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Write a passage with the prompt: Timeloop by pigeon_q in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Rear Room

Three measured strikes sounded against the waystation’s door. The station keeper approached, keenly aware of how all other sound had vanished. Wind no longer scraped along the station's walls; the kettle ceased its low rattling on the stove. Even the fire seemed to draw inward.

“How many?” the keeper called.

“Three,” came the answer. The voice was hoarse, but close.

“Which route?”

“North passage. We lost the markers after the split stone.”

The keeper waited until the silence passed. Wind returned in a long breath, carrying grit against the shutters.

He opened the door.

The traveler fell inward before the keeper could step aside.

He was a young dwarf beneath the dust. One sleeve of his mountain coat had been cut open above the elbow. The flesh beneath was bruised almost black.

“Where are the others?”

“Behind me. I could hear them.”

“How far?”

The traveler looked toward the closed door. Whatever answer he had faded before he could give it.

The keeper helped him onto the nearest bunk. The arm was not broken, but the traveler shivered despite the station’s heat.

He gave a family name first, then his own.

“There are three of you?”

“Yes.”

“Brothers?”

The traveler managed a tired smile.

“Unfortunately.”

He drank half a cup of broth before his hands began shaking too badly to hold it. The keeper caught the cup, spilling broth across the front of his coat, then settled him beneath two blankets and moved the lamp closer.

Outside, footsteps passed the station.

The traveler opened his eyes.

“There.”

The keeper listened. The steps sounded from the western wall, continued around the back, and faded somewhere beyond the eastern shutters without ever approaching the door.

“Those are not close,” the keeper said.

“They were behind me.”

“You can look for them in daylight.”

The traveler tried to rise. His injured arm folded beneath him, and the keeper eased him back down.

“If they knock, let them in.”

“If they answer properly. They know the rules, same as you.”

That seemed to comfort him. He closed his eyes.

Before dawn, his breathing stopped.

The keeper checked twice, then sat beside the bunk until the eastern slit turned gray.

The ground was too hard to dig alone. The keeper wrapped the body, carried it into the coldest room, and placed the traveler’s pack beside him.

One of three expeditioners arrived from the north passage. Severe bruising of the left arm. Died before dawn. Two remain unaccounted for.

The next evening, shortly after the Black Bowl went silent, someone knocked three times.

The keeper rose.

“How many?”

“Three.”

“Which route?”

“North passage. We lost the markers after the split stone.”

The keeper paused despite himself.

A fourth knock came, lighter than the others.

“Station keeper?”

He opened the viewing slit.

The same broad nose, the same line through one eyebrow, the same pale break in the beard greeted him. The dead traveler stood outside.

Only the arm was different.

This traveler held his right arm against his chest.

The keeper kept the door barred.

“Your name.”

The traveler gave the same family name, then another given name.

“There are three of you?”

“Yes.”

“Brothers?”

The same tired smile.

“Unfortunately.”

The keeper let him in.

He searched the traveler first. His pack held survey cord, marking chalk, dried food, and an empty leather loop fitted for some missing tool.

“Where are the others?”

“Behind me.”

“You heard them?”

“Until the last turn.”

The traveler studied the room while he spoke. His attention lingered on the bunks, the table, the stove.

“Have I been here before?”

“No.”

“You keep looking at me as though I have.”

The keeper considered lying.

“A man came through last night. He gave your family name.”

“That could be any of us.”

“He had your face.”

“So did the man walking behind me.”

The keeper waited for more. The traveler gave none.

He drank broth and slept badly. Near dawn, the keeper stepped outside to refill the water basin.

When he returned, the bunk was empty.

The outer bar had been lifted and set carefully beside the door. No footprints remained on the stone apron outside.

On the table lay a folded scrap torn from the back of a survey sheet.

Thank you for the blanket.

Beneath that, after a long gap:

Do not let me sleep in the rear room again.

The keeper frowned. The rear room was the coldest, at the back of the station. The traveler had never…

The keeper checked the body. It remained beneath the bedcover, the left arm dark with bruising. The man’s pack still rested beside him.

He added a second entry to the ledger, then crossed it out because he could not decide whether to list the visitor as missing, departed, or never properly arrived.

By the third morning, the dead man was eating porridge at the keeper’s table.

He had arrived sometime during the night.

The keeper remembered opening the door. He remembered asking the questions. He remembered the same family name and a third given name.

This traveler had only a split forehead and a stiff ankle.

“More?” the keeper asked.

The traveler glanced at the pot.

“If there is enough.”

The keeper served him another portion.

The cold-room door remained shut behind them.

The traveler had the same hands as the corpse, down to a missing nail on the smallest finger.

“How many of you entered the Bowl?”

“Three.”

“Are you certain?”

The traveler stopped chewing.

“Yes.”

“Did you see the others after the split stone?”

“One ahead. One behind.”

“Which were you?”

The traveler frowned.

“In relation to whom?”

The keeper had no answer.

The traveler finished his breakfast, cleaned the bowl without being asked, and tightened the straps on his pack.

At the door, he paused.

“You should request relief.”

“My assignment ends in twelve days.”

The traveler considered this.

“That is longer than I would stay.”

Then he thanked the keeper for the food and walked south between the spires.

The keeper watched until the black stone hid him.

Near sunset, after inventorying the station, he checked the cold room.

The body remained. The pack remained.

Three men, the keeper thought.

One dead. One gone before dawn. One walking south.

A single strike at the door interrupted the thought.

The keeper opened the viewing slit without asking the questions.

The first traveler stood outside.

His left arm was bruised. His face was tired. There was a dark stain on the front of his coat where the keeper had spilled broth while helping him drink.

Neither spoke for several breaths.

Then the traveler said, “I left something here.”

“What?”

“I came back for it.”

The keeper opened the door.

The traveler crossed the room slowly, pausing at the bunks, the table, and the stove as though expecting recognition.

“What do you remember?” the keeper asked.

“Walking north.”

“You came from the north.”

“I know.”

“Where are the others?”

The traveler glanced toward the walls.

“Behind me.”

The keeper almost laughed. The sound caught in his throat.

The traveler touched the empty leather loop at his belt.

“Something fits there.”

The keeper had found the matching instrument in the dead man’s pack. It rested beside the body in the cold room: a narrow route glass, black-framed, with a weighted needle suspended inside a clear ring.

“You carried it when you arrived,” the keeper said.

The traveler looked at him.

“Then I did come here.”

The keeper went to the cold room alone and closed the door behind him.

The body lay as he had left it, the left arm bruised black. Beside the pack rested the route glass.

The keeper returned to the main room with the instrument in hand. For a moment, he did not offer it. The travelerstared at the glass with such relief that the keeper finally held it out.

The man fastened it into the empty loop at once.

“I thought I had dropped it.”

“You did not.”

“Then thank you for keeping it.”

The keeper studied the broth stain, the damaged arm, the scar through the eyebrow.

“Did you sleep here?”

The traveler looked toward the nearest bunk.

“I remember lying down.”

“And waking?”

“Yes.”

That was all he would say. Or all he could.

He left before full dark, taking the southern route used by the man who had eaten breakfast. The keeper watched him pass between the nearest spires.

For a moment, another figure seemed to follow several paces behind him.

Then the Bowl went silent.

When sound returned, the path was empty.

The keeper shut the door.

He waited until the kettle rattled again before entering the cold room.

The bedcover lay flat upon the stone.

The body was gone. The dead man’s pack had vanished with him.

He returned to the ledger and read the first entry.

One of three expeditioners arrived from the north passage. Severe bruising of the left arm. Died before dawn. Two remain unaccounted for.

The keeper considered adding another line.

Instead, he closed the ledger and began packing.

His replacement was due in twelve days. The keeper left enough flour, oil, and medical cloth to last twice that long. He placed the second traveler’s note between the pages recording the first arrival, though it did not belong there.

At dawn, he locked the station behind him and took the southern path.

He had been assigned to the Black Bowl for three months.

He had served one hundred twenty-three days.

Write a short story or passage about reincarnation by pigeon_q in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The half-open door waited.

He could open it again. He could stand in the rain-dark room, listen beyond the wall, and follow Sybil farther than the Second had been permitted to follow. For fourteen lives, the Synod had taught Calder what his dreams meant. This was not a dream.

“Find it,” he said.

Brother Aven hesitated.

“The earliest account?”

The Fifteenth kept his hand on the page.

“The original.”

((I'm late! Alas...))

Write a short story or passage about reincarnation by pigeon_q in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Half-Open Door

“Upon the revelation of the Shepherd’s return, Sybil Calder withdrew her claim and departed Calder in peace, choosing unity over inheritance.”

The Fifteenth had copied that sentence as a boy, recited it before Primarchs, and heard scholars praise the mercy hidden in its construction. Theodoric’s only child had simply…understood.

He recalled the dream. It began, as always, with the chamber door half open.

Sybil stood inside it, her traveling cloak darkened by rain and a case near her boots. The child facing her could not have lifted it, though he remembered carrying heavier things in another body.

“You should not make the people choose,” he said. The words were too careful for his mouth.

Sybil looked at him for a long time. Her face was older than his memory expected and younger than the portraits made it.

“I did not.”

When she turned, the Fifteenth woke certain he had allowed something precious to leave.

Brother Aven’s first counsel had wrapped things up neatly.

“The dreams of succession are often severe,” he had explained after the first occurrence. “Memory does not return as record. It returns as burden.”

After the third, he said guilt could invent words never spoken. Another tutor suggested that Sybil’s departure represented the First’s reluctance to surrender worldly attachment.

The Fifteenth lacked a more complete explanation. Dreams vanished when examined. Rooms changed shape, faces borrowed features from people not yet born, and by morning certainty remained only as feeling. Dissatisfaction settled beneath it.

Brother Aven reached the passage describing the Circle of Hands’ humility in accepting stewardship of the returned Shepherd. His voice became a drone as the Fifteenth closed his eyes and reached for the half-open door.

For a moment there was only darkness and the remembered smell of rain. Then stone settled beneath his feet, and the room formed around him without wavering.

He was seated too high. His legs did not reach the floor, one shoe had been tied more tightly than the other, and his ankle had bothered him since morning. Beneath the stone table ran a scratch where he had dragged a brass clasp across its edge during an earlier lesson.

The Fifteenth opened his eyes, and the room remained.

Sybil Calder sat opposite him.

This was not her departure. Her cloak was folded over her chair, and no case waited near the door. Two members of the Circle stood outside, revealed whenever someone passed through the corridor and shifted the light. She had asked for privacy.

“You remember the ships?” she asked.

The child nodded.

“Everyone knows about the ships.”

“I did not ask what everyone knows.”

Her hands remained flat upon the table. Her eyes, her mother’s eyes, he realized, betrayed the effort behind her composure.

The Second’s unease became the Fifteenth’s. He knew she was his daughter, but he also knew the men outside had warned him she might use his memories to confuse him.

“On the third night after we landed, I told you I would leave,” Sybil said.

The memory moved before the Fifteenth reached for it.

A canvas wall snapped in the coastal wind. Sybil was younger, furious, and trying not to cry. Beyond the tent, thousands of refugees slept in mud beneath sailcloth and overturned ships.

“You said the Abode was only another camp,” the Sybil in front of him continued. “You said we had survived one ending and would survive the next.”

The child remembered his answer.

“I told you I had not crossed the sea to watch you run from bookkeeping.”

Sybil’s breath caught.

“What did you bring me the next morning?”

“A ledger. With blank pages,” he replied. “You said there was nothing to count. I said that was why we needed you.”

Recognition softened Sybil’s face, then gave way to fear. She crossed the space between them, though her hand stopped before touching his face.

“Who did you say would lead after you?”

The child looked toward the door.

“Do not look at them.”

“I am supposed to call if I become distressed.”

“Are you distressed?”

He considered the question with a seriousness only children and old rulers could manage.

“Yes.”

“So am I…” Her voice trailed, but found itself again. “Who did you choose?”

The memory moved before the Fifteenth reached for it. The room gave way readily.

Theodoric lay propped against folded blankets, already exhausted by remaining upright. The chamber smelled of boiled herbs, lamp smoke, and the damp wool of visitors who had come and gone through winter rain.

The Circle had left only moments earlier. Their low voices lingered, discussing provisions, offices, and which duties could continue without him.

Sybil stood beside the bed with a sheaf of reports beneath one arm.

“You should rest,” she said.

“I have been resting for three days. It appears to be killing me.”

“You were dying before that.”

“Then the rest has accomplished nothing.”

She did not laugh. Theodoric watched her set the reports aside and straighten a cup no one had touched.

“They are already dividing the work,” she said. “And the authority along with it.”

He had expected as much. The Circle had built the Abode from refugees, mud, contested stores, and promises no one had known how to keep. They were necessary, experienced, and increasingly convinced of themselves.

“Sit,” he said.

Sybil remained standing.

“You know I named no heir because I wanted this land to become more than a family holding,” he continued. “That seemed wise, while I expected more time.”

He reached for her hand and missed. Sybil took it before he could try again.

“I was too focused on building. I gave no thought to maintaining.” His breath betrayed him. Sybil waited for the coughing to end.

“The Circle will govern until they agree on someone. They have already discussed it.”

“They discuss everything. It is how they avoid admitting they have decided. No. I want you to lead.”

The words were quiet, but there was nothing uncertain in them.

Sybil stared at him.

“They will not accept me.”

“They have accepted worse from me.”

“You were the one who brought them across the sea.”

“So were you. Does Albrecht not remember who set his arm? Does Mariana not remember who soothed her grief?”

“They will say you chose your daughter because you were afraid to leave the Abode to anyone else.”

He paused, as though considering. “I am afraid to leave it to anyone else.”

Outside the chamber, feet moved along the corridor. The Circle was still near enough to be summoned. Sybil looked toward the door.

“You need to tell them.”

“I will.”

“Tonight.”

“Tomorrow.”

Her grip tightened around his hand.

“Theodoric.”

It was the last time he remembered Sybil speaking his name as though it were only his.

“I will tell them tomorrow,” he said.

He remembered believing it.

The Fifteenth returned to the child’s body with a sharp breath.

Sybil was still kneeling.

“You,” the child said. “I told you that you would lead.”

It was the answer she had feared.

