planning to poach her brain in its own juices. She'd taken the hint when she was still south in the desert, had painted the roof of her car a slick white. But her hair was black, and hats made the skin above her ears itch, and the knots of bandanas annoyed her, so she'd said fuck it. Her hair could bake. She'd dealt with worse.

After a while, her phone deigned to connect to some lonely satellite up above, and buzzed with a message. Jem keyed it up, and let out a breath: good. Only about ten minutes old; not something she'd missed hours ago as she drove through the trackless wilds.

[You there yet?] the message read.

[Just got here,] Jem typed back, and stared at the screen. Its cover kept most of the glint off, but there was still enough reflection that it felt like the sun was reading over her shoulder, analyzing her life choices. After a while, a new message appeared.

[Can't be. I'm here. Which GPS are you using?]

Jem gave the sky a I really forget that? look, and typed back [India. You?]

She could imagine Amica judging her from however many minutes of latitude and longitude away she was. She'd be using the American system, of course. Jem didn't like the American satellites, though; they never seemed to get her where she needed to be, when it came to coordinates and not addresses. Why was a question she'd never hunted out the answer to – the people she knew squabbled about universal inaccuracies introduced to foil home-grown targeting systems, about satellites drifting out of alignment, about viral code in the computers, about backdoors in the phone GPS software that kept people from visiting locations that weren't on a whitelist... and Jem just cut the damn knot and paid someone to hack her phone to track to a system that actually worked.

[Never mind], Jem sent. [I'll translate the coordinates for you.] Last Jem knew, Amica had a car that didn't protest every time you asked it to do something. That actually cooled her while she drove. Amica could drive out here, not that the exact location mattered worth a damn.

She sent off the coordinates, got a [K] in response, then looked at the sky. It was a washed-out blue that deepened toward the east, with a few wispy clouds struggling on, high above. An empty sky over and empty part of the world.

If she was going to be waiting, she decided, she might as well get out of the stuffy heat of the car and into the clear heat of the prairie. Stretch her legs, even if the only place to go, really, was up and down the old road. Ten meters in any other direction and she'd have to have the GPS point her back to her car. At least she had the location set. A crappy little place in the middle of nowhere, picked out of lat-long blocks she had no business being in, selected by dice-rolls so that no one would think to track her out here.

So she did, crunching along the abandoned highway, hearing here and there the drone of bugs. Nothing changed, as she walked – not even an ancient aluminum can, rolled flat and forgotten – appeared underfoot.

Until a breath of cold air passed by her.

Jem froze in place, half-remembered ghost stories and half-believed superstitions gripping her by the hindbrain. Then she took a deep breath, flexed her fingers, and turned to survey the land around her.

She had a collapsible baton on her right beltloop, and it was suddenly heavy and present in her awareness. Didn't matter that she didn't know what kind of cold-air threat would be that she could beat up with a baton. Maybe one of Boss's bounty hunters had come up with a handheld air conditioner?

Yeah, right.

There was nothing to be seen, but the cold air came again, and Jem turned her head to catch its direction. It was coming from somewhere out in the tall grass, and she pushed a few of the stalks aside with her hand.

Then she checked her phone, muttered "Screw it," and felt her way forward into the prairie.

The tallgrass here might look dead, but it grew with plenty of vigor. Most of it swished up past her hips, some of it up to her armpits, and there were no shortage of stalks waving up above her head. She had no idea how many kinds of grass there were, though they scraped at her skin as she went through; hopefully none were razor grass. Hopefully none were poisonous. Hopefully there were no snakes coiling on the ground, or stinging insects clinging to the stalks.

But as she pushed through she saw a strange gap in the grasses, and she slowed down. Crouched low, then pushed the last few handsbreadths through to see a sinkhole, maybe fifteen meters wide at an estimate. When the wind came from across it, it blew cool.

Huh, Jem thought, and crouched down by it. She'd never seen one of these before.

She didn't hear the motor of Amica's car, but her phone buzzed, and a second later she could hear Amica's voice calling out "Hey! You hiding?"

"Over here," Jem yelled. A second later, she heard someone pushing their way through the grass.

"You're in trouble, aren't you?" Amica called. Jem quirked a smile; she could see a disturbance in the tall grass, but she couldn't see Amica yet. From her position at the edge of the drop, she guessed she wouldn't see Amica until she was a couple meters away. "You only ever want to meet me in the middle of arid nowhere–"

"Watch your step," Jem called back. Then, as an afterthought, "Come on, I am trouble."

"You are," Amica said, and pushed through to her. Jem turned her head, but didn't get up.

