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 Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:21 pm
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Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:24 pm
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Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:21 pm
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Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 6:22 pm
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Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:10 pm
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Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:19 pm
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Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:33 pm
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Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 5:52 pm
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Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 5:55 pm
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Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 5:59 pm
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Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 2:18 pm
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[THE QUICKENING]
[PART ONE]
|homecoming|
Spring break, and she stood in the doorway of the cathedral where she lived for the first time in five months. A black suitcase, shiny with evidence of recent purchase, leaned against the jamb of the door. Her headphones were flung around her neck, as usual. But overall, Aurelius looked just fine.
She rang the doorbell, lifting her hand slowly, as if it weighed at least as much as the suitcase next to her. The shrill sound of the doorbell hurt her ears, so she dropped her arm back to her side.
Aure didn't want to be here.
Sure. It seemed like whatever monster Riku was creating had died. Only the usual uneasiness of seeing family you haven't even spoken to in months fluttered about in the general area of her stomach; there wasn't any tried-and-true nausea lurking in there. She had no love for abominations of nature.
The door opened, revealing the purple-haired persocom that had plagued Aurelius throughout her childhood. "Aurie," she said, flinging her arms around the girl. "You've gotten so big, my little love!" The target of her affections bore it stoically, without any kind of mention of the fact that she was barely shorter than Ku now, and hardly little. Also, she didn't speak up and say that she didn't particularly like Ku, and never had; she stayed solemn and silent, waiting it out.
It didn't work.
"Please let me go, Ku. I want to go inside." Her backpack weighed heavily on her shoulder, seeing as it had gorged itself upon books and note papers from a school upon the planet Earth. She wanted to put it down, maybe in the closet, and ignore it until the spring break finished in two weeks. As a matter of fact, this pleased her so much that she willingly ignored Tsu and Wolfram coming out to cling to her long skirt. After a moment of a 'group' hug which neither desired nor needed Aure's participation, Ku let her go inside, trailing the black bag. Tsu endeavoured, with the help of Wolfram, to close the door behind her.
"Where are Kieve and Mother?" Aure said this very carefully, without inflection. The uneasy looks between the persocom and angel told her all she needed to know, but she waited for them to vocalize it. She needed to hear it from their own mouths, not from correct conjecture in her own mind. Maybe she was wrong...
But she didn't think so.
Tsu was the bravest. She said, "Well, it's not like we didn't try to get them out here." Ku was quick to follow that with an explanation.
"Yes, Aurie, we sat outside and begged for her to come out! but she didn't want to. You must know we tried, we really did. We know that it would have meant a lot to you, but they refused to be budged!" Wolfram nodded his quick agreement, turning large brown eyes to Aure.
Every face in the room fell at her reaction. Her eyes had first gone wide, then narrowed into mere slits of green. Bright red had stained her cheeks, blooming like roses. For a minute, Ku thought for sure she would have to clear tears up, or at least fix some shattered pottery. She had seen this in a toddler Aure, and thought she knew how to deal with it.
Well, she was very very wrong. Aure had learned much better coping skills as a child.
Wordlessly, the Illusionary heaved her heavy backpack into Ku's face with surprising alacrity for someone with such poor muscle tone. Papers scattered everywhere, leaving Wolfram and Tsu buried underneath them, like the residents of ancient Pompeii. The green-haired persocom fought her way out from under Aurelius's Life Sciences text and started to heave it up onto the proper side. It didn't stand to be an easy task. A girl nearly six times the size of Tsu thought it heavy; to the persocom, moving the textbook would be like moving Mount Vesuvius, and twice as laborious.
"Really!" Tsu said.
The blonde girl stormed across the room and the sunken den, slamming any open doors shut and knocking the pictures down from tables and walls. The couch became a settee as she dissolved half of it at a molecular level; the covering, a rose upholstery, turned into a fine multicolored ash and scattered in her wake. "You could have gone in and gotten them!" Her shriek echoed down the long room, audible even over the shattering of the glass frames as they fell down the steps into the sunken area. "You COULD HAVE TRIED HARDER!"
Her voice lowered in the sudden silence created by the end of crashing and a slight dip in her temper. "But you didn't." Aure executed a smart 180 degree turn on her heel, and over the crunching of glass, made her way to her room, nearly the entire way down the side of the sunken den. The door slammed shut behind her and echoed down the room to the stunned faces of Ku, Tsu and Wolfram. Several more pictures fell, and the glass shattered at the shrill scream of abject fury and despair they could hear through the thick, medieval stone walls.
"Surely Riku could hear that," Tsu said sensibly. She began to neaten up the papers.
Well... Riku could.
[▬] |
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Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 2:19 pm
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Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 2:20 pm
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[THE QUICKENING]
[PART THREE]
|the zookeepers girl|
A butterfly flaps its wings in Barton; there is a hurricane in Durem. Another scene has begun in our little tragedy...
