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 Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2013 5:32 pm
1. Beginning
2. The Forest
3. Choosing
4. Midnight Rendezvous
5. Be Prepared
6. Wolves at the Door [Ilmarinen] |x|
7. Mine
8. Friend
9. Enemy
10. First Crush
11. First Date
12. Betrayal
13. Revenge
14. Prank
15. Punishment
16. Alone
17. Together
18. Soldier
19. Duty
20. Disaster
21. Peace
22. War
23. Wolves
24. Guardians
25. The Old Ways
26. Hedgewitch
27. Love
28. Hate
29. Family
30. I Love You
31. Childhood
32. Adulthood
33. Festival
34. Welcome!
35. Mentor
36. Protection
37. ... why do we have so many potatoes? [John and Rani] |x|
38. A Peaceful Moment
39. No Other Choice
40. Comfort
41. Peace
42. Orders
43. Exile
44. Healing
45. Forget
46. Loss
47. Found
48. Paradise
49. Lost
50. Victory
51. Celebration
52. Mourning
53. Rest
54. Dark
55. Light
56. Awkward
57. Hero Worship
58. The Dreaming
59. Do Guardians Dream of Sheep?
60. Memories
61. Innocence
62. Jealous
63. Hope
64. Music
65. Life
66. Death
67. Legends
68. Escape
69. Maturity
70. Wish
71. Don't Give Up
72. Give Up
73. Damn it!
74. A Light in the Dark
75. Sparks
76. A New Home
77. Simple Pleasures
78. Pets
79. Familiars
80. There Were Once Wolves in These Hills [???] |x|
81. Laughter
82. Fear
83. Hunt
84. Silence
85. Those of the Dark
86. Reunion
87. With Sweat, Blood, and Tears
88. The Heart Speaks
89. Freedom
90. Aftermath
91. What Happens Now?
92. It's not MY Fault
93. The World
94. Home
95. Safety
96. Too Late
97. Confession
98. Trapped
99. One Thing at a Time
100. Ending
[note: I know these things aren't really well-known on Gaia. The idea is to write entries for each little theme. Some people insist that each entry is supposed to be under 100 words (a drabble), but I like writing.
Feel free to steal the list, if you want to do your own challenge. There are no prizes or anything. This is simply personal practice, sort of thing. If nothing else, it's lovely writing practice and a nice opportunity to show a bit more about who your character is. :3
It doesn't have to be writing either. You can also draw pictures and things. ]
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Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2013 5:37 pm
Wolves at the Door
Traditionally, the ‘Hour of Wolves’ was anywhere between 3 and 5 am. Supposedly, it was the hour when Wolves would gather around the front door, presumably waiting for some fat human being to come tumbling out. It probably made sense in the days where privies hadn’t gotten any further than a latrine and a book with really soft pages. In this day and age, the concept of an ‘Hour of Wolves’ was ridiculous.
Wolves didn’t need to go for the door.
They lived inside minds.
The triplet wolves of fear and doubt and guilt circled Ilmarinen’s mind, haunting his every step. That was what the true Hour of the Wolves was; it was when that hour rolled around, giving you just enough reflection on the day before to realize your mistakes and feel horrible for them, and dread for the day ahead when you’d make more. It didn’t matter what had happened that day or what the next would bring; the wolves didn’t care. The mind didn’t care. Being human was basically going through life in a cesspool of anxieties. That was what the wolves did; they preyed on such things, bringing them to the surface. They were the things that held people back when they could've been something more.
A candle flame flickered, trying desperately to chase shadows away. The shadows refused to be frightened, and simply danced on the walls. ‘Walls’, they were called; they were thin enough that Ilmarinen could hear everything going on in other rooms (much do his dismay). Hell, he could stretch out his limbs and still touch two out of four of the walls. It was just a tiny room with a bed in it.
Even if it had been the biggest room in the world, it still wouldn’t have been large enough for Ilmarinen’s cramped mind. Admittedly, his work wasn’t helping much. Bits of paper were strewn around the room, crinkled up and tossed away, retrieved, flattened, and then crinkled up and thrown away again. Music wasn’t working very well as a distraction, but he was trying anyway. White hot terror streaked through his thoughts, no matter how he tried to chase it away. It was terror without words; it was the sort of thing that defined 'terror'. Oh, people tried to put words around it. Dictionaries and such. But this was the true raw deal, the emotion that came straight from the marrow.