Amica was wearing her long white sleeves, and they fluttered in the breeze. She always said it was cooler that way. Jem didn't care. She liked the feeling of the sun on her skin, even when it was pounding the blood dry in her skull. She was dark enough from her mother's side that she'd never burned, and she didn't care much about the spectre of skin cancer later in life. She'd spent most of her teens thinking she'd die by twenty-one anyway.

Now at twenty-six, she met her continued survival with an ongoing, wary surprise.

"I fucking hate my life, Ami," she said. "What's the point of it? I could be a fetch and carry girl for the big man on Lake Mead. Die without doing anything worth anything to anyone. I can't even think why I get up in the morning." Aside from sheer stubbornness, and the fact that pining in bed and waiting to die sounded unendurably boring.

Amica looked at her, and her face said that this scared her more than Jem's usual grousings. "Uh," she said, and edged closer, then crouched down and trailed her fingertips along the dry dirt. "Okay. You should tell me if I should really be worried about this, 'cause we're having this conversation right on the edge of a giant hole in the earth."

Jem blinked. She hadn't considered the implication, there. Honestly, suicide just seemed like more of a pointless waste than living out the rest of her stupid pointless life down south. "I'm fine," she said. "I actually didn't even know this was out here."

Amica let out a huge whoosh of breath. "Okay," she said, and rocked back onto her butt. And from her tone, that was that. Jem being bitter was just Jem being Jem, while Jem being maudlin and sitting on a precipice was context out of bounds.

"I needed to get away," Jem said. It sounded like an apology to her ear, but Amica didn't take it as one.

"I've been saying that," she said. "You need to crash wit me for a while?"

"Have to go somewhere," Jem said. "Could be dangerous, though."

"Daughter of homesteaders," Amica said. "I've got shotguns."

Yeah, and what do you think we used back where I'm from? Jem was temped to ask. It sure wasn't stern words and wrist-slaps. And it tended to come with a higher rate of fire.

Instead of saying that, she stood and walked around the edge of the sinkhole to where the sun slanted over it and got in her eyes. Then something caught her eye down below, pale in the deep shadow like a jutting bone.

"Look at this," she said, and crouched down.

Amica picked herself up and came around, though she kept a good distance between herself and the edge. Jem didn't bother. She swung her feet over the edge and leaned forward, trying to make sense of the shapes down below.

"What is that?" Amica asked.

"It's like the side of the Coliseum," Jem said, and Amica looked at her. "I've seen goddamned pictures, okay," Jem said.

"No, you're right," Amica said, and shaded her eyes. "Those are, like, Ionic columns. Like someone stuck a city hall into the wall, and then it got... swallowed up."

Jem pushed back from the hole, and stood up. She scanned the landscape again, casting her gaze out toward the horizon. Even in America's heyday, she didn't think this place had been built up; from what she knew from old road atlases and trivia sites, this whole swath of country had been farmland before it had gone arid. That was another reason she liked the prairie grass; they'd said this place would be desert, couldn't be saved for irrigation or prayers, but the grass didn't care.

But there were no houses out here, decaying back into the landscape. The road that came out here had been some county highway that no one spared a thought for. Not the kind of place someone would build a place with marble columns – and if they had, sinkholes didn't swallow things up and leave them mostly-intact and sticking out of the walls.

"Wonder if you can get down there," Jem said. She had tie-down cables in her car, not that she'd trust her life to them. She didn't carry climbing gear. Why would she?

"Climbing down a sinkhole?" Amica asked. "I mean, correct me, but that sounds like a stupid idea."

Jem shrugged one shoulder. The cool air that blew off of the sinkhole was like a beacon, and the longer she looked at the pale column down below, the more she thought she could pick out the shape of a larger structure. Passages retreating back into the walls. Hell, it could have been a whole underground city.

"It's scary as hell going into mineshafts," Amica was saying, "and those things were made for people to go down. You know that gases can build up underground so bad that they'll kill you a few feet in from the entrance?"

Jem grunted.

"And I've heard that these things can just open up in the ground one day with no warning at all, sometimes right in the middle of town," Amica went on. "What if it does that again, but while you're down there?"

"Fuck," Jem said. "If I lived life thinking like that, I–"

She hadn't thought the sentence through, and found that she didn't really have a way to finish it. I wouldn't be on the run was an option, but while getting away from the Boss probably had a net positive effect on her life, it wasn't the kind of decision she could hold up as something to be envied.

