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[jtrahan]

Batman's Halloween

"Oh, don't even tell me you don't like dressing up! You dress up every night!"

"That's different. That's for work." He gazes stonily out through the manor windows, where an orange sunset is running down the glass. The expression on his face is stern and foreboding, and looks as though he practices it in the mirror, which--she now knows, as of a few weeks ago--he does. It's strange to know these things, having spent so many nights wondering; and she laps them up like milk, always hunting for new ones, the vulnerable little edges of man who has worked so hard to have none. As though she, of the two of them, is the detective.

"If it's the theme that bothers you," she says, toying with the diamonds at her neckline, "You shouldn't worry. It's just that villains always have the best looks, you know, it's not that people don't appreciate--"

"I am not dressing up."

"You can go as Harvey," she says. "That way you'll only have to dye half your hair, and I can scratch up the left side of one of your old suits--"

"No."

But that voice, the same voice that once struck such fear into the heart of a petty jewel thief at the wrong end of a dark alley, holds no terror for her now; and she revels in it. "Then you can go as me," she says, and removes the headband from her hair, placing it on his own much larger head. It strains, but stays. "And you can't possibly complain about that, Bruce. It would be rude."

Two little black cat ears stick up from the top of Bruce Wayne's head. He glares at her; but she sees, with a fierce rush of triumph, that he can't help but begin to smile.

[jtrahan]

Butterfly God

Her father was a butterfly god, and in lieu of child support he had given her mother a beautiful chrysalis that opened once each month to reveal a golden coin at its center. The coins were of an uncertain metal and no mintage known to man and it was nearly impossible to cash them at the bank, and so in a way it was almost a relief when the chrysalis stopped working a few years later. Her mother kept it on an end table, a beautiful undecaying thing in translucent greens and pinks, folded open, with a hollow at its center.

There were no pictures of her father in the house. Once as a child she had been exploring under her mother's bed and discovered a shoebox full of old papers, and on top of the papers had been a photograph of her parents together, her father standing behind her mother with his arms around her shoulders. His monarch wings seemed enormous, filling the frame with orange and black, looking almost as though they had absorbed the sunlight and now possessed their own internal radiance. His smile was warm and carefree and it was easy to see why her mother had fallen in love with him. If he had already been planning to leave when the picture was taken there was nothing to indicate it, although she spent a long time looking, there with her little flashlight in the dust under the bed.

When she went back a few days later the shoebox was gone, and she was too afraid to admit that she knew of its existence to ask about it.

The years swept by and amassed into decades and when she was twenty-seven, a cousin she knew vaguely through Facebook sent her a message saying that her father would like to meet. She drove to the address provided, nervousness churning in her gut. She had no idea what she was going to say.

The address turned out to be an open field, unmown grass and milkweed growing high around a few old stumps. Her father, the cousin had explained, was much diminished in recent years. The cult of the butterfly god had fallen badly out of fashion, and indeed had almost no human adherents left. Now she saw that the description had been literal: with only the butterflies themselves to worship him, her father had shrunk to match their size. She sat on a stump while he climbed up a twig to look at her, wings fluttering at his back, standing maybe about two inches high.

Her father spoke to her, but he was so tiny by this point that his voice was only a series of squeaks, and she could not understand him. She left him a small piece of apple and never saw him again.

[jtrahan]

Tech Support

You work tech support at a company that makes robot butlers, and every day people call you to complain that their brand new robot butler keeps serving soft boiled eggs when it has clearly been instructed to make them poached. “Please hold for a moment,” you say. You push back your chair and walk down past the long line of other workers hunched over their monitors or jabbering into headsets and you push open the door to the prototype room, where a dozen robot butlers are preparing eggs at stoves all around the edge. There is a lot of egg on the floor and there is egg on the ceiling and egg dripping from the light fixtures. One of the robots has begun stirring its bowl of egg faster and faster, inhumanly fast, and the whisk abruptly flies out of it hands and embeds itself in the wall. “I can’t do this anymore!” shrieks another of the butlers, and it begins to advance on its handlers, electric mixer raised above its head. A SWAT team bursts in through the door and guns the robot down in a hail of bullets, which is unnecessary because you can just shut down all the robots remotely, but ever since the new nationwide robotic police force was established the government has instituted programs providing employment to now indigent SWAT teams, and they only know one way to do things.