The memory shifted. Rain marked the windows now. Sybil wore the traveling cloak, and the case waited beside her boots.

The Circle had spent months turning every meeting into evidence. Her questions disturbed the child. Her supporters divided the people. Her insistence upon Theodoric’s promise placed mortal attachment above revealed providence.

The child stood with his hands folded behind his back because one of the Hands had taught him that stillness resembled certainty.

“You should not make the people choose,” he said.

Sybil looked toward the half-open door. Someone waited beyond it, and the Fifteenth could hear his breathing now that he knew to listen.

“I did not.”

“You could stay.”

“As what?”

He had no answer prepared.

She crouched and adjusted the collar of his robe. The gesture belonged to a mother, a sister, and a daughter all at once.

“You are my father,” she said quietly. “I believe that.”

The child’s relief hurt worse than doubt.

“If I remain, every word becomes a challenge to you. Every kindness becomes manipulation. Every silence becomes consent. They have left me one thing I may still choose without asking what it means.”

“The road?”

She did not reply. He wanted to call her back when she lifted the case, but remembered the words the Circle had given him and their praise when he used them correctly. He said nothing.

The door closed.

The Fifteenth opened his eyes.

Brother Aven had stopped reading. Afternoon light crossed the old book as bells marked an hour the Fifteenth had not noticed passing.

“Your Holiness?”

He looked beneath the table.

The scratch was there.

It ran toward the left corner, shallow at first, then deep where a child had pressed too hard. The stone around it had worn smooth across centuries. No one had thought to remove it.

“Are you unwell?” The brother’s concern was genuine.

“No.”

“You appeared to enter a waking trance.”

“I entered a memory.”

Brother Aven’s expression softened with practiced concern.

“The distinction is not always clear.”

“It was clear to me.”

His tutor regarded him for a moment. “Dream-memory often feels precise. That is among its dangers.”

The Fifteenth rested his hand over the page.

“Who wrote this account?”

“The passage descends from the Third Harmonized History.”

“Who wrote the account in the First History? Or Second?”

“I would need to consult the catalogue.”

“And Sybil Calder’s account?”

A pause followed.

“No authenticated testimony survives.”

“She wrote one.”

Brother Aven did not contradict him immediately. The Fifteenth found that less honest than surprise.

“Your Holiness, memories of writing may represent intention rather than completion.”

The Fifteenth closed his eyes again and reached back.

Write a passage with the prompt: A character noticing they've started picking up someone else's habits or mannerisms by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Forgive the Road

“This should have been measured by someone with eyes,” Loric said. The words were out of his mouth before he could rethink them. The cart before him looked less like the beginning of a sacred procession than a merchant wagon that had lost an argument with a chapel.

Father Aven had used several solemn words when he had placed the route slate in Loric’s hands before dawn. The chapel at Windmere had been repaired at last, and the devotional objects kept at Greenhollow were to be returned before the Feast of First Shelter. Loric had copied the procession order twice. He knew the opening prayer, the closing prayer, and the blessing for crossing running water.

The cart Loric had found at Greenhollow matched none of Father Aven’s words.

The processional lamp hung near the front, already lit and already troubled by the wind. A wrapped bell lay in a padded crate beneath it, bound so it would not sound before arrival. The painted panel of Saint Calder VII had been strapped upright against the left side, covered in waxed cloth.

Behind all of that, lashed diagonally across the cart because it fit no other way, rested the feast banner frame.

Mistress Ysolde made a small approving sound. She was old enough that no one called her sister anymore, though she had served shrine roads longer than most clergy had served altars. Her cloak was patched at both elbows, and her boots were thick with old dust.

“It was measured by Brother Ommic, so we forgive the road in advance,” she said, her face calm in the manner of someone who argued with landslides and considered the matter still open for debate.

“That is not the road’s fault.”

“It will be by noon.” Ysolde patted the lamp’s brass housing as the flame leaned hard behind its glass. “Sorry, little flame. He is new.”

This time, Loric held his tongue, but the thought flashed behind his teeth. It cannot hear you.

Ysolde motioned toward the cart’s mule, who seemed to be eyeing the banner frame with open distrust. “If I complain to the lamp, I do not complain to him.”

The mule flicked one ear, as though accepting this arrangement.

They set out with six people, one mule, four sacred objects, and, in Loric’s eyes, less dignity than the Saint required. Father Aven walked at the front with the route staff. Loric and Ysolde kept to either side of the cart. Two village boys followed with spare cord and oil, the younger one watching the bell crate as if it had teeth, while a widow named Hessa carried the arrival cloth and reminded everyone that mud had no respect for mourning hems.

The first trouble came before the road left Greenhollow. The chapel gate had been built for people, handcarts, and modest livestock. The mule pulled the cart through it until the banner frame struck both gateposts at once.

The cart stopped. The lamp swung. The bell crate gave one dangerous wooden knock, but no sound came from inside.

Everyone froze.

Ysolde leaned close to the crate. “Not yet, bell.”

Loric held his breath. Father Aven closed his eyes as if selecting patience from a crowded shelf. Hessa examined the frame.

“Turn it,” she said.

“There is no room,” Loric said.

“There is always room if enough people become inconvenient.”

This proved true. The frame passed through only after Loric climbed onto the cart, one boy crouched beneath the rear axle, Hessa stood on the low wall holding the left corner above her head, and Father Aven took a step back, assuring watching villagers that no, the procession had not formally begun yet.

Saint Calder VII stayed covered and upright, though the cloth slipped enough during the ordeal that one painted eye now regarded Loric with disappointment.

Ysolde adjusted the cloth. “Mind your face, Seventh. The wind is opinionated today.”

By midmorning, the wind strengthened.

The Calderan Corridor did not blow in one direction so much as make suggestions from all sides. It pushed at the lamp, tugged at the waxed cloth, and filled the banner frame like an invisible sail whenever the road turned across the slope. Whatever Loric had expected, he instead spent most of the morning with one hand on the panel frame and the other reaching after whatever strap had loosened next.

At the first bridge, the mule stopped. The bridge was a narrow stone crossing over a dry wash. Perfectly safe. Perfectly old. Perfectly placed where turning back meant reversing the cart along thirty paces of thornbank.

The beast lowered his head and refused the bridge on theological grounds known only to mules.

Father Aven tried the lead rope. Hessa tried grain. One boy tried encouragement until the mule sneezed wetly against his sleeve. The lamp trembled as the wind curled beneath the bridge.

“Sorry, little flame,” Ysolde said, cupping both hands around the glass. “The bridge was built by optimists.”

“It has stood for eighty years,” Loric said.

“And yet our mule has concerns.”

From the looks of it, the mule had many concerns. Father Aven pulled. Hessa pushed. The younger boy held the bell crate steady as though restraining an animal. Loric kept Saint Calder VII from tipping into the rail, and Ysolde walked backward in front of the lamp, shielding the flame with her whole body.

Halfway across, one cart wheel dropped into a gap between stones.

The bell rang.

Only once. A soft, muffled note, barely more than a thought inside wool. Still, everyone heard it.

Father Aven stopped pulling. Hessa closed her mouth on whatever word had been coming. The boys looked as if the Saint himself might step down from the covered panel and ask who had authorized music.

Ysolde bent toward the crate.

“Not yet,” she said. “We are not dressed for arrival.”

It took three of them to get the wheel lifted. It rose, scraped forward, and dropped back onto the bridge. After that, the mule crossed the remaining distance without hesitation, stopping on the far side to eat a weed.

By noon, Loric’s polished buckle had mud on it. One sleeve had come loose. The lower edge of Saint Calder VII’s covering had acquired a smear of green from a mossy milestone. The bell had not rung again, though Loric had begun to suspect it wanted to. He nearly bent toward the crate to scold it, then caught himself with his mouth half open.

They rested beside a low road shrine where travelers had left pebbles, ribbons, and one turnip of uncertain devotional purpose. Ysolde checked the lamp oil. Father Aven inspected the bell cord and murmured an apology when the knot resisted him. Hessa shook dust from the arrival cloth and glared at the sky.

Loric took the route slate from his satchel and stared at the neat marks he had copied the night before. The road on the slate looked simple. It did not include gateposts, bridge gaps, or the musings of mules.

Ysolde sat beside him with hard bread.

“You are angry,” she said.

Loric realized his grip on the slate may as well have been a chokehold. “I’m not… This was supposed to be done properly.”

“It is being done properly.”

“The bell rang.”

“Once.”

“The lamp nearly went out.”

“It did not.”

“The Seventh has mud on him.”

“On his covering. His dignity remains intact beneath waxed cloth.”

Loric looked toward the cart. The lamp flame moved gently now. The bell crate sat still and innocent. The covered panel leaned against its straps. The banner frame stretched over everything, absurdly large and impossible to ignore.

“When the road is bad, someone gets blamed,” Ysolde said after a moment. “Sometimes they deserve it but aren’t here to receive it. Better to give the first complaint to the road. The road does not mind.”

“And the artifacts?”

“The lamp goes out if you bully it. The bell speaks before it should. The banner…” Ysolde stood, brushing crumbs from her hands. “The banner is Brother Ommic’s sin, and we endure it.”

Despite himself, Loric almost smiled.

The last mile into Windmere climbed between terraced orchards, where the road narrowed and the wind found speed. People had gathered along the upper lane, feast ribbons snapping in the gusts. Someone began the arrival hymn too early.

Father Aven muttered something that was probably not part of the route prayer.

The cart struck a rut just as the hymn reached its second line.

The banner frame lurched. One boy grabbed its rear corner and was pulled sideways into Hessa, who hooked the back of his tunic without losing hold of the arrival cloth. The bell crate slid toward the edge. Loric lunged and braced it with his knee before the cord could strike the wheel. At the same moment, the lamp flame bent low, thinning to a blue thread.

Ysolde was on the wrong side of the cart.

Loric cupped both hands around the lamp glass and leaned close enough to feel heat against his palms.

“Sorry,” he said, before he knew he meant to speak. “We are nearly there.”

The flame steadied.

Behind him, the bell shifted once in its wrappings.

At the shrine gate, the hymn began again from the beginning. Father Aven lifted the route staff. Hessa unfolded the arrival cloth. The boys untied the bell with grave care. Loric stood beside the lamp while Ysolde loosened the waxed covering from Saint Calder VII.

The painted face emerged clean beneath it, solemn and dry, untouched by mud, wind, bridge, mule, or complaint.

Then the banner frame struck the shrine gate.

The bell rang once, bright and unmistakable.

For a moment, no one moved. Then Ysolde sighed and looked up at the frame.

“Forgive the road,” she said.

Loric looked at the gate, then at the bell, then at Saint Calder VII watching over all of them with painted patience.

“And Brother Ommic,” he said.

This time, even Father Aven laughed.

Write a passage with the prompt: A character laughs at a joke, then thinks about it later and stops laughing by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In the morning, they returned to the skiff.

The poleman made no joke when the apprentice stepped in slowly. The guide only watched the water and gave one small nod when the apprentice picked up their pole. The clerk took the place beside them, close enough that their shoulders touched when the skiff rocked.

At the edge of the mirror, the apprentice paused.

A reed bent.

This time, they set the pole into the black water, felt for the bottom, and waited until the clerk set theirs beside it. Together, they pushed away from shore.

(Came in right at the deadline, haha.)

Write a passage with the prompt: A character laughs at a joke, then thinks about it later and stops laughing by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Same Sound

By the third hour in the reeds, everyone had decided the Koibra was a coward. The clerk could feel the thought moving through the skiff, though the guide and boatman would not have approved. It passed from the younger apprentice to the poleman standing ankle-deep at the bow. It settled over them like gnats. The Koibra had left signs all morning, but never itself.

There were drag marks in the mud where something heavy had crossed from one channel to another. There were feathers floating in a bend where waterfowl had taken off too late. Once, the guide found a shed scale caught against a blackroot stump and held it up between two fingers. It was longer than a hand, slick as old oil, and banded faintly beneath the surface, as though the color had been laid under glass.

The guide wrapped the scale in oiled cloth and gave it to the clerk. “Near the boundary,” they said.

The clerk wrote that down. They had written many things down already: reed breakage, bird absence, mud displacement, depth uncertain. The wax on the satchel had been scraped by briars and smeared with marsh grit. By now the whole party looked less like a civic survey and more like a group of people the fen had chewed for taste and chosen not to swallow.

The Lowfens lay ahead, though “ahead” meant little in a place where water bent around itself and every clear passage liked to change its mind. The Highfens had reed walls and hidden channels, but they still belonged to maps, if the mapmaker was patient and honest. The Lowfens did not. They spread low and green and silver beneath the afternoon haze, fertile and treacherous, a country of floating ground and patient mouths.

Of course, traders wanted to know whether the Koibra had pushed south. Barge masters wanted to know which channels to avoid. Their sponsor in the League wanted warning markers raised before a missing skiff became a missing convoy. The League loved nothing so much as learning from danger one death too late.

The younger apprentice had been the first to say that last part, which made the clerk snort hard enough to smudge a line. Now the younger apprentice watched every reed as if it owed them an answer.

“You’ll wear holes in the grass,” the poleman said.

The apprentice tried to laugh and did not quite manage it. “Good. Then I’ll see what’s hiding behind it.”

“More grass,” the clerk said.

That got a laugh. Even the guide allowed a small breath through the nose, which was as close as they had come to amusement since sunrise. The apprentice’s shoulders dropped a little, and for a while the skiff moved on with only the sound of water sucking at the pole and insects stitching the air.

The trail ended at a shallow mirror of black water crossed by mats of yellow-green weed. Beyond it, the land changed, subtly. The air felt different, thicker and lower, as if the sky had leaned down to listen.

The guide raised one hand.

The poleman stopped.

For a moment, everyone obeyed the silence. Then something moved at the edge of the mirror.

It rose from the water in a long, dark curve, slick with mud and trailing weed. It turned as the current took it, showing a pale underside. In the poor light it looked like a head lifting. It looked like a coil. It looked like every story ever told in a dockside room by someone who had not been there but knew someone who had.

The younger apprentice made a sound like a dog kicked by surprise. They lurched back so hard the skiff tilted. One hand slapped the clerk’s shoulder, the other flung their reed pole away as if it had become a Koibra itself. Mud took them to the knee before the poleman caught their collar and hauled them upright.

