New Year's Dave
Jan. 3rd, 2007 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koilungfishNew Year's resolution: 500 words of fiction per day, no expections, no excuses. Results not used for other things posted here.
1/1/07 - Two cigarettes and a splash
"Well," he said, as the parcel sank into the river with a stream of bubbles, "that's the end of that."
"What makes you so sure?" she said, lighting a cigarette and smearing her cherry-red lipstick across the end as she inhaled.
"It sank," he replied, turning away from the river and leaning back against the old grey-stone parapet, looking upriver into the blue-dark night, where the city lights turned from sodium yellow to crystal white and the buildings merged into a black hummocky mesh. The skyline was a tree-line, old conifers swaying gently in the evening breeze between the bunkers on the golf course.
She peered over the parapet; she couldn't see it. Perhaps it had sunk. Or not. It certainly splashed, but had it come up again? Was it floating downriver atop the current, rather than below? Was it lodged against a pier of the bridge? She dropped cigarette ash into the waters, the grey wafery stuff vanishing long before it hit the surface. "Perhaps it did."
"Well, can you see it?"
"No," she replied, still peering down into the dark water. The surface chopped and roiled. A fish? A bit of net? A plastic bag? A Navy submarine?
He ran his hand through his hair with nervous impatience. His hand was strong and brown, but the wedding ring was losing its gilt. His hair was thick and black, but the grey roots were showing through the dye.
"We should leave. We're starting to look suspicious."
He looked at her, at her fawn-coloured coat and the red-sequined skirt peeking out around her deniered calves, at her high heels the colour of stop-lights, at her cherry-red lipstick. He looked at her tightly permed hair and the neat little cap she was wearing, white feathers quivering in the breeze. He looked down at himself, in his slept-in evening dress and good shoes ruined by running through gravel.
"Starting to look suspicious?" he wondered aloud. He took his own cigarette case from his jacket pocket, flashing its bright blue lining, flashing the silver case in the streetlight, the monogrammed initials that weren't his clear between his fingers. He only had two cigarettes left, and both were battered. The inside of the cigarette case was yellow with ancient nicotine.
"People like to stand here to look at the sea," she pointed out, doing just that as the last hem of sunset fringed the horizon, "but only during the day." She didn't offer to light his cigarette; he didn't ask her to.
"People come here at night," he said, sounding indifferent.
"Yes. But they don't look like we do."
"What?"
She didn't answer that. The tarts would be out soon and she had no intention of being mistaken for one. Not dressed like this, not in a six-hundred-dollar cocktail dress, especially not one she'd been wearing for two days. "Do you think anyone will find it?"
"Doubt it. With all those rocks inside. Gone straight to the bottom." He spoke around his cigarette, savouring it more than her company.
"What if it hits a powerline?"
"In this bay?" he asked, and she had to laugh at that.
2/1/07 - Draw Back
"You must be bold when the cold wind blows, and eyes flicker in the thickets that shiver in the wind. You must fear the face that is keeping pace through the breaks as you make your trembling way home. When the owls flash white in the closing night and a shape walks close behind, when footsteps follow in gloomy hollows and a shadow falls behind yours on the road ... all this and more will snuffle at your door as you huddle close 'round the fire. Stack logs to build it higher, and quaking wait for the dawn."
Such was the poesy gloom he was reading, huddled close over his reading-table with the drapes drawn and a contented fire murmuring in the grate, when in the corner of his eye he caught an owl-white flash. It was just a suggestion of a something, but enough to make him drop his book, forgotten, and startle out of his chair.
The curtains were tightly drawn, thick heavy things in beige twill with an even thicker lining to keep out the chill. Outside, the wind rattled the bare branches and mourned around the eaves. There was the distant shushing of the woods and nothing more.
He thought to himself, This is silly, and strode over to the curtained window. A prickle of fear ran up his spine as he passed the two windows on his left, though their curtains were equally tightly closed - presumably the work of the overzealous Spanish housemaid who feared drafts as if they were vipers - and there was that sense he couldn't dismiss. He had seen something, a flicker of white.
A face had peered in at the window.
On the third floor? Up three storeys of bare stone wall? Good stone, neatly repointed only the year before, so that the sandstone face was as smooth as if it had been planed? Never!
Yet here he was, standing before the window, cold sweat beading at his temples, eyes fixed on that little black V where the curtains didn't meet quite as tightly as they might because one was coming away from its runners - again the work of the overzealous Spanish housemaid who treated curtains as if they were oxen. Here he was, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his smoking jacket, fumbling with his pipe and his tobacco to distract himself from the terrible idea that he might pull the curtains back.