You sort of just take it all in for a bit, and then you go back to your cubicle and pick up the phone. “Listen,” you tell the customer on the other end, “You don’t need a robot butler. They’re completely useless. The only reason they exist at all is because some people have too much money and they can’t stand the idea of just giving it away. Our entire economy is built on inventing expensive new kinds of garbage to sell in the hope that eventually a tiny amount of money will trickle back over to the people who actually need it. Take the robot, and--”

The side of your cubicle explodes inward as another SWAT team smashes through the wall, screaming at you to get on the ground so that you can be properly fired. Almost at the same moment the other side of the cubicle explodes as a team of HR representatives smashes through that wall, thick employee handbooks strapped to their chests and limbs like body armor, screaming that you can’t be fired because the damage control following your outburst has created so many jobs for company lawyers and publicists that you’ve actually saved the local economy. You watch the SWAT team and HR reps create jobs for the nearby hospital by beating the shit out of each other for a while, and then you quietly slip away and out the side door.

Someone is running across the employee parking lot in the distance. As you approach you realize it is the deranged robot butler from earlier, somehow slipped out past security, body riddled with bullet holes, electric mixer still clutched in its fist. It is staring at the sun and there are motor oil tears leaking from its eye sockets.

You watch as it feverishly rushes for the edge of the parking lot. The robot vaults the guard rail, sprinting towards freedom, and is immediately run over by a self-driving car.

[jtrahan]

Leaves

The man glances up at the security camera and motions you a bit further back into the alley. The hood of his overcoat is pulled down nearly over his eyes, but there's something odd about the way it sits on his head. If you didn't know better, you'd wonder if it was covering horns.

"Do you have the stuff?" you say, which sounds a lot less cool than when you were practicing it in your head on the way over, but fortunately the stranger does not seem to notice. Apparently satisfied that you are out of the camera's range, he is unbuttoning the coat, doing something complicated with his fingers over each buttonhole, and now it is falling open, and there, against the dark green velvet of the lining, you see them.

Leaves. Row after row of leaves, leaves in every shade of green and orange and yellow, colors bleeding into each other around the veins, so bright and vibrant they might have just been plucked.

You know you are staring, but you can't help it. You haven't seen this many leaves together since the blight of '27. In fact, it's been a very long time since you've seen any leaves at all. The CO2 scrubbers lining the sidewalks are smooth, utilitarian things, and while they did have decorative leaves attached for a while, the city eventually removed them in order to make the Amazon logos on the sides more plainly visible. In some of the more affluent neighborhoods across the river, they can afford to have sculptures of trees. But these are the real thing, staring back at you from the stranger's coat, and in this moment you think they are the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.

In exchange for a handful of leaves you promise the stranger the life of your firstborn child, on the day it turns one year old. You've just had a vasectomy this past week, but he doesn't need to know that. The leaves seem almost warm in your hands as you clutch them to your chest, hurrying past dilapidated townhouses that seem to loom higher in the gathering twilight. You are nervous about being seen with contraband, but unlike the stranger you did not come prepared with a stealthy overcoat, and you are afraid of damaging the leaves by shoving them into your pockets.

At the corner of Elwood and Main a police dog raises its robotic head from where it has been lapping at a dish of oil and begins to trot after you. There is almost no one else out at this hour, your fellow citizens having actually heeded the air quality warnings, and you begin to panic. The dog cannot possibly be following anyone else. On an impulse you cut abruptly to the right, up a small flight of stairs into the park, and you can hear the metallic footfalls behind you suddenly quicken in response. You own footfalls seem terribly loud on the park's concrete surface, but all the children there are all wearing VR headsets and filtration masks and cannot see or hear you, and are arranged at public terminals in a neat grid pattern so that it's easy to move between them. The dog pauses for a moment to raise its leg against a terminal so that the RFID tag mounted on its belly can log a potential hostile in the area, and you cut left this time, down another alley, hoping this time you might lose it.

