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bookshelf-in-progress · 2 years

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Letters from Athelor

This is the portal fantasy that I had intended to be my main story for @inklings-challenge. I would still like to finish it in some form. It may be vastly different from what I have here. But after two years of saying I was going to write an epistolary portal fantasy and then writing something else, I’d like to prove that I was trying to write this story, even if it hasn’t yet come together. So here’s a very, very, very rough fragment that introduces most of the main characters. Let me know if it’s worth continuing.

1. A letter from King Justan Ibrien of Athelor to Amanda Zegler of Earth

Amanda,

Forgive me for writing. I wouldn’t force a letter upon you if it weren’t a dire emergency, but I have nowhere else to turn.

Athelor is at war. Five of the outer provinces have rebelled, spurred on by several of the princes who objected to my crowning and wish to claim pieces of Athelor for themselves. I couldn’t give them the power even if I wanted to—I’m tied to Athelor as a whole, and splintering this connection would make Athelor decay into a barren wasteland—but they value their own power over the good of the land. I became king to nurture Athelor, but that same love drives me to defend her.

But first, I have another duty to care for. My sister Miralie has been my ward for the last four years. You remember her as a two-year-old child, the miracle of my parents’ advancing years. She has matured into a bright and responsible girl of twelve, but I can’t expose her to the dangers of battle. If I leave her behind, she becomes a target for anyone who wants to use her against her as a hostage. The only way to ensure her safety is to send her somewhere far beyond the reach of our enemies.

When I found that you hadn’t severed the connection of our letterbox, I had to reach out. Miralie would be safe on Earth—not even my enemies would breach the barrier between worlds—and I trust you to care for her. Could I send her to you? I understand that I have no right to demand such service from you. This war could last for days or years, and only God knows if I will even survive it, but I have nowhere else to turn. I have vowed to keep Miralie safe, and I ask you to help me keep that vow.

I have idea what kind of life you live now, or if you wish any contact with Athelor or with me. If helping us is impossible, please tell me so and I will trouble you no more. But for the sake of the friendship we once shared, I beg you to respond.

Justan, King of Athelor

2. Excerpt from the diary of Amanda Zegler

After I finished reading the letter about seven zillion, four-hundred and eighty-thousand times, of course I brought it to Lauren. After all the adventures we shared there, my sister deserves to know about anything related to Athelor. I think I ran through at least ten red lights driving from my apartment to her house. She read the letter by her kitchen table.

“Are you sure it’s from him?” Lauren asked me at least ten times. As though a letter in Justan’s handwriting and marked with Justan’s seal that arrived via my magic interdimensional mailbox could be from anyone except Justan.

“It’s from him,” I said, due to all of the above.

“What are you going to tell him?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Lauren just about fell out of her chair. “Are you serious? You’re going to take in a child from another dimension?”

“It’s Justan,” I said. “I can’t say no.”

“You’ve said no before.”

I let that one drop. “She’s a child who needs help.”

“And you’re going to help her?” Lauren said.

She tore into me for a solid five minutes. If I took in the child, she’d be my responsibility. We didn’t know how long we’d have to care for her, or if Justan would even survive the war. I couldn’t run off on trips when I got bored. Lauren had enough to take care of with her own kids, and with Kevin gone, I couldn’t expect her to pick up the slack for me, etc., etc.

I think I deserve sainthood for putting up with that. Listening to Lauren, you’d assume I was a deadbeat teenager who had never done a responsible thing in her life. I like adventure, but I’ve built a life that can accommodate that. I hold jobs. I’ve never missed a rent payment. I think living on more continents makes me more responsible. It isn’t like Lauren would have the first idea what to do if she were in South America living out of a backpack.

I’ll admit I’ve been wanting that adventure for a long time now. Living back here in Green Valley with Lauren, going to work every day, living out of my normal apartment in a normal city with the same normal routine every day has made me itchy. But when that letter came, I realized that maybe the adventure I really need is to let the adventure come to me. I’ve never had someone from Athelor on Earth before. Who else could say they hosted a kid from another dimension? No matter how long she stayed, that could never get boring.

I argued about our duty to Athelor, the need to protect innocent children, our debt to the king who’d been our friend through so many of our childhood trips to his nation. I told her that of course I’d take care of the kid, and she didn’t have to even see her. And Lauren took offense at that and said she wasn’t heartless and of course she’d help, she just wanted me to know what I was getting into.

The thing is, we don’t know what we’re getting into. And that’s what makes it an adventure. Lauren thinks I run off on adventures to get away from problems. She doesn’t understand that it’s not really an adventure until there’s problems. There’s nothing like being out somewhere and knowing you can rely on nothing but your own skill and wits. And having a kid from Athelor here is certainly going to require a lot of that.

I think I convinced her. At least, she didn’t argue when I took a piece of her printer paper and wrote a letter back to Justan.

Paige came home from school just as we were finishing the argument. When we told her we were discussing Athelor, she rolled her eyes and walked away.

“Were we like that at fourteen?” I asked Lauren.

“We were too busy wrangling gryphons and hunting for undersea treasure,” Lauren said.

You’d think that interdimensional travel stories like that would get me some cool points with the teenagers. I wonder if Paige believes we just made up all these stories about Athelor. She’s just dense enough to come up with a complicated rational explanation rather than accepting the obvious, irrational one.

I’ve wondered why Lauren never brought the kids to Athelor--we can still access the paths. I’d have offered to do it, but I try not to travel to lands where I’ve antagonized the king.

Then again--he did write that letter. Maybe he was never my enemy at all. He wouldn’t send his sister into the care of someone he hated.

What am I saying? Iread the letter. He said it himself--he only contacted me because his world is literally ending. He had no other choice. I was better than total annhililation. But it’s not like he’s forgiven me.

It doesn’t matter if he does. This is bigger than either of us.

I’ve sent off the letter. I hope I don’t regret it.

3. Letter from King Justan Ibrien of Athelor to Amanda Zegler

Amanda,

I don’t have the words to express my gratitude or the time to write them. Time grows short. I will send her to you with the next sunrise.