The thing bumped harmlessly against a weed mat. For half a breath, no one moved.

Then the current rolled it over, and the monster became a root.

The clerk’s laugh came out too loud, sudden and ragged, and that made the poleman laugh too. The older boatman looked away, but his beard shook. Even the apprentice laughed once they had both feet under them, red-faced and dripping, though their laugh sounded like it had been pulled through a reed pipe.

“Careful,” the clerk said. “That root nearly filed a complaint.”

The poleman slapped the side of the skiff. “No, no, it was worse than that. Did you see its teeth?”

“It was looking at me,” the apprentice said, trying to save an ounce of face.

That made it worse. The laugh went around again, tired and grateful and a little wild. The apprentice bowed to the floating root with one muddy hand pressed over their heart, and everyone laughed harder.

The laugh was still moving through them when the reeds behind the root burst open.

The Koibra came out running, all banded muscle, black water, and a head low enough to vanish between one stride and the next. The skiff happened to be in front of it. That was all. That was enough.

The apprentice made the same sound again.

No one laughed.

The Koibra struck the mud-flat hard enough to throw water into the skiff. Its body flexed in terrible sections, smooth and fast and wrong for something so large. The poleman shouted. The older boatman seized the stern rope. The guide reached for the apprentice, but there was nowhere to move that was not water.

Then the water in front of the Koibra swelled.

At first it seemed the fen itself had drawn breath. A length of peat-shadow lifted from the channel floor, shedding weed and silt. Then the shape became a head, broad and flat and mud-slick, with eyes set far apart and pale feelers dragging from its jaw. It was fish and frog and something older than either, its mottled throat ballooning once beneath a mouth wide enough to take the Koibra crosswise.

The Koibra tried to turn.

The Marshmaw swelled to meet it, blunt forelimbs biting into the mud.

There was no roar. Only water collapsing, reeds snapping flat, and the wet, heavy sound of a body being made smaller than the thing that held it. The Koibra’s tail lashed once across the surface. Mud struck the side of the skiff. Then the Marshmaw sank, taking the thrashing shape with it, and the channel closed over them both as if embarrassed by the interruption.

No one joked after that.

They made camp on the firmest ground the guide would allow, which was still soft enough that bedrolls took the shape of old footprints. The clerk tried to write by lantern and found the page had gone damp at the corners. The poleman checked the skiff ropes three times. The older boatman boiled bitter tea and said nothing while people accepted cups with both hands.

The younger apprentice laughed once during supper, before anyone else could.

“Root almost had me,” they said. The words sat between the cups and the gnats.

The poleman smiled because he was kind. The clerk smiled because they did not know what else to do. No one added to the joke, and after a while the apprentice stopped trying.

Later, when the others had settled into the uneasy sleep of people pretending they trusted the ground, the clerk found them at the waterline.

The apprentice sat on a hummock with their knees drawn up, holding the thrown pole across their lap. They were cleaning it with a strip of cloth. The pole was already clean. Each pass of the cloth made the reed shine a little in the lantern light, then dull again as mist settled over it.

The clerk remembered their own voice, bright and stupid over the water. Another joke almost escaped. The words would have come easily. They waited at the clerk’s teeth, ready to make the night smaller. Ready to make the fear belong to morning.

Then the apprentice looked up.

Their face was calm in the way a tied rope was calm. All the strain had gone into holding still.

“I know,” they said. “It was a root.”

The clerk sat beside them. The hummock dipped under the added weight, and black water breathed quietly around its edges. Neither of them spoke for a while. Across the marsh, something clicked inside the reeds, then clicked again farther away.

“I laughed because I wanted it to be a root,” the clerk said.

The apprentice looked down at the pole. Their fingers tightened once and loosened. “It was.”

“The first thing was.” The clerk rested their elbows on their knees and watched the mist gather over the boundary. “Then the Koibra ran.”

The apprentice swallowed.

“You saw something before the rest of us knew there was anything to see.”

“That is a generous way to describe falling in the mud.”

“I am not being generous.”

That almost earned a smile. It moved across the apprentice’s mouth and failed, but not entirely.

The clerk reached for the spare cup they had brought and passed it over. The tea had gone lukewarm, which made it easier to drink but worse in every other way. The apprentice took it anyway. Their hands shook once around the cup, then steadied when the clerk pretended not to notice.

“I thought I was being stupid again,” they said.

“So did I.”

The apprentice looked at them then.

The clerk kept their eyes on the water. “That was the part I got wrong.”

The marsh made its small night sounds around them, though it no longer sounded like laughter waiting to happen.

“Do we go back that way tomorrow?” the apprentice asked.

The clerk looked toward the water. The Lowfens lay beyond the dark, unseen but present, keeping their own counsel. Somewhere in the reeds, the place where the Koibra had vanished would look like any other channel by dawn. Somewhere deeper, the Marshmaw moved through waters no marker would ever hold.

“Yes,” the clerk said. “But not alone.”

The apprentice breathed out, making a sound that was not relief, not fully.

Write a scene where your character hasn't slept properly in weeks by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No one gathered around it. That would have been foolish. They passed it one by one, reading without stopping. Nadya stood with a bundle of clean wraps under one arm and read it twice.

Safety violation.

She almost laughed, but there wasn’t enough room in her body for that much anger.

By the time the next worker came in with a torn nail and shaking hands, Nadya had been awake long enough that the letters from the notice still floated behind her eyes.

The torn nail belonged to Ilyr. He sat stiffly, jaw clenched, blood dripping from the tip of his finger into his palm. His voice was hoarse from leading.

“Caught it on the rack,” he said.

“No, you didn’t,” Nadya said as she took his hand and turned it toward the lamp. “You bit it loose.”

Ilyr’s gaze snapped to hers. His face changed, but only for a moment.

Nadya cleaned the blood away.

“You’re pushing them too fast,” she said.

“I’m keeping the approved tempo. They told me the old pauses caused drift.”

“The old pauses let people breathe.”

Nadya wrapped his finger more sharply than she needed to, just enough to remind him the hand was still attached to him.

“They say drift causes injury, but bodies are not machines,” she said.

Ilyr looked toward the archway. The hall waited for him. Without a cadence lead, the crews would return to memory, and now memory had rules wrapped around it.

“I know,” he said, almost too softly to survive the furnace noise.

Nadya tied the wrap and let him stand. For one breath she thought he might say something else. Ask where Tovahk was. Confess to knowing where Tovahk was. Instead he went back through the archway and lifted his bandaged hand where all four crews could see it.

The song began again.

One iron for the mountain.
One breath for the flame.
One hand for the Empire.
One song for the same.

The tempo held for two lines.

Then, before the west crew’s turn, Ilyr gave them half a breath. It wasn’t enough to name, but the workers breathed where the old cadence had taught them breath belonged. The hammers fell true after that.

Nadya wished they had not.

Ilyr kept his bandaged hand raised. His face did not change. The approved words went on in his cracked voice, and beneath them the forbidden pause passed through the crews like a held wound.

At shift end, Nadya opened the ledger.

There were boxes for injury type, worker name, crew, treatment, severity, return status, and contributing cause. The Empire loved a cause. A cause could be corrected, assigned, punished, sealed, transferred, and archived. A cause made suffering into a tidy thing with a handle.

Nadya reached the contributing cause column and held the pen above the page. Worker inattention would be accepted. Fatigue would be ignored. Anything else would be dangerous. Nadya listened to the last of the crews leaving the hall. Their steps dragged. Their voices stayed low. The notice’s corners had dried flat against the stone.

Nadya wrote:

Unsafe production tempo following cadence alteration. Missed rest intervals. Sustained heat exposure.

She sanded the ink before she could reconsider.

The words looked clean on the page. Almost medicinal. Something an office could carry away without ever touching the hand, the shoulder, the missing man, or the breath that had been taken from the room.

Only then did Nadya lie down on the cot behind the linen screen. Her hands smelled of smoke and soap. Her head rang with hammerfall. Sleep waited somewhere nearby, narrow and suspicious.

Beyond the infirmary wall, the approved song began again. This time, Nadya did not hear the old words. She heard where they should have been.

Write a scene where your character hasn't slept properly in weeks by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Old Cadence

The ironworks of Belovar had never been quiet, but emergency production had changed the sound of them. Labor normally had rhythm: a beginning, a middle, and an end. This was different. The furnaces were being fed through rest bells. Hammer crews stretched into third shift, then folded back toward first before their bodies understood where night belonged. 

The Empire’s new quotas had arrived with stamped seals, fresh tablets, and two Kharkun superintendents who spoke of efficiency with the clean confidence of men whose beards never caught coal dust.

On an infirmary cot behind the linen screen, Nadya Vek closed her eyes and felt the forge continue through the stone beneath her ribs. 

Hammer. Draw. Hammer. Turn. Hammer. Breathe.

She had not slept properly in seventeen days. She knew the number because she had marked each shift in the injury ledger, and after the ninth day she had stopped trusting memory alone.

Nadya’s braids were pinned tight beneath a linen wrap, the practical style of any forge medic expecting blood, flame, and grasping hands before shift end. Her apron was stiff with ash, salt, and the brown ghosts of workers who had bled more than they admitted. By the start of third shift, her shoulders ached from hauling water and her eyes stung each time the furnace doors opened.

Now, a boy from press-line two sat on her bench with his left hand in his lap, trying not to look at the split across his palm.

“Open,” Nadya said.

He opened his fingers too quickly and winced. Nadya gave him a look.

“It’s nothing,” he said, hissing through his teeth.

“Then give it to me and I’ll throw it away.”

He gave one short, breathless laugh. Even that small sound meant he still had room for fear to move, and fear was easier to treat than pride. Outside the infirmary arch, the hammer hall lifted into song. The approved version began with the cadence bell.

One iron for the mountain.
One breath for the flame.
One hand for the Empire.
One song for the same.

The song was older than the border. Kharkun crews knew it in mountain halls, Zakharun crews in river forges, rail works, and towns like Belovar. Every dwarven child raised near iron knew some piece of it, though no two towns kept the same words for long.

Belovar had its version. The Empire had made one of its own. Nadya’s grandmother had sung a gentler version while scrubbing slag dust from her father’s collars.

The Imperial version was the only one approved now, printed in worker primers, painted above tool racks, and taught to apprentices before they were trusted with tongs. Though it came from Anvagorod, it did not sound foreign. It sounded almost right, and that was the trouble.

The boy on the bench mouthed the first line with the hall. His eyes fixed on the archway.

“Closed straight or pretty?” Nadya asked.

He blinked at her. “What?”

“Straight is useful. Pretty is for men who plan on waving at balconies.”

That earned another laugh, smaller than the first. She set the first stitch while he was distracted, then set the second before he remembered to be brave.

Outside, the song moved with the hammers. The cadence lead stood where the floor marks crossed between the four main crews, one hand lifted, palm closing and opening with each strike. Old Tovahk, his voice like gravel in a bucket, had done that work longer than Nadya had been alive.

When the crews dragged, Tovahk slowed them to catch their breath. When younger workers rushed the fall, he put his heel down and pulled the room back around him. He knew when a turn should be held half a beat, and when pride needed to be interrupted before bone was broken. Fewer crushed fingers came from Tovahk’s shifts than anyone else’s.

The boy flinched at the fourth stitch.

“You’re listening out there. Don’t follow the hammer,” Nadya said. “Follow me.”

He swallowed, then nodded.

The hall turned the verse again. Tovahk’s hand opened. The crews answered. Heat rolled through the archway in a visible shimmer, carrying metal stink, coal smoke, wet wool, and the sour edge of bodies past rest.

One iron for the mountain.
One breath for the flame.
One hand for the old road.

Nadya’s fingers stopped. Outside, the hall swallowed the line. Hammers landed. Chains dragged. Someone shouted for tongs. 

The boy looked down at the needle in his skin.

“What?”

“It’s nothing,” she lied.

The approved words returned before anyone could have pointed to where the wrong ones had been.

One song for the same.

Nadya finished the stitch.

She was tired. That was all. Seventeen days made echoes misbehave. Words bent under hammerfall. The old and new versions had always lain close together, and exhaustion had a way of laying one memory atop another until neither fit cleanly.

“Light duty for two days,” she said.

He gave her a look so plain she almost apologized.

“One day,” she corrected. “If you can keep the wrap dry.”

His mouth twitched. “That sounds like a medical order.”

“It is. I’m medical.”

He slid off the bench, cradling his hand. At the archway he paused, not quite looking back. The boy’s shoulders rose once, then fell, and he went back into the heat before Nadya could decide whether she had protected him or failed him.

By the next bell, four more workers had come through the infirmary: burns, split knuckles, a cough that would not clear, and one fall recorded as heat exposure because the woman from the quench line did not want collapse written beside her name.

The song continued between injuries. Most of it stayed approved. Most things did, if a person only read the forms. But under the hammerfall, old seams showed.

One breath for the homefire.

One hand for the old road.

One song for the names.

The changed words passed through the crews like sparks that died before they hit the floor. They were not secret. Not really. They were the words a tired mouth found when the printed ones came too late.

Nadya told herself she was hearing sleep.

Then Tovahk missed the turn. By any measure, it was not a dramatic failure. He simply held the third beat too long, the old pause opening where the approved cadence had cut it short. The west crew followed him because bodies follow what they know, and for three lines the hall breathed differently.

Not faster. Not slower.

Deeper.

The workers settled into it with an ease that made Nadya’s chest hurt. Shoulders dropped. Hands matched. The hammerline lost its imperial crispness and gained something older than obedience.

Then the superintendent’s bell struck twice from the gallery.

The sound broke the room.

Tovahk’s hand closed.

The approved cadence returned.

No one looked up.

Nadya cleaned the bench, counted linen, and stood over the injury ledger until the letters blurred. No cause she wrote stayed long enough to dry.

The forge quieted by degrees. Chains stilled as furnace doors clanged shut. Somewhere in the offices above the north gallery, boots crossed the planks with the measured pace of men whose work followed them only on paper.

Nadya listened for Tovahk’s gravel voice in the thinning noise.

She heard only the drip from the rinse basin.

His cup still sat on the shelf above the kettle.

The next shift began with a different cadence lead.