Amica sighed. "The hell did you do, Jem," she said, but it sounded like she said it to herself. So, Jem decided not to answer. They both knew the salient parts – that she was up here running and hiding from something, that she'd brought it on herself – anyway.

"I want to see what's down there," Jem said. If nothing else, it was something that wasn't carrying brown packages and threatening messages up and down the Colorado. A little blip against the meaningless drudgery of her life.

"Use binoculars," Amica suggested. "Hey, come on. I'm melting out here. You called me because you needed a place to lay low for a while, didn't you?"

Another shift in the wind set the cool air around Jem again. She kept her eyes on the shape down below, and thought about buried cities, buried mineshafts, long-forgotten bunkers, accidental empires.

It was all flights of fancy. And she'd never afforded herself many of those, before. But still, the deep column called to her, and she said, "Be crazy if I've just found one."

Fascinating. I like the airid future and the stubborn prairie plants.

I'll tell you a story of when time had no meaning, when legend and history walked hand in hand.

Blood makes noise.

Cast your shadow down.

Do what you like with these. Use one, use all, put them together! I'm good with whatever.

I love that first one!

Once I saw a list with hundreds of entries about all the ways that stories begin:

"Once upon a time ..."
"Back in the slavery days ..."
"Long ago, when animals still could talk ..."

Today we have "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ..."

And I'm just enchanted by these things, because there's something about them that is all the same, how they delineate a shift between story-time and current-time; yet the details vary in ways that tell you about the culture.

In Torn World I decided that a common example would be, "Long ago, before the world was broken ..."

Listen.

I will tell you a story of when time had no meaning, when legend and history walked hand in hand.

I will tell you of the visitors who came from beyond the dome of sky.

>

They put envoys in our clans and observed us. In time we learned that they were studying our language. In three generations they had learned it; they were very slow. They told us to call them builders and teachers and healers but we taught them that they had to have a name; all things must be named. They had no name in their own language which could fit itself to our tongues, so they studied our language for some further time, and acquiesced to the name tiamtum.

Friend, in that time, you must understand that much of the sky was hidden to us. The keenest-eyed among us could discern a few pale freckles in the sky beside the sun, which would travel with exquisite slowness across the sky. And you must understand that the sun was dimmer than today, and it hung above our heads like a lamp that must never be moved.

No. Listen.

The tiamtum gave us the spoken records you have heard in the temple. There are some in the reef-cities of Uremda which also preserve sight, clearer than any carving. The tiamtum came to a world in which the sun hung immobile in the sky. Much of our ocean was glacier, and we lived in a sea with the sun overhead, the only place in our world where its warmth could melt the ice. The sun was so small in those days that standing below the disc in the Temple of Abzum, the disc would cover it entirely. Now, the disc is only the pupil in the eye of the sun.

The tiamtum made the sun grow, friend. They were compelled to because they also caused it to set and rise. They stretched the day so that it wrapped around the whole world, but it would not stretch so far, so they stitched it end to end with night. And this is what passes above us: the day, and the dusk, and the night, and the dawn, and the day, where the sun shines down on all our oceans and we build reefs where once nothing could live.

But I was to tell you a story of the tiamtum, who left long ago and whom we have not seen again. I was to tell you of the time when the sun was always fixed at midday, and we slept when we would, and we ate when we would, and we did not consider lamps or time-tellers because there was no need. We had a very small world with infinite light.

I was to tell you of Madodok, the first one of us to know night, who went with the tiamtum to the dark half of our world. I was to tell you of the tiamtum ship that was lost on the ice which is now ocean. I was to tell you how many have searched for it, and how many believe it may still be found.

This is truth, my friend. The tiamtum did once walk among us. Their secrets are still in this world, waiting to be found.

Listen.

*rolls around in this and fucking ADORES IT*

This is an awesome world and I want to swim in its awesomeness.

>

when they took seven families – enough to fill up the first bus – and drove them out to a new patch of dead land,

>

where a number of tents had been set up for them.

Erarei felt laughter scrabbling against her sternum. These tents were not like the ones at the other camp. Each was big enough for a family, maybe, but they were round and fluted, with vents at the top. They looked like they could open like a seed pod; they were beautiful, in a way.

Someone had thought, we'll make a tent to sell to the aid workers, the army men, the people who see to the destitute, and we will make it beautiful. As though any of them could afford beauty, no matter how they yearned for it.

>

The inside of the tent was cool, at least; air passed through it and the sun bounced off, so maybe the people who designed these things were not only thinking of beauty.