Our setting for this act of our play is an empty plain, with waist-high green grass. A river runs through it at the far north-western corner, feeding the thorny flower bushes that form the field into a fortress from the outside world. In the field, far away from the river corner, sits a girl with golden-blond hair. Dolls of many colors and descriptions surround her, thrown about with no regard nor carefulness. Many scraps of fabric are scattered about her area, shredded into tiny strips of useless cloth. It is stormy, gray, as if it is soon to storm.
Our sole cast member is that very girl. Her skin is tanned, as if a sun god had come down to kiss her; eyes are a pale gray, near to white. They are barely open. She seems to be dazed; her fingers run over the lips of the doll she is cradling in her arms as she stares off towards the sound of far away thunder. Her black dress (silky, with many layers of lace to form the bodice and sleeves) flutters slightly around her bare toes. The wind is cold; she is shivering, but doesn't leave her place.
Her name was Undine Irving, but she didn't know this. She called herself Zige, after the song Zigeunerweisen, as written in the early 1900s by a German violinist. Zigeunerweisen is a song about the Gypsies, praising their love of freedom, their independence, and their cooking. She was not a song, but she sat in that field, free of a body or a moral center to stop her from achieving her goals.
Zige threw the doll in her lap, which she had been cradling like a child, away from herself. She had more important things to do, like...
"You can't go to sleep," she said to the girl, wavering in front of her, a baby-doll in a white nightgown. "He'll get you, the god of creation and thunder, the blazing one. I don't want him to get you, dragonfly."
The girl clung tighter to her green dog and demanded to be let go. She wanted to sleep. It would make her head hurt less.
"You'd feel better if you hadn't been crying," Zige scolded, tending to a doll with short blond hair and dragonfly eyes. "You're making yourself sick. You should've listened to that n'Barit guy. He coulda steered you right. Shoulda made friends with that Ayame girl, or that Mereneth boy. They coulda stood by you now when the blazing one comes for you, when Croatoan comes for you."
She retorted with an angry denial, her voice loud in Zige's head. It sounded of an echo of the coming storm, all driving rain and hoarse thunder. I know best for me. Let me go.
"Obviously not," she said sensibly. "Stay here. You can rest."
Let me go.
Zige shrugged. "Suit yourself, dragonfly." The baby-doll wavered in a strong wind and then vanished, as if she had never weighed more than a million tiny feathers. She watched her go with disinterested gray eyes, a tiny smile curling her dusty-rose lips. Weren't real people silly?
She petted the hair of the doll and settled back into her nest of flattened grass. The doll came with her, dragged by the hem of its pale pink dress. Dragonfly eyes opened, as if it really was a child's baby doll. It spoke, crying "Mama!" in such a convenience-store Cabbage Patch doll voice that Zige threw it away, staring at it as if it were the very devil itself. She kicked it still further away and backed up a little for good measure, wrapping thin arms around bony knees.
"I don't like you," she said. The dragonfly doll lay there, harmless, silent.
She scrambled for another doll, one with long hair and bright eyes that weren't dragonfly, with pale bronze makeup on. A tiny braid held a place of honor in the doll's hair; a feather, black as ash, was knotted into the end with a garnet ring. Her powder blue dress was embellished with lace, and her socks and shoes were shiny, new as a penny. "You, I like," she confided, as she braided another lock of hair.
Now the scene changes, turning gray, becoming a graveyard, as the storm begins. Zeus and all his gods war busily with their enemies, striking with thunderbolts and driving rain.
A wrought-iron fence appears, rising from the grassy ground like a brush was painting them into place. The top is all sharp spearheads that seem to bend over the girl and her dolls like sneering men; they grow mouths and begin to laugh. Marble tombstones sprout like bleeding hearts in neat, orderly rows. The brass nameplates are green with age and envy; the stone itself is cracked, for saplings have found places among the rock.
A mausoleum sprouts against the sky; statues of angels and saints raise their arms to shake off the clumpy, muddy dirt. The dead sigh beneath the earth, waiting for trumpet sound and Judgement Day.
The slow, rhythmic flap of a helicopter reaches its way through the rain, breaking up the noise of rain on tombstones.
Zige looked up to sky with a dreadful look on her face, a rictus smile that echoed the faces of the executed of yore. Her eyes were impossibly wide. "We're in trouble now that he's here," she said, in a little-girl voice, to the doll she held in her arms.
The helicopter came in for a landing.