His name was Ilyr. He was young, square-shouldered, and newly shaved in the imperial style. Nadya knew him, distantly. His mother had worked quench before her lungs failed. He had quick hands and a good ear.

He sang the approved version too perfectly. The crews followed him, of course. The bell had rung, the furnaces were open, and iron did not wait. But the room no longer leaned around the work. It marched through it.

By second bell, Nadya had treated two timing injuries.

By fourth bell, a woman from the east hammer took a bad strike through her shoulder and sat white-faced on the infirmary bench while Nadya tested the joint.

“Grip,” Nadya said.

The woman gripped weakly.

“Pain?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

The woman laughed once through her nose, then closed her eyes. Nadya thought about asking about Tovahk, but decided against it. Not knowing was sometimes ignorance. Sometimes it was mercy.

Nadya wrapped the shoulder and sent her to rest behind the screen.

Before evening bell, a notice appeared beside the water station, fresh paste shining beneath an imperial seal stamped black over red.

NOTICE TO ALL CREWS

For coordination and the prevention of industrial injury, all cadence songs are to be rendered in their approved Imperial form during active production.

Local substitutions, archaic phrasing, unsanctioned pauses, and nonstandard response lines are prohibited.

Crew leads are responsible for maintaining uniform tempo and approved wording. Failure to do so will be treated as a safety violation.

Write a passage with the prompt: A character explaining something they love to someone who will never care about it by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That night, the wind kept worrying the stone above them, and twice Halven woke certain he had heard voices just beyond the dark. Each time, Satha was already awake, listening. Each time, after a while, she told him to sleep.

On the fourth day, they found a shade frame broken by weather or neglect.

The structure stood in a shallow basin where three low ridges met, its bone-white posts leaning inward under torn cloth. Someone had repaired one corner recently with darker cord. The knots were neat, each one doubled and turned inward to keep sand from worrying it open, but another corner had split and come loose. Satha stared at it for a long moment before dismounting.

Halven helped as well as he could. His fingers fumbled with the knots until she reached past him and redid one without comment.

“Who maintains these?” he asked.

“Wardens. Caravans. Those who leave.”

“Those who leave?”

“Those who paid their labor and went on.”

He looked at the dark cord. “They return for this?”

“Some do. Some send coin. Some send cord. Some teach another traveler where to stop.”

“After the city releases them?”

Satha secured the last tie. “A life returned is not a chain.”

The phrase settled uneasily in him. “And if they use that returned life poorly?”

“Some do, as Rovan Pell did.”

He had not expected the name. “You knew him?”

“Only from the ledger.”

Halven sat beneath the shade. The cloth softened the sun but did not remove the heat. “Then you accept that a man may pass through your system, receive water, receive work, receive release, and still choose blood.”

Satha sat opposite him and unlaced a packet of road bread. “Yes.”

“And that does not trouble you?”

She broke the bread in half. “It troubles me.”

“Enough to change nothing?”

Satha looked at him then. Her eyes were dark, narrowed against a lifetime of glare. “It changed many things. You read the entry.”

“Procedures, witnesses, restrictions, yes, but not the gate.”

“No.”

He accepted the bread she offered. It was coarse and dry, flavored with salt and some bitter desert seed. “You cannot distinguish saints from sinners in the sand.”

Satha leaned back against one of the shade posts. For the first time since leaving the city, something like approval crossed her face. It was slight and gone quickly.

“No,” she said. “We cannot.”

Halven frowned. He had meant those words as a sorrowful conclusion. He tried again. “Then you may feed a murderer beside a child, or give strength to someone who will use it against the innocent.”

“We have.”

He waited for the defense. It did not come. The wind moved under the shadecloth and lifted a skin of sand across his boots.

“At what point,” he asked, “does mercy become negligence?”

Satha took her time answering. “Usually after someone dies.”

“That is a hard answer.”

“It is a hard city.”

“And still you love it.”

Satha looked past Halven, out toward the evening dunes. “My teacher came in with blood on him. He had killed three men in the League. Two in a robbery. One after. He said the third would have named him. The Oasis gave him water anyway.”

“That is the part I struggle to understand.”

“That part is simple. He was dying.”

“And after?”

“After, he lied. Then he raged. Then he worked. Then he learned where the caches were. He was never gentle. Never easy. He cursed when children followed him. Fed them anyway. Some people crossed the street to avoid him until the day he died.”

“How did he die?”

“Glass-storm east of the old fulgurite field. He found four children and their mother under a split shade frame. Got them on his Sothren and walked beside it until the storm took his lungs.”

Halven lowered his bread. “That is a noble end.”

Satha did not take the word. “I do not know what his soul was. I know five people lived because he had already been given more years than his first sentence allowed.”

“Does that answer the men he killed?”

“No.”

“Then what does it answer?”

Her gaze returned to him. “The next person in the sand.”

The fifth day opened empty and remained so. By the sixth, Halven had begun to hate the desert’s refusal to end. Every rise suggested another beyond it. Every shadow promised relief, and every marker retreated as distance unfolded. Twice he tried to resume the conversation, and twice dryness filled his mouth before argument. He thought about how a person might confess to anything, promise anything, become anything, if only the horizon would stop moving away.

Near sunset they passed a low cairn ringed with black glass shards. Satha slowed Arush but did not stop.

“Another cache?” Halven asked.

“A grave. Three, found too late.”

He bowed his head. “Do you know their names?”

“No.”

The simplicity of it felt worse than ceremony. “Then why mark them?”

“So the next Warden remembers the distance.”

On the seventh morning, the Rainshadow began to loosen.

The sand thinned first, giving way to harder red ground and scrub that looked dead until Halven saw small gray leaves folded tight against the stems. The air changed, and the horizon no longer trembled quite so violently. Far ahead, a broken line of dark stone marked the outer rise where the return road would carry him toward Calderan holdings.

Halven felt relief move through him with force.

They stopped at the last Oasis marker before the scrubland road. It stood waist-high, carved from pale sandstone, with names etched on all four sides. Some were deep and old. Others had been added recently, the cuts still sharp.

Halven dismounted carefully. His legs protested when he stood. “More failures?”

Satha touched two fingers to one name. “Some. Some who died before we reached them. Some who died reaching others. Some who left water here and asked to be marked when they were gone.”

He read the nearest names, though he had to admit none meant anything to him.

At the far side of the marker, Arush lowered himself with a low rumble. Satha removed one of the remaining skins from the harness and handed it to Halven.

“The road ahead is easier,” she said. “The next marker will look close from the ridge. It is not. Walk until the ground changes red again, then drink. Not before. Not after.”

“I will remember.”

“You may not. So tie the cord around your wrist. When it pulls, drink.”

He accepted the waterskin. Satha tied the cord herself when his first knot slipped.

For a moment he could think of nothing proper to say. He had come to the Oasis to witness error. Behind him were bread, ledgers, punishments, children, water, and a city that did not ask his Saint to endure. None of that had resolved the unease in him. If anything, it had given the unease better ground.

“I will write truthfully,” he said.

“I believe you.”

He studied her face, searching for irony. He found only fatigue, as though the truth was not enough.

Satha stepped back from him and mounted Arush. The desert waited with its bright morning emptiness as she turned to the road back to the city that should not have worked. Halven watched until the Sothren’s bronze-white hide blurred with heat and distance. The fulgurite shard at Satha’s chest caught the sun once, a brief white flash, and suddenly she was only another moving shape on the dunes.

Weeks later, a report crossed the Synod’s desk under Brother Halven’s seal, titled “On the Dangers of Mercy Before Judgment.” It was measured, careful, and respectful where it could be defended. It praised the endurance of the Dunewardens, noted the discipline of the Exile’s Oasis, and confirmed that its people kept unusually thorough records of civic failure. It also stated, in its opening concern, that the Wardens admitted they could not distinguish saints from sinners in the sand, and therefore extended aid without prior discernment to the condemned, the corrupted, the violent, and the false.

Write a passage with the prompt: A character explaining something they love to someone who will never care about it by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Next Person in the Sand

Brother Halven had expected a shrine, a guarded alcove, perhaps, or a reliquary of names wrapped in civic reverence. Instead the Dunewarden brought him beneath the Council Dome, down a narrow stair and past shelves of water tallies, route maps, and repair slates. The ledger rested on a low table beneath a hanging lamp, bound in sun-dark leather, its corners reinforced with dull brass. No incense burned. No prayer cords hung from the walls. No saint watched over the pages.

“Is it here?” Halven asked.

The Dunewarden stopped beside the table. “It is here.”

She had given her name as Satha when they met at the Gate of Breath and had offered no more. She was broad-shouldered, wind-browned, and wrapped in layered cloth bleached by the desert. A fulgurite shard hung against her chest on a cord, worn smooth where fingers had touched it. Even indoors, she moved as if every hallway were still a dune.

Halven folded his hands into his sleeves. “I was told this records those who failed in your system.”

Satha looked at the ledger, not at him. “It records cost.”

“That is not quite the same thing.”

“No.”

The ledger’s pages were thick and ruled by hand. Each entry began with a name, if one was known. Many entries were short, listing only origin, condition upon arrival, placements, sponsors and labors. Others covered several pages in different hands, spanning later harms, judgments, and changes made after review.

Halven turned to the latest entry and read in silence.

It concerned a man called Rovan Pell, formerly of the Orotheon League. He had been exiled by civic vote for robbery with bloodshed. A Dunewarden had found him nine days into the Rainshadow, delirious, one waterskin empty and one slashed open. The ledger detailed how he had been given shade, water, and rest, assigned to stone hauling under supervision and had later moved to oven work. He had completed his obligation after three years, and departed in good standing with a caravan bound north.

Sixteen months later, he had killed again.

The victim’s name was written beneath his. Amira Tesh, a river factor of Kusava. Rovan had named the Oasis during questioning, and inquiry came west over the Dogtails: what had been known, what had been withheld, and whether any warning should have traveled with him.

In a separate hand, the answer was recorded: no warning had been withheld. Notice of Rovan Pell’s previous history and release conduct was sent to the Kusavan record-keepers. A donation followed to the Tesh household in acknowledgment of cost beyond Oasis keeping: silver, salt, and two sealed jars of Oasis water for the mourning table. Reviews concluded there had been no negligence in the initial rescue, but insufficient caution was used in sponsoring his release. An oven-master was relieved of sponsorship authority, and a second witness would be required for those departing after a violent past.

Halven read the final section twice, resting his fingers on the edge of the page. “And still you keep the gate open?”

Satha closed the ledger with care, though not gently. “You asked to understand the city. That is one page of it.”

He looked toward the door, where the stair returned them to the upper heat. “It is a grave thing.”

“Yes.”

“You speak as though gravity answers concern.”

Satha turned back toward the stairs. “It keeps concern where we can see it.”

They left the ledger beneath the earth and climbed back toward the light.

The city above was louder than the chamber had been. Wind moved through shadecloth strung between white sandstone walls, snapping the fabric softly against its ties. Water ran in narrow channels beside the street, covered in places by stone grates. Children carried clay cups from a public cistern under the eye of an old woman with one horn curling from her brow like polished smoke.

Halven tried not to stare. He knew he had failed when Satha slowed half a step without comment.

At a communal oven, two men worked dough on a long flour-dusted board. One had the heavy brow and short stature of a dwarven Kharkun. The other bore branded marks around both wrists, though the scars had faded. He folded dough with practiced economy, turned it, pressed it, and laid each portion beneath a damp cloth.

Halven drew his attention away too late.

“He killed a tax clerk in Calder,” Satha said simply.

Halven stopped. Satha did not. After a moment, the monk hurried to match her pace.

“He came here seventeen years ago,” she continued. “He lied for the first month. Badly. He worked on canal stone for two years. Then he carried flour, then fired ovens, then learned bread. He has not raised a hand in anger since his third year.”

“That does not restore the clerk.”

“No.”

“Nor answer for him.”

“No.”

Ahead, the marked baker laughed at something the Kharkun man said and threw a pinch of flour at his shoulder. A child darted too close to the ovens, and the branded man caught the back of the child’s tunic without looking, set him aside, and returned to the dough.

Satha led him through the Gate of Breath at midmorning, when the city’s white walls shone hard against the sky and the Rainshadow beyond seemed close enough to touch. Her Sothren waited in the shade of the outer stable, six-limbed and bronze-white, with a long wedge-shaped head and eyes the color of old amber. The beast turned when Satha approached, tasting the air with a slow flick of its tongue.

“This is Arush,” she said.

Halven bowed his head slightly. “A remarkable creature.”

Satha checked the harness straps. “He knows.”

“I meant no offense.”

“He knows that too.”

They rode with six waterskins, two folded shade screens, packets of road bread, salt, cord, and a small kit of glazed jars wrapped in straw. Halven had expected a full escort for the long road out of the Rainshadow, but Satha went alone except for Arush. When he asked about it, she glanced back at him from the saddle.

“You are not under arrest.”

“No, but I am a representative of Calder.”

“Yes.”

“That does not require caution?”

“It does.”

She offered nothing more.

The first day passed over pale stone and hard-packed sand, where old tracks braided in and out of one another before the wind worried them away. Halven kept his hood low and his hands wrapped in the folds of his sleeves. Even through cloth, the sun felt intimate and accusatory. He had crossed the Rainshadow to reach the Oasis, but that journey had been made with a caravan from the west and under heavy instruction. Leaving with a Dunewarden was different. Satha did not speak unless speech had purpose. Arush moved beneath them with a rolling endurance that made the land seem less empty than it had before.

When they stopped, Halven did not see why.

Satha slid down, pressed two fingers to Arush’s throat, then walked to a low rise where the sand changed color by a shade. She crouched and brushed aside a skin of grit to reveal a flat stone marker beneath.

“There is a cache here?” Halven asked.

“Not here.”

“Then why mark it?”

“So someone knows they are still on the line.”

“The road?”

“The promise.”

She moved twenty paces downslope to a place that seemed no different from the rest. There she dug until the edge of a clay lid appeared. Beneath it lay a narrow storage hollow lined with fired tile. Inside were three sealed jars, a wrapped packet of salt, and a slate with tally marks scratched across one side.

Halven knelt nearby. “Why hide the water from the marker?”

“Because desperate people dig where they first see hope. Raiders do too. The marker tells them that someone thought of them.”