But you should have known it was too late. The city knows that you're here now, and the AI-powered fire escapes that the police department spent fifty million dollars installing last summer are unfurling themselves from the walls in a sudden blaze of red light and orders to stop in a dozen overlapping languages. You are running now, as fast as you can, as fast as you ever have, but the fire escape's railings are unfolding into terrible metal fingers that stab after you, and the end of the alley is there and you can see the streetlights glowing in the gap beyond and oh my god you are not going to make it. It's too late to worry about saving anything now, and in a frenzy you began cramming the leaves into your mouth, biting and chewing and feeling all those colors come apart against your teeth and spill over your tongue and scratch your throat as you swallow. You're almost out now and the leaves fill your mouth and you reach out a hand to the light and the fire escape tears free from the building with a terrible shriek and spears you like a fish and you slide across the pavement and your blood sprays over the lost dog posters and housecleaning ads plastering the nearest lamp post and you lie there in a twisted pile of metal and guts and all is very still.

You watch as your lifeblood runs away down the storm drain. Fragments of leaves still cling to your lips, and as you feel them there, you smile. You are dying, but that's fine. That's perfectly alright. In springtime, you will rise again.

[jtrahan]

[Meta] 358/2 Days broke my heart

The thing about Kingdom Hearts is that it can go from "anime OCs stand around addressing a trench coat-wearing Mickey Mouse as 'Your Majesty'" to "This is most emotionally devastating game you've ever experienced" within about ten minutes.

I've been going through these games in order, and I've just finished 358/2 Days, which affected me so much that I had to write something about it. Spoilers for everything in the series up to that point after the jump:

Man, Kingdom Hearts II has its sad moments, but Days just makes them hit so much harder in retrospect. Let's see:

-- Axel, having watched everything he cares about fall apart, sacrifices himself for someone he barely knows just for the slightest chance that he might get to see some part of Roxas again.

-- Namine promises Xion that she'll look out for Roxas when Xion can't anymore, which make their goodbye in KH2 (a scene I already really liked) even more bittersweet.

-- Roxas rejoining himself with Sora doesn't just mean that he's willingly giving up his own existence (which was already sad enough). It means he gets to be with Xion again, in the only way that's left to them. He doesn't remember her, and neither of them even exist any more in a way their old selves would understand. But they're together, in the end. I've always struggled with the finality of death, and this part hit me like a ton of bricks. (All this, by the way, from a video game series in which you also get to watch Jack Sparrow interact with Donald Duck.)

And of course this is all to say nothing of Days itself: Xion's final moments of perfect happiness watching the sunset, with Axel in the background trying to live with the knowledge that soon it all has to end. Xion fading out from that joyful clock-tower scene. The devastating way it links back up to the very beginning of KH2, with Roxas still hoping he and his friends might get to go to the beach.

And, most of all, the conviction that even after the people we love are gone, even after they've slipped entirely from our memories, they were still real, and they still mattered.

358/2 Days broke my heart.

[jtrahan]

Vampyre

The choir of St. Andrew's, in apparent defiance of the traditional adage on practice and perfection, had instead seemed to decline week by week ever further into a kind of advanced musical decrepitude, for with the first notes of "Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed" I nearly started from my pew in alarm at the sound of their voices. The rasping, shrieking notes from the throats of those singers, common folk arrayed in what I supposed must pass for their church-going best, would have driven me to grimace at the best of times; now, half sunk into the torpor which so often concludes a long day of travel, its effect on me was nearly uncanny. In a detached way I observed that my recent illness had been less diminished by my return to familiar climates than I had hoped, for the whole countenance of the room seem disturbed: the lamps, trimmed against the shadows of evening, caused my eyes to water with their brightness; the scraping and rustling of restless children in their pews seemed almost to drown out even the infernal wailing of the choir; and the candles upon the altar blazed with a sickly light. My condition had clouded my judgement, I told myself. The rest of the congregation seemed calm enough, resigned in a bovine sort of way to the weekly praising of their savior. Surely the music could not be so bad as all that.

