[Warning hiss]

a riddle

Warning hiss–
Twist’d tail stings.
Snapping back,
Bright blood brings.

Unsound

This is a continuation of Ciori’s story, which began with Recruits. The events preceding this snippet can be found in a previous post, A Thousand Threads.

“Wake up. The priestess is here to pray for you.”

The voice came to her, faint and distant like something spoken in a dream. Ciori shifted where she lay, trying to make sense of it. Wake up? She wasn’t sure that she’d even been asleep. Or perhaps this was sleep: when she opened her eyes the room blurred around her and when she struggled to sit up, her head spun. She was caught in some strange, unsettling dream.

“Where—” she asked, but words would not slip past the painful dryness in her throat.

Someone knelt beside her and, one hand supporting the back of her neck, brought the edge of a bowl to her lips. “Here.”

Ciori drank gratefully. The water washed the leaden feeling from her tongue but it did nothing for the fog over her eyes. She tried to focus on the person beside her to no avail. 

A man’s shoulders. Skin dark like hers, darker hair, calloused hands. “Borian?” Ciori murmured. She reached for him as he moved back, but cold metal around her wrists jerked her off balance. The man caught her before she crashed to the flagstones.

Servant to a Lady

a ballad

O minstrel, why do you play so sad,
Why so sad, I pray thee?
I pine away for a sweet young maid
A servant to a lady
A servant to a lady

One morning from the road I strayed
And wandered through a woodland fair
Then from within a sunlit glade
I heard a song upon the air

The singer sat beyond the stream
And washed her garments free of grime
Her hair alight with sunrise gleam,
She scrubbed, and sang to keep the time.

Fingerprints

a story in four parts

---

Black

“Tsssss!”

The young girl looked up from the fireplace she was stoking and glanced about the room for the source of the voice. The room, as she had expected, was still empty. Mistress Adeshi wouldn’t retire to her bedchambers for a while yet, and no one else had a reason to be in the Mistress’s rooms besides the one readying them for her arrival.

She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of a sooty hand and continued to rake together the last of the glowing coals.

“Tsssss, Tavi!”

Louder now, the direction of the voice was clearer—the window. Someone called to her from outside.

“Tavi!”

No, not just someone—she recognised the voice at last. Dana. Her brother.

Tavi shoved the brush and poker aside and stood. She checked her skirts and her feet for excess soot before scurrying across the tiles to the open window. Careful not to leave black fingerprints on the sill, she leaned over and peered into the garden. “Dana?”

[In silver prison]

a riddle

In silver prison so it stands,
Its only purpose to be seen;
It learns its master’s every mien
With soundless lips and weightless hands.

Soft, and Close Your Eyes | Music

I’ve put my little quilt of words to music. Please enjoy!

A Thousand Threads

This is a continuation of Borian‘s story, which began with Recruits. The events preceding this snippet can be found in a previous post, In Her Place.

---

The tree was dead.

Well, it wasn’t a tree, really. Not anymore. It was lifeless, stripped of all foliage, one of two pillars which framed the entrance to the Sanctuary and supported its high, vaulted roof. Around the lower half of the trunk, its bark had been worn as smooth as glass by the years upon years of hands clutching it in hopes of a blessing.

Borian pressed his palm against its smooth surface now, more out of habit than any belief in divine power. Legends claimed that once, long ago, trees such as these had walked the earth, fearsome battle giants and stalwart defenders. Even the bedtime stories his mother spun for him were filled with the great deeds of Oakenbrow the Elder, the schemes of the Willow Sisters, and the sad fate of many an apple maiden.

Stories. Borian’s hand fell to his side. That’s all they were. No divine defender of the forest would awaken to rescue his mother from the cell in which she lay, nor would his clinging to a dead tree at the threshold of the Sanctuary do her any good. He had to follow the plan.

[Silent bird]

a riddle

Silent bird in a seamless cage,
No feathers on its wing–
Blind and breathless, the longer it stays
The sooner it will sing.

Tangon, Apprentice Scribe

Tangon, apprentice scribe, had fingers long and quick like spiders’ legs, spattered with dark blue ink and incredibly, impossibly precise. That was a requirement for the job, you see. One couldn’t risk tarnishing the names of the great scholars and inestimable poets by ascribing to them things they had not said. Every word, every letter had to be perfect—even the last curlicue of the most insignificant little O. 

And the quicker Tangon copied them, the quicker the sundial marks would pass until he could head home.

So his fingers flew across fresh parchment as he transcribed his master’s scrawled notes into a more legible form. Irregular angles were made more uniform, lumpy cursive was smoothed into submission, questionable conjugations were tweaked into perfect clarity. Soon another man’s words were organised in even lines, every tail of every L looped through its neighbours like a twist of beribboned curls. 

He had no time to admire his handiwork. The ink had not yet dried when Master Golvad called him to a different task.

“Have you quite finished, Tangon? Come! I must dictate a letter.”

Soft, and Close Your Eyes

a lullaby

Close your eyes and rest, my child
Let this song surround you
Let me weave a quilt of words
Soft and warm around you.

Daylight’s final drop is poured
Drink, to soothe your crying
May it sweeten all your dreams
Pure and satisfying.

The wind may weep between the trees
The wolf may mourn beneath the skies

Don’t listen to the wind, my child
Don’t listen to the wolf, my child
Hear my song and dream, my child
Soft, and close your eyes.