What if the Wolves really are back? fear ate at his mind, chewing on his neurons at any chance it could get. Dad said that what happened was probably just an insane human who went mad from being alone in the woods too long. ‘The natives of Usana call it Wendigo,’ he told Ilmarinen once. ‘A spirit that invades men who have gone too long without food so that they turn to their own species for sustenance’. But Mum said it was Wolves. ‘Look at the footprints’, she’d always insist. They found footprints of Wolves the next morning, or so the rumors said.
Granted, they were only rumors. According to rumor, all sorts of things were going on.
‘Dogs’, Dad said. Had to be some particularly large dogs.
Ilmarinen wasn’t sure. Nervous fingers smoothed out another piece of paper and he hurriedly placed a few blobs of notes. The inspiration wasn't there. It wasn't even particularly good fear-music, the kind that made the blood race and heart pound, the inner ears of the brain hearing hounds at the bay.
Look at you, a voice in his mind sneered. The wolf of guilt chose to make an appearance, voice sickly snide, like a snake. Writing pretty tunes and lovely music, oh yes, that will protect people. What will you do? Threaten to play the fiddle at him?
It’ll come here, eventually.
You won’t be able to see it, because you’re pathetic.
You won’t be able to protect anyone.
Ink splattered on the page, completely obscuring the notes. It didn’t matter. It had been s**t anyway, at least according to doubt. Look at the page, all splattered with ink; even before the ink spilled, Ilmarinen’s handwriting was shaky and nigh illegible.
Ilmarinen let out a shuddering sigh and pulled his knees close to his chest. There were militias now. Men----and even a few women! Oh the scandal that was causing…----who joined to learn how to fight, so they could defend what was theirs. But they’d probably take one look at Ilmar and laugh; he was short. That was almost certainly pointed out by the wolf of doubt, the tiny little voice that always tried to stop people from being extraordinary.
The coppery-haired young man looked out the window. Snow plastered itself to the glass, like birds with really poor directional skills. The winds howled in sympathy with the triplet wolves. On nights like this, people vanished, swallowed up by the blizzards. Sometimes, they were found again. Sometimes, not enough of each person was found.
Ilmarinen's breathing steadied and he kept his gaze fixed on that snowy window, on the night sky just beyond the smeared glass. Fires burned. He'd never given up on anything in his life and this was a poor time to start. He sat up and put his feet flat on the floor.
Something was out there. It didn’t matter whether it was Wolf or man, it was dangerous and it had to be stopped.
Forget what the militia would say. He’d make them listen. He was Ilmarinen Dixon, for crying out loud! That meant never giving up. In fact, in his private dictionary, 'difficult' just translated to 'try harder'. 'Impossible' didn't exist at all. He glanced back at his music and carefully piled up the pages, hands now completely steady. Music and art would come later. Right now, it was time to fight.
Sooner or later, the Wolves, metaphorical, real, or simply just some poor insane sod, would come to the door.
Ilmarinen would make sure they burned before they got to his family or friends.
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Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2013 5:53 pm
There Were Once Wolves In These Hills...
Everyone knew the stories. Everyone had once been sat upon their parent's knee (or perhaps the very rich were sat upon a nursemaid's knee) and told the stories of how once wolves roamed the hills. They spoke with the voices of men, beguiling and beautiful, set on luring naughty children away. These were stories of blood. They took home and safety, the things that mattered the most. They took away a human's humanity, replacing it with the dull hot fear of a mere prey animal.
Perhaps the Wolves of legend were just wolves.
That didn't change the stories they inspired.
They took everything. What they left behind was fear.
There were once Wolves in the hills, in the days long before. No one was quite clear on when, precisely, the fabled beasts existed. 'Hundreds of years' was the closest estimation anyone could get.
Long before the written word anyway, or at least long before the written word became well-known. Back then, people got by on a series of pictograms. A leaf on a sign for an herbalist's shop, a shoe for a cobbler. A sign language, in fact.
But not before songs.
It was like the alphabet. Some bright spark of a mind realized that teaching tykes the alphabet was a lot easier if done through song. The same applied to the warnings of the Wolves. Actual knowledge, solid and true, slid through the cracks of the mind. But some things remained, clinging to the brains of society the only way they could. They passed through tongues and music, far into myth and legend. So far into stories that people forgot what was important:
Just because something was a legend didn't mean it wasn't true.
There were once Wolves in these hills...
...no one ever said they had stopped.
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Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 12:37 am
Why do we have so many potatoes?