With thanks,

Justan

#inklingschallenge #team lewis #genre: portal fantasy #imagery: bread #imagery: wine #(at least that's the plan)#story: unfinished

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lydiahosek · 2 years

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Connection

[A few days late and much shorter than last year’s, but here’s my story for the @inklings-challenge! Thank you for hosting again!

And here’s the music which served as its inspiration: x]

The bridge between the two main modules was Val’s favorite part of the ship. It afforded a view of the landless landscape unencumbered by monitors or control panels or other emblems of their duties. It had been well drilled into her head at Basic that space travel was not all fun and games, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t any fun and games.

Well…maybe “fun” wasn’t the right word for the bridge. The feeling it brought her was quieter. Deeper. She felt lifted up and laid bare, as if confronted by the Real after filling the rest of the day with busywork. She had only before gotten that feeling at a handful of church services or from a very few pieces of music. Which was why at this moment she had brought her comm pad and earphones with her, to test the effect of the sight and the sound together.

Which was why she didn’t hear Connors approaching, indeed didn’t notice him at all until he was only a few feet to her left. She started and removed the earphones. “Connors,” she nodded.

“Munroe,” he nodded back, smiling. “Sorry, didn’t mean to sneak up.” He held out to her an open foil bag. She turned her head to read the label. Block letters spelled “SEA SALT PITA C-” His hand covered the rest. Not standard issue, at any rate.

She took one SEA SALT PITA C, thanked him, and popped it into her mouth with a loud crunch. He gestured at the phones and the pad. “Transmission from home?”

“Uh, no, it’s, uh…’Clair de lune’.” She at first intended to dismiss the private concert as a personal frivolity, and maybe she would have if anyone else had found her here, but one did not need to act especially professional in front of a fellow first-timer dipping into his care packages. “I always think of it when I pass through here. Even though there’s not usually a moon.”

“Just about everything else, though,” He joined her in gazing out at the sea of stars and distant planets, asteroids and nebulae. “It…helps.”

Val quirked a brow. “Helps what?”

Connors hesitated, and Val was about to retract the question when he began: “I mean, I know we’re here to work and they do what they can to meet us halfway, provide some amenities and train us off of others, but they could at least not paint everything white.” Val thought of her own quarters. They had been permitted to bring a limited number of personal effects, and hers had included posters and photos, but they did little to overpower the stark, plain brightness of the walls, doors, floor, and bedding. He sighed. “I’ve been keeping track. It’s October on Earth, now. The trees’ll be changing color, and against the sky, it’s…kind of like that.” He pointed to a nebula on the far left, bright blue surrounded by a thick ring of green and gold.

Val looked at him. He had been away from home longer than she had – Earth was much farther from the training center than Juturna. All Juturnans could claim Earth ancestry, some as recent as two generations back, but her great-great-grandparents had been the last in her family to live there, breathe its air, see its trees against its sky. They recreated it as best they could for themselves and their descendants, but recently every other conversation with Connors revealed to Val something else that had gotten lost in translation.

She turned back to the view. “It sounds beautiful.” She cast about in her mind for something else to add. “I always love visiting the greenhouses back home. You can spend hours in the complex, it’s so huge, moving from biome to biome…Once when I was a kid I got lost in the deciduous room, but then I just kept walking in one direction, and I finally hit the wall and followed it back to the exit.”

He chuckled, then grew quiet, lowering his eyes. “You know what I always think of here?...How we can’t get lost. Even if all our navtech blew up.” An announcement went out over the intercom, but neither of them heard it. “Thousands of years ago sailors used the stars for guidance. And now we’re doing the same thing. We’re sailing through their map. I can’t get over that. It’s like…For all the manmade stuff everywhere else aboard, looking out at that I…” His voice became softer, stumbling. “I…feel the most human. The most…”

“Connection,” she supplied. They both turned from the window to see each other steeped in its blue glow. He offered her the bag again and she took another piece before they both turned back. Chewing slowly this time, she deactivated the earphones and hit play on the Debussy once more. They stood listening and watching as the piano and the stars shimmered across time and space.

Until, that is, Stephenson appeared in the doorway, telling Val that Boyers wanted the entire bio team to meet in the lab and hadn’t she heard the overhead?

As Stephenson disappeared back down the corridor, Val moved to follow her but stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “Connors.”

He looked at her for a second or two and smiled. “Arlo.”

She returned the smile and headed towards the lab.

#inklingschallenge #team lewis #explosion mention #genre: space travel #imagery: light #imagery: bread #story: complete #my writing #science fiction #short story #my ocs #connection

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ravenpuffheadcanons · 2 years

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and the darkness comprehended it not

Here we are - bits and pieces of my story for @inklings-challenge (both late and incomplete, I’m sorry!). If this story had stayed at the length it was intended to be, I might have finished it, but it grew until it became the first glimpse of a universe I think I might want to explore in something much longer. I at least want to finish the story, given that I have mostly written the sad parts at the start and not got to the excitement/vulnerability/hopefulness of making new friends when you’ve been lonely for so long that you think you’ve forgotten how!

I really enjoyed the challenge, even though I didn’t finish, and am looking forward to reading the other stories. My intention was to explore the perils of being self-reliant and cutting oneself off from others, contrasted with being in a community - I ended up using both light and bread as imagery, though to very different extents.

I think the simulated sunrises are the worst part of being in space, myself. Before I left I suppose I worried about the cramped quarters or the terrible algorithmic telly or the microgravity. It’s true that all those things grate. The ship makes a strange noise, as well, and that sometimes stops me from dropping off at night. I hadn’t anticipated that. But it’s the sunrises that do it for me. Oh, I know all the reasons they have to have them. In fact, assuming my memories are accurate - Earth memories feel unreliable somehow, though really it was only a few weeks ago that we left - I think it’s partly my work they’re using. Circadian rhythms, regular sleep-wake cycles, routine, melatonin and blood pressure and homeostasis. I know all the reasons they have to have them.