[▬] |
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Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 2:21 pm
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[THE QUICKENING]
[PART FOUR]
|letterbomb|
Quote: Dear Journal; When I woke up this morning, all I felt was nausea. After leaving an unattractive mess of puke on the floor and taking a shower, I go downstairs to find my beloved mother and sister waiting. Except there's something wrong with Kieve. So she's got some cracks on her face, okay, I can deal. I'm a big girl. But it doesn't end there. One arm had a space where there was only bone. Half of her face was ruined, like acid had been thrown on it. Her chest was torn apart! I'm ashamed to say I didn't know what to do when she said hello and her voice was harsh and broken like scraping my hands over broken glass or something. It hurt to listen to. I didn't know what to do when she came over for a hug. I slapped her and turned and ran like some kind of frightened baby. I didn't want her touching me. I didn't even bring my wallet and cell phone, but I brought my retarded journal. What the hell is wrong with me?
She tossed the journal into a garbage can on her way past the alleyway where she had once found a dead bird.
[▬] |
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Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 2:22 pm
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[THE QUICKENING]
[PART FIVE]
|lloyd, i'm ready to be heartbroken|
He'd found her on a bench in the park, cheeks flushed red and fingernails bright with blood.
"You know it's not safe to wander on your own," she'd said darkly, never mind the fact that she, herself, had been alone. The blood had flowed from the cuts on her arms, where her nails had dug in so hard as to break the skin. It streaked down her arms and had flaked when she'd shifted to glare at him better.
Akenha had sat next to her and pretended to be immune to her obvious hostilities. She had continued to try and beam bad thoughts at him despite it. "So, girl," he'd finally said, in his most Friday Casual voice. "Why are you out alone then?"
She didn't answer, not even to correct him as to how to address her.
Of course, Akenha had known who she was as soon as he had seen the green dragonfly wings fluttering at the sides of her head. The only girl he knew with exactly that trait had to be the daughter of his consort. It had to be Aurelius.
And of course it had been Aurelius. He had seen a paper- with an "A+" written on it in red ink- hanging out of her green bag. Another had fallen into the mud at her feet, with her name- written in full capitals- visible to casual passerby. Akenha was never, ever wrong about such trivial things.
He had wondered if it would be worth it to bring Aure back to the coven. As a surprise for Dice.
But he had decided to abide by the contract and hand her over to Croatoan, as he'd been asked. It would keep his coven safe from discovery on mortal Earth. This had seemed important at the time, but upon later reflection...
"Just go away," she'd finally said. She'd even attempted to push him away; of course, he hadn't moved. Akenha was a vampire, ages old. If he had been human, his bones would have been dust by now. If he could be moved by a child, he wouldn't be worthy of leading a coven of his size.
He had wanted to tell her to run, just to make this more enjoyable for him. There was no enjoyment in the capture of an exhausted, bleeding child like her. The only reason he had gone out for her himself was for the challenge, one that he now found severely lacking. "No, you really should not be out so late, little girl." He had planned to whet his desire for the chase on verbal sparring.
She had not responded for several minutes.
"Would you like me to call someone to come and get you?" Her head had jerked up, as if she had been drowsing while he was sitting next to her. The momentary twinge of anger was hard to ignore. "Like you said, it is not safe to wander on your own in the dark. There might be bad men out waiting for you." Like himself.
"Like you," she'd said, an eerie echo of his thoughts. The way she had said it, like it wasn't even a question, had struck him as strange. "Your jacket smells like chlorofoam," Aurelius had added, in the fashion of a court mistress mentioning that there was a strange odor around the king. "You're not too hard to figure out."
She really was infuriating. Most humans couldn't sense the dabs of chlorofoam he had placed on his wrists and neck like some kind of exotic perfume. But he had forced himself to remain cordial. "I'll call one of my friends, you may stay with her for the night." He pulled out a cell phone and started dialling; it looked like she had dozed off again and didn't care what he did.
The phone had not rung for very long before she responded. "Hello, Verdelet clan residence. If you're a vampire, 'm sleeping, you b*****d."
The entire world had seemed to be planning to insult him tonight. "Elixabeté."
A pause, then: "Oh. Hello, Akenha, sir."
They had exchanged the pleasantries, each asking after respective others; Lixxie sounded drowsy and tentative, barely worth her own weight in copper this late. He had expected to locate Aurelius sooner, had not counted on her leaving her home. Seeing her travesty of a sister had cured him of that notion, and sent him checking on other avenues of location.
"It is time to act, Elixabeté," he'd said, lowering his voice in case Aurelius's drowsy face had been a mere act to decieve him. "She is sleeping. Now is the time."
"I got you on the first 'it's time to act'," she grumped, then she hung up.
He had settled back against the bench. His accomplice didn't live too far away from the park.
Indeed she had arrived very quickly, pale hands reaching around Aure's head with a chlorofoamed rag. "I don't want to," she'd said to him when he'd approached her for help. But she had done as he'd asked, just as she'd known he would. Because that's just how Lixxie had always been.
He hadn't felt any regret as Aure slumped and Lixxie's hands had dropped down to the girl's shoulders.
"You can go now," he'd said, and Lixxie had disappeared into the night.
But the look of utter shame on her face remained in his mind, even now.
[▬] |
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