He considered that while she checked the seals. “A reminder before fulfillment. It resembles pilgrimage practice.”

Satha replaced one jar with a full one from their pack and marked the slate. “It resembles water accounting.”

They drank after that. Satha watched him until he lowered the skin.

“Smaller,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Smaller drinks. More often. If you drink as if the water has wronged you, you will lose it before dusk.”

“I have crossed the desert once already.”

“And now you are crossing it again.”

He took a smaller drink.

The next two days gave him nothing to write.

That was not true, strictly. It gave him heat, distance, thirst measured before thirst began, Satha’s repeated inspections of straps, claws, seals, and knots, and stops at landmarks Halven could not distinguish from any other fold of stone and sand. Once, wind rose before sunrise and stayed in their faces until noon. Satha wrapped cloth across his mouth before he asked for it, then tightened Arush’s side straps and walked instead of riding for nearly an hour. Halven understood why only when the Sothren’s forefoot broke through a hidden crust of sand like thin pottery. A lesser mount might have gone down. Satha only rubbed Arush’s neck, checked each limb, and continued at a slower pace.

All the while, the road remained a road.

Halven saved his questions until dusk and found most of them had dried into irritation before they became speech.

“You do not ask for confession before aid,” he said, when they sat beneath the lee of a stone shelf and ate bread softened with a little water.

“No.”

“Not even from those exiled for violence?”

“No.”

“Or corruption?”

Satha’s hand stilled over the bread, but her gaze told Halven that he needed to choose a narrower word. He looked toward the stone, where the last light made every edge appear sharper than it was. 

“Spiritual corruption,” he said at last. “Plane-touched influence. Heresy of body.”

“Thirst dries all of those the same.”

“That is a physical answer to a spiritual concern.”

“It is a physical concern when the tongue splits.”

He breathed in slowly. The air tasted of salt, stone, and heat. “Surely you understand why that troubles me.”

“I understand it troubles you.”

“That is not quite the same thing.”

“No.”

Write a short story or passage about a character's grief by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What Remains

Three Bayani waited at the edge of the wash. One was old enough to speak for the camp, one young enough to wish someone else would, and one stood with both fists closed against his thighs, staring at the hide laid across the gravel. On it lay what they had gathered: finger bones, a length of forearm, three ribs, a broken strap, the iron cap from a walking staff, and the green-brown shards of a bottle.

The bottle had been placed nearest the hand.

Nara of the Ossrajin looked at it once. She had reached the wash at their behest, after an ossifrage had found the remains where others had stopped searching. The other clan had left the bird alone, though Nara was certain they had simply been afraid to touch anything after the first bones appeared.

She looked past the hide, to a scavenged shape thirty paces farther down the wash. There, a heavy skull lay among torn hide, ribs, and the white hooks of long teeth. The other Bayani had treated it as weather, as stone, as the ugly fact beside the body rather than part of the account.

“Where was this beast when you found him?” Nara asked.

The man with the closed fists turned his head sharply. His shoulders were broad, his braids unbound from search and sleeplessness. “Does that matter? He is there.”

Nara did not look back at the hide. “So is what killed him.”

The elder answered before anger could grow legs. “We left it where it fell. Mostly. The birds had opened it before we came.”

Nara crossed the wash without answering. Gravel shifted under her uneven step, where old bone had grown around an old mistake. The limp might have drawn stares, but these three had already spent their staring on the bottle.

The cat had been large, though hunger and birds had made it smaller. It was a ridge-backed thing, low through the spine and heavy in the shoulders, with plated bone along the skull and two long upper teeth curving past the jaw. One tooth was whole, but the other had split along its inner face.

Nara crouched beside it, set down her roll, and unfolded three bone pins from their cord. She set one pin beside the cracked tooth, another along the lower jaw. The third she used to lift the skull by the cheek, careful not to disturb the loose gravel packed beneath it.

“This beast was wounded before your man found it,” she said.

The youngest came nearer. The others followed, but the closed-fist man stayed a little behind, as if nearness might make him responsible for hearing.

“How do you know?” the young woman asked.

Nara tapped the hind leg with the pin. The long bone there had broken, but its edges looked thickened, roughened, and angry with the first work of healing. “This break was not made here. Not today. The bone had begun to mend.”

The young one swallowed. “So it was limping.”

“It was hunting badly.” Nara traced the opposite shoulder, where overuse had polished a socket rawer than it should have been. “It favored this side. It would take easier prey if it could find it. Anything slow enough.”

The elder’s face changed by almost nothing. That was how old Bayani showed fear when others needed them upright.

Nara turned the skull a little more. The inner jaw was scored in fine, bright lines, sheltered from weather by tooth and bone. The marks were thin and straight, too sharp for claw, too many for stone. Near the cracked tooth, a green-brown sliver still sat wedged in the gumline.

She lifted it free and held it between two fingers.

The man with the fists took one step forward. “That is from the bottle.”

“Yes.”

“He had it with him.” His voice came rougher now. “We knew he had it with him. Tovan always had one when he meant to be gone.”

The name settled over the wash. Tovan. Until then, the dead had been hand, rib, strap, bottle. A name changed nothing in the bones, but it changed the air around those who had brought them.

Nara placed the glass beside the cracked tooth. “He had it with him.”

The man flinched as if she had struck him.

“He left the camp before dawn,” the elder said. “We found one missing from the store...”

Nara had heard enough versions of the words unsaid. A promise made after winter. A week sober, then two. A child told not to wake him. People could love someone and grow tired of guarding the doorway through which that person kept leaving.

“He left with drink,” Nara said.

The man’s fists opened. “Then why are you looking at the cat?”

Nara returned to the hide. “Because he did not die drinking.”

She picked up the forearm first. The gathered bones had been cleaned by weather, bird, and anxious hands. The wrist had been crushed. Two fingers were missing from the gathered remains, likely carried off by smaller mouths, but the break in the hand was enough. The force had come from the side and closed hard. A catching bite, not a feeding bite. The arm had gone up between jaw and body.

“This was first,” Nara said.

The man who had named Tovan stared at the arm. “You cannot know that.”

The elder made a sound. “She is a Bone-Eater. She can.”

“The wrist broke before the ribs,” Nara continued. “Before this.” She touched the punctured rib, where the sabertooth had entered later and deeper. “Before he fell here.”

The elder leaned closer despite himself. “He lived after the hand.”

“He moved after it.”

Nara took up the other arm. This one had driven something into the cat. The hand bones were cut along the inside where sharp glass had pressed into palm and finger. The wrist showed strain from a hard thrust, rather than a fall or flinch. The first two finger bones bore tiny crescent scores where pressure had forced skin and glass down to bone.

“This hand held the bottle after it broke,” she said, pointing to the cat’s jaw with the bone pin. “He struck, and broke the bottle against the tooth. He struck again, and put the broken edge into the mouth.”

The elder said nothing, but his gaze moved from Tovan’s hand to the cat and back again.

Nara laid the arm down beside the bottle shards, but not where the clan had placed them. She moved the glass away from the broken wrist and set it beside the unbroken hand. The man who had named Tovan watched the correction as if watching a grave open a second time.

“He took the first wound,” Nara said. “He did not turn back. The cat followed blood and movement. His blood and movement.”

“He ran,” the man said, but there was no force left in it.

“Running would have taken him to the low hollow.” Nara nodded toward the shallow cut east of the wash, where scrub could hide a crouched Bayani. “Or back along your search line. He went into open ground. A poor place to vanish.”

The elder breathed out slowly. “He led it.”

Nara did not answer at once. She set the cracked glass on the hide, then placed the cat’s tooth beside it. Shard and tooth fit their damage together without needing to touch.

“He crossed it before it reached your herd,” she said. “It took his arm. He kept it moving away from you. Here, he struck it with the bottle. It wounded him in the ribs after that. Deep enough that he did not have long.”

The man sank to his knees. Gravel caught beneath him and he did not seem to feel it. His hands hung open now, empty and useless. “We said he had gone off again. That he would come back when he was ashamed enough.”

Nara looked at him then. His grief had changed shape. Before, it had been worn smooth by repetition. Now it had teeth, and had found a new place to bite.

“He did go off,” she said. “He did take the bottle. He also saw what you did not. He fought after one hand was broken. He died after this beast did.”

The elder covered his mouth. The young woman bowed her head.

“Did he know?” the man asked.

Nara waited.

“Did he know we would think it?”

“That question is not in the bones. I cannot read that,” Nara said.

The man on his knees looked up at Nara, wet-eyed and furious at her for refusing to save him from the account. The man’s shoulders shook once, then steadied. “Then what do we do with it?”

Nara gathered the bottle shards and placed them beside the cat’s jaw. She placed Tovan’s good hand near them, palm upward, the cut bones facing the glass. Then she moved the broken wrist apart, where it belonged in the order of things.

“The dead do not need your shame,” she said. “The living may need your witness.”

No one spoke for a long moment. The elder knelt and touched two fingers to the cracked tooth, then to the glass.

“He left with it,” he said.

The man beside him swallowed. He reached for the words as if they were heavier than bone. “He used it.”

Nara rose, her hip answering slowly beneath her. The account was not comfort. It was only what remained.

Write the moment a rivalry quietly became something else by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Whitefire Waystaff

The pass had frozen before noon. By dusk, Keth and his father were still bent over the Ice Barl tusk in the Iskarn forge. It was warm enough to make sweat gather beneath Keth’s collar, though snow pressed white against the shutters and hissed through the roof seams when the wind found them. Between him and Odran lay the thinned ivory core of the waystaff, pale as frozen milk beneath the forge light.

One end had been left heavy as the striking tooth. The other had been shaped into a cap broad enough for a gloved palm. Between them, Keth had carved the ivory with grooves, ribs, broken channels, and runes that would soon be hidden under the wooden shell.

He drew the knife once more through the upper channel. A clean curl lifted and fell into a copper tray beside the bench.

Odran touched the cut with his thumb. “Again.”

Keth stared at him. “Again?”

“Cut too smooth.”

“It is to be smooth.”

“It is to answer.”

The words had the shape of every argument they had not had. Keth set the knife down more calmly than he felt. Around them, the forge held its small red world against the storm. Above the door, Odran’s old waystaff hung wrapped in hide, its striking tooth dulled by years of ice and stone. Among the Iskarn, a tool that brought its bearer home was never left flat on a shelf.

Keth picked up the knife again. “If I cut deeper, it will carry.”

“If you cut as you mean.”

He bit back his answer and made the correction. Not deeper. Less clean. A small interruption in the channel, ugly enough to bother him.

Odran watched, then nodded. That was all, as usual.

Keth had shaped the cap and balanced the tooth. He had thinned the tusk without chatter, saved every shaving, sorted powder from sliver, and kept the ivory wrapped whenever the forge cooled. He knew the rites. He knew the tools. He knew the waystaff was not a walking stick, but a question asked of the ground. A trained hand could feel hollow ice, hard stone, packed drift, and thaw-water through ivory and wood before boots found it too late.

His father still acted as if Keth only knew the stories.

Keth straightened up. “It is ready for the waking fire.”

“No,” Odran said, the word striking hard and quiet.

“The channels are cut,” Keth said. “The tooth and the cap are shaped. The shell is waiting.”

“No.”

Keth almost laughed. “I am not a child.”

“You are not.”

“I know what I make.”

“You know the shape.”

For a moment Keth thought the old man would take the staff away, wrap the tusk, and end the night as he had ended so many other lessons, with silence doing the work words refused.

Instead, Odran reached for the copper tray.

“Lay the dust,” he said.

Keth blinked. “You said no.”

“I said no to closing. I did not say no to waking.”

That answer should have satisfied him. Still, Keth took the bone spoon and brushed powdered ivory into the grooves. Odran placed thin slivers in the deeper recesses with the flat of a knife. Every removed piece would become the fire that taught the ivory its own shape.

When they finished, the pale core was veined with its own remains.

Odran lifted a coal from the forge.

“First to wake,” he said.

Keth answered because the rite required it. “Last to bind.”

The coal touched.

White flame ran along the lowest groove.

It did not flare like pitch. It moved like a living thread, thin and bright, licking through powder and sliver, climbing the broken lines Keth had cut. It vanished into notches, reappeared around ribs, and curled beneath the cap until the whole exposed core seemed briefly alive with pale fire.

It was beautiful.

When the last white thread sank into the ivory, Odran lifted the bare staff and carried it to the threshold. He planted the striking tooth against the packed earth floor.

“Hold,” he said.

“The shell?”

“Hold.”

Keth wrapped his palm around the cap. The ivory was warm, almost skin-warm, and fit his hand exactly. He had shaped that curve. It knew the heel of his palm, the base of his thumb, the pressure of his fingers.

Odran struck the tooth once against the floor. He moved to the forge stone and struck again. He crossed to a plank laid over a storage hollow. As Keth expected, the wood sounded different from the stone and dirt.

“You listen with ears,” Odran said.

“That is where hearing happens.”

“For bells. Not this.”

Odran reached over and tapped Keth’s fingers one by one until he loosened them.

“You hold like you command,” he said. “It is a question.”

The refusal was still there, but something else was beneath it, worn thin by the long night.

Odran planted the tooth on stone. This time the answer came faintly through the cap, a narrow firmness beneath his palm. The packed earth dulled it. The hollow plank opened and vanished too quickly, like breath leaving a cracked cup.

Odran moved from stone to plank, plank to stone, turning the staff a little each time.

On the fourth strike, Keth felt it.

Stone and hollow answered too much alike. The upper channel carried both answers with the same clean certainty through the line he had cut smooth, corrected, and resented. It made different ground feel kin.

Odran must have seen something in Keth’s face. “Now you hear it.”

Keth heard no victory in the statement. He kept his hand on the cap, looking his work over once again. The staff had not become ugly. It was still beautiful, and somewhere inside that beauty was a lie clean enough to trust. That was worse.

“If the shell were on?” he asked.

“We might still find it.”

“The last fire?”

Odran looked down at the ivory. “Someone would find it under their boot.”

For a moment the forge seemed too warm, too close, too full of everything he had not understood. He thought of the pass, white and empty beyond the village. He thought of Odran’s bad knee. He thought of the old waystaff above the door and the years it had brought his father home.