The others in Erarei's tent were not her family, but they had found each other in the camp. Furtive glances, a certain set of the shoulders, a silence that watched and learned and did not call attention to itself – except that it called attention from each other. To be alone in the camp was the worst thing, so they had eaten together, slept next to each other, let the people who doled out food and medicine and the ill-fitting clothing assume what they would assume. But they were not friends. Erarei had spoken with some of them, briefly, but she suspected that they were like her: not inclined toward friendship, not even out of convenience.

>

and sat on the canvas floor, her head down, ignoring the others.

She had counted the tents when she came in. Seven in a patch that could be covered by her held-up hand, and thirteen hands at the correct lengths to count the tents nearer to her or farther away. The same way she would count a scatter of antelope grazing. The same way she had counted the people milling in the last camp. There were not enough tents for all those people.

If a host feeds you on a golden plate, she knew, they will soon ask for the hand of your eldest. What benefit was there, for these people to curry favor with the families they'd plucked out of the camp? What did they expect from them?

>

and when Erarei left the camp, she ducked around the gazes of all the administrators. A few, here and there, had guns – who they were planning to shoot eluded her. The army, with its spidersilk vests? The vests which stopped bullets, clotted blood? This handful of guards would be slaughtered before them, and Erarei would observe their deaths with the same dried-up lack of surprise.

>

and passed another from her tent kneeling on the ground – his name was Nuuah, and they had exchanged glances: silent ways to say, Yes, I see that you exist, that we are both still alive. To Erarei, it seemed as though he was waiting for something. That through the war and the camps and the food prepared in repurposed oil drums over coal fires for the masses which lined up in the evenings for it, through the dry dust and the dry skies and the interminable march of the sun from one horizon to the other, he and she were both waiting for something to happen, though neither could say what.

She would have walked past him, but a soft singing caught her ear. She turned to see if it was Nuuah, and Nuuah looked up at her.

"You hear it," he said, with something like resignation.

"What is it?" Erarei asked, and crouched down near him.

Nuaah swept the flat of his hand over the dirt, and revealed a dark stain. Blood.

>

I want to be able to throw things at you on a regular basis. Getting things like this, it makes me want to see more and more stuff from you because I could really fall in love with it.

I considered changing or erasing the one-word line there at the top, and then decided to leave it because, you know, that is a pretty good indication of how I write. "I do not want to forget this name! I'll just assume the story starts with it and then stick it there."

Shannar-just

>

where Hayleidh-stern stood, her hands folded severely. "Do you have any questions?" she asked.

Shannar-just suspected that any questions, at this point, would be a black mark against her. But still, Hayleidh-stern was a veteran of the Oubliette. She had answers that Shannar-just's training materials couldn't offer.

"What's it like?" she asked.

Hayleidh-stern's lips flattened in disapproval. "As they told you. There's nothing I can say that will explain it any better. And you'll see for yourself soon enough."

Of course. Shannar-just hadn't expected anything different. "Any last advice, then?"

The Senior watched her. Shannar-just stood tall; she had already been appraised and deemed suitable for deployment. Hayleidh-stern had a certain reputation, but if she would judge Shannar-just, better she judge her now and get it over with. Shannar-just had no interest in putting a best foot forward that she couldn't maintain over the log term.

Let Hayleidh-stern be frustrated with her curiosity – or not.

At length, though, the Senior said "You will forget that your shadow is not you. After all, you are seeing through its eyes, and feeling what its body feels. So you should take care to remind yourself of the fact, often. You are here. You are in this room. The shadow is a puppet, on a puppet stage."

>

There was no practicing immersion before the Oubliette. The Oubliette was the only place of its kind.

>

and entered her Crucible, which folded closed around her. She could see, to her right, Hayleidh-stern vanishing behind the leaves of her own.

Shannar-just took a deep breath, and let darkness wash over her.

-

Shannar-sleep, glowed the words before her eyelids.

-

A vast cold washed over her, and carried the sense of her body away.

-

Then the cold was the cool breeze of nighttime, and Shannar's body was around her again – she was seated in her awareness in the space behind her eyes, with flesh and bone extending down to the ground, swathed in clothing (a tunic, leather pants, a jacket, heavy boots), her feet shoulder-width apart, hair bound back, hands (gloves; metal gloves) on the pommel of a sword (symbolic, she thought), strength in every line of her.

(Idealized self-image, she thought; I am not my shadow. I am sleeping deep, in the crucible.)

She looked to her right and saw Hayleidh, and for a moment, a name blinked before her eyes: Hayleidh-ruthless. She blinked twice more, and turned her attention to herself again.

Shannar, blinked her name. She had expected Shannar-new, or Shannar-uncertain; something to that effect. Something to some effect.