And they’ve done a beautiful job with them, too, the techs. Big windows in all the rooms, a fractionally different sunrise every day, times and views shifting subtly as the days slip past. They’re working from Earth data, data from all over the planet: simulated sunrises and sunsets are the closest thing to a replica Earth experience you can get anywhere on the ship. It’s certainly closer than the food. I believe they went with the times from central Peru in the end, after they reviewed upwards of a hundred options. Close enough to the equator that nobody has to endure the short, bleak days we used to experience closer to the poles; not so close that there’s no seasonal change. The best possible outcome for everybody. They’ve even adjusted climate controls so that the temperature increases slowly as the “sun” comes up. That used to be my favourite part of the day, walking to work across the park as the ground slowly warmed, and they’ve got it spot on. The perfect sunrise, statistically speaking - better than any you’d get on Earth. And I hate it. I watch them every morning and I hate every one. I couldn’t tell you why.

II.

Having a routine is important in circumstances like this. (Technically, that’s more of my research, though I don’t think anyone on this ship needs to read a paper to find out that bedtime matters. Brightest minds in a generation, etc). Anyway, I get up at 0600. I exercise until 0645, I shower, I eat breakfast, I head to work. I get to work at 0730 every day, and return at 1930. The work is interesting - more interesting than I had anticipated, actually. It works like this: everyone has regular check-ups with a physician - one of the requirements, since nobody has ever been in deep space for this long before - and I get fed all the data even vaguely connected to my field. I sit in my little lab watching MRIs, running blood samples, reading clinical reviews; a jack of all neurosciences. They would have liked a team, I think, but there were so few people who were willing to sign up to over a year in interstellar space. Until the ship docks on Kepler-452b, I’m really only doing data entry. Sophisticated data entry, for sure, but my dataset won’t be complete for at least a year. Eventually I’ll have the tools to sit down and analyse it, but for now I’m compiling data and developing theories about what this trip is doing to the inhabitants of this vessel.

Making everyone weird, mostly. Not really the kind of thing I can write in a paper. No patterns, not yet, not really: things are definitely changing, but I can’t tell if it’s the FTL travel or the microgravity or the sheer strangeness of everything. There are fractional changes in all the MRIs I’m sent. Nothing that I’m alarmed by. The physicians haven’t reported an increased incidence of mental health issues - not any more than would have been expected in a population of academics, nothing that hasn’t been reported in biospheres or the ISS - and there doesn’t seem to be anything dangerous going on.

(The good thing about this ship full of academic weirdos is that everyone wants to participate in my research. I would have killed for this kind of dataset on Earth. I think that’s hyperbole. I hope it’s hyperbole. Either way, I never dreamt of this: having an army of willing lab rats, people who actually want to be part of my little observational experiments, happily consenting to whatever data I want to get my hands on).

Anyway. All of this means that I know routines are important. My usual morning exercise is a walk - or a jog, if I’m feeling penned in - around the ship’s hydroponics bay. When we left the earth, it was still looking sketchy, and it’s true that I’ve been surviving mostly on rations since take-off. I had my first ship-grown radishes the other day, which was a relief after weeks of packet food - but it’s still getting off the ground. Still, though. It’s the closest to an outside space on this whole vessel, so every morning I walk through it and watch the simulated sunrise from its window. They leave a sort of psychological aftertaste - not an aftertaste, of course, but that’s the closest I can get to the sensation. The chemical sort of feeling I used to get after eating a cheap burger on Earth. I can’t seem to stop watching those sunrises anyway, though, no matter how hard I try.

III.

Do you remember what you were doing the day before we left the Earth? I don’t. Lots of people don’t. That’s one of the things I’ve seen notes in clinical reviews, over and over. It seems strange. We knew we were leaving our homes behind, probably forever. We knew this journey would be long and cold and dark; we knew - we still know - that the light at the end of the tunnel is not guaranteed. Why wasn’t that the prompt to make some final memories, to say goodbye? Perhaps it was and I have just forgotten - but I don’t think so. I don’t think this is a case of collective amnesia. Partly, of course, that’s because no cases have ever actually been verified and documented in the medical literature. (I suppose I do things every day now that were never verified or documented in the medical literature). Mostly, though, the people who do seem to have memories from that day aren’t claiming anything outrageous. There was a man recently - a few weeks ago, I think - who told me he spent that last morning defrosting his freezer. If untrue, it lacks imagination. If delusion - well, I’ve never heard of an hallucination so boring.

You know, there are nearly 300 people on this ship. Why do so few of us have fond memories of those last few days? It makes me sad when I think about it. All of us just floating in the middle of nowhere. Surely there are people on this ship who had families? People who miss their friends? Surely some of us had goodbye parties or walks in the woods or something before this grey floating existence. Maybe we self-selected for this mission because we were lonely.

IV.

The strangest thing just happened to me. I was in the kitchen making some tea when Tony came in. He nodded at me when he came in, so I nodded back, and he went over to his cubby.

He pulled out a lurid package of those individually wrapped honey buns. Awful stuff. I’ve never understood the appeal. If it can survive being shot across space, I don’t think it can possibly count as cake. Anyway, he took out a bun and unwrapped it, looked at it for a minute, looked at me, and then looked back at his hand. After a moment, he broke the cake in two in two and offered me half. No comment, just a little smile. Completely pointless, of course, for I have perfectly satisfactory rations, ones designed with my own tastes and nutritional needs in mind. Somehow, though, I found myself thanking him and accepting it. I sat down to eat it right there in the kitchen. He sat down and ate his half with me before getting up in silence and going about his day. I’d only gone in for a cuppa. And yet I feel better now. Palm oil and sugar and probably some sort of stabiliser; my mango jerky sits untouched in my cubby, though it would have done me much more good I am sure. Why do I feel so much better now?

My hands tighten around my mug. It’s freezing in the Hab - at least my brain tells me it is, although I don’t think it’s actually any colder than my bunk, and I’ve got a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. But I know that the planet is cold, much colder than Earth, so I shiver despite myself and take a grateful sip of tea. A noise at the door startles me, and I look up to see Tony and Esther coming in, hand-in-hand. I had expected to have the place to myself this morning, but somehow I don’t mind as they come to stand silently beside me, one each side. Tony, who seems to be literally incapable of seeing a person without feeding them, untucks one hand from my mug and pushes a buttered roll into it. He frowns at me until he sees me bite into it.

