Challenge a Furthurz (Insert Prompt, Get Poem/Flash Fiction)

[Feathers]

Whoops, accidental post! Will edit later with my responses to my prompts. *facepalm*

[Feathers]

@Kestrad: Yush, he was certainly brilliant. Have you ever read “Hills Like White Elephants?” It’s a really short story, but he puts SO MUCH MEANING into every single word. It’s incredible.

@Yellowfang: Ooh, good prompt. Lessee, lessee…

"Ocean"
They refer to the ocean as a woman, the sailors and the fisherman. They call it a lover, a mother, a temptress. But he’s always been a male to Risha.

Maybe that’s only because she’s a woman that he does that, comes to her window at nights with his tiny shells to toss to her window. He’s not trying to get her attention, she thinks; he just likes throwing her seashells. He looks surprised every time she pokes her head from the window and calls in a loud whisper, “Be right down.”

And he appears tall to her, maybe because she used to say to the ocean, to him, how much she wanted to look up at someone when she was little. She talked to the ocean so much that she thinks she gave him life…but that’s too much responsibility. She didn’t bring him to life, she just had such a hole in her chest that he decided to speak back to her. That was all, she decides, standing outside, looking at him. His eyes are colorless, or if they have color, it changes like the flickering of a hummingbird’s wings. Gray, blue, green, and some strange mixture of something between, and then the color slides away. His hair is the color of white sand, too pale for a real person, like he’d seen her blonde hair and tried to recreate it with mixed results. And his skin is the color of sealskin, grayish brown, but not sickly. It gleams like it’s just a little damp all the time.

When she comes down from her empty house, they walk on the beach together and he says the same words, their ritual, their prayer ever since she was fifteen years old: “Have you any troubles today?” And she always has something to share with him, some problem to worry at, as their foots leave light prints in the sand. He collects all the seashells he finds and braids them in her hair when they stop at their cove; those shells, braided like knots into her hair, are the only sign of his reality. He is the best listener she’s ever met, and as the years pass, she talks less and less, more and more content to walk with him, their shoulders almost but not touching, eyeing the shells he selects for her hair. She never cuts it too short for him to braid.

And then one night, when he asks his nightly question, she has nothing to say to him. No taxes, no relatives, no funny men with large glasses trying to tell her she’s not old enough to live in her house on the beach and care for it properly. No problems. And she tells him that, says, “Actually, I haven’t. I don’t. My publisher’s off my back, and Uncle Rob hasn’t tried to pull any legal stuff with my parents’ will lately.” She shrugs lightly and tries to keep moving forward, but…

He’s never touched her before, other than to braid her hair. The hand he puts on her shoulder is cool, smooth, gentle. “Do you mean that?” His voice sounds like a storm on the horizon, dangerous in a distant, invisible way. “Your troubles have ceased?”

Risha’s throat closes into a knot. What has she said? But she has to nod, swallow, say again, “I’m…happy. Right now, today, I’m happy.”

The ocean stares at her, silent, eyes unblinking. He’s never been more terrifyingly blank, more motionless. She freezes, and wildly her mind turns in circles. She’d managed to think of him as human, somehow, or at least not as dangerous, as the ocean, and right now he’s so alien to her. She can’t see her friend of so many years right now.

After a lifetime, after a moment, the ocean sighs and nods. “That is good, then,” he says, his voice low, something somber running like a riptide under his breath. And they walk to their cove, the stillness broken in all but the beat of Risha’s heart. He picks up shells and braids them into her hair, and they talk quietly of things like smells and memories and the way the sand feels between their toes, but Risha’s throat never comes quite untied. Something’s different.

And when she wakes up in the morning, that feeling remains throughout her day, lingering over her skin like the fine layer of salt from living on the beach. And that night, there are no seashells at her window, no one looking up at her surprised when she leans from her windowsill. She goes outside and wanders the beach that night, up and down, from her house to their cove and back again so many times she loses count. She falls asleep wrapped in a blanket of sand, curled in on herself like a shell, leaking ocean water from her eyes.

But when she wakes up, there are shells in her hair.