Surely it was nothing. A fancy. A trick of the light. A spark from the fireplace. A figment of the brain. The gamekeeper's torch. At the uttermost worst, a passing owl.
He listened. The fire crick-cracked sleepily. Beyond the lawns and the flowerbeds, the wood rushed in the wind, and the wind sighed around the gutters, and a pheasant coughed a mile away. On the first floor, a door closed.
He couldn't have seen a face at the window. Not a white face, not an eyeless face, not a face peering in between the curtains at the top of a window eight feet high, not at the top of a window three storeys up.
Perhaps he should go to bed ... but the dark hallways were suddenly forbidding. The passage beyond the door was bleak with potential for far worse than a rucked carpet underfoot or an unseen cat on the stairs.
This is silly, he told himself again, and grasped the curtain firmly, set upon yanking it back to reveal the dark and empty night outside. Then he would look down on the frosty lawn and the gravel path shining under the moon - aha, the moon, white and peering in through windows - and then he would laugh at himself and smoke a pipe before retiring to bed with De Witts's Life in Oxford or somesuch.
"This is silly," he said aloud, and pulled back the curtain.
It was terribly white.
3/1/07 - The Lost Bunyarro
Seated high on the back of his habarro, Abashier saw a dark speck emerging from the hamada in the distance - a little black fluff of movement, moving steadily out of the stony plateau into the dunes, towards the shelter of the shade beneath the cliffs.
"Haballo," he said to his brother, "my eyes discern a beast in the sand. Do yours also?"
His brother reached into the panniers strapped across the enormous haunches of his bunyarro and retrieved his binoculars. He stood up in the saddle, making the bunyarro snort and shift its weight. It shook its shaggy, kangaroo-like head, making the fat hump on its shoulders wobble. "If it is a spirit of the sand, it is doing a remarkably good impression of a bunyarro," Haballo said, "but I would be wary of any beast who drags its rider behind him."
"Unfortunate is the man who saddles a spirit," Abashier said, leaning over to borrow his brother's binoculars, "but more unfortunate is the man who falls off a running bunyarro in the hamada."
"Unfortunate is the man who drops my binoculars," Haballo replied.
"Unfortunate is the man who continues to speak of such things after his brother has bought him a new pair," Abashier responded curtly, raising the binoculars to his eyes. He had no need to stand in his saddle - Abaha, his habarro, was more than twice the height of a tall man at the shoulders - and through the glass he saw indeed a bunyarro, bounding along in an exhausted way, its leaps long and slow, its head and tail low. Its panniers were in disarray, and it dragged its unfortunate rider behind, one foot still tangled in the stirrups. "That is indeed a very unfortunate man. Let us bury him."
Haballo took back his binoculars and, with a silent nod, spurred his bunyarro along the edge of the cliff, towards the slope where it met the dunes.
Abashier unholstered his five-foot whipcane from its sheath on the habarro's shoulder, where it stood upright like a flagpole. "Yut, Abaha," Abashier said, swatting the habarro lightly on the forelimb. It swung its flat, scaly head back and regarded him with a coldly malevolent reptilian eye, a tiny yellow marble deep amongst jade-like scales. "Yut!" Abashier commanded, swatting Abaha hard upon the flank. The habarro startled forwards, over the edge of the cliff.
The first plunge left took Abashier's stomach behind, throwing him back in the saddle-straps as the great lizard, as long as five tall men, hurried head-first down the cliff. The long hooked claws caught and scraped on red rock, the saw-scaled belly dislodged pebbles and sand and hardy little plants that didn't deserve to be so overturned, so they arrived on the sand amid a shower of scree. Abaha leap the last twenty feet, landing with a plump in the sand and starting off at a game run.
The bunyarro had seen him, but seemed too hot and tired and dispirited to flee the great reptile. It lolloped into the first patch of shade and flopped down, sides heaving. Abashier reined Abaha in and approached it cautiously. The bunyarro gave no sign of being a potential desert devil. It did not spit dust, or roll its eyes in many colours, or send up smoke from its nose and ears, nor speak. It simply lay in the shade, long furry ears cocked in his direction, watching him with a disinterested eye. Abashier could see that it was exhausted. The hump on its shoulders was sagging right over, quite drained of water, its panniers were full of sand and falling in all different directions, and its reins were quite gone.