None of us are meant to be here, though I probably have the best excuse. My work doesn’t need to be prepared for transfer, after all - nothing particularly physical about it. Tony should be selecting the plants that he thinks have the best chance of survival in the planet-side hydroponics bay. Esther should probably be boxing up medication and taking inventory, though perhaps one of the other physicians is doing it. The ship docked behind us is a veritable hive of activity. I’m not quite sure why they’re here - I’ve never heard either of them complaining about the sunrises on board the ship. They can’t feel the same magnetic draw to this view that I do - this first sunrise in our new home.

Perhaps, I realise suddenly, they knew I would be here.

There isn’t time for me to ask, and I don’t know how I would do so anyway. Instead I hold my breath as Esther reaches behind me to flick off the lights in the Hab. Dawn is breaking.

It’s a pale imitation of the simulated sunrises. The sun itself - or the star, I suppose I should say - is tiny, slipping up over the horizon. There’s not much discernable change in temperature, and the light is blue-grey, not yellow. We’re at the edge of the habitable zone, and the plastic wall of the Hab is thick and slightly grainy. It is a much less impressive than the pink and red and gold that has been splashed across the window in hydroponics. And yet, as the dawn breaks, I feel my shoulders drop, my jaw relax. I haven’t realised until now how tense I have been holding myself.

“Well,” says Tony, and his voice sounds different to any time I have ever heard it. His usual joviality is gone entirely, replaced with something no less happy but somehow more serious. “How about that. Seems impossible, don’t it, after all those months in the dark?”

We haven’t really been in the dark for months. The ship is flooded with warm yellow light during the day, dimmed but not extinguished during the sleep shift. Esther usually corrects Tony when he makes trite statements like this, her voice sometimes edged with irritation, so I’m surprised to see her smile at him instead. Yet, before I can open my mouth to be the voice of reason, I am smiling too.

#inklings challenge #team lewis #imagery: light #imagery: bread #genre: space travel #i didn't mean to write a story about how horrible lockdown was but i guess that's what happened somehow #incomplete #lou writes #inklingschallenge #inklings challenge 2022 #team-lewis

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toothanddraw · 2 years

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A Song for Saprotrophs

@inklings-challenge

I did it. I dusted off the old short story format and wrote it. I hope you like it (a little.) It’s rushed too, so I want to go back and refine it sometime. I enjoyed learning about Chesterton during the challenge.

Team Chesterton

Category: Intrusive Fantasy

Imagery: Tree, Bread

Word Count: 2,040

“Stop! Don’t eat that.”

My instructor told me that as I washed the bite of sandwich down.

Apparently, the bread was found to be moldy. I couldn’t taste it. The team of trainers apologized profusely, and the kitchen staff rolled out some pre-dinner stuffed shells. Their embarrassment charged the air and what could I say? That’s something I didn’t want to learn. It’s not as if I could tell the difference myself.

Fisher didn’t know this, he didn’t care.

The dog sat up, then returned to the ground, thumping his tail when the trainers passed again. I turned to him and could tell through the blurry bubble of vision I had left that he was a black lab, not a yellow.

I had known him for 10 days. He was the best thing that happened to me post-forty. Every night, still angry about what was taken away: “Thank you for the dog. Thank you for the dog!”

I set my napkin down and took hold of the harness handle and heard him shift to look up at me expectantly. That’s magic.

Enough to forget about some moldy bread that I couldn’t even taste. At least they told us. This class was legally blind, we probably wouldn’t have known.

I think I was the only one to eat it. I think. I didn’t hear anyone complain about their stomach issues later. And I kept quiet about mine. I’ll spare you. Still, a little bit of mold shouldn’t have done that.

Fisher rested his head on my back as I sprawled on the bed in the student’s quarters.

He technically wasn’t allowed on the bed. But I figured off-duty is off-duty.

I would have told someone, I really would have, if the full effects of what I ate had shown up in the last two weeks I stayed at the school.

But Fisher and I were trained, bonded, and gone months before the side-effects kicked in.

Mold is a type of fungus. I’m sorry if you already knew that. I’m not a mycologist, I’m a credit analyst. Some molds are good. Penicillin is a type of mold. Some molds will kill you. I wasn’t dead yet, months later, so that was good news. I hadn’t even thought of the bread until I took a hike with Fisher.

It was a warm late September afternoon and the wide fire roads through the forest made a windpipe for trees, still full of leaves. I loved these woods. I would have been here sooner but there’s a lot of pressure around going back to where you used to go with someone you loved.

It wasn’t half a mile in when I began to smell a lot of rich food. Someone must have been having a banquet of a picnic. The savory smells hit first, like tender protein, fall-apart bird meat. Buttery smells mixed in: roasted walnuts, oliveoil dripping off of bread. I honed in on it. It was curiously strong, it must have been right off the trail.

But when I got up to it, from what I could tell, it was a tree. Fisher stood at the ready while I knelt down and felt around the base. The smell was so intense I had an absurd picture of an offering upon silver platter on the ground.

A mushroom met my hand. One of those blurry yellow-brown ones. My stomach growled.

Fisher sniffed the cap out of polite curiosity but didn’t go to eat it. No. I was the one salivating. Like a crazy person.

Fisher licked my arm.

I took the mushrooms home with me, walking back past other delicious smells.

I had mangled them so it was hard to get an ID on them. Especially with text-to-audio descriptions of pictures. And the feeling of hunger I had towards them did not abate.

I had to know what they tasted like. Like a dumb kid on the playground. I didn’t stop at a taste. Or a bite. They were so tender and delicate.

I wondered after they were gone if I was having some kind of grief-induced psychosis by taking and eating something from the forest park. I panicked the rest of the night, waiting for symptoms of mushroom poisoning to manifest. All the while wondering. Apologizing for being so stupid.

A week later I still felt fine. A week after that, the singing started.