@Tsukistar: and here’s my response to your prompt. c:

"Shots of Fairy Dust"
“If a wolf could tell you his story, you wouldn’t want to hear it. ‘Nother shot of fairy dust here, please.” There was barely a pause between the Fairy Godmother’s words as she raises a tired wand at the bartender, who gave her a critical once-over with his good eye.

“Lady, you look like you’ve had enough. You’re sparking.”

The Fairy Godmother turned her head to look at her wings. Yes, they were currently emitting small sparks and darts of colored light like she was a merrily burning fire, but curse it all, she’d had a long day. She glared at the bartender through her purple bangs.

“Young man, I may look youthful, but I’ve been around long enough that I probably brought together some couple in your ancestry and I’ve got enough magic in my nose to undo Sleeping Beauty’s curse, so if you’d like to end up with your ears on your buttocks, by all means, keep giving me that lip.” The bartender blinked, wavered, and with a put-out sigh, he tipped his pitcher of fairy dust into her waiting glass.

She sipped at it, staring down into the twinkling, shifting dust. It wasn’t dust, not really; she wasn’t sure who had called it that first. But it WAS made by fairies, and that meant it was quite potently magical. Which was good for the Fairy Godmother, who needed a good buzz tonight.

She looked back to her drinking buddy, a slim, dainty princess from some country or other who was under a curse. With her wide, blue eyes and her fair hair, the Fairy Godmother was sure she was from somewhere up north, maybe Arlaidia or Porli. She sat with the perfect grace of a daughter of wealth and watched the Fairy Godmother with polite attention, sipping prettily at her tea.

“Why wouldn’t I want to hear what a wolf has to say?” she asked as a way of getting the Fairy Godmother to go on. “I should think their stories would be at the least very interesting.” Did she sound defensive?

The Fairy Godmother rolled her eyes. “Oh, sure, interesting for the first two seconds. It’s all food, food, fighting and food with wolves. At least the kind I’ve met.” She took another long draw from her glass. “And the one today, holy glass slippers, I’ve never met a wolf with a shorter attention span. He’d fallen in love with a human girl, and you’d think that’d never happened to anyone before. ALL he wanted to talk about was ‘Oh, do you think she’d like rabbit meat? I like rabbit meat. D’you think you could turn me human again?’”

The cursed princess blinked and her eyelashes began to tremble. Oh, no, the Godmother thought. I’ve accidentally done it again. “Human again?” the princess whispered, her voice fluttering and high. “The wolf…did he speak? Was he a talking wolf?”

The Fairy Godmother rolled her eyes again, then put her fingertips to her temple. All the eye-rolling was starting to give her a headache. “Sure, love. He was a talking wolf whose duty was to guard a princess in some kind of magical tower from which--”

“--She may not escape until her eyes can see beneath the monster…” The princess was getting breathier by the second. “Oh, I’ve made a terrible mistake!” She stood up far more quickly than Miss Manners allowed and rushed out of the Grimm Brothers’ Tavern in a rustle of taffeta and perfect golden locks.

The Fairy Godmother stared after her for a moment, sighed, and turned back to the bartender. “Another shot, please.”

Whew, that took me longer than I meant for it to take me to post. >.> Creating a new post so as to bump le topic.

And for interested parties, the first prompt, “Ocean,” came out to 820 words, and the second, “Shots of Fairy Dust,” to 602. c:

[Mathcat]

Okay, here's my prompt, based on one of my more interesting recent typos. The phrase is "something interesting to talk to" (the full phrase was "hoping to find something interesting to talk to," if you'd rather work with that). I'd really love to see what you come up with. Thanks!

[Kestrad]

I have read "Hills like White Elephants" (for my flash fiction class xD ) but I didn't enjoy it that much. I really loved The Old Man and the Sea, though.

The story with the fairy godmother and a wolf's story was awesome, by the way Oh, and another prompt for you! "One last time." Have fun!