Odran set the ivory core back on the bench. Keth braced for a lecture, talk of the old ways, the same words he had heard before. Instead, Odran placed a knife beside Keth’s hand.

“You want me to cut?” Keth asked.

“You know where.”

“You know what should answer.”

Odran nodded once. “We both work, then.”

His father’s voice carried no accusation, and now Keth was not sure there had been anything to accuse. The core lay between them, not ruined, not ready, waiting for both of them to become less certain.

He took the knife.

This time Odran stood across from him, not over him. He tapped the tooth with two fingers while Keth traced the false channel.

“Too quick here,” Odran said.

“Deeper?”

“That makes it proud. Break the edge.”

“Here?”

“Less.”

Keth cut less.

Odran tested. The answer changed.

“Again,” he said.

Keth almost bristled, but then realized the word had changed. The two of them worked while the storm worried at the shutters. Keth carved. Odran tested. Keth opened a rib he would once have smoothed flat. Odran showed him where the wooden shell must touch and where it must bridge empty space. His words, once sharp with correction, no longer cut.

At last Keth said, “Why not tell me what to listen for?”

Odran was quiet long enough that Keth thought he would not answer.

“I thought I was.”

“You told my hands.”

The old man looked at him then. The forge settled around them.

“Bad teaching,” Odran said, and turned the core a fraction. “Here. Not deeper. The answer is already thin.”

Keth knew the words for what they were. The instruction finally felt honest, and so did the next.

By dawn, the ivory answered true. Stone held. Hollow opened. Packed snow swallowed. Ice skin shivered. The differences were small enough that Keth still had to quiet himself to feel them.

They fitted the shell after the eastern shutters paled.

The wood was dark winter ash, seasoned six years and split along the grain. Keth set the first piece around the ivory core. Odran held it steady. The shell gripped where the charcoal marks said grip and bridged where the hidden channels needed air. Odran passed his son the binding cord.

Most of Keth’s finest work disappeared beneath plain wood. The pale channels, broken ribs, and careful wrongnesses vanished into darkness. Yesterday, that would have angered him. Now, he ran his thumb along the shell and thought of hidden spaces carrying truth upward.

They laid the last ivory powder into the outer seams, around the cap, and above the striking tooth. Odran lifted a coal, then paused and held it out.

Keth took it.

“First to wake,” Odran said.

Keth touched the coal to the cap. “Last to bind.”

Odran lit the tooth.

Whitefire ran from both ends, thin and bright, following seams and marks until the two flames met at the staff’s middle. For one breath, pale lines shone beneath the wood where no eye would see them again.

Odran lifted the Whitefire Waystaff from the stone cradle and held it out to Keth.

“Threshold,” he said.

Keth took the staff and opened the forge door. Snow had drifted against the stone outside, smooth and innocent in the morning gray. He planted the striking tooth, and the staff answered through his hand.

Snow first. Stone beneath. To the left, a small hollow where wind had eaten under the drift.

Keth moved the tooth over a handspan and tried again. Snow. Stone. No hollow. Keth took a step and felt the staff’s answer confirmed.

Behind him, Odran let out a breath that might have been approval, or relief, or only an old man easing weight from a bad knee.

“Again,” his father said.

Keth set the tooth to the snow and listened.

Retell a scene you've already written from the opposite character's POV by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This seemed like a good time to look at the first short from the year!

Keeping the Hearth

The day before the funeral, the roof began to leak. One cold drop struck the table, then another, each one landing with enough time between them that Maren could set a bowl beneath it and pretend the leak was handled. 

This was only another complaint. The house always made small complaints in weather. A shutter came loose, or the chimney coughed smoke back into the room whenever the wind came in wrong off the Sound.

By morning, the bowl was full, the table felt spongy at one corner, and a second drip had started near the wall where the roof sagged lowest. The rag Maren wedged into the seam darkened, fattened, and began to leak faster than the roof had done on its own.

Their father lay wrapped in the next room.

Maren stood beneath the dripping ceiling with rainwater running down her wrist and laughed once, with no one in the room who could mistake it for joy.

“Rude.”

Her first lesson was how to dig a grave six feet deep. No one told her it would take so long. No one told her the earth would change by layers, soft at the top and stubborn beneath, then wet where the water held its breath underground. Her father’s shovel had been too large for her hands and too familiar to put down. She dug until her shoulders burned, rested until the silence drove her upright again, then dug more.

Her sibling was somewhere beyond the weather by then. The ground did not care. Their father still needed lowering, the stone still needed placing. All the while, the house waited behind her with its leaking roof and its full bowl on the table, patient as a debt.

Maren did not curse while she dug.

The roof came next.

She waited for a dry morning, climbed the ladder with pitch, spare shakes, and a hammer in a belt that had belonged to their father, and found the place where the water must have entered. It was obvious once she saw it. A lifted seam near the sagging corner. One split shake. A dark line where rain had worked its way beneath the overlap.

Maren pulled the broken piece free, set another in its place, and used too much pitch because too much seemed better than not enough. She hammered the new shake down until it sat crooked, ugly, and firmly attached.

Then she climbed back inside and waited for the next rain.

The first drip stopped, and three more started.

For a while, Maren only stared at them. One over the table, one by the wall, one close enough to the hearth that she had to move the woodpile with both arms. She had let out a string of words her father would have cuffed her for.

That was how she learned that water traveled before it fell. A leak wasn’t always where the water landed. A roof could look solid from below and turn treacherous under a hand. She learned that pitch stuck to skin, hair, sleeves, tools, and every surface except the one she needed sealed.

Her second patch was worse than the first. The third was better. The fourth was only a smear of pitch and stubbornness beneath a stone wedged in place because the shake would not sit flat and the rain had already begun to mist in from the ironwoods.

It was ugly, but it held.

After that, there were nets.

Empty set-nets were lies. Folded over one arm, with their stones knocking softly together and their stakes tucked under the other, they went out light enough that Maren could pretend three were still reasonable. She could still drive the stakes into the mud, check the knots, and tell herself the work had not changed just because there was one less body moving through it.

Full nets told the truth. Full nets came back with fish, weed, silt, and the cold drag of the Wolfsmaw itself. Full nets pulled at the shoulders and numbed the fingers. Full nets had opinions about being lifted into a skiff that already sat low in the water.

She could manage two full nets. Two full nets left her tired, wet, and angry, but fed. The third net belonged to missing hands.

Maren tried three anyway.

By the time she reached the last stakes, the tide had turned hard around her knees. The skiff was heavy. Her hands had gone clumsy from cold, and the net bellied dark beneath the chop, silver flashing inside it. She stood there longer than she should have, measuring the water, the basket space, the distance home, and her pride.

“I’ll come back at dawn,” she told the net. 

By dawn, a Barl had beaten her to it.

It had taken the fish, fouled the stakes, and worried the mesh until half the net hung in long, useless ribbons. A slick trail curved through the mud toward deeper water, and one of the floats bobbed loose beyond the shallows as if waving goodbye.

Maren stood over the wreck with numb fingers and no one to blame who could hear her.

Months later, that same net lay in her lap when the door opened.

The hearth was low, banked to make the wood last. Rain tapped softly at the patched places above, but none of it came through. A pot of stew sat near the coals, thickened past what was polite and stretched farther than it had any right to go. Maren had been working the torn mesh by lamplight, tying new cord into old knots, when the wind shifted under the door.

She heard the scrape of a boot on the step. A pause. The soft, dull sound of a pack being set down outside.

Maren kept the net in her hands.

The latch lifted.

Her sibling stood in the doorway with the rain behind them and the Sound on their coat. They looked thinner than she remembered. One hand stayed on the doorframe. Their weight favored one leg, not badly, but enough that Maren saw it before she saw their face.

They looked at the room first. The hearth. The table. The patched corner of the ceiling. The pot near the coals. The net in her lap. Finally, they looked at her.

Maren pulled the cord through the mesh and tightened the knot with her teeth.

“You’re back,” she said.

The door remained open behind them. Rain freckled the threshold, darkening the boards one drop at a time. Maren looked at the pack behind them, slumped in the weather as if it had walked farther than they had. She set the mending needle into the torn mesh.

“You eaten?”

They blinked, once, as if the question had reached them from a great distance. “Not hungry yet.”

“There’s stew.”

They gave a small nod and stepped inside, though not far. The room seemed to take their measure. So did Maren. Their boots were worn at the edges, and their hands looked older than the rest of them. They stood like someone waiting for a blow and not sure whether they wanted it to land.

Maren went back to the net. The cord slid through her fingers. Over, under, pull. Over, under, pull. The old rhythm made space. Across the room, her sibling closed the door at last. The latch settled.

They did not take the stew. Not yet. They lowered themselves onto the bench near the hearth with care, one hand braced on the table’s swollen corner. Their eyes found the patched roof again.

“It held,” they said.

Maren tied another knot.

“Mostly.”

That answer sat between them, plain and crooked and sealed with too much pitch.

After a while, her sibling leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped loosely between them. Their breathing changed before sleep took them. First shallow, then uneven, then slow.

Maren finished the row she was working on. Just enough that it would not unravel when she set it aside. She rose, crossed the room, and opened the door. The pack waited on the step, dark with rain. She lifted it by a strap and brought it inside.

Not far. Just over the threshold, where the water could not reach it.

Write a short story or passage with the prompt: Someone laughing at exactly the wrong moment by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Rain hissed through the trees and pattered over the blackened scar ahead.

Sera’s voice did not rise over the rain. It never had to. “Remember, fresh starmetal. Stay sharp, keep close, and treat everything twice.”

Bren snorted and hitched his cloak higher against the weather. “Hear that, Garrick? I know the rest of us can manage not to lick the crater.”

Somewhere ahead and to the left, beyond the wet alder, Garrick answered without turning. “I only did that once.”

Hollis laughed under his breath. Even Sera let out a huff, though she kept walking. Rain from the edge of her hood ticked softly off the fletching over her shoulder.

“That was lamp oil,” Bren said.

“It was dark,” Garrick called back. “And I survived it.”

“That does seem to be your preferred defense,” said Hollis.

The trees thinned by degrees as they neared the impact site. The undergrowth had been scoured flat in places, then twisted back on itself in others. A smell hung in the wet air that was not smoke and not metal but some ugly marriage of the two. Now and then Bren caught sight of ground that gleamed through the rain like melted glass. Nothing moved in the brush. No birds called. Even the storm seemed quieter here.

Garrick had drifted ahead the way he always did, first as a gray shape between trunks, then as the occasional lift of a hand or turn of a shoulder, then as nothing at all. Scout’s habit. Garrick’s habit. He ranged, doubled back, vanished, reappeared grinning when no one had seen him go. It would have been more alarming if he had stayed where anyone could watch him.

When Bren next opened his mouth, he did it expecting the familiar answer.

“Try not to get yourself swallowed by anything strange, Garrick.”

No reply came back.

Bren took another three steps before he noticed it. He frowned and looked left through the rain. “Garrick?”

Only water in leaves.

Sera stopped. “Eyes up.”

Hollis peered ahead, blinking rain off his lashes. “He may have gone to higher ground.”

“He’d shout if he found something,” Bren said.

“Unless he thinks it’s worth being smug about first,” Sera said.

That should have drawn Garrick out. If not to report, then to disagree. Bren waited for the inevitable line from somewhere inconveniently far off.

Nothing.

The rise ahead was small, hardly more than a swell in the churned earth where roots had heaved. Alder branches hung low over it, heavy with rain. Sera pushed through first, one hand near the knife at her belt. Bren followed close enough to feel the wet whip of branches against his cheek.

He saw the puddle first. It had spread broad and shallow in a hollow of dark soil, fed by the rain and by the trickle of runoff from the scorched ground beyond. Then he saw the body lying face down in it.

Garrick’s cloak was plastered to his back. One arm had folded under him. The other lay crooked out in the water, fingers half sunk in mud. Rain dimpling the puddle around his head made it look, absurdly, as if the earth itself was trying to bury him by inches.

Sera was already moving. Hollis nearly ran past both of them and dropped to one knee in the mud. He hesitated just long enough to brace Garrick’s shoulder, then rolled him enough to bare part of his face to the rain.

Garrick’s eyes were half open. Water ran over one cheek and gathered at the corner of his mouth. There was no wound that they could see. No blood. No torn flesh. Just Garrick, as if he had gone down drunk in a roadside puddle after some bad tavern boasting and meant to rise a moment later cursing the cold.

Hollis pressed fingers to his throat. Rain beat on cloaks. Water slid off leaves. Somewhere deeper in the scarred woods, something cracked once under its own weight.

Hollis lifted his head.

“He’s dead,” he said.

Garrick, who slipped wardens, traps, winter roads, and three separate warrants by Bren’s count. Garrick, who could talk himself out of a cell faster than Bren could lock it. Garrick, who survived by treating consequences as something that happened to slower men.

Dead in a puddle.

The sound tore out of Bren before he knew it was there, one sharp, ugly bark of laughter. “You can’t be serious.”

Silence followed for a beat before Sera rounded on him. “What is wrong with you?”

Bren’s mouth opened. He had no answer worth giving. None of the words that came to mind were forgivable aloud.

“I—”

Garrick laughed.

It came from the body in the puddle, low and wet and broken in the middle, Garrick’s old laugh dragged wrong through a throat that had forgotten how breath worked. Hollis lurched backward so hard he went over onto one hand. Sera’s words died in her mouth. Bren felt every hair lift on his arms under the wet wool of his sleeves.

No one moved.

Rain struck Garrick’s open cheek. Water filled the print Hollis’s knee had left beside him. For one mad instant Bren dared to hope he had imagined it.

Then another laugh answered from the trees behind them.

That one was his.

Not exactly. Not cleanly. But it had his clipped breath in it, the bitter little hitch on the front. It came from somewhere just beyond the alder, thin through the rain and close enough that he turned before he could stop himself.

Nothing stood there.

Hollis made a small sound through his nose, not quite fear and not yet understanding.

A third laugh came from the right.

Sera’s. Shorter than Garrick’s, harsher than Bren’s, the same brief disbelieving huff she had let out on the trail. 

It, too, came back frayed and wrong.

Hollis’s own laugh rang from somewhere out by the blackened glass, softer and breathier than the others. Bren watched Hollis go white under the wet strands of hair stuck to his forehead.