A hum. A pleasing hum in my head as I walked into the bank where Fisher’s celebrity status had not lost any shine. I annoyed everyone else, asking if someone was singing. After work, it kept up, on and off. It was never too loud and I could ignore it. I scheduled a physical.

And then it made contact.

Just impressions. Like “I’m here.” “Do you know I’m here?” “Hello.” And repeatedly: “We need to find the trees. We need to find the trees.” All melodic. No words as people would define it, though they translated easily enough.

I know what you’re thinking. I ate some mold and some mushrooms and now I was hearing things. But if I was tripping out, it was rather disappointing. I used to have vision. If all of this was a side-effect of a hallucinogen, shouldn’t my brain be treating me to colors and details?

Distinctly, I remember wrapping my arms around Fisher in my apartment and trying to will away my anxiety about it. I reminded myself that I was going to see the doctor next week. I could make it until them, no matter what music my head was playing.

Fisher licked my arm.

And the voices surged in wonderment. A curiosity that was distinctly not mine rang through my head. As if it realized all of a sudden, what a joy it was to hold a dog. “We need to tell the trees!” Undercutting that was a sudden jealousy that was mine. A love outside my own for my companion. My eyes. Fisher.

You need to understand, there was little to no confusion about which thoughts were mine and which ones were the intrusive others. They were very happy to be in my head.

I was a nervous wreck. I called out sick.

…

I didn’t want to return to the forest park. The voices did. They wanted trees.

“What are you going to DO to me?” I shouted, out loud, in my empty apartment. I slid down the wall to the floor and sobbed, fully aware that I needed serious help, terrified of the implications.

An impression came. No words. Of pressure. Just below the surface of the skin across my shoulders and chest. There was a confusion. A profound befuddlement, even an embarrassment that was not mine. The voices quieted to a thoughtful stirring. It shocked me out of my terror.

In the middle of the night, I woke. No fear stained my thoughts yet. In the split second of calm came a deliberate question to me: “Are you earth?”

In my AC, in the dark, on the polyester sheets, I answered: “No.”

A different strain of music. Another question: “Are you bread?”

“No!”

Fisher sneezed incredulously.

The voices puzzled and burbled in my brain.

The good thing about being very tired was that sometimes, it beats the feeling of fear. “Please shut up. Let me sleep.”

For some reason that worked.

...

“We need to tell the trees.” The voices told me.

“You have a system of mycelium beneath the surface of your skin.” The doctor told me.

She was a blurry, kind-sounding woman. She seemed way too eager about this. “There’s a powdery mildew coming off of your inside-elbows. We’ll see what the lab has to say about the samples. I’ve never seen this before in my life or studies… But you’re otherwise healthy!”

And then she prescribed me some antifungal cream and pills. She went on to explain that fungal infections happen. They just didn’t happen quite like this.

She didn’t know about the voices.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I would pick up my medication from the pharmacy and stop this strangeness.

Tomorrow was the day, too. The bad one on the calendar. Maybe it meant something that all of this was happening now. I knew what I had to do.

“Fisher,” I told him, “If you see me reach for anything I’m not supposed to eat tomorrow, bite my hand off.”

His tail thumped against the ground.

He never barked, that one.

The voices in my head, the music of the mold and mycelia, seemed less a conversation to themselves and more of a performance that night.

I itched the inside my arm as I listened. The singing changed, different voices harmonizing. Rounds, layers of lovely thoughts and ideas spun out, intending that I should listen. Intending that I should find their music beautiful.

“It is.” I told them finally. “It’s really good. Good singing.”

…

I was back at the forest park. Once again, delicious food-like smells were everywhere. But now I knew better. I wasn’t taking on anymore voices. I had picked up my prescription earlier that morning and would work to set things right after my hike.

Fisher led me down the fire road.

“I feel like I’m still wandering alone in the dark sometimes,” I told Fisher. “Even with you. Even if I could see.”

The singing was less complicated at the moment, more direct now. Almost like concrete words. Just happy to be here, in contrast to me. It was tempting just to float on whatever the fungi were feeling, without my baggage.

I found a spot I felt was about right and sat down, my back against an ample, blurry hickory. “Alright. You’re at the trees. What do you want?”

To my surprise, I felt a jolt through my hand as I settled myself on the ground. A transmission. A call.

And immediately, a response back through the base of the trunk.

I caught recognition. I placed both palms flat against the ground and then I listened.

So many voices. Distinct and mature. It was like I had stepped inside a marble hall with a thousand giants conferring.

It was them. The forest. Tall complex singing and ideas in the trees and the fungus (which had their own voices and acted as translators and networkers between the trees.)

I listened in as I was announced and appraised with curiosity and a tiny sense of shame. I spoke. And as I responded, it felt like a tribunal, I just wasn’t sure who for.

“Animal, animal. This is an animal,” the forest decided. Many voices nodding along.

And from me: “They are bread. They are ground,” they insisted. “Where else would we be?”

“What is this? Who are you?”

And they explained. I listened through the lives of the great and simple. The trees, the co-operation. The competition of plants and fungus. All the while, they spoke. They traded information. And I got the impression: I was an ambassador. Not just a devourer of plants and other animals. I had a voice to present to them and a translator that I took in with that cursed moldy sandwich bite.

“You came after! Yours is a different line. A kingdom of creation we have not heard from. A mover. A killer and a die-er. Welcome! How strange and wonderful your voice.”

“It has to stop,” I pleaded. “I regret it. I need to make it right.”

The fungus that I had growing in me felt fear for the first time.

I removed my hands from the ground, like shutting the door on the council chamber. I took out my medication.

The voices within me sang. “They said we had no earth. They said we had no bread. (We told them about the dog.) They said we grew on the body of higher voice. Have we done wrong?”

I had never heard them so distinctly before. They had grown.

“I’m sorry. You can’t stay here.”

“Please! We need to break bread. We need to break ground. We need something to eat or we’ll die!”

“Even if I die?”

At this, Fisher sought my face to kiss.

The voices held their silence. I held my breath. I understood.