Rani was, by now, used to her Chosen's more... erratic behavior. Barely a night went by without something exploding, another thing crashing and her human variously saying, 'ok, I'm pretty sure I know what went wrong that time', 'wait, that wasn't supposed to happen' and 'it's just glowing with stability'. So long as nothing was on fire, the doe's typical response to a sudden explosion was to sign and turn over onto her other side. If there was a fire, she just had to kick a sand bucket over the flames because her Chosen wouldn't do it. The fool man would, more likely, be trying to figure out what went wrong even with his own sleeve on fire. This was why, as soon as silence permeated the air, the hind woke up with a snort. Her ears twitched, straining to catch anything.
There were a few muffled thumps in the distance and then John muttering, “Oh, blast. I dropped a corner, hang on, I'll get it.”
Crinkle of metal hitting the floor as the man most likely tried to juggle three dozen things at once. For such an intelligent man, he had large pockets of stupidity, like the fact that gravity worked everywhere.
There probably were more crowded workshops. They probably existed around the North Pole and were populated by little men in green clothing and pointy hats. John had no true discipline (in every sense of the word) simply because he was so erratically interested in everything the world could throw at him. As such, his workshop represented less 'work' and more 'what would happen if an Alzheimer’s patient was given large amounts of acid and then an unlimited decorating budget'. It didn't help that John was a big follower of the Put Things Down Wherever There's Room method of filing. Rani daintily stepped to one side to avoid the skeletons that hung down from the ceiling. Something crinkled under one of her hooves and she leaned down to investigate a page from Mink Breeding for Intermediates. Other books lay nearby, ranging from such topics as cheese recipes to fairy tales. Zoology books cozied up to geology. Tomes of anatomy became close intimate friends with books on folk beliefs. Technology, history, literature. There was something for everyone, if a person looked hard enough.
Rani stumbled on something. She bleated in surprise and, against her instincts, looked down. In general, it was best not to look too closely at anything in the workshop. In this case, a whiff of dirt assailed her nostrils. Dirt? Her ears twiched again and she leaned down. A...
Potato?
There was nothing intrinsically threatening about a potato. It was a decidedly normal thing to find. Lots of places had potatoes in them, being a staple of the diet and all that.
Which was why she sighed.
Just what was her idiot up to now anyway...
As she walked by the various experiments, she passed more and more potatoes. It was like an extremely specific sort of whirlwind had whipped through the place, leaving tubers in its wake. At least John wasn't difficult to find. In general, Rani found, just following the loud noises was enough.
Stupid-human-getting-self-killed, she lectured, nudging her idiot in the back. They weren't spoken words, not as humans understood them. It was a language nonetheless, one of sensations and emotions that came straight from the blood and bone and twisted itself into the mind.
“Oh, I am not, don't exaggerate so much, Rani,” John said automatically. He lifted a hand and patted the hind's nose affectionately. “If I died every time you said I was trying to get myself killed, I'd be dead. And then where would we be?”
You mean besides dead? Rani thought to herself. Stupid-human-not-trying-hard-enough-to-stay-alive, the hind corrected, rolling her eyes. Fine, semantics, semantics. What did she care? The essential idea was there: her human was being a bloody fool. And what was with all those potatoes anyway? Her yellow eyes narrowed at the tuberous vegetables that littered the table in front of John. Many of them had strange metal rods sticking out of them and mysterious wires. No sign of steam, though, so she assumed nothing would explode.
Then again, if anyone could find a way to make a potato explode, it would be her John.
“It's a harmless experiment...”
Rani gave her Chosen a Look that fully deserved the capital letters. It deserved its own definition in the dictionary. It was mostly defined as, 'you've got to be ******** kidding me'.
“In all fairness, we learned a lot from the flour incident. For instance, we learnt that flour explodes,” John said, still messing with the wires and potatoes. He paused for just a moment. “Alright, so maybe that one wasn't as harmless as I thought it would be, but that's no reason to be afraid of sciiizzzzz!” that was because the tip of a finger touched a wire. A jolt of something spasmed his muscles until he was forced to drop the potato.
Rani was immediately on the scene. Stupid-human-alright? she sent, nuzzling her idiot once more.
“Oooh, that smarts! Some sort of... energy thing that does things when there's the right stuff,” the man said as he shook his hand frantically. “Some sort of... hmm...” He leaned over and picked up the root vegetable once more, examining it. More carefully this time, he selected another wire, this one more of a tight coil than the other, and pushed it into the potato. The wire glowed. Not particularly brightly and not for very long, but it was definitely something.
“Awww, see that? That's brilliant, it is. A new light source...”
It failed to impress Rani even a little bit. They had gas lamps. They had candles. What they didn't need was for her idiot to get himself killed over something they already had.
Also, she thought as she looked down once more, they'd need to do something with all these potatoes.
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