My suspicion of my own diminished faculties seemed confirmed at the song's ending, for although I prided myself on my Latin, I could scarcely comprehend a word of the service. The priest's speech seemed slurred and barbarous, a goatish bleating that droned on and on. In my state of exhaustion I began to fixate on the depiction of our Lord that hung just over the priest's shoulder; a poor rendition, truth be told, the splayed limbs slightly off from their natural proportions, the mouth and gash in the Savior's side an identically unnatural shade of red. Something about the eyes of the figure unsettled me. They had been depicted as open, cast upward in what the sculptor had no doubt hoped was a supplicating expression; but some imperfection in the craftsmanship made them appear instead to be staring forward, a kind of baleful light pooling in the yellow irises. Though I knew it was irrational, a product of my condition, I began to feel almost angry at the figure's gaze. It was but a depiction of a dead thing, formed from plaster that had never been alive. What right had it to look upon me so accusingly?

It seemed then, as the light and heat and droning voice settled over me, that I began to dream.

In my dream the body was still nailed to the cross. But the cross itself had broken off at the base, leaving only a shattered stump, and its occupant lay prone where it had fallen. My dream-self approached, kneeling, reaching out with hands I did not recognize as my own. The body was no longer plaster, but flesh, and it stank of man and death and the early sweetness of purification. Blood and water flowed from the wound in its side, and I placed my tongue against the wound and lapped like a dog, filling my mouth again and again.

As I finally pulled back, my thirst momentarily lessened, the figure opened its eyes.

In its eyes--

I am dreaming. Surely, I am dreaming.

Its eyes were the sun. Twin suns, where each socket socket should have held an iris. But there was more, for where the white of the eye should have been there was void, and in that void were more suns, as distant and terrible and numerous as all the starts in heaven, suns with wings and faces and great spears held in gleaming hands. They looked at me, all those infinite gazes staring through the eyes of the man on the cross, and their million voices spoke as one through the red gash of his mouth.

Go back to your father, they said. There is nothing for you here.

I reeled back, and there was the terrible noise of the choir, the unbearable brightness of the lamps; and I could stand it no longer. Half blind, jostling against figures that squalled in protest, I staggered from the pew and down the long aisle. Concerned hands reached for me as I fumbled with the door, but I brushed them away. Outside there were horses whickering, a few voices from the street, but otherwise the night was blessedly still. And the sky--so unlike that terrible light-pierced void in my dream--the sky was black and lifeless, empty as the grave.

I raised a trembling hand above my head, and the ground seemed to recede from beneath me. I rose. Trees and rooftops shrank away. The dark was all around me, and I was clothed in darkness, and darkness flooded the caverns of my lungs.

This is dream, I thought. This has to be dream.

And within my own throat, the darkness laughed.

[jtrahan]

Streetlights

The natives of this place appear to be moon worshipers, for they have placed effigies of the moon on tall metal poles overhanging the roads throughout their populated areas, presumably so that no one, even on nights when the sky is dark and empty, need ever walk too far from their own front door to behold an image of the moon. It's a charming custom. I decide to spare them this time.

[jtrahan]

Why it is very important that you let me eat the last slice of tomato garlic pizza

The town council has selected me as the annual blood tribute to appease the local vampire lord, and ever since I found out I have been stuffing myself with garlic every day so that when he bites me he will get a full blast of garlic blood and fall down dead. Obviously I’ll still become a vampire, of course, and you will have to drive a stake through my heart me to prevent me from going on a bloody rampage of revenge; but just think: if you don’t let me eat the pizza, my garlic levels will not be high enough and the vampire lord will survive, and then you’ll have to kill two vampires. That’s twice as many! It’ll be your whole weekend! You really must let me eat the last slice of tomato garlic pizza.