#inklingschallenge #team chesterton #genre: intrusive fantasy #imagery: bread #imagery: tree #story: complete #Short Story

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e-b-reads · 2 years

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Warning: this is not complete! It's not even very edited. But I wanted to get something posted, so here's the beginning of a part 1 of the story I outlined in full for this year's @inklings-challenge. It's almost 2k words so far, and does end on something of a cliffhanger; sorry.

TBH this isn't even titled yet. But maybe it's good for me to get something so unpolished out there instead of staring at it! I can tell you that I was on Team Tolkein, and chose to write secondary world fantasy. Anyway, here goes:

New Cattalan, Oskana, 4002. Two weeks before the Paladin’s Sword is taken from the Sky God’s Altar.

“And Jacobin took his sword and sheathed it in the rock, till nought but the hilt could be seen, and he said…” – from Canticle of the Sky God’s Paladin

“Shit and goblin spit!”

Jax snorted at me from across the kitchen, without turning to see what I was swearing at. “Shut up,” I said. “I hate this new sprayer.” The old nozzle in the dish pit had been deteriorating, so Gloria had finally bought a new one, which was great, except that the water now came out with twice the force I was used to, so I kept spraying myself whenever I hit an oddly angled part of whatever pan or plate I was washing. “Throw me a towel.”

Jax pulled one out of his back pocket and tossed it to me, still almost without looking, though he glanced quickly to aim. Despite the way the waitresses tended to giggle about him, he wasn’t quite superhuman. “You’re soaked,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said morosely, mopping gingerly at the front of my sweater. It was a nice sweater, too—a nice stripey blue pattern, and not real wool, but warm. It was technically the beginning of summer, but the usual sticky heat that descended on New Cattalan in the summer months hadn’t arrived yet; it was rainy out that evening, even a little cold. Even if it had been warm, though, this would have been annoying, because, “I can’t take off my sweater,” I said, giving up on the towel eventually and tossing it onto the counter in the middle of the room. “Gloria would hate my T-shirt.”

Jax grunted in agreement, focusing on the pot of stew in front of him on the stove. Stew was one thing we were famous for, here at the Red Dragon Inn—stew and being around “since the Heroic Ages,” though a lot of people tended to forget that while, sure, New Cattalan was the capital now, and we were about three blocks from the current Palace, at the height of the Heroic Ages, the only thing here had been a fairly disreputable port town. It didn’t seem to affect our popularity any. Gloria believed wholeheartedly that we were giving a taste of the Heroic Ages, even though we had things like heating and aircon and indoor plumbing, and when Gloria believed in things, she believed so strongly that she almost made you believe too. Almost.

This is why I wasn’t planning to take off my sweater and show off my poorly chosen T-shirt—it was just a band shirt, but of a band famous for being irreverent atheists, and it had a pun on it that Gloria would have definitely been offended by. She and her husband, Elias, were the owners of the Red Dragon Inn, and therefore my bosses, and they were also very close to being basically Evangelical Welkians. Not actually as strict as the true Evangelical sects that had started to spring up in, honestly, only the past fifteen years, who had a lot of old fashioned beliefs, like about whether women could be priests (they said no), along with some extra new prejudices they’d thought up themselves. Suffice it to say that Gloria and Elias—though she was more outspoken about it than he—were very religious, and almost saddened when they encountered someone or something that went against their beliefs.

Which is why I wondered sometimes how Jax had even gotten the job there, and what was making him stick around for so long. He seemed like everything Gloria should disapprove of. Take me, in contrast: I started working at the Red Dragon three years ago, and though I once heard Gloria describe me to someone by saying “Nico is a very conscientious young man,” by which I think she meant I care slightly too much about my appearance in a way she considers oddly feminine, I have short hair and no tattoos or visible piercings, I come to work on time, I pick up odd jobs—I started as a dishwasher, but these days I do a little of everything—and I even make her laugh sometimes. And, entirely to Gloria’s credit, she’s never said anything about the darker skin or tightly curled hair I inherited from my Ettrean Oskanian grandmother. Well, probably to her credit. Mostly people aren’t rude, because there’s a lot of dark skinned people here in New Cattalan, but they ask sometimes since I look so mixed; I’m not sure Gloria’s ever noticed.

Anyway, as to Jax—OK, he’s generally on time to work, too, but otherwise he’s as disreputable as they come. He’s got at least four tattoos that I know of, he takes a lot of smoke breaks in the back alley considering the amount of food he’s able to produce in a given shift, and every now and then he comes out and says something scathing about the Welkian Church that makes it very clear he is not a member. Aside from this, he never talks about himself really at all; also, under his dark, perpetually too-long bangs and his facial hair, he’s actually pretty handsome in a thin-faced kind of way. Between the mystery and the looks, all the waitresses—as long as I’ve been here, the waitstaff have all been female, and I’ve never known if that’s Gloria being sexist or just a fluke—have wild theories about him. I’ve heard ideas ranging from Jax being the son of a foreign lord, to him being the only surviving member of a questing party, to him being the prophesied return of the Sky God’s Paladin.

“You could bring out the bread,” said Jax now, nodding to a platter of it, just sliced and still steaming. I’d zoned out while I’d finished scrubbing the pot that had sprayed me back, and run it through the sanitizer. “Wanda’s gone for the evening.”

“Yeah, got it,” I said, and grabbed a tray to put the bread and a dish of butter on. We weren’t famous for the bread, not on any travel ethernet sites, but it was always very good. Sourdough. Not for the first time, I wondered if Gloria kept Jax around mainly for his bread—the one thing they had in common was that they were crazy about that sourdough starter. It lived in a little jar in the high back window of the kitchen—a labeled jar. Its name was Bob.

The reason that Wanda, who’d been the one waitress on duty that weekday evening, was gone was that it was pretty late—past our normal dinner rush. We only had one group out in the common room, as we called the big downstairs dining room with that one long table in front of the fireplace, and it was the group that was spending the night; they’d arrived late, and proved very content to accept a late dinner. They’d been calling themselves a questing party in their reservations, but though we did get questing parties through here—they were usually on a quest for some kind of magical artifact, there were a lot of resources in New Cattalan for that kind of thing—I could tell this group wasn’t really one, in the traditional sense of the term. It was a bunch of college-ish aged guys, which was typical for a questing party, but they’d come with suitcases and duffles instead of hiking packs, which was a big giveaway, and also they just kept talking about all of the neat places they were going to go see. Their “quest” seemed to be to go see a lot of Heroic Age-associated places in the city.