There was no helping the rider. There was not much of him left. Abashier waited silently on Abaha's shoulders, giving a gentle tug on the reins whenever the giant lizard showed signs of pondering a bunyarro meal. Abaha regarded him once again with his gaze of stupid yellow malice, and flicked his forked tongue at the bunyarro, which lay too tired to even take fright.
Finally Haballo completed his detour around the cliff-paths. His bunyarro bounded across the dunes with sprightly ease, quite unlike the poor riderless beast's gait. Haballo looked down at the dead man, and at the shaggy bunyarro, sides heaving with exhaustion, and back to the dead man. "A very unfortunate man indeed," was his comment.
"Such a man might think himself fortunate if we were to wrap him in a cloak and carry him with us to Aljattar, to be buried in a proper grave."
"Such a man might think himself fortunate not to have been eaten by vultures," Haballo said warily, reining his bunyarro back a step.
Abashier leaned over to look more closely. "Indeed, this man has escaped the attentions of the birds of Zanharro."
"That is not a thing which reassures me," Haballo said, looking glum. "If Zanharro does not want him enough to send his birds, Zanharro will not want him whether we bury him or not."
"That is not a suggestion which reassures me," Abashier replied.
"I am not speaking of reassurances," Haballo said, "I am speaking of leaving alone what even Zanharro does not want."
"And how do you know that Al Abattiar does not want this unfortunate man whom Zanharro's birds do not want?"
"Al Abattiar could hardly have missed him," Haballo said, most disrespectful of the all-seeing eye above.
"Al Abattiar could hardly have missed that," Abashier replied coldly, remembering once more why he did not like to travel with his brother, binoculars and foul-smelling bunyarro aside.
"If you want to bury him in Aljattar, you may carry him on that ridiculous monster that you are calling a steed," Haballo said, reining his bunyarro back further. "I am going on, with or without you, and if this most unfortunate man follows behind me, I will ride faster."
"Since you are going on ahead, will you not at least take the unfortunate man's bunyarro with you?"
"It does not please me to ride with the steed of a man whom Zanharro does not want."
"Does it please you to notice that the steed of the man whom Zanharro does not want has many panniers?"
"It does not," Haballo replied, but he cut the stirrup and threw a guide-rein around the bunyarro's neck. It obediently rose. "At least it is polite."
"You should water it," Abashier said as he climbed down from Abaha's shoulders.
"I will water it in Aljattar, since we are almost there."
"If the unfortunate beast drops dead of thirst, its soul will follow you for that."
"I will take that risk. The souls of bunyarros do not cause me fear." Haballo bowed curtly in his saddle and kicked his bunyarro into a swift leaping stride, the sad and sorry beast following behind.
That is no way to treat a beast, even one as ugly as a bunyarro, Abashier thought, and wrapped the dried and shredded body of the unfortunate rider in his least-best cloak. He bound the man in a bundle and strapped him amongst the panniers on Abaha's back. Then he climbed up Abaha's scaly shoulders and seated himself between the jutting ridges there, and tied himself into the saddle.
"Now, Abaha," he said, unholstering the whipcane, "we shall go on to Aljattar and see if I must bury my brother also."
1/1/07 - Two cigarettes and a splash
"Well," he said, as the parcel sank into the river with a stream of bubbles, "that's the end of that."
"What makes you so sure?" she said, lighting a cigarette and smearing her cherry-red lipstick across the end as she inhaled.
"It sank," he replied, turning away from the river and leaning back against the old grey-stone parapet, looking upriver into the blue-dark night, where the city lights turned from sodium yellow to crystal white and the buildings merged into a black hummocky mesh. The skyline was a tree-line, old conifers swaying gently in the evening breeze between the bunkers on the golf course.
She peered over the parapet; she couldn't see it. Perhaps it had sunk. Or not. It certainly splashed, but had it come up again? Was it floating downriver atop the current, rather than below? Was it lodged against a pier of the bridge? She dropped cigarette ash into the waters, the grey wafery stuff vanishing long before it hit the surface. "Perhaps it did."
"Well, can you see it?"
"No," she replied, still peering down into the dark water. The surface chopped and roiled. A fish? A bit of net? A plastic bag? A Navy submarine?
He ran his hand through his hair with nervous impatience. His hand was strong and brown, but the wedding ring was losing its gilt. His hair was thick and black, but the grey roots were showing through the dye.
"We should leave. We're starting to look suspicious."
He looked at her, at her fawn-coloured coat and the red-sequined skirt peeking out around her deniered calves, at her high heels the colour of stop-lights, at her cherry-red lipstick. He looked at her tightly permed hair and the neat little cap she was wearing, white feathers quivering in the breeze. He looked down at himself, in his slept-in evening dress and good shoes ruined by running through gravel.