[Feathers]

Wow, it took me WAY too long to respond to your prompts, guys! DX I'm terribly sorry. The crash ate my first post, and then an internet hiccup ate the second attempt; I got so frustrated that I wrote the response to Mathcat's prompt down in a notebook and just hadn't got around to typing it up. So sorry! And Kestrad, your poem took me too long to get up here, as well; however, both were VERY fun prompts, so thank you guys for challenging me! I'll get on later and post the poem I wrote for that prompt because I have to run now. c:

(I feel like I wrote a small novel for this one, lulz)
"Something Interesting to Talk to"
My mother pats me on the shoulder and croons, "Oh, sweetie, cheer up! You'll find your familiar in time! You just have to keep your head up and, you know, find something interesting to talk to."

Sensing, perhaps, that her attempt at consoling her daughter isn't working, Mom sits down next to me at the kitchen table, which I can tell by the scrape of the chair's legs on the tile. My forehead will nevertheless stay firmly pressed to the table, thank you very much. "Oh, Helene, I know it all seems hopeless now, but if you just stay hopeful anyway--"

"Mom. Please."

"I mean, you remember great-aunt Lucy and how long it took her to find hers?"

"Mom."

"She was only thirteen hours from her birthday until she got lucky enough to find the salamander in that old pistol and look at what a fine Compass she turned out to be. I mean, yes, she pressed the limit, but it all..." Her voice trails off at my lack of response. She's getting tangibly uncomfortable. I resolve to maintain my steady, unblinking eye contact with this particular knot of wood until she gets bored and goes away. "Helene, you're being quite immature, honey. You've still got three whole days. That's, erm, lots more than great-aunt Lucy."

I can't handle this. "Okay, I get the hint, I'll go away for a while." I stand up so fast my chair clatters to the floor. Mom jumps and I guility right the chair.

"Fifty-nine more hours. That's how many more." As I gather my shoes, jacket, and bag from where I flung them in my after-school rage, Mom watches me half-guardedly. "I know, Mom. I'll see you later." Things gathered, I make my escape to the front door, but before I can retreat, Mom gets in one final well-meant, soul-stabbing comment.

"Remember, being a Stone isn't the worst thing in the world!" And the door slams behind me.

Standing outside in the biting cold air, I stuff my hands into my pockets and set off on my wand'ring or whatever. "Not the worst thing in the world," I mutter darkly. Yeah, she'd know.

My family, for time immemorial and all that crap, has been different from the rest of the world ever since some ancient relative decided it would be fun to piss off a god: we possess the gift, or curse, of becoming Compasses, guides for the ghosts of the dead and for the Spirits who slip between our dimension and theirs like they're on vacation. There's tons of us now, spread all over the globe, thanks to immigration in the 1800s and a particularly virile member of the family in the 1700s. Still, we manage to keep ourselves busy with our gifted curse, moving the dead on to their next plane of existence and keeping rogue Spirits from getting into too much trouble on Earth.

I kick a loose piece of gravel as I walk down the sidewalk aimlessly. Not all of us are up to snuff, so to speak, though. See, there's this rite that we start at the age of nine, and then we have up to nine years to complete it. Nine's an important number, for some reason, but anyway, in those nine years, we have to try to find a familiar. It's rough talking to some Spirits; pixies just want to make mayhem and angels are too full of self-righteousness to listen to what you're saying to them back. And none of the dead ever want to hear about moving on to the next world, much less be told they HAVE to. So my family quickly realized, all those three or four thousand years ago, that we wouldn't get very far on our own trying to live up to our duty.

Enter the Others. Basically, they're people who can see the Spirits and ghosts like us, but they don't have our boundaries, our duty. Goody for them, except they and the Spirits really, really hate each other. My family's not really sure why; we're cool with both sides, really. But the Spirits attack the Others pretty much on sight, and the Others, for thousands of years, would respond by hexing the Spirits they found with a particular sort of curse that bound the Spirit to a physical object in this realm. At least, that used to be the practice; recenetly, within the last 200 years, the Others seem to have figured out a way to just make the Spirits they find go poof, somehow.

Anyway, so my family, all those millenia back, noticed the hexing hangup of the Others and thought to themselves, "Say, that seems like a good way to get some assistance." So we formed this rite, this nine-year rite, where a young member of our family must find a Spirit bound to an object and present it with a deal: we need help dealing with Spirits and ghosts who aren't really open to constructive, you need unhooked from the curse that binds you to that trap. What say we help each other out?