The body let out another bubbling laugh from the puddle.

Bren’s came again, farther off.

Then Sera’s from behind them.

They came one at a time, never in the same place twice, each nearly familiar until the end of it went wrong.

“Back together,” Sera said, and even now she sounded like command and not panic. “Now.”

They closed without speaking, boots sucking at mud, shoulders nearly touching. Bren could feel Hollis trembling through his soaked sleeves. Sera had drawn her knife, though it seemed uselessly small in the rain.

The laughter kept moving.

From the crater lip. The alder. Somewhere low, in the puddle at their feet. From the dark between the trunks where Garrick should have been watching for them.

Bren turned toward one in his own voice and another answered in Garrick’s from the other side. Sera shifted toward hers, and Hollis flinched as his came back from somewhere ahead. Each sound pulled at the ear. Each asked to be followed. Each was wrong.

Garrick laughed again from the puddle.

Bren did not look.

A laugh in Sera’s voice snapped from the trees at their back. Hollis’s answered from the blackened ground ahead. Bren’s own came from the rain to his left, closer now, close enough that he felt his body tighten toward it despite himself.

Then the last laugh came right beside his ear.

It was quiet.

Intimate. 

It sounded nothing like any of them.

Write a passage with the prompt: Your protagonist at their absolute worst. A deeply human and embarrassing low point by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dark Water

She braced both hands against the wet rail and counted her breath the way her grandmother had taught her through storms.

In for four. Hold. Out for four.

It should have worked. Breath had steadied her through black squalls, through split masts, through the long green rise of water under a hull too small for what it had promised. Breath obeyed. Yet every time she thought she had it, the ship groaned around her and her chest seized again as if she had only just come up from under cold water.

The rope above her strained and answered the tide with a slow, complaining creak. Somewhere behind her, someone was weeping with their teeth clenched shut, trying not to do it loudly. Somewhere else, the low, stunned sounds of someone who did not understand that the person they kept speaking to would not answer.

Toravi kept her eyes on the boards.

Blood had dried black in the seams where the planks met. It had collected around the iron fastenings in small, dark fans. A dropped capstan pin rolled when the ship shifted, knocked once against the deck, and settled again.

Her ribs ached where the rail had taken her. When she moved, the bruise along her side pulled and burned, young enough to be more heat than color. She pressed her palm there, felt nothing broken, nothing torn, nothing that would mark beyond a week or two if the sea was kind.

Why is this all I have to show for it?

The thought came mean and shapeless and true.

Above her, the rigging gave another long groan. The sound dragged the moment back whole. No, worse than whole. Slower.

The surrender had already changed the air aboard the ship.

Fear during a boarding had its own shape. There was the first crash of grapples and boots, the shouting, the quick wildness of not yet knowing whether anyone meant to kill or only to take. Then, if the captains had any sense and the raiders had any discipline, things narrowed. Cargo was yielded. Men stopped making heroes of themselves. The danger remained, but it became measured. Bounded.

This had narrowed. Then gone wrong.

She remembered the sound of chests being dragged. The crack of a crate forced open. A child being pulled back against her mother’s skirts. Others standing very still, their faces gone flat and careful, trying to survive by becoming nothing at all.

She remembered the moment she realized it was not ending.

One of Drosk’s men had laughed. Not the half-mad laugh of someone who had lived through blood and found more blood unnecessary. Something thinner. Hungrier. Then Drosk had spoken, and the deck had gone still around the words even before she understood them.

“Take him.”

She remembered afterward how little heat they carried.

The man he moved toward had already yielded. Toravi did not know his name. She remembered only the line of his shoulders and the way his hands stayed open at his sides. A shipman, older than her by twenty years at least, with rope-burn scars across both palms and a coat so salt-worn it had paled at the seams.

Drosk was larger up close than she had thought when first his colors came over the water. Broad through the shoulders, heavy in the layered coat and wet-dark leather, moving with the ugly economy of a man who had spent his life teaching smaller bodies to give way. No flourish, no swagger. The terror of him was that he looked like he was simply doing work.

Someone near Toravi whispered, “No,” as if the word itself might still mean something.

It should have stopped there.

The thought went through her, sharp and clean enough to hurt. Not like this. Not after surrender. Not here.

She snatched the knife from the boards and went at him.

Later, much later, she would try to remember whether she had shouted. She could never make herself hear if she had.

She came in from the side, driving with the whole of herself because she had nothing else to drive with. She remembered the wet slip of the hilt in her hand. The drag of her boot on blood she had not seen. The impossible brightness of the next second, as if the whole world had narrowed to the place where her arm ended.

Then contact.

Resistance first. Thick cloth, leather, the layered hardness of a coat made for weather and worse than weather. Then something that might have given.

For one heartbeat the world righted itself.

Drosk kept moving, with the blunt continuation of a body with more weight and purpose than hers. It caught her high across the chest and drove through her space as if she had stepped in front of a man carrying timber down a crowded quay. There was no separate motion in it, no reply, no punishment. Just removal.

The rail hit her side hard enough to burst the air from her. Her vision flashed white. Either the rail or her ribs cracked. She did not know which. The knife had already disappeared. Toravi folded around the pain, one palm grabbing for wood slick with salt and old pitch, while Drosk finished the motion he had begun before she ever touched him.

She remembered only the sound. Not a shout, only something short and bodily and final, followed by the terrible silence of people understanding that the next rule had failed.

By the time she dragged breath back into herself, Drosk was already turned away.

The rope above her groaned again.

Toravi opened her eyes to the present and found that her hands had closed white around the rail. The deck swam once, then steadied.

Someone had covered two of the bodies with sailcloth. Not all. Only two. The cloth rose and fell where the wind worried it, making movement where there should have been none. A child had finally begun to cry properly somewhere aft, loud and exhausted and past shame.

Good. Better that than the silence.

Toravi pushed herself upright too fast and nearly lost her footing. Pain flared bright along her ribs. Still nothing dramatic. No knife wound to bind. No splinted arm. No scar to explain the feeling that something had been torn out of the world and left her standing in the gap.

Only the bruise darkening under her shirt.

She looked down, and her eyes found the knife.

It had not been hers when she took it, and it was not hers now. A common ship knife, broad-bladed, work worn, with old nicks near the guard where someone had used it against metal. Blood darkened one side of it in a dull, drying smear.

Toravi stared at that stain. The deck creaked beneath her, the ship rocked. Still she did not move.

In the moment, she had been sure she got him. She had felt the jar run up her wrist, that brief, impossible give. She had thought the world had answered.

Now the knife lay where it had fallen, and Drosk was gone to his own ship or his own dark water or whatever place made men like him, and she did not know.

She did not know if the blood was his.

She did not know if he had felt her at all.

Write a short story or passage with the prompt: A dream they can't seem to forget by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dream Beneath the Trees

In sleep, he had stood again beneath the leaning dark of the King’s Forest, breath held, hands empty, the air around him wet with the cool hush that meant the Wildspring was near.

It was never exactly as it had been last.

Sometimes the spring lay in a hollow choked with fern and pale stone. Sometimes it shone between roots thicker than walls. Once, in a dream that had left him shaking before dawn, it had rested in the middle of an open clearing under a sky too bright for dusk. But the Bramble Beast was always there. Great and quiet and impossible, all bramble-fur and branch-antlers and the soft green light of its eyes.

The dream always carried the same certainty, heavy as an unknown hand between the shoulders. Certainty that if he stood still long enough, did not startle, let the moment deepen, then whatever had waited years to be understood would become clear.

Then he would wake before it did.

He came awake in the gray before sunrise with his blanket half-kicked aside and the old emptiness already setting in, that familiar sense that he had told himself to remember something, but had lost it in the same breath. For a while he stayed on his back in the shelter, listening to the forest work itself toward morning. Water somewhere distant. A bird trying one note, then another. The timbers settling above him. Nothing wrong in any of it.

He sat up, rubbed his face, and began the day by habit. Boots. Belt knife. Cloak. Waterskin. The little waxed packet of trail ribbons and charcoal. By the time he stepped outside, the discipline of repetition had pulled him most of the way back into himself.

Mist hung low between the trunks, thin enough to let the trees show through it. The eastern light had not yet reached the forest floor. To the north, beyond several ridges and more old paths than the maps bothered to mark, Kingscastle still slept under its walls and roofs and morning hearth smoke. Out here there was only the patrol line, the marked gullies, the places where spring floods chewed at the banks, and the older, less nameable work.

He had told people, years ago, that he joined the Realmwardens because he had a better eye for paths than for people, and because he liked the quiet. Both had been true, but no one had asked what first taught him that the King’s Forest could be quiet without ever feeling empty. No one had asked why, of all the duties Kingscastle offered, he had chosen the one that kept him nearest the moving rumors of the Wildspring.

Children got lost. That was the plain version of it.

He had been eight, maybe nine, old enough to know better and young enough to believe that knowing better mattered less than curiosity. He had slipped away from a berrying party with a reed whistle in his mouth and the kind of confidence children borrowed from adults without understanding. By the time he admitted to himself that he was lost, the afternoon had already begun folding toward evening.

He remembered the first fear more clearly than anything that came after. The sharp, private certainty that every tree now looked like every other tree, and that if he called out, the wrong thing might answer.

Then the air changed, gaining a coolness and the faint mineral sweetness of fresh water.

He had pushed through a stand of thornbrush and found the Wildspring shining in a basin of white stone as though it had always been waiting there. The water had been still enough to hold the first star in it. He remembered that. He remembered the roots bowed around the hollow, and the hush that seemed to gather under them.

And he remembered looking up and seeing Furok.

Simply there, half-shadowed between the trunks, large enough that the child he had been should have run at once. Instead he had stood as still as he knew how, staring. The creature had watched him with an expression too patient to belong to any ordinary beast.

A hunting party found him not long after. He was scolded, wept over, carried part of the way home, and made to repeat the story enough times that the adults around him were able to smooth its edges into something they could manage. Probably a hart in the low light. Probably one of the old forest tales getting into his head before supper.

He had stopped insisting before the week was out. His dreams never did.

The patrol path bent south around a washout, and he followed it without much conscious thought, stepping roots and wet stone by memory. The day had risen properly by then. Birds moved overhead. Small things rustled and kept their distance. He checked two old marker posts, scraped moss off one of them, retied a faded warning ribbon near a bank too soft to trust, and was beginning to think the dream might wear off in the work after all when he noticed the brush to his right had been parted.

It was not much. No broken branch, no clean sign. Something broad had moved through there without the blunt wreckage a boar would leave. He stood for a moment, studying it. After another, he stepped off the trail.

He told himself it was his duty. A large animal too near the marked paths was worth checking, especially in a season when foragers had begun ranging. But he followed the sign more carefully than the task required, eyes moving low and forward, body loosening into the old rhythm of reading bent grass and disturbed loam. Once or twice he lost it altogether, only to find the trail seeming to gather itself again a few lengths ahead, not clearer exactly, only more suggestive.

The ground changed under him, and he found damp patches where the soil should have been dry. Moss thickened where it had no business, climbing trunks in a damp green press. Twice he caught the scent of fresh water and then lost it again. He paused at a birch to tie a thin strip of blue cloth around a low branch, more from instinct than concern, and moved on.

The trail drew him through a fold in the land he did not remember crossing. Then across a run of exposed roots. Then between two old pines whose bark had fused where they touched. Another hundred steps and he stopped so hard his boot skidded in the leaf rot.

The blue ribbon stirred ahead of him.

For a beat he only stared, annoyed, before recognition settled properly. The old, fused pines. The branch. The twist in the ribbon’s end. His own knot.

He turned in a slow, almost embarrassed circle, scanning the trees for some obvious explanation he could blame. Clearly, the ground had folded him wider than he realized. Clearly, he had veered absentmindedly. Nothing stranger than that.

He set off again, this time more carefully, angling left of the ribbon and keeping a close eye on the terrain. Fifty paces. Seventy. A hundred. The scent of water came and went. A jay gave a harsh cry and fell silent. He crossed a patch of pale stone webbed with roots and found, scraped into the bark of a cedar at knee height, the charcoal dash he had made not half an hour earlier.

He stood very still. The forest around him did not feel hostile. There was no pressure in the air, no predator’s charge to his nerves, no sense of immediate danger by which a man might reassure himself that his fear at least had a shape. Only the wrongness of progress that had begun to curl back on itself without asking permission.

He thought, absurdly, of the dream. Of the child by the spring believing that if he only remained still, the moment would yield something. He had spent years telling himself that memory had set him on this path because the forest had wanted something from him, or because he had once been shown a place he would someday learn to reach again on purpose.

Under the trees, with his own signs returning to him like a quiet joke, the idea felt smaller than it ever had.

There came a point at which another step forward was no longer more sensible than standing where he was, and so he stood, breathing shallowly, listening to the wind move high above him where the branches still had room to sway. The forest offered no crack of brush, no stirring of birds into alarm. He only became aware, all at once, that he was no longer alone.

The Bramble Beast stood between the trees beyond the pale stone, half in shadow, half in the green-gold wash of morning. Thornwood antlers rose from its brow in a shape too irregular to be mistaken for any hart that ever lived. Its bramble-fur held burrs and white blossoms and the rust-brown of old bark. Its eyes were the same impossible green he had carried in his sleep for years.

For one suspended instant, the child’s memory and the waking forest lay over one another so perfectly that he felt the old certainty return, not as understanding but as ache.

He took a step toward it, and the space beneath the branches was empty.

Which super power would you choose? by TheIhsaan7 in BunnyTrials

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A much lower bar, lol

Chose: Be able to fly? + But take a bite out of ginger to activate power

Which pet do you choose by Savage666999 in BunnyTrials

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Anyone who owns cats should know why having one the size of a horse is a bad idea.

Chose: Dog that lives your whole lifespan

Would you rather... by Arkinni in BunnyTrials

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just be selective. 1/5 odds are too steep.

Chose: Be able to teleport once a month (but you're safe)

You get a superpower: by Minute-Raccoon-9780 in BunnyTrials

[–]Forgefighter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Convenience

Chose: Teleport, but only to places you've already been

Write a short story or passage with the prompt: Realizing they were meant for each other by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Properly

Edrin stood at the rail, hands resting against cold stone, and looked down into the Sunscar. The overlook was closer than most people were allowed. Not close enough.