Hayleidh-ruthless approached her. "Look," she said.

Shannar brought her attention away from her body – the body of her shadow. She looked around and saw that they were in a campsite; a campfire flickered on the cleared-bare dirt, and with focus, she could feel its heat. Two tents had been set up, and their entrance flaps were tied open. Trees ringed the camp, each with a tall, straight bole; the branches only began over Shannar's head, and even then, they were slender and mostly bare.

Out beyond the trellis of tree trunks, she could see the night sky: far fewer stars than could be seen outside the Oubliette. Off in the distance, mountains pale as night clouds. Above, a full moon, its light too diffuse to be real.

The Oubliette is not real, Shannar reminded herself. Not in the way that matters for physics and figures.

Hayleidh-ruthless gestured to a path leading out from the campsite. If Shannar looked along it, she could see that it joined a longer road.

"Do not forget," Hayleidh-ruthless said, "that the people of the Oubliette were cast down because they were criminals. We cast our shadows down to watch them. Whether we watch them as the sheepdog watches a flock or as the wolf does, they will decide."

>

Something combining magic + local cuisine for food-based or food-affecting magic?

Honors & insults: Differing reactions to being called the same name/term, depending on who uses it.

Divine intervention: You want me to do what to fulfill my destiny?

I had this whole idea for a divine mission to a lighthouse with a bunch of mysterious disappearances, but then this decided it needed to be all about this guy's backstory.

The sky above Asepsu was so bright that closing his eyes did no good. But here in the garden, that was no matter. The water he drew up on the water-screws cooled the air as it passed by, and the lattice of shadows cast by the date palms held back the brilliance of God of Heaven, King of Gods.

This was not the worst place to be. Even if it was outside the palace walls, and he could see against the polished horizon the white stone of the stepped temple.

>

"I am hungry," the man said.

Asepsu looked at him. The man's gaze was direct as an archer's, sighting along his arrow; his face had a narrow look, as though he would appear as a jackal when glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. Asepsu gestured up toward the trees. "The dates are not yet ripe. What do you want of me?"

"When King Nisiqtu decreed the construction of these gardens," the man said, "he did it so the city should never go hungry. Any citizen under his Law could come and be fed from the garden's attendants. Now the place is full of flowers and perfumes. What do you attend?"

A good enough question. But Asepsu shrugged his shoulder, unwilling to denounce the king to a man he didn't know. Who might have been sent out from the palace to test him. "I tend the gardens. The King decrees the planting of the gardens, and I obey the king."

"But I am hungry," the man said again, and showed his teeth. And for a moment, his face was the face of a jackal, and Asepsu stepped back as though struck. His heel caught the edge of the water channel and his leg went out from under him, and he caught himself on his palms on the hard marble.

Then, he cursed. "Do you expect me to feed you, Wandering God?"

>

A destiny was a terrible thing. A great godly expectation. But the Wandering God was famously indifferent to the worship or suffering of men.

>

"Let me tell you, attendant of the Terraced Garden, of some things," he said. "They mistrust you because of your broad nose, no matter how honeyed your skin. And they are right to. The day the priests found you in your rich silks was the day a noble family in Arqat found a number of their silks missing. Your mother who stole them forfeited her life, but vanished before charges could be brought. You will remain outside the palace all your life, attendant, unless you attain this destiny for me."

"And you will, what?" Asepsu asked. "Narrow my nose for me?"

"I am owed some small thing by the Lady of the House of Heaven, Wearer of Celestial Jewels," the Wandering God said. "Do this thing for me and she will adorn you with the pearls of nobility. No one will deny you. Is it your ambition?"

Asepsu had spent years outside the palace walls, turning the water-screws by hand, digging out weeds with his bronze axe. It was a job for one of noble blood, true, but for a child or a youth, not a man of the age to marry. The noble families might have taken him in, because he was a babe swaddled in riches, perhaps some prince who would be called for again. But yes, they had their suspicions.

And Asepsu was not surprised to hear those confirmed. When he was young he drank yogurt without honey; he ate fish with his fingers, the white flesh tasteless and dry and flaking between his fingers. Those things existed in his memory, though his family here had fed him dates and lamb and olives in brine and honey scented with roses.

He had not expected to prove himself. But to have his nobility established by godly decree... that appealed to him, to his resentment of the white palace walls.

He spread his hands to the Wandering God. "What would you have me do?"

Edited Date: 2014-06-26 07:45 am (UTC)

Ooo, I like this! Destiny is a fascinating thing, especially when it is somewhat malleable.

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