Dandelyon's Worlds

Sandie read the local papers obsessively, though most of them weren’t even on paper any more. They had kept her finger on the pulse of her City, so she could sell feature articles and humor pieces to the magazines. Now she also read the #Chicaugwa twitter stream and various local blogs and Facebook pages too. Chicaugwa was endlessly fascinating, vibrant and alive.

But today she frowned as she read. There were more want ads, but people complained of insufficient jobs. Apartment ads were plentiful, and house sales were down. Economic indices were up, but the spirit of the people of Chicago was unhappy, restless, even hopeless. She had seen it first on the street, in the grocery stores and restaurants, but now it was everywhere, even on MySpace. People were leaving, packing up their families and pets, abandoning beloved jobs, and, like it was an afterthought, putting their dream homes into the hands of harried real estate agents. It just didn’t make sense.

Sandie picked up the next neighborhood paper and scanned it, then shook her head. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong, but this only showed the symptoms. She would have to go out and find the cause—but where?

It was time to check a different source of information. The old ways were usually vague or as maddeningly symbolic and obscure as the Delphic Oracle, but sometimes they were needed.

She cleaned her dining room carefully and took the leaves out of the center of the tablee, leaving herself with a proper circle to work on. She laid out a fine, microfiber tablecloth, then set five candles equidistant around the edge and lit them. Five tiny carved cats, each with a cone of incense were next. Then she started to spread the papers on the dining room table. For this, she needed real paper, so she identified a number of the puzzling articles and posts online and set her printer to chattering.

She shifted the papers until the pictures, columns of text, tweets, and advertisements shaped into a pentacle, and the whole table was covered. Finally, at the center of the table, she placed the stand for her crystal ball. It was brass, and depicted five cats, each with different precious stones for eyes—amber, opal, peridot, sapphire, and amethyst. Finally, she lifted the crystal ball from its case and set it carefully on the stand. It was natural quartz, expensive and beautiful.

Then she lit the incense and breathed deep, walking around the table and opening her inner eyes. She sank into the process; she had inherited enough of the catkin magic for this, but only barely. She chanted as she walked, waiting until she felt the flare of the magic deep inside, then turned toward the table and opened her eyes.

She was facing the cat with opal eyes, and saw its tail twitch angrily. It was not looking at her, however. It was looking over at a picture of the Lakefront earlier that year, the article about tourists visiting the ice caves before everything in the city had gone nuts.

Sandie didn’t remember printing that article, much less placing it on the table.

She whispered to the cats, “Show me, please—who is messing with my city?” She leaned over the table and gazed into the ball. Immediately, as clearly as if it were a cute baby animal post on Facebook, she saw a beaver frolicking in icy waters, swimming in circles, up and down and around and around. She watched for a moment, but like a facebook video, that was really all there was to it. As expected, a riddle.

She sighed and looked at the cat, and was surprised to find herself looking at the one with amethyst eyes. She sighed with relief. The cats were willing to answer more than one question, this time. That was rare, and precious, and probably meant that her city was in even more trouble than she had realized. She considered, then asked, “Where should I look first?”

All the articles she had been reading spun in front of her eyes, as if to say, “everywhere”. She pushed at the magic harder and leaned in to look at the crystal ball. Words from headlines and ads flashed by as the articles kept spinning, faster and faster. Animal rights, natural habitat, pollution, wilderness. Then she was too dizzy to focus and the magic she could call, exhausted, was slipping away.

It wasn’t enough! She reached, swinging her arms out, reaching in an attempt to grab at least one more clue, and her left hand hit a small glass bottle, knocking it over.

What? She had cleaned the room! Where did the bottle come from?

Dizzy, she fell against the wall. She was by one of the doorways, and she grabbed the moulding there, looking over at the table. What had she hit?

An open bottle of indelible India ink lay there, open, on its side. She watched as the ink spread across the papers on the table, forming a complex set of perfect concentric circles, each one overlaid with strange symbols. She watched in horror as the ink sank into the paper, twisting faces from smiles into grimaces of fear or anger or longing and obliterating or reshaping words. The smoke from her incense cones swerved in the still air of her apartment to avoid the area.

She’d gotten her additional clue—someone had cursed Chicaugwa, cursed her city carefully and thoroughly.

She stared in horror at the mess on her dining room table, knowing that it had become her responsibility to rescue her city, though she didn’t have the training or the magical power to even really understand what had been done. And the symbolism of the India ink was not lost on her. The curse had already soaked into the fiber of the City, like a stain on the tapestry woven by the fates.