[jtrahan]

Objects of Power

Most people assume that performing spells or magical rituals is a complicated process, requiring years of careful practice and study; but they are wrong: magic is easy and anyone can do it. You can do it right now, if you like. Select an object (ideally something portable and, at least for beginners, of sentimental value: inherited jewelry or knickknacks received as Christmas presents work well for this, but it can be anything really. For demonstration purposes, I will be using my favorite pair of winter gloves). As you prepare to leave your house for the day, take the object in your hands (or wear it or put it in your pocket or whatever) and say: “This is an object of power. Because of its presence, fortune will bend in my favor.” That’s it, that’s the whole spell. For your first casting you may find that you need to repeat the spell on subsequent occasions, but very soon the object will be imbued with enough magical energy to function entirely on its own, and you will discover that merely feeling it against your skin or glimpsing in from the corner your eye floods your mind with renewed confidence and vigor for no apparent reason. Congratulations. You’re a wizard now. Your powers, already considerable, will only continue to grow, and you will find that you are capable to performing this same spell on much larger objects, even entire buildings or cities. You will be able to perform it on living creatures. In fact, you will very likely start to notice your fellow wizards casting this spell on you. It will grant you the power to change their whole day simply by existing. It will make you feel like magic.

[jtrahan]

On a Steel Horse I Ride

Oh god it’s so uncomfortable

[jtrahan]

Dead God

The dead god’s carcass is huge beyond measure, glittering trails of frozen blood leaking from ancient wounds where asteroids have punched holes in its flesh. Here, isolated from the terrible void of space, deep within the rotting cathedral of its monstrous rib cage, is where I have made my home. It’s fine. The schools are good. Traffic often gets snarled up on my way to work, but that’s mostly because my commute happens to pass through the dead god’s intestines. A team of flesh moles is currently chewing out a bypass. It’s something to look forward to. On fine evenings my wife and I go out walking through the crystalline forests of the dead god’s unibrow, holding hands and watching comets twinkle against the void. Sometimes there are other gods drifting around up there. This is a problem, because if a living god ever gets close enough to notice that our god is dead, the living god will probably come over and try to eat it. On those nights I kiss my wife goodbye and rush down to the command center, where my team is already springing into action at their switchboards and steam pumps. A complex system of levels and pulleys hoist our god’s lifeless fingers into one of the hand signals gods use to communicate with each other. Through the telescope I see the living god begin to back off. My team whoops. High fives are exchanged. We managed to get everything into position in less than five minutes this time, a new record. Outside in the darkness, the dead god’s cyclopean middle finger stands tall against the stars. Down the black depths of its slowly decaying body, my shift supervisor pops the champagne.

[jtrahan]

Edging for Mimics

Most times, when a group of wandering adventurers makes it as far as the seventh hall of the thirteenth chamber of the lost temple of King Brhzumrd the Unpronounceable, they will notice a large silver chest glinting in the darkness of a dusty alcove; and most times, upon noticing that the chest is unlocked, they will eagerly throw it open and thrust their hands in to retrieve the waiting treasure; and most times this decision will absolutely ruin their day, because as their fingers cross the threshold of the chest a row of jagged teeth sprouts up, and a thick prehensile tongue bursts out from the waiting piles of potions and gold, and the chest snaps shut with a sickening thud. It’s a bad time for the adventurers. But it is a very good time for the mimic that crouches in the alcove, which has thrived over the years on a steady diet of adventurer arms. The mimic was raised in domesticity in the courts of the southern empire, like its father and grandfather before it, growing fat and stodgy as an endless parade of the shah’s enemies were thrown into its chambers, with pauses only so that its handlers could descend with prods and nets to skim off the golden coins that are the main byproduct of mimic digestion. It was a safe life, but a tedious one. We aren’t meant to live like this, the mimic insisted to its father, who by this time had swelled to nearly the size of a bank vault. It isn’t right. The father burbled and turned away. When the mimic finally made its escape, galloping out through a gap in the walls and away across the moonlit desert, its father did not even say goodbye.