"Starting to look suspicious?" he wondered aloud. He took his own cigarette case from his jacket pocket, flashing its bright blue lining, flashing the silver case in the streetlight, the monogrammed initials that weren't his clear between his fingers. He only had two cigarettes left, and both were battered. The inside of the cigarette case was yellow with ancient nicotine.
"People like to stand here to look at the sea," she pointed out, doing just that as the last hem of sunset fringed the horizon, "but only during the day." She didn't offer to light his cigarette; he didn't ask her to.
"People come here at night," he said, sounding indifferent.
"Yes. But they don't look like we do."
"What?"
She didn't answer that. The tarts would be out soon and she had no intention of being mistaken for one. Not dressed like this, not in a six-hundred-dollar cocktail dress, especially not one she'd been wearing for two days. "Do you think anyone will find it?"
"Doubt it. With all those rocks inside. Gone straight to the bottom." He spoke around his cigarette, savouring it more than her company.
"What if it hits a powerline?"
"In this bay?" he asked, and she had to laugh at that.
2/1/07 - Draw Back
"You must be bold when the cold wind blows, and eyes flicker in the thickets that shiver in the wind. You must fear the face that is keeping pace through the breaks as you make your trembling way home. When the owls flash white in the closing night and a shape walks close behind, when footsteps follow in gloomy hollows and a shadow falls behind yours on the road ... all this and more will snuffle at your door as you huddle close 'round the fire. Stack logs to build it higher, and quaking wait for the dawn."
Such was the poesy gloom he was reading, huddled close over his reading-table with the drapes drawn and a contented fire murmuring in the grate, when in the corner of his eye he caught an owl-white flash. It was just a suggestion of a something, but enough to make him drop his book, forgotten, and startle out of his chair.
The curtains were tightly drawn, thick heavy things in beige twill with an even thicker lining to keep out the chill. Outside, the wind rattled the bare branches and mourned around the eaves. There was the distant shushing of the woods and nothing more.
He thought to himself, This is silly, and strode over to the curtained window. A prickle of fear ran up his spine as he passed the two windows on his left, though their curtains were equally tightly closed - presumably the work of the overzealous Spanish housemaid who feared drafts as if they were vipers - and there was that sense he couldn't dismiss. He had seen something, a flicker of white.
A face had peered in at the window.
On the third floor? Up three storeys of bare stone wall? Good stone, neatly repointed only the year before, so that the sandstone face was as smooth as if it had been planed? Never!
Yet here he was, standing before the window, cold sweat beading at his temples, eyes fixed on that little black V where the curtains didn't meet quite as tightly as they might because one was coming away from its runners - again the work of the overzealous Spanish housemaid who treated curtains as if they were oxen. Here he was, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his smoking jacket, fumbling with his pipe and his tobacco to distract himself from the terrible idea that he might pull the curtains back.
Surely it was nothing. A fancy. A trick of the light. A spark from the fireplace. A figment of the brain. The gamekeeper's torch. At the uttermost worst, a passing owl.
He listened. The fire crick-cracked sleepily. Beyond the lawns and the flowerbeds, the wood rushed in the wind, and the wind sighed around the gutters, and a pheasant coughed a mile away. On the first floor, a door closed.
He couldn't have seen a face at the window. Not a white face, not an eyeless face, not a face peering in between the curtains at the top of a window eight feet high, not at the top of a window three storeys up.
Perhaps he should go to bed ... but the dark hallways were suddenly forbidding. The passage beyond the door was bleak with potential for far worse than a rucked carpet underfoot or an unseen cat on the stairs.
This is silly, he told himself again, and grasped the curtain firmly, set upon yanking it back to reveal the dark and empty night outside. Then he would look down on the frosty lawn and the gravel path shining under the moon - aha, the moon, white and peering in through windows - and then he would laugh at himself and smoke a pipe before retiring to bed with De Witts's Life in Oxford or somesuch.
"This is silly," he said aloud, and pulled back the curtain.
It was terribly white.
3/1/07 - The Lost Bunyarro
Seated high on the back of his habarro, Abashier saw a dark speck emerging from the hamada in the distance - a little black fluff of movement, moving steadily out of the stony plateau into the dunes, towards the shelter of the shade beneath the cliffs.
"Haballo," he said to his brother, "my eyes discern a beast in the sand. Do yours also?"