I sigh and drag myself half-physically out of my consideration. Without paying attention I've wandered to the local park. Picking a bench, I sit for a moment to observe the goings-on, which are slim to none on a cold mid-December afternoon. This is the part of my family's history that sticks in my craw.

Because ever since the Others stopped binding and started zapping, there are fewer and fewer Spirits to be found, and if I can't find a familiar before my eighteenth birthday, I'll be labelled a Stone in the family annals, someone who can only sit and watch Spirits and ghosts until an actual Compass can show up and send them on their merry way. I'll be useless.

I won't be a Stone. I'll jump off of something tall first.

I growl to myself and stand. I don't want to think about it any more and this bench is freezing my arse off anyway. Walking across the park toward the playground, I peer glumly at every pebble, every stray piece of trash. You never know. As I draw closer, I can make out a ghost wandering around playground, looking lost, as ghosts tend to do. I pick up my pace and jog up to it. There's really not a lot I can do without a familiar to lend weight to my words, but I can at least go and give it a push toward the underworld, even if it doesn't budge. The frozen pieces of gravel crunch under my shoes as I approach, but the ghost is too preoccupied with watching the swings sway dejectedly in the soft wind to look at me. Ghosts are such a bummer.

"Hey, you, dead stuff." At my call, the ghost turns half around to follow the sound, its spectral shroud spinning and swirling as if the wind could touch it. The sun passes sluggishly through its colorless, bald head.

"You see me," the ghost moans plaintively. "Please, where's my father?"

I wince and shake my head, even if the ghost can't see me. Ghosts all look alike, no hair or skin or limbs, just vague, colorless torsos floating around, so it's next to impossible to guess at their genders or ages...unless they say something to give you a hint. "Your father's not here."

"He told me he would pick me up as soon as he got done at the car wash." The ghost's gray, sightless eyes get a little fuzzier at the edges. "He promised he'd be here. Right here!"

I cross my arms and dig through my memory for things my older sister says to ghosts. Of course, she has a sylph to help her enforce what she says, but who's thinking about that? Not me, Jack. "Can you see a glowing light anywhere near you, sweetie?"

The ghost begins to whimper quietly and ignores me, swirling its shroud as it turns away.

I growl and kick the swingset, which serves only to stub my toes. Without a Spirit to present itself to the ghost in the world the ghost sees, my voice is just another confusing, nonsensical noise to it.

"Hey, you, Compass."

The skin at the base of my spine crawls into goosebumps and I turn around slowly on the balls of my feet. The boy standing ten feet behind me grins, gives me a jaunty salute complete with a smart click of his steel-heeled boots. Dressed in a black leather jacket that jingles with steel hoops and baubles stuck through it, complete with his rough blue jeans, he's clearly trying way too hard to look dark and brooding. The golden tan, bright blue eyes, and surfer-blond hair ruin the effect, though.

"And who are you supposed to be? Or what, I guess I should say." I roll my eyes but keep alert. This guy's obviously not a normal person. "Lord and King of alll that is Hipster, I presume."

The boy chuckles dangerously. He can't be much older than me, and he may even be younger, but he moves like a powerful man in his prime. "Ah, love, you talk so big for a Compass with no direction." I can't place his accent, but it sounds practiced, old, like someone who's been good at making speeches on the fly for years. He slides a step closer; behind me, the ghost mutters to itself about its father. "I'm a will-o'-the-wisp, Compass mine." There's a loud, firecracker pop and the boy disappears, replaced by a soccer ball-sized orb of light that shoots forward faster than my eye can follow. By the time I can splutter out a curse and stumble back, the orb circles me twice and stops in front of my nose. It pops loudly again and then the boy stands nose to nose with me.

It takes all of my practice having staring contests with the kitchen table to keep me from flinching back now. We stand way too close for way too long, and at last the wisp chuckles again, more light-heartedly this time. He darts in and presses his lips to the tip of my nose, stepping back quickly before I can lash out with a jab of my fist. He licks his lips. "Tasty."

"Okay, look, I may not be an active Compass yet, but I know a few who can be here in less than half a minute." Kind of a lie and my voice is shaky, but I'm not feeling super stable right now. Stupid heart, racing in, erm, adrenaline. "Get gone."