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Thank you to tigertoy for the prompt!

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The beaver walked out onto Lake Michigan as the sun rose. She was in her human form, in worn insulated pants and jacket. She scuffed her feet a little, ice-fishing equipment in her back pack and pole in hand. A low bank of clouds hid the sun, but its light spilled over, slowly turning the shadowy violet twilight into a monochrome landscape of muted blue-greys. The world grew quiet as she moved steadily onto the lake from the outskirts of Chicaugwa. The noise of millions of people crowded together never stopped, not even in the natural hush before dawn.

It would be more than an hour to get to the ice caves, but the Beaver enjoyed the walk. She felt like she was being cleansed of the pollution and chaos of modern life. Out here there were no cars or cellphones, no coffeeshops or skyscrapers. Just frosty blue sky overhead, snow-covered ice below, and the sharp clean winter wind. She fell into a meditative state naturally, filling her soul with the simple actions of breathing and walking. The unusually cold winter was a blessing for her, in more than one way.

A seagull circled overhead, then dove downward in the distance, directly in front of her. She frowned. Chicaugwa-area gulls mostly ate human leftovers. They’d gone from glorious hunter-scavengers to living as parasites off the least wholesome mammal species the planet had yet produced. It was sad. Something had to be done about it.

She didn’t want to eliminate all humans, of course. She had friends in the city, and family. But she longed to return the area to wild swamp, or at least to once again have rivers and streams that beavers could enjoy. She’d never been able to build a dam in her ancestral waters, and it made her blood boil. As long as Chicaugwa was a major metropolis, she never would.

It was past time for change to come to Chicaugwa. She walked steadily onward, returning to the meditative state that let her pull in the natural beauty to fuel that change.

She was almost to the caves when the roar of several snowmobiles approached. She turned and shook her fishing pole at them, and they smiled and waved. “Idiots.”

The snowmobilers zoomed past the first, tiny cave entrance, heading for the larger, more spectacular one a little further out. But they had been to her small cave already, the pile of trash being picked over by a smug-looking seagull was testimony to that.

She shook her fishing pole in the direction the humans had taken, then dropped to her knees and crawled inside. It was beautiful inside the cave, but she had seen it before, and was no longer in the mood to appreciate the sight. She crawled, wiggled, and scooted until she reached the hidden area where she’d dug her fishing hole.

This area was partially open to the sky; once she reopened the fishing hole, she stood in the narrow beam of sunlight and stripped off her clothing, folding it neatly to cover where the sunlight hit the ice. Then she transformed and dove into the water.

From below, she looked up at the underside of the ice, and smiled. Her inner sight showed a vast magical circle, glowing and perfect. She ran her eyes over the pattern, checking for flaws, then returned for a breath of air.

The foundation was well laid. Today, she would build upon it.

Over the course of the day, she filled in the circle. In the center, she carved blessings for pure water and for wilderness. She blessed the natural world with fertility and abundance. She called on earth, fire, water and air to clean away the ugly, unhealthy excesses, and to eliminate things that stood in the way of an ecological recovery. Closer to the edge, she added sigils for chaos and entropy, to help that which should pass into dust again do so quickly. Finally, on the outer edge, she carved symbols of humanity, adding blessings of wanderlust and envy.

There would be more, as much more as she could add in the days before the ice started to melt again. She fought against her impatience, knowing that each day’s work had to be balanced and perfect. She couldn’t count on cooperation from the weather—the spell was set to be released as the ice melted, so it had to be left ready-to-go every time she headed home.

It was dark by the time she headed back across the lake, tired, but with a sense of accomplishment. Her limbs ached and her stomach growled. By the time she stepped back onto the streets of Chicaugwa, she was too tired to cook. She decided to stop at Blackbeard’s for fried fish on the way home.


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Thanks to dreamwidth user Clare_Dragonfly for the prompt!

The doorbell rang, and Ramai put down the wand she was carving to peek out the front window. No one was on the porch. She went back to her chair and picked up the tiny chisel again. The bell rang again.

This time she set down the chisel and picked up her main carving knife. She ran her fingers along the symbols lovingly carved into its handle, awakening the athame’s defense functions. She went straight to the door this time, mentally reaching to read the wards. There was no one on the porch, at least, not any more. The yard was empty, save for the small critters that lived there. The perfectly mundane bunny was crouched in its warren; beetles and worms and mosquitoes went about their normal business; morning ephemerals shimmered out of existence and mid-day ephemerals shimmered in.