His brother reached into the panniers strapped across the enormous haunches of his bunyarro and retrieved his binoculars. He stood up in the saddle, making the bunyarro snort and shift its weight. It shook its shaggy, kangaroo-like head, making the fat hump on its shoulders wobble. "If it is a spirit of the sand, it is doing a remarkably good impression of a bunyarro," Haballo said, "but I would be wary of any beast who drags its rider behind him."
"Unfortunate is the man who saddles a spirit," Abashier said, leaning over to borrow his brother's binoculars, "but more unfortunate is the man who falls off a running bunyarro in the hamada."
"Unfortunate is the man who drops my binoculars," Haballo replied.
"Unfortunate is the man who continues to speak of such things after his brother has bought him a new pair," Abashier responded curtly, raising the binoculars to his eyes. He had no need to stand in his saddle - Abaha, his habarro, was more than twice the height of a tall man at the shoulders - and through the glass he saw indeed a bunyarro, bounding along in an exhausted way, its leaps long and slow, its head and tail low. Its panniers were in disarray, and it dragged its unfortunate rider behind, one foot still tangled in the stirrups. "That is indeed a very unfortunate man. Let us bury him."
Haballo took back his binoculars and, with a silent nod, spurred his bunyarro along the edge of the cliff, towards the slope where it met the dunes.
Abashier unholstered his five-foot whipcane from its sheath on the habarro's shoulder, where it stood upright like a flagpole. "Yut, Abaha," Abashier said, swatting the habarro lightly on the forelimb. It swung its flat, scaly head back and regarded him with a coldly malevolent reptilian eye, a tiny yellow marble deep amongst jade-like scales. "Yut!" Abashier commanded, swatting Abaha hard upon the flank. The habarro startled forwards, over the edge of the cliff.
The first plunge left took Abashier's stomach behind, throwing him back in the saddle-straps as the great lizard, as long as five tall men, hurried head-first down the cliff. The long hooked claws caught and scraped on red rock, the saw-scaled belly dislodged pebbles and sand and hardy little plants that didn't deserve to be so overturned, so they arrived on the sand amid a shower of scree. Abaha leap the last twenty feet, landing with a plump in the sand and starting off at a game run.
The bunyarro had seen him, but seemed too hot and tired and dispirited to flee the great reptile. It lolloped into the first patch of shade and flopped down, sides heaving. Abashier reined Abaha in and approached it cautiously. The bunyarro gave no sign of being a potential desert devil. It did not spit dust, or roll its eyes in many colours, or send up smoke from its nose and ears, nor speak. It simply lay in the shade, long furry ears cocked in his direction, watching him with a disinterested eye. Abashier could see that it was exhausted. The hump on its shoulders was sagging right over, quite drained of water, its panniers were full of sand and falling in all different directions, and its reins were quite gone.
There was no helping the rider. There was not much of him left. Abashier waited silently on Abaha's shoulders, giving a gentle tug on the reins whenever the giant lizard showed signs of pondering a bunyarro meal. Abaha regarded him once again with his gaze of stupid yellow malice, and flicked his forked tongue at the bunyarro, which lay too tired to even take fright.
Finally Haballo completed his detour around the cliff-paths. His bunyarro bounded across the dunes with sprightly ease, quite unlike the poor riderless beast's gait. Haballo looked down at the dead man, and at the shaggy bunyarro, sides heaving with exhaustion, and back to the dead man. "A very unfortunate man indeed," was his comment.
"Such a man might think himself fortunate if we were to wrap him in a cloak and carry him with us to Aljattar, to be buried in a proper grave."
"Such a man might think himself fortunate not to have been eaten by vultures," Haballo said warily, reining his bunyarro back a step.
Abashier leaned over to look more closely. "Indeed, this man has escaped the attentions of the birds of Zanharro."
"That is not a thing which reassures me," Haballo said, looking glum. "If Zanharro does not want him enough to send his birds, Zanharro will not want him whether we bury him or not."
"That is not a suggestion which reassures me," Abashier replied.
"I am not speaking of reassurances," Haballo said, "I am speaking of leaving alone what even Zanharro does not want."
"And how do you know that Al Abattiar does not want this unfortunate man whom Zanharro's birds do not want?"
"Al Abattiar could hardly have missed him," Haballo said, most disrespectful of the all-seeing eye above.
"Al Abattiar could hardly have missed that," Abashier replied coldly, remembering once more why he did not like to travel with his brother, binoculars and foul-smelling bunyarro aside.