"Hm." The wisp hooks his thumbs through his belt loops. "Lots of fun, I'm sure, but I'm a smidge rushed at the moment and I need your aid."

My cheeks are practically steaming. "Look, I have no familiar. I can't help you. Get lost already."

"Mm, and that's where I enter, stage left." He does a little hop to the right as if stepping onto a stage and grins. "I'm offering you my assistance."

I frown. Spirits, especially tricksy ones like kelpies and phoukas and wills-o'-the-wisp, are hugely anti-restraints. They agree to pacts and promises only as their very last recourse, and sometimes not even then. We only end up with tricksters as familiars because they need a way out and we're their only escape.

As I frown at him, the wisps begins to fidget, the first time his cool has slipped. He rocks back and forth on heels and glances just slightly over his shoulder. "What's it going to cost me?" I ask slowly. This is way too perfect. Fate is never this kind, especially to me. Something's weird here and as desperately as I want to jump up and down yelling "Yes, yes, oh, sweet gods, yes!" I'm not leaping into this face first.

"Oh, naught, naught. How old are you, pet? Sixteen? Seventeen? You must be growing anxious." He's talking faster and faster, his accent getting thicker and thicker. Speaking of growing anxious. Something's definitely off here.

"What's going on?"

"I'll give you my true name!" the wisp blurts.

I gape. None of the Spirits ever share their true names; their names encompass all that they are, and to know their names is to control them completely. It's like he's offering me the remote control to his soul.

"I...I don't..." is all I can manage to stammer. There's no cheery idiom that deals with this. I don't think anyone in my family can even begin to claim they've dealt with something like this.

The wisp looks behind him again and groans impatiently, "Oh, stars and ash, I swear it on Bonny Lady Mab's left hand I'll give you my name if you'll take me as your familiar!"

That desperate note, the way his voice breaks and wobbles on the solemn vow, that's what does it. "Fine," I snap, spitting the word before I can come to my senses and start peering at this gift horse's teeth.

The wisp smiles and it's lovely. "Perfect." He steps right up to me again, wraps one hand around my waist and the other around the side of my neck to hold me still. His mouth is right next to my ear and even pulling away just tightens his grip. He's only a few inches taller than me, even in those boots, and I'm sure he can feel my pulse quicken under his thumb.

"My name, the true name that I am, is Vyr Rine el Tlar." His voice, low and rumbling, is so quiet that it's as if he merely drops the words from his mind to mine. There's a heat spreading from his hands to me, through me, and I don't know if it's real or if I'm imagining it. "Never forget it and never speak it to another. Say it now and seal the bond."

I gulp, but my voice is steady and serious. "Vyr Rine el Tlar," I whisper.

The wisp sighs and I feel a pressure at my breastbone. Then the heat and the pressure are gone and the wisp backs off. Not before giving my earlobe a quick, gentle nibble, though, and my hand lashes out at him too late.

"Okay, all that's gotta stop," I snarl, but the wisp still looks far too pleased with himself to hear me. His thumbs are back in his belt loops but now his rocking back and forth is cocky. "Do whatever your part of the Compass ritual is, love. My half is done."

Now that I have his name, now that I'm about to get my familiar after almost exactly nine damn years of searching, my elation is creeping around the edges of my reason. Wills-o'-the-wisp, from my family's annals, are pretty bad-ass familiars, being bearers of big magic and above human speed and strength in their human-like forms. They're clever, too, and rarely get themselves caught by Others. "Okay, um, let me get myself together." I close my eyes for just a moment to summon the words I memorized when I was seven years old. They're in some ancient language I can't even name, a tongue that died centuries before Latin was muttered, and I think we lost their meaning long before that. But as I say them, each gutteral word sharp as summer sun in the winter air, their power, their meaning is obvious. The wisp sobers up and watches me recite with guarded, narrow eyes that begin to glow like the blue heart of a fire. And then I finish the recitation and take a deep breath. The wisp chuckles as if he's out of air and, at my nod, repeats the last few words.