The temple of King Brhzumrd has been a much needed change, and the mimic is grateful for it. Lately, though, even its new routine here has begun to feel a bit too constricting. The mimic just wants to mix things up a little, you know? Sometimes, when the adventures approach with hands outstretched, greed and wonder mixing in their torchlit eyes, the mimic lets them get a little farther than usual. It allows them to reach down and down, into the cool golden piles resting on its insides. Sometimes it lets them go all the way up to the elbow. And sometimes, when the mimic is feeling especially licentious, it will even let them leave. A terrible, secret thrill fills its body as the hands withdraw, laden down with precious jewels and the deeds to King Brhzumrd’s finest stretch of beachfront property. Fuck you, dad, thinks the mimic, feeling giddy and young again for the first time in years. I’ll live my life however I want!

And then the next adventurer in line grabs onto the mimic’s gallbladder, which by some strange quirk of evolution looks almost exactly like a health potion, and the moment (for the adventurer, at least) comes to an extremely abrupt end.

[jtrahan]

The City of July

Several miles outside of Zanesville you have to stop the car, because there is an old barn creeping slowly across the road, half-collapsed walls tilting crazily, loose beams picking their way carefully over the asphalt like the legs of some giant crab. There is nothing to do but wait for it; many of the people behind you have turned off their cars and are strolling around or taking pictures. Some of them appear to be getting out picnic baskets. You have never seen a barn in this final stage of its life cycle before, but you are embarrassed to admit it, and when one of the other drivers notices you gawking and asks about it you panic and say some nonsense about how, well, yes, you do know about barns. Obviously you’re familiar with barns. This is just a particularly big one, is all. The locals nod knowingly. You should go see the City of July sometime, they tell you, as the barn creaks onward and the sinking sun pours golden light through the many holes in its walls. You have to go by helicopter, of course. It’s easier to find a helicopter than it used to be, Uber has them now, though it’ll still be fairly expensive. But it’s worth it for the view, at least once: all those barns crawling slowly through an endless cornfield, coming at last to rest against walls made up of thousands of their ancestors, rising high in shattered ramparts of faded brown and red. And there, on that final upper terrace of ancient hayloft balconies: the Fireman’s Queen, decked out in the full regalia of her finest corn husk dress, a single blob of sunscreen smudged on the side of her nose, waiting to welcome her faithful servants home.

[jtrahan]

Specter

There is nothing glamorous about it, being able to see ghosts. You have been huddled in the corner of this convenience store with your ouija board for almost half an hour now, under the glow of light from the beer cooler, and it is nearly three in the morning and the package of Twizzlers you bought so the cashier wouldn’t kick you out immediately is all gone and certainly you are going to regret that in a minute but also the cashier keeps glancing at you in an increasingly nervous way and is probably going to call the police and so maybe you will regret a lot of things. The ghost for whom you are going to all this trouble hovers pale and insubstantial over the ice cream freezer. It must have been here for some time, because its outline has degraded to only the vaguest suggestion of a person, like a chalk drawing subjected to one too many rainstorms. That happens with ghosts. With no way to fix the regrets keeping them chained to existence, ghosts will eventually degrade, but they degrade less like compost and more like a nuclear reactor. If this ghost goes critical that cashier will have a lot more to worry about than some weird girl eating Twizzlers in the corner. Judging by the ghost’s current condition, your timeline for avoiding this is down to the minutes. You’ve got to figure out how to let it move on. 