"If you want to bury him in Aljattar, you may carry him on that ridiculous monster that you are calling a steed," Haballo said, reining his bunyarro back further. "I am going on, with or without you, and if this most unfortunate man follows behind me, I will ride faster."
"Since you are going on ahead, will you not at least take the unfortunate man's bunyarro with you?"
"It does not please me to ride with the steed of a man whom Zanharro does not want."
"Does it please you to notice that the steed of the man whom Zanharro does not want has many panniers?"
"It does not," Haballo replied, but he cut the stirrup and threw a guide-rein around the bunyarro's neck. It obediently rose. "At least it is polite."
"You should water it," Abashier said as he climbed down from Abaha's shoulders.
"I will water it in Aljattar, since we are almost there."
"If the unfortunate beast drops dead of thirst, its soul will follow you for that."
"I will take that risk. The souls of bunyarros do not cause me fear." Haballo bowed curtly in his saddle and kicked his bunyarro into a swift leaping stride, the sad and sorry beast following behind.
That is no way to treat a beast, even one as ugly as a bunyarro, Abashier thought, and wrapped the dried and shredded body of the unfortunate rider in his least-best cloak. He bound the man in a bundle and strapped him amongst the panniers on Abaha's back. Then he climbed up Abaha's scaly shoulders and seated himself between the jutting ridges there, and tied himself into the saddle.
"Now, Abaha," he said, unholstering the whipcane, "we shall go on to Aljattar and see if I must bury my brother also."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 03:24 pm (UTC)Yay!
Do I even need to ask ifyou want feedback? ;)no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 03:32 pm (UTC)I'm never going to say no to feedback, but these are more writing exercises than actual polished, finished stories, so don't bother digging too deeply.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 03:45 pm (UTC)- The first one is a little frustrating insofar as there's not quite enough of it to make it click, for me. It'd be nice to have a bit more depth to the characters or a bit more explanation of what they're doing, as the presence of either would make up for the lack of the other. Intriguing though.
- The second one I like, not least because it looks suspiciously like a bash at a certain unused MR James prompt. ;) I like the final line, because it's such a charmingly inconsequential understatement that demands an (admittedly simple) intuitive step from the reader to realise what's happened, rather than just going "OMGWTFitwasreallythere!11!!" Love the opening bit of verse-ishness, too - nice rhyme structure and rhythms.
- *SPLORFLE*. What universe is this from? I love the repeated refrains of the way the two brothers speak, especially the contrast between the lyrical mode of speech and the deadpan humour ("Unfortunate is the man who continues to speak of such things after his brother has bought him a new pair," indeed! ^_^) Of them all, this is the one I'd most like to see continued. I get the feeling there's a lot of fun to be had with this.
[PS: Slaanesh presents his compliments to Scatha and hopes the hangover is better now...]
no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 04:37 pm (UTC)- Well, a drabble written a clear year after the last piece of writing I did was never going to be much to write home about. Still, if it's got you interested enough to want to know more, I've done better than I had expected.
- It certainly fell into the Jamesian mode quite easily. I wasn't consciously going for anything of his in particular, just a passing idea. The last line probably took more work than anything else, since it needed to make it clear what was being seen without being whack-over-head-with-plot-shovel. No idea where the verse came from, it just arrived.
- I have *no* idea what universe it's from. I've tagged it as 'desert fantasy', despite the use of binoculars. It just turned up. The speech was a bit of a struggle, which probably explains all the repetition, heh. The last line was a bit of anvil to stop the thing, so it might get continued [I get the feeling Abashier may stick around].
- Scatha seems to be fine, albeit absent, as the brainspace devoted to his universe has been filled up with gods, means of prophecy and funeral rites from a different culture.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 04:54 pm (UTC)- *nods* Well, fair enough!
- James says in his notes that he had an idea involving a face at the window that he never managed to write. Maybe you subconsciously remembered it. :)
- Well, hurrah! More of Abashier would be cool.
And alas, poor Scatha, elbowed out by other gods. Always a sad fate...
no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 05:01 pm (UTC)- Why the guy looks like Sean Connery's James Bond after a bout of malaria I'm not sure. I shall call him Ralph Hurling, because someone needs to be called that.
- More like consciously remembered it; as I recall in his version the face was actually a mask with living eyes.
- Heh. Barely three days in and already I've got a character with continuation potential.
- Not so much elbowed out as the focus moved. Besides, you'd like this new one who's turned up.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 06:25 am (UTC)ZOMG FISHIE IS USING THE LJ TO POST SHIT!
*faints*
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 11:21 am (UTC)