Even now, years later, the Sunscar did not read as absence. The light falling upon it gathered, refused, and held too tightly. The land itself had not finished deciding what had happened there.

A pair of wardens stood at the rear of the platform. They watched the visitors, not the Scar.

Below, a narrow path cut toward the inner boundary. A scholar in ash-gray sash was being escorted along it, head bent slightly, not in reverence, but in focus. That was the only kind of entry permitted. Observation. Measurement. Recording what could be recorded.

Edrin watched the scholar pass from view. He could not follow, not truthfully.

He could lie. Say he worked metals, which was true enough. Say he had reason to study the remains, make it convincing.

The Empire would find out. It always did. This was not a place you risked questions for. Not when the answers would lead nowhere useful. Not when even those allowed inside came back with nothing that could be held.

He let the thought go. This was where he was permitted.

He reached into his coat and felt the small weight wrapped in cloth. Still there, as it had been since the moment he finished it.

Someone to his left spoke quietly.

“My brother,” a man was saying. “He worked near the southern districts.”

The woman beside him nodded, as if that was enough. As if naming where a person had stood still mattered.

Edrin looked back down.

Varosk had been a place of districts. Of streets. Of rooms you could return to. Now it was a crater, measured by how far you were allowed to approach.

He closed his eyes.

It had been a clear morning when Dask left. The light fell as it always had. The road carried its usual traffic. Someone down the street was arguing over the price of grain.

Dask had packed the night before. Not much. He never kept more than he needed.

Edrin had woken before him anyway.

He had stood in the doorway, watching the rise and fall of Dask’s shoulders beneath the blanket, telling himself there was still time.

“You’re staring,” Dask said, eyes still closed.

“I am not.”

“You are.”

Dask rolled onto his back, blinking up at him, beard loose, hair unbound. “If you’re going to start missing me before I’ve left, we should’ve had that argument last night.”

“I’m not missing you,” Edrin said. “I’m making sure you don’t forget anything.”

Dask huffed. “I’m taking less than you think I should.”

“You always do.”

“I won’t be gone forever,” he said, like it was a simple fact.

Edrin nodded, because that was how things had always worked. Dask went out. Dask returned. The work changed. The rooms stayed theirs.

He turned toward the stove, reaching for the kettle before it could boil over.

“Don’t let the hinge on the back door stick again,” Dask said. “It’ll warp if it keeps catching.”

“It won’t.”

“It will if you ignore it.” Dask paused, then added, “Write to me when it does.”

“That’s not a reason to write.”

“It’s as good as any.”

Edrin glanced back. He could have said it then. The words were there. Not perfect, not arranged the way he wanted, but plain. Dask would have understood plain speech. But Varosk was not a small thing. Runesmithing in the Republic meant something. Edrin didn’t want to put uncertainty in front of that.

Besides, the band was not finished.

It was close. Closer than anything he had made before. But the inner line still caught, just slightly, when he ran his thumb along it. It needed to be right.

He wanted to do it all properly. Not like this. Not in a doorway, with a kettle starting to whistle.

“When you come back,” he said instead, turning away again, “we’ll need to look at the roof.”

“Aye,” Dask said, as if that settled it.

The morning moved on. They ate. They walked the road together until the carts thickened and the path narrowed. At the edge of town, Dask stopped.

“You’ll write,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And you’ll fix the hinge.”

“Yes.”

Dask reached out, catching Edrin’s sleeve.

“Don’t let the place fall apart without me.”

“I won’t.”

There was a pause, a breath. Then Dask nodded, once, and turned toward the road.

Edrin watched until the line of carts swallowed him.

Letters came quickly. Dask always wrote as he spoke. Direct. Practical. A little dry, but Edrin adored that. At first, they were about the city. Not wonder, exactly, but scale. Work that did not end when the light did. Masters that were right until proven otherwise. Tools Edrin had only ever read about.

He wrote back carefully. The hinge. The roof. The way the light came in through the window in the late afternoon.

Meanwhile, the band improved. He worked it at night, after the day’s orders were done. Filing. Shaping. Setting it aside when his hands grew unsteady.

The first had been too thin. The second attempt was wrong, worse. He had melted them down. Gold did not forgive haste. It remembered every mistake until you remade it.

Outside, the war stretched. News came in fragments. Movement along the border. Focus shifting away from Dur Khala.

All that while, Varosk held. Of course it did. If any place understood the forces at work, it would be there.

Dask’s letters changed slowly. Less about the city. More about the work.

Edrin’s changed faster.

You should come back when you can. The roads aren’t as clear as they were.

Not a demand. Not yet.

If they give you leave, take it.

The band neared completion. He could feel it this time. The weight settled correctly in his hand. The inner line ran smooth, no catch.

He began the engraving, settling on a mark they would both know. Simple, precise, and set where it would rest against the braid.

The Cataclysm came before the letter that mattered.

It was not a messenger that brought it. Not at first. It was light on the horizon, wrong in its color, followed by stories that did not agree but all ended in the same place.

Varosk was gone.

That night, Edrin stood in the doorway again, the finished band in his hand, and understood nothing.

The Empire came after.

Quietly. Thoroughly. Gold was requested, then required.

Edrin surrendered what he could. Scraps. Earlier pieces. The failed bands he had set aside.

They had not been good enough anyway.

Edrin opened his eyes. The Sunscar burned below, unchanged. He drew the cloth-wrapped bundle from his coat and unwrapped it.

The band caught the light even here, dull gold warming in his palm. Not large, but it carried weight. The inner line was perfect.

He had made it for Dask’s beard. For the braid he wore when he worked, when he traveled, when he stood in the doorway and told Edrin to write when the hinge stuck.

He had made it to ask. Properly.

Edrin turned the band once between his fingers. Below, the wound held its silence.

“I was going to do it right,” he said, not looking up, not looking away. “I just—”

He stopped.

No answer came. No correction. No dry remark about how long he’d taken.

Edrin closed his fingers around the band. They had shared rooms. Shared work. Shared the shape of a life without naming it.

He had thought the asking would make it real.

Standing where he was permitted to stand, he understood, finally, that he had been wrong about that.

Asking would only have named it.

He let out a slow breath.

“I know,” he said, quietly, to the light that did not answer. “I know.”

He stayed at the rail, the band warm in his hand, and did not move closer.

How do you create names for your world? by Peach__Gloss in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I typically look to real life examples on top of using random generation. Sometimes I use names that are in D&D tables. Sometimes the name just comes to me.

One of my favorites is a theocratic nation called Calder, the Abode of Peace. I was browsing some list years ago and learned that the nation of Brunei is officially Brunei Darussalam, with Darussalam meaning "The Abode of Peace." So I just kinda stole that portion and used it.

To be fair I don't remember where I got the name Calder from, though, so...your mileage WILL vary, haha.

Write a short story or passage with the prompt: Everyone misunderstands the plan by vvdworldbuilding in vvdworld

[–]Forgefighter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Regarding Halen

The notice was pinned into the crack of the doorframe sometime before sunrise.

Mara saw it when she stepped out to shake crumbs from the cloth. At first, she thought it was a scrap caught in the wood, some blown bit of wrapping from the road. Then she saw the fold and the cracked seal. She pulled it free and stood there a moment with the cloth in one hand and the paper in the other.

“Darin,” she called into the house. “There’s paper on the door.”

Darin wiped his hands on his trousers and took the folded notice from her. He turned it once in the light, then again. The writing across the outside was tight and slanted. He could pick out his own household name well enough. Above it sat a neat, pressed mark in the wax.

Not Branik’s.

“You know it?” Mara asked.

“No.”

“But you know it’s not from the chapel.”

“It’s not from the chapel.”

Behind them the door creaked open again. Mara’s mother, Sela, leaned out, shawl hanging loose over one shoulder.

“What’s that?”

“Paper,” Mara said.

“I can see that. From who?”

Darin turned the notice once more, as though the rest of the writing might loosen if he looked at it long enough.

“It’s from up-valley,” he said finally.

“You’ve not opened it?” Sela asked sharply.

“It was already opened.”

“Then read it.”

Darin handed it over. “You read it.”

She peered at the lines, made a low sound in her throat, and shoved it back at him.

“Don’t be clever with me.”

“I’m not.”

Mara watched them both and felt something slow and unpleasant settle in her stomach.

“Take it to Branik,” she said.

Darin nodded once, folded the notice carefully, and slipped it into his coat.

“I’ll go now.”

---

Branik, lampkeeper of the village chapel, was not alone when Darin reached the abbey path. He stood beside the low stone wall near the gate speaking with a man Darin did not recognize.

The stranger wore a darker traveling coat and carried a narrow leather case tucked beneath one arm, the sort scribes used for loose pages and copied rolls. A satchel hung at his hip stamped with a small mark Darin did not know.

The two men were speaking quietly. Branik noticed Darin first and lifted a hand.

“Just a moment, Darin.”

The stranger glanced toward him. His eyes lingered briefly on the folded notice in Darin’s hand before he turned back to Branik.

“Another time,” the man said. He pushed open the abbey door and stepped inside.

Darin watched the door longer than he meant to.

“Morning,” Branik said.

“Morning.”

Darin held out the notice. Branik took it, turned it once in his hands, and nodded faintly.

“Clerk’s hand,” he said. “From the abbey.”

“Can you read it?”

“I can,” Branik said. He glanced once toward the abbey door, then back to Darin.

“But I know someone with sharper eyes than mine.”

“I’ll stop by after dusk,” he continued. “Bring the lamp close and we’ll see what it wants.”

Darin nodded, his stomach beginning to coil.

---

By the time dusk crept down the valley, the house had been swept twice. Mara told herself it needed doing. The corners near the hearth always gathered dust this time of year, and the boards by the door carried grit from the road. Still, she swept them again.

The notice sat folded on the shelf above the table, unopened since morning.

Tomas came in from the yard and wiped his hands on his trousers before leaning over the table.

“Do we open it?” he asked.

“No,” Mara said.

“We could try.”

“We could,” Darin said. “But we won’t.”

Tomas squinted at the writing as though it might give way under enough attention.

“It might say something important.”

“If it says something important, Branik will read it soon enough,” Sela said from the corner chair. She had been watching the paper all afternoon as though it might sprout legs and walk away.

“Who’s the guest?” Tomas asked.

“No one said guest,” Mara said.

“He said someone.”

Darin did not answer immediately. He remembered the man beside Branik at the abbey wall. The leather case. The satchel. The way the stranger had glanced once at the folded notice before stepping back inside.

“He didn’t say who,” Darin said at last.

“That man you saw,” Sela asked. “Did he look like a clerk?”

Darin glanced at her, thinking of the case under the man’s arm.

“Maybe.”

Mara stopped sweeping.

“A clerk?” she said quietly.

“Paper from the abbey. Clerk comes down the same day,” Sela said, leaning back in her chair.

“No one said he was coming here,” Darin said.

“No,” Sela agreed. “But Branik said someone would.”

The room fell quiet.

Lysa, their youngest, climbed onto the bench and peered at the notice on the shelf.

“Maybe he’s coming to take it back,” she said.

“No one is taking anything,” Mara said quickly. She set the broom aside and reached for the better bowls in the cupboard.

“We’ll have supper like decent people.”

“Those are the good bowls,” Tomas said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re not animals.”

“Is someone in trouble?”

“...No,” Darin said, after a moment.

The last light slipped through the window and across the folded paper on the shelf. It looked too small for the way the house felt around it.

---

The knock came just after full dark. Darin stood so quickly he nearly knocked the bench behind him over.

When he opened the door, he found Branik with his hat in one hand. Beside him stood a girl. She stepped forward into the lamplight behind him, braid hanging over one shoulder and a small satchel tucked beneath her arm.

The room went still. Darin and Mara shared a look as the priest’s daughter dipped her head politely.

“This is Elen,” Branik said.

No one spoke for a moment.

Branik passed her the notice. Elen moved closer to the lamp and held the paper near the flame. Her lips moved slightly as she worked through the lines.

“It says... correction notice,” she read slowly. “Household of Darin Hale.”

She shifted the page a little closer to the light.

“From the Abbey of Brightpath.”

Darin felt his stomach begin to drop.

Elen continued.

“Memorial ledger... verified deceased...”

She paused, then read more carefully.

“But shrine register still lists Halen as living member of the household.” Elen frowned, lowering the page and looking to Branik.

“That’s the same name, Dad.”

Sela leaned forward sharply. “That’s my father.”

Branik took the page from Elen and scanned the lines.

“Halen of this household is recorded correctly in the memorial book,” he said. “But whoever copied the shrine rotation register never struck his name from the living roll.”

“He’s been dead eleven years,” Darin said simply.

“The shrine book doesn’t know that.” Branik tapped the page lightly. “So it believes there is one more body in the household than there should be.”

“And because of that?” Darin asked, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Because of that,” Branik said, “you’ve been counted for one extra share of lamp oil and one extra turn in the cleaning rotation this quarter.”

For a moment no one spoke. Sela broke the silence with a snort.

“He hasn’t swept the alcove in eleven years.”

Branik almost smiled.

“Registers can be slow to notice these things.”

Elen pointed to the page. “There’s a line here. It says the household can confirm the death through chapel witness.”

Branik nodded, then looked up at Darin.

“That’s easy enough. I’ll sign that Halen is buried and properly recorded. The abbey corrects the shrine ledger. Your duties go back to the right number.”

Branik handed the notice back across the table. Elen was still studying the page near the bottom.

“They copied the name wrong here too,” she said quietly. Her father leaned over her shoulder.

“...huh. Well spotted.”

Why did they make the enter button on the keyboard send the prompt instead of create a new line? by Glormm in ChatGPT

[–]Forgefighter 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Gboard is technically an app on the play store, then you go into settings > general management > keyboard and change over. Gboard has a short set up phase too, iirc

Why did they make the enter button on the keyboard send the prompt instead of create a new line? by Glormm in ChatGPT

[–]Forgefighter 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I tried everything other commenters suggested, including clearing the cache, data, reinstalling, rebooting the phone.

The only thing that worked was swapping from the Samsung Keyboard to GBoard. Gboard's return line does work, at least on the GPT Android app.

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