They were friendly enough, for all that. When I brought out the bread, several yelled some greetings that I think were supposed to sound vaguely historic, and two started telling me at the same time about the places they were planning to go in the next couple days. I didn’t mind; Elias had lit a fire earlier in the evening, and I worked my way surreptitiously closer to it, under the pretense of getting closer to the guy who was still talking to me, so that I could start to dry off a little more. “We’re all at NCC,” said the guy, who was brawny and red-faced, though probably because he was closest to the fire rather than because he was drunk—they’d only had one round so far. He gestured around the table generally. “So most of us have been to most of these places at some point—” NCC was New Cattalan College, three trolley stops away from the Red Dragon on the shortest line “—but none of us have been to all of them. It’s like—like a pilgrimage.” I noticed that this allegory in particular made the pale young man sitting at one end of the table grimace just a little. Something drew my expansive new friend’s attention to this guy, too, because he reached over, leaning around two other guys, and clasped his shoulder. “Frankie here hasn’t been to any of them—he’s from the north, almost Fedir.”

“Francis,” said the pale young man, in introduction, and actually held out his hand to shake. I shook it, a little startled. He was dressed pretty much the same as all the other guys there—his T-shirt was a plain color instead of sporting some kettleball team, but it was a T-shirt, and he had on pants with extra pockets just like most of them, and a slightly expensive-looking raincoat on the back of his chair. So I’m not sure why he looked so ascetic, in comparison to the others. Maybe it was his almost colorless eyelashes.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“You as well,” he said, sounding like he meant it, and then looked at me so expectantly that I realized he wanted my name, too.

“Uh, Nico,” I said.

“I’m Brian,” said the garrulous guy, and then told me about how they were all going to be sophomores in the fall, but meanwhile most of them were taking summer classes so they wanted to get a little vacationing in before that, and the ones who weren’t taking classes were going home or something when their two weeks of sightseeing in New Cattalan was up. “This is kinda the first stop,” he explained, “and we’re definitely doing a guided tour at the Palace, but I’m also hoping to see the Silver Fish—you know the tavern in South-Southeast? And we’re doing the National Cathedral, too,” he added, with a glance at Francis for some reason, “but not ‘til close to the end.”

“That sounds great,” I said, and realized that my sweater was actually almost dry, meaning, incidentally, that Jax was probably ladling out stew in the kitchen and wondering where I was. I started reaching for empty plates and glasses. “Let me just take these—can I get you guys another—?”

Before I could finish my question, three things happened: Gloria, in all her slightly dumpy, maternal glory, appeared on the landing, which was across the room from the kitchen doors, probably to say something about the group’s bedrooms; Jax leaned out the swinging kitchen door, eyebrows drawn down, to jerk his head impatiently at me; and the front door to the Inn swung open with a dramatic bang, which I hadn’t even known it could do, letting in a gust of cold air, a small squall of rain, and a young woman in a fairly skimpy outfit, who slammed the door behind herself and sort of subsided into a leggy heap on the floor of the common room. After a brief stunned moment, I realized the young woman was Alicia, a waitress who usually worked in the mornings, and who I had never seen in anything less conservative than the white shirt and dark skirt she wore to work.

#inklingschallenge #christianity #(though not explicitly since this is a fantasy world)#team tolkien #genre: secondary world #imagery: bread #imagery: water #(specifically i'm planning for bread to be a theme across the parts and the other images to show up occasionally but for this bit...)#story: unfinished #hope this is tantalizing instead of frustrating!

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ozthearistocrat · 2 years

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Inklings Challenge: Food For the Journey

Thank you, @inklings-challenge for allowing me to participate. I apologize if this late, I had a very busy week. Unfortunately this is unfinished but I hope you all enjoy. I am looking forward to reading everyone else's too.

Food for the Journey

Dr. Sarah Creed had of course been in plenty of underground tombs beneath the hot desert but the sudden shift in temperatures always came as a bit of a shock. The sweat that you accumulated under the hot desert sun suddenly turned against you as the cold tomb air hit it. After the initial shock, Dr. Creed walked towards the chamber in which her colleague, Dr. Alfred Kent was waiting for her.

“Hello Dr. Kent, I hope I wasn’t keeping you waiting. “Ah, Dr. Creed, it is no trouble. I have not been waiting long. we shall begin now.” She and Dr. Kent worked hard to uncover the various items that had been lost to the desert sands. Most of them were fragments of carvings, broken pottery, or large stones. This was no tomb robbing, as the evidence pointed to that happening years before they came along. But the people that had come before were more interested in gold and treasure than small disparate pieces of a long gone civilization. But as far as Dr. Creed was concerned, what she was finding was much more valuable than gold or jewels. Though it was hard work, finding even the smallest pieces would make every hour in the heat of the sun or in the chill of the tomb worth it. Her thoughts turned to pondering the remains of this civilization that she was digging up. She did not know much about them, she knew they were nomadic and that they held a high respect for their gods. They weren’t much for keeping records that’s for sure, but from what Sarah could find they had a great deal of these tombs, buried beneath the sands. They might have stood above the desert for all too see, but time and shifting sands had buried them, leaving many lost under the desert. Her mind was so fixated on the many possible buried tombs that she did not hear Dr. Kent speak to her at first. Suddenly his voice broke through her wandering mind and brought her back to the cold of the tomb. “Dr. Creed, come look at this. I think you might be interested in this.” “Yes what is it Dr. Kent?” Sarah stood up and walked over to the kneeling Dr. Kent.

“I found this,” Dr. Kent gestured to a small alcove that had been covered by sand and stone that he had recently uncovered. “Usually these alcoves are empty, but I found these in the one that was clearing out.”

