In fairy tales and fantasy, two types of people go in towers: princesses and wizards.
Princesses are placed there against their will or with the intention of ‘keeping them safe.’
This is very different from wizards, who seek out towers to hone their sorcery in solitude.
I would like a story where a princess is placed in an abandoned tower that used to belong to a wizard, and so she spends long years learning the craft of wizardry from the scraps left behind and becomes the most powerful magic wielder the world has seen in centuries, busts out of the tower and wreaks glorious, bloody vengeance on the fools that imprisoned her.
That would be my kind of story.
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I was tagged by @cruulsummer
The rules are simple - find a sentence, or excerpt, that includes the words you’re given and paste it in, and include a link to the finished story if you want. But honestly, these are guidelines at best - do what you want.
I’m tagging: @lunarmoment @scorpioaqua @laestrellapanda @raevenlywrites @blushroomx @fiora-miriel
My words to find: Red - Sleep - Writhe - Shallow - Bet - Safe - Look - Anger - Help
Your words are: Intention - Suit - Dark - Smirk - Heavy - Spread - Music - Stop - Alcohol
Red and Help (double whammy because it’s a long bit!) from The Invention of Gravity (a Gravity Falls 1800’s AU that will probably never be finished…):
“What’s your name?” Mabel asked.
“Wendy Corduroy!” Grunkle Stan shouted from the ground. The three looked down. “Get in here!”
Wendy descended from the tree in a series of exact movements that told the twins she’d been slowing down for them before. The twins observed as she ran into the house after their uncle, long red hair mostly out of its cap flowing freely behind her.
The two looked at each other, finding themselves higher up the tree than they’d ever intended, and now alone.
“…How do we get down?” asked Dipper.
Inside, Wendy Corduroy was telling Stan, “I can chop wood, make pegs, I can empty up a mattress and fill it up and sew it back up again with help, I can almost cook on the spit without burning it, and I can clean and shoot a rifle.”
“You’re already hired, Miss Corduroy, I spoke with your papa,” Stan told her.
Sleep from There’s Probably a Moral at the End Somewhere (my Teen titans play-format Fairytale AU, posted here)
STARFIRE: She is floating two feet above the ground. You who know her best, is this how she sleeps?
ROBIN: I don’t even know if she sleeps. I don’t know anything about her. And everything I thought I knew about her was wrong.
I’ve got nothing for Writhe, or Squirm, or Thrash, so I offer you Struggle lol, from a roooough draft of my original story Surot (found absolutely nowhere):
“But if the bathrooms are closed, you can get the key from the hut over there, just ask for Laura…”
I stopped myself. Stella looked kind of jittery and nervous. When I’d motioned to the bathroom she’d dove forth, and now that I’d presented her with a challenge, her eyebrows arched, like she was slightly shocked she’d have to struggle in this way—or like she was calculating she’d spent too long talking to the class freak and was panicking about it.
“Hold on,” I say, and I hold my camera to my chest as I go to the hut myself, all the while wondering why I insist on doing things for pretty girls. It made me feel like a boy. Or like a rough maid from a period drama doing stuff for her delicate ladies.
Shallow from The Club of Unauthorized Heroes Year 3 (yet unpublished):
Dick’s breaths were shallow. His mind was stuck on the here and now. He felt like he should be reviewing the mission—searching for where they went so wrong. But really all he could think about was how much Gar hated hospitals. How annoyed he’d be when he woke up.
Bet from Feral (an entry for BBRae Week 2022, found here):
“That was cool. Quick and clean. Bit sloppy at the end, though. Anyone could see what you were doing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The girl’s voice was a grave whisper. Nearly a hiss.
“You chose a good area, too,” Gar went on regardless. “Lots of distracted loaded pockets around. I bet there’s even some left for me.”
Safe from Over Again (my Teen Titans-Miraculous Ladybug AU, first two chapters found here):
He took in her sarcasm and decided to one-up her. “Hm. You tell your crush you like them yet?”
She groaned, all her coolness gone. “I never should have told you about that.”
“But you did,” he reminded her with a big grin.
And she still didn’t know why. How had she told Beast Boy when she hadn’t even told Kori? She guessed she felt he was safe. Kori might try to set her up with Gar if she knew; it wouldn’t take her long to figure out who her crush was. But Beast Boy was detached from her world—he went to her school, but he couldn’t let her know that.
Look from The tide is full, the moon lies fair (my only She Ra fanfic, a Seamista oneshot, posted here):
He laughed, and it rumbled through his chest. “Really. A small fire. Without me needing to be there?”
“Maybe the venue missed you,” she returned, moving away to look at his face—his handsome face with the jaw and the ridiculously sharp moustache and the hyper-expressive eyes. She’d missed the chance to really look at it, before.
She tilted her head up to kiss him, and the whole world fell into place. To come back into his arms after a long time was a feeling she wouldn’t trade for anything.
And finally, Anger from The Club of Unauthorized Heroes Year 2 (which is published here, but not this bit yet!):
Gar looked back and forth between the faces in the car windows. “Jen?” He turned to Terra, whose face turned from anger to panic when he did.
“You haven’t figured it out yet, slug-face?” taunted Mikron. “Are we gonna have to spell it out for you?”
“Figure out what?” Gar returned. “That you’re Hive? We knew that for ages.”
“Do you wanna tell him?” Baran asked Terra. He was clearly having the time of his life.
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crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.
i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.
in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.
i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.
i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.
plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.
the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.
we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.
i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.
a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.
today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.
loved beyond thinking.
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