The doorbell rang again, accompanied by a tiny zing of magical force, a bit of energy just exactly big enough to completely expend itself in the physical force needed to compress the mechanism. The only thing she could sense from it in the brief moment before it was gone was a familiar sense of mischief.

Cautiously, Ramai approached the door. Was one of her current or former students testing her? She laid a scarred brown hand on the polished walnut door frame and checked the integrity of her wards. They seemed fine, so whatever was awaiting her on the porch came either from someone she trusted or from someone with enough skill to fool her tightly-woven magic.

The doorbell rang again while her attention was extended into the whorls of her own magic. Reflexively, she reached for it, but caught only a wisp of mischievousness as lyrical as laughter.

There was no good option. Even if this was only a prank, it could be dangerous, but admitting weakness by not opening it was not an option. Ramai never admitted weakness.

Holding the athame ready in her right hand, she unlocked the door with her left, leaving the wards across the threshold in place. There was no flare of energy, good or bad, so she opened the door.

A sweet scent floated in on the wake of air moved by the door. The porch was empty—no, almost empty. Sitting in the exact center of the welcome mat was an apple.

Ramai crouched down to look at it more closely.

The apple was small and round, the blend of yellow and red promising a rich flavor, tart and sweet at the same time, a perfect apple for her tastes. It looked and smelled perfectly ripe. Ramai reached for it, reaching through her house wards in a swift motion, smiling and holding it in front of her nose as if taking in a long draught of the scent. It held a tickle of that mischief-magic, but deep and old, as if the magic had been placed on the blossom before the fruit formed, or even on the tree as a seedling.

Slowly, she smiled and drew it into the wards. As it moved into her home, she wrapped a bubble of ward-magic to encapsulate it, and closed the door.
Athame still ready, she swept the design for the new wands off of her work table to reveal the mother of pearl inlay highlighting the pentagram carved into the ebony. Carefully, she placed the apple on the table and activated the table.

Only then did she set the athame down and return to her seat to ponder the perfect fruit. “Well, my life’s not boring, at least!”

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Thank you to kelkyag for the prompt.

I love reading urban fantasy, and I've been wanting an urban fantasy world to play in--er, write in. But I don't have an urban fantasy world designed yet. I want something different, with magical beings that suit my personal sense of whimsy. A world different enough to let me challenge my characters with a different set of dilemmas.

I finally have the start of an idea for a world, and want to do some world building. I'd also like to give all of my patient readers a bit of a present.

I'm a cat lover, so there will be cats, probably a lot of them. Not only cats, of course, that would be too predictable. There will be ephemeral beings, and bright colors, beauty and danger, and quite possibly dragons, or maybe something else altogether, but ancient and strange and powerful.

So, if you want to play along and give me a bit of a Midwinter Gift, you can offer words, thoughts, questions, images or songs; my gift, for each of you that do so, will be to pick at least one to inspire me and offer some small glimpse into this world, a vignette or ficlet (at least 100 words), poem or song, or perhaps a bit of art.

Whether you play along or not, I hope you have wonderful Midwinter Holidays, and a marvelous New Year.

Technical difficulties prevent me from sharing a snow picture or two right now; later!

For now, let's get started!

So, ellenmillion  came up with this really cool world, where the ancients were playing with time and really screwed things up.  At the time of the stories she's written so far, the world is becoming less fractured, but many changes were wrought by the time storms and by having some places where time ran much faster than others. 

She has decided to turn it into a collaborative project, allowing other people to participate--to write stories and submit art, and once the site is out of beta-testing, readers will be able to not only subscribe to the stories and art, but to adopt characters (gaining certain rights to control their destinies).  The website is here and there are some stories and artwork up already.

Right now, she's holding a contest for Torn World Wiki entries for plants (details on her website).  I initially had a number of ideas for animals, but was kind of stymied about plants, but came up with an idea this weekend at M.O.O.N.Con.

So, today, instead of writing a con report, I've been writing a wiki entry.  I can't tell you more about it now, since entries are anonymous until after the judging, but I thought I'd share my excitement about the world. 

It'll be up to Ellen which entries get adopted into the wiki, becoming cannon, an official part of Torn World.  And, of course, one entry will win the contest!  Maybe even mine, though there are a number of very talented people involved already.