"So that's how it feels to be bound to a Compass," he mutters, then grins devilishly. "I must say, it's an altogether enjoyable pain. But doesn't everyone find pain...exciting?"

I grit my teeth at him. "Look, I get you think you're hot stuff, really I do, but will you please shut your face and help me with this ghost?" I feel this is a terribly irreverant way to start business with my familiar, but I can't help it.

The wisp (my wisp? Yikes) grins lopsidedly and steps sideways, as if he's going to step around me, but instead there is that popping sound and the orb of light floats past, going right up to the ghost. "Right, you, let's get on to the other side, yes?"

The ghost shifts around and sideways so suddenly that I know it's startled. "W-who are you? the ghost stammers. "I'm waiting for me--"

"Your father, yes, I heard." The orb seems to nudge the ghost. "Why don't let's see if he's over here, with the sparkling, fizzy pit."

"...I guess if..."

"If, indeed. Come on, let's get moving!" The orb shoves the ghost another foot and the ghost disappears in a soft squeaking and sparkle. The orb pops and the wisp stands there looking bored and mildly worried. "Easy as breath, love. Shall we away?"

I blink at him. He's getting visibly anxious again, shifting from foot to foot. "Is that how you deal with all dead people?"

"Well, she's dealt, isn't she? I thought you wanted that. Let's go now, please?"

"Because that was pretty harsh."

The wisp groans. He's got moods like a seesaw, apparently. "Oh, I'll attempt more diplomacy in the future, now, if you please, can we--"

"Hey, you, princey."

Okay, are people mocking me or have I accidentally stumbled upon the next big thing in sarcastic greetings? The new voice is husky, feminine, and sultry, the kind of voice that belongs in film noire. She sounds deadly and playful as a jungle cat. The wisp looks over my shoulder at the speaker and winces. I turn.

She matches her voice pretty perfectly. Her hair is cut in a very neat flapper-esque bob, and combined with her smoky eye makeup and the belled scarf tied in her hair as a headband, she looks like a gypsy.

But as she can see the wisp and she's not, to my knowledge, related to me, I can assume she's either a Spirit or an Other.

"I'm afraid I can't help you, Gloria," the wisp tells her with a meek bow of his head. "I'm a familiar to a Compass now."

The woman's eyes turn to me and I can do nothing but look back at her. She's lovely, with her dark, dark eyes and smooth black hair, but she's terrifying, too. What is going on with these two? "This Compass? You're joking me. She looks over the age."

"No, no, she's not, I assure you," the wisp interjects quickly. "I am to be her familiar for the rest of her life, you know. So I can't abandon my duties."

The woman scoffs. "You know, 'the rest of her life' could be arranged to be now, if you'd like." My heart leaps.

"No need, no need. I suppose it's just my punishment for carelessness." The wisp gives a melodramatic sigh and shrug. "You'd best go spread the word, Gloria."

"Gloria" stares at the wisp; does he seem to shuffle ever so slightly to stand behind me? Finally she sighs with way too much anger and points a finger first at the wisp. "This isn't over, Rine." The finger moves to me. "Or with you, Compass girl." With that, she opens her mouth as if for a yawn, but instead smoke begins to pour out of her lips, more and more and more until her skin shrivels away and the huge trail of smoke snakse off through the atmosphere.

I stare after her until the smoke looks like nothing more than a tiny gray cloud in the distance. Racking my brain, I can think of no Spirits my family has chronicled that can do that. And I've been studying the annals since practically before I could read.

What. The. Hell.

The wisp, apparently known casually as Rine, coughs awkwardly and taps my shoulder. I jump. "Sorry about that, love. She's really a pussycat when you get to know her." I give him a look and his voice gets even meeker. "Did you, um, ever tell me your name?"

"I'm Helene, but don't change the subject. What was all that?" I gesture at the disappeared dot of smoke.

His thumbs go back through the loops and he's rocking on his heels. It's like clockwork. "Erm. Rather a large issue, that. Mayhap we could go back to wherever you dwell and--"

I grab his shoulders and give him a quick shake. "Look, I can undo the binding and develop amnesia and go on with my life, Stone or not. You tell me what you've dragged me into!"