Sarah noticed that there were four small objects in the alcove, one clay bottle and three round black objects of similar size and shape. She carefully reached her gloved hand into the alcove and drew out the objects. The bottle sloshed with some unknown liquid and was heavier than expected. The small round objects, which resembled stones, were much lighter, like charcoal briquettes. She brought them out for her and Dr. Kent to examine in a clearer light. The bottle was definitely clay, and it was sealed by some sort of wax. She felt the liquid inside move as she examined the bottle. Dr. Kent examined the round objects, carefully holding them so as to prevent breaking them. They silently analyzed until Dr. Kent broke the silence. “Strange, I am not quite sure what these are? They seem like some sort of stone with their appearance, but their weight belies something else entirely. What do you make of it Dr. Creed?” Sarak looked up from the bottle she was examining to look at the objects Dr. Kent was examining. She stared at them intensely before silently taking the bottle and removing the seal. She smelled it and then she took off her glove and held her thumb to the top of bottle and held it upside down. She then returned it to the upright position and removed her thumb, placing it in her mouth before she spoke. “From the looks of this they might have been provisions of some sort. This bottle has vinegar in it, so it might have been wine of some sort. The bottle is featureless and smooth clay, most likely baked to keep the liquid from drying out. Those round things look to be bread, given their weight and size. The bread was meant to last quite long. It's amazing that they have been preserved so well…though I do wonder as to why they are here?” Sarah furrowed her brow as new questions emerged from her questions.

“What do you think? I doubt that the nomads would have left food around for just anyone.” Dr. Kent placed down the bread as he spoke.

“If this is a tomb, then I think these things would be some sort of an offering. Maybe to the dead but I think more to their gods. They would leave offerings of bread and wine to them.”

“But wouldn’t these be someplace…more obvious? These seemed a little more out of the way. I think that these would be more for survival than anything. Take for instance, these nomads, they are being attacked. These tombs are places to hide and recover. This food is for their survival.” Dr. Kent looked over the rock like bread as he spoke, as if to find a clear explanation in the fossilized crust.

“I agree with your assessment that these were for some purpose, but I am inclined to say that these provisions match with other ancient cultures offered to their gods. Bread and wine, more often than not, was offered to all kinds of gods.” Dr. Creed shifted the bottle in her hands as if the sound of the moving liquid could whisper some hidden answer. “I do not think that there would be such a simple reason as to that Dr. Creed, besides it also well known that most ancient cultures look after themselves, which would help explain what the purposes these provisions would have.” “I am not sure where you seem to think this doesn’t disqualify-”

Sarah’s words were suddenly cut off as dust fell from the ceiling. A distant rumbling sound could be heard. An earthquake? A strong sandstorm? Sarah was unsure, but whatever it was it was causing the entire room to shake. Sarah began to move when she notice Dr. Kent wasn’t following her. She saw that he was trying to scoop up the black bread into his hands.

“Just leave them, we need to get out of here.” Sarah ran over and grabbed Dr. Kent’s arms and pulled him along with her. The dust began to cloud the air, causing both of them to cough and sneeze as they ran throughout the chamber. The long hall was no better, and the rumbling wouldn’t stop as they continued to run. The light at the end of the hall began to fade as more sand was moved by the shaking, but Sarah moved quickly with Dr. Kent alongside her. As they reached the end, Sarah felt herself fall over a loose stone. She saw Dr. Kent arrived at the entrance before he turned around to see her on the ground. He called out to her, but his voice was drowned out by a loud crash as the ceiling fell down around her. Loose sand and stone covered Sarah and all sounds and light began to fade as she lost consciousness.

Sarah awoke looking up at a tent ceiling, but not the tan burlap of the camp tents, but a rough hide tent. She tried to sit up but her entire body ached when she tried to move. She craned her neck to look around the tent she was in. There wasn’t much to see, the hides were tanned and stiff creating a small but open space. The only light came from a hole cut out of the wall of the tent, with a smaller and looser piece of hide handing over the tent for privacy. She was lying on a pile of soft furs that kept her from the hard ground and supported her. She didn’t know where she was or how she had got here, but her racing mind was suddenly halted by a sound coming from outside. Someone was moving towards the tent. Sarah tensed when she saw a shadow cross the entrance and as the loose hide moved she saw the silhouette of a woman enter the tent. She was wearing hide and fur, similar to the ones that made up Sarah’s tent and bedding. Her dark hair had red beads in it, and similar red beads hung in a string about her neck. As Sarah looked at her she noticed a smaller shadow across the entrance, and a younger girl, presumably the daughter of the woman, entered as well. Silently, the woman placed down a bowl of water and began to wash Sarah’s face. She shifted at the sudden coldness of the water, but she relaxed as the water began to cool her. The young girl watched her as the woman worked, giving Sarah some water to drink before getting up and gesturing to the younger girl to follow her. The girl looked back at Sarah as she felt, their eyes met, but the girl turned away and hurried with her mother out of the tent. Sarah didn’t know what was going on, but she was determined to get to the bottom of it.

Dr. Sarah Creed had managed to recover after a day or so of rest. When she was well enough to get up, she would at first, walk around her tent. Sarah looked at its construction and the type of hide used to make it. She could see the similarities in the tent’s design that pointed to a specific tent that was used by the nomads she was studying at the time. She concluded that she must have somehow returned to a period of time in which they still lived and operated in the desert. She would be visited by the women, sometimes with the young girl and sometimes without, who would give her food and water. She tried to communicate with the woman, though at first they could not understand each other Sarah began to understand a few words and could guess with gestures and context what people were saying. A few days more and Sarah was able to leave the tent and walk outside. Though there were a few tents, there was not much else beside sand and a few sheep. There were other people, but they did not seem to pay much attention here, seemingly caught up in other activities. Occasionally Sarah would see the young girl and wave to her, which would make the girl notice her and then run off like a frightened deer. But as Sarah grew more accustomed to the nomad camp, the young girl began to wave back with a friendly smile.

#inklingschallenge #team tolkien #genre: time travel #imagery: bread #imagery: wine #story: unfinished

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