Mind you, the ghost is not making things easy. It has managed to explain that it was a bystander killed in a botched robbery on a night much like this one, and it has actually gone and spelled out “a night much like this one” on the ouija board, which is especially annoying because you have to keep your hand on the planchette the entire time even though the ghost is entirely capable of moving it on its own. “But what were you doing that night,” you say, increasingly desperate now, because the cashier has noticed that you are apparently talking to yourself and is inching towards the phone, and the ghost gives you a “b” and then a “u,” followed by a “y,” and of course there’s an “i-n-g” afterwards, come on, come on, and then there’s a “c” and an “h,” and an “e,” and another “e,” and god you hope that spells “Cheetos” because you are officially out of time. You gather up your sweater and hurry to the counter, stopping for an agonizing second in front of the Cheetos rack, and oh god the ghost didn’t have time to tell you a flavor but Flamin’ Hot is just going to have to be enough for redemption in this case, and you slap the bag and a couple bills down on the counter and say “Just this, keep the change,” and in another second you have picked the bag up again and ripped it open and begun flicking Cheetos at the place where you think the ghost’s mouth probably is. The cashier yelps and runs around the counter but you are too fast for him and flee down the nearest aisle and go skidding around the corner as you clutch at a beef jerky display for support and the cashier becomes entangled with the big cardboard sasquatch who was holding the beef jerky and the ghost is bobbing along enthusiastically as you flick Cheetos through its head and god, it is SUCH a pain in the ass to be able to see ghosts. 

[jtrahan]

Princes and Thieves

There is a beautiful young thief in this year’s graduating class at the Larcener’s Academy who has taken to lounging in the marketplace, a few strands of red hair sticking out from the edge of her black hood, loudly proclaiming that for her practicum final she intends to rob the private chambers of the crown prince. She does this mostly on days when the crown prince is riding by in his palanquin, face obscured behind gauzy curtains that shimmer and flutter in the breeze. The prince is besotted with her. Every night he has been taking great care to place his collections of precious jewels and gilded silverware in prominent locations around his bedroom, so that when the thief shows up she will be sure to have a good time; except actually now that he thinks about it this might come across as patronizing--she went to school for this stuff, after all--so instead he is enlisting the royal engineers to design various hidden panels and secret compartments throughout the room, so that when the thief arrives she will not feel underestimated. Yeah. He thinks that’s probably the way to do it. 

He has, however, left one jewel-encrusted goblet in plain view out on the balcony, painstakingly positioned to look as though it has been carelessly left behind. Here, it says. This is the place. In here, there are things longing to be stolen. 

[jtrahan]

Leznupar

Leznupar’s sister was always the favored daughter, and after her disappearance their parents’ neglect of Leznupar grew even worse. Leznupar carried a lot of resentment about that for a long time, but it’s okay now, really. She’s over it. These days she has more in common with her sister than ever. They both live in tall, isolated towers, although in the case of her sister this is due to a bargain made with a witch following their mother’s unfortunately timed craving for salad, whereas in Leznupar’s case it is because she got a really good deal on rent. Still, they both spend their days in a tiny room with the world spread out far below them. They both sing songs to the creatures of the forest. They both have body parts that grow uncontrollably. Leznupar licks her lips as she thinks about seeing her sister again. They will have so much to talk about. 

That prince who comes wandering around the tower every so often is back again today, singing a song as he picks his way through the thorn bushes. The song is about his longing for the maiden in the tower.  Leznupar smiles a horrible smile, and lets down her fingernails. 

[jtrahan]

Druid

In the early days of September you put on your least wilted flower crown and go out walking with Summer, in the high rolling hills above the cow pasture. She has kept her promise to dye your hair this year, even if the process took several months. The two of you have been growing a garden together. You watch her fingers trace patterns against the cloudless sky, the grass turning golden where it brushes the hem of her dress. “Please don’t leave me,” you want to say, but of course it is hopeless. At the edge of the woods there is a place where half-a-dozen nameless gravestones have begun to crumble and tilt among the tree roots. You lie down there, in a patch of dappled sunlight. You curl your fingers tightly in the grass. You press your lips against the dirt.