"Fine, fine!" He sighs and I take my arms away to cross them over my chest. When he speaks again, he speaks slowly. "I, ah, am the heir to a minor Court. Nothing very important, mind, but a throne nonetheless is a throne. I was quite far down on the line of heirs for several decades and centuries because it's traditionally a weak throne, the Court of Steel. Not a prosperous Court...until humanity made such use of the blest stuff." A deep sigh. "Long tale short, members of the line started mysteriously bumping off until it got down to me, and I fear I'm being pursued by women trying to marry me and assassins who want to murder me alike."

"I see." My voice is girlishly breathy. I clear my throat. "And in which category does Gloria fall?"

"Possibly both." Rine smiles sheepishly.

"So by becoming my familiar..." I swallow.

"...I've earned myself seventy-odd years of safety." His eyes burn softly. "If you'll consent to aid me, that is."

When I don't reply, he takes my hands and I'm too numb to do much more than listen and watch him speak. "I shan't deny that it will not be easy, having me for your familiar, sweet Helene. There will be Spirits trying to murder or steal or marry me on occasion, but I promise to do my duty and be as little trouble to you as I can. Oh, do say you'll keep me. We need each other, do we not?"

I focus on breathing and close my eyes. My family has heard stories about Spirits having Courts, rumored to be ways of dividing up the power of various things like Light or Stars or Wind. We don't know a lot about them; they're kept very hush-hush. I didn't even know they had princes. If Rine was my familiar, I'd be able to add so much information to the annals.

I'd become famous in my family for generations to come.

Apparently my decision shows on my face because he's already grinning when I open my eyes. He squeezes my hands and drops one, holding the other tightly. "Lead me to my new home, love, and we can begin to work as Compass and familiar, perfectly in synch, working together as closely as..."

He chatters on but I'm not really listening. I'm too busy grinning giddily.

He's dangerous and cocky and rude.

But he's something interesting to talk to.

[Feathers]

Okay, and now that I have the time to get it transferred, here's the poem I wrote for Kestrad's prompt, 'one last time.'


"One Last Beginning"

It's enough to say 'the end,' but it's so much harder
To say 'the beginning.' The end is done, because you
And I can't go back there anymore.

But the beginning.

The beginning means one more time.
The beginning means this could be the end,
And I'm so scared of question marks and dots

And you know that.

So you hold my hands like you're holding glass,
But your eyes gleam like water.
"One last time," you ask me. "One last beginning with me."

And I say yes.

[Mathcat]

Thanks so much for the story - I really enjoyed it!

[freakazoid]

Awesome! :o
Two more prompts:
April
Rain

[Feathers]

Thanks for the prompts, Yellowfang! c: I wrote a bitty flash fiction for 'April' and a poem for 'rain.' The first is about the most terrifying type of obsessive, possessive love, and the second is prettier, if sadder. CX

"Ember Heart"
They will call me cold when they hear of this but I swear that I am on fire. I swear that I have burned for her, for my April. I see her everywhere, in the arms of other men, in window panes and mirror reflections, in my arms again every time I close my eyes.

No one can really understand the fire I have for her, none of them. I bring her with me everywhere, and I see her in the faces around me. But no matter how I try, who I try, none are her, not even dressed in her clothes or saying her words.

She is here somewhere, I know she is, inside any one of the ribcages I peel back from the would-be Aprils like the lids of tin cans, like stamps from paper. They try to trick me but I always know because I know what her heart feels like. I held it in my hands and it was on fire. I held her ember heart in my hands until the air around it came aflame.

Oh, they will say I searched for her with a heart of ice, but I will say I burn.

"The Rainstorm"
We write of pain and speak of joy
But who is there to sing for stillness?
Who remains to say I stand in the heart of thunderstorms,
The wind presses thousands of kisses to my brow,
The trees moan their secrets in my ears,
The rain wraps my shoulders in its coldest, kindest blanket
And grass bleeds sweet smells all around me,
But still

I feel numb?

[freakazoid]

I love them both; but especially the 'April' one.
Hurr what can you do with: Summer Night
edit: OH and what can you do with: April Rain
If possible, can the 'April Rain' one be like "Ember Heart"?