Flash Fiction Friday - Azure

Rewrites for Blood Promise DONE! I'm kind of in a limbo state now, querying agents while planning how to tackle Neverland all over again.

So in an attempt to get back into the Neverland groove, this week's short story is inspired by Peter Pan,

This pretty merman artwork: 

And, okay, this:

Is he rocking that blue hair or what! And on a sidenote, SUPER JUNIOR IS BACK WITH THEIR 7TH ALBUM!!!

*leaves to fangirl*

*gross sobbing*

*supersonic screeching*

*incessant self-fanning*

*spazzing*

*more spazzing*

*swooning*

*more swooning*

*faints*

...

...

...

Ahem.

Okay I'm done.

And now, here is this week's flash fiction.

*

Azure


She had seen the boy with blue hair from somewhere.

At first, she thought she was dreaming. Or a hallucination. It had been a straight week of interrupted sleep and groggy eye-rubbing. People saw worse things when they ran on too little sleep.

But the boy seemed real enough. His features were fine, like they were painted the strong planes of his face with clean brush strokes. Bowed lips, arched brows, a narrow slope of the nose.

Definitely her imagination.

She could reach out and run a finger down, since he was just lying there with his eyes closed (asleep?), is azure hair fanning out from beneath his head. But she curled her fingers into her palm and whispered instead, "Are you really asleep?"

"If I were asleep, what would you have done?" His eyelids slid open and he sat up. Every movement he made was deliberate and fluid.

His eyes, clear, wide pools the soft fawn colour of a jay's wing, revealed nothing of his age. They were boy and man, dreams and laughter, wistful and playful, sad and bright all at once. She found herself staring and took a step back.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Old enough."

"What does that mean?"

"It means growing up is over-rated. We are all as young as we want to be."

"So how old are you?" she huffed.

"You seem very preoccupied about age."

"I just want to know how old is old enough."

"Old for what?"

"Old enough to stop caring."

He fell very silent. Ran a hand through his rippling, azure hair. She wanted to do the same, wondered if it smelled of the sea.

"There is a place," he said at length, "where the caring stops for a while."

He told her about lands too far away for her to imagine, about feisty girls who fought pirates and wore feathers in their hair. He told her about the men with smiles as bright as the knives they carried and voices as smooth as their coats. He told her about the mermaids with their flashy tails and fairies with their glittery wings. He told her about the castaway ship and the secret cave next to the lagoon.

"But those are just stories," she said when he was through.

"Some stories are real, though. You lived in them once."

So she did know him from somewhere. She knew him from the tales she had heard and the ones he told, from the ones he had taken her to. She knew him way back when he was just a boy no older than twelve, standing at her bedroom window. He told her he knew a place they could go where they didn't have to worry about snipped shadows or growing up.

And back then, she had believed him. Back then, she was wrong. But that was the thing about the blue-haired boy. You wanted so badly to believe him, to believe in him.

She believed him then and she believed him now. She was sure she always would.

He smiled. Because he knew. There were children who never grew up, and those were the only ones he trusted.

Flash Fiction Friday - Monster Memory

"Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row."

– Ray Bradbury

"A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it."

– Edgar Allan Poe

"The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side." 

– Emma Donoghue

See more lovely quotes about short stories at Aerogramme Writers' Studio!

This week's flash fiction is a result of this song - White Doves, by Cider Sky:

and this prompt:

*

Monster Memory

It takes a monster to kill a monster.

But no matter how many monsters she fought, there was one she could never slay. The one that grew stronger inside her the more kills she racked up. Monsters came in various forms, but there was none quite as scary as the one that looked back at her in the mirror.

You mustn't grow a conscience, was what they said when she decided to join the Creed. It's bad for business.

But she couldn't stop the third party – unwelcome or not – from settling in her gut. It was an occupant that would turn the house inside out and leave muddy footprints all over the floor, but even this beat the emptiness that lived there before.

As she slipped through the desolate night into the target's house, she wondered if she was right in taking on this assignment.

Stop thinking like that, she chided herself. She had been a shivering, bloody mess reaching, grasping for support when they first found her. And it was the killing – the single-minded focus of ridding the world of evil, evil that she had had to encounter – that nursed her back to health; it was the killing that made her stronger than she had ever been before.

Why then was she shuffling her feet around this mark? Was it the file of sketches she found in his study, the one that called to mind the quiet melody of a piano filling a room, the low, gentle voice next to her ear, a warm, dry hand that smoothed the hair off her face? Whatever it was that raked up these fragmented sensations, it made her inch towards the room at the end of the hallway with an uncertainty that was as bewildering – disorientating – as it was atypical.

Even monsters had memories. What did it say about her that she recalled nothing of her life before she joined the Creed?

She shook her head hard, shoving the thoughts back into the store cupboard of her mind. Memories are dangerous things, they said. They get in the way of the job.

The doorknob was loose. It jiggled in her hand. She froze, not because of her less than perfect entry, but because of the sudden draught. All the windows were closed. 

She had seen things, many things, terrible things, as a result of this job. The violence she witnessed was what conditioned her hand, froze her heart, and drew her further and further away from herself. But here in this sparsely furnished room, where moonlight collected into a concentrated pool on a mounted canvas in the corner, what greeted her wasn't a sight that made her killing a gratuitous act.

There was no mark. No ugliness, no violence, nobody. Only the barren shell of a home abandoned by its occupants, and the pure blank canvas on which the moon made its art.

She stood in the middle of the room like a soldier stranded without an order.  Memories surged in to fill the void, seizing her by waves, driving her to her knees. And there she remained, splayed out. Played out.

When she saw him, a luminous spectre in the moonlight, she got to her feet and whipped out the knife from her shoe in a practised move. But the sight of him turned her to sand. Her knees barely supported her; even her voice came out as a rasp, raw and scraped dry.

"You were dead." She couldn't remember his name. She wouldn't.

Even though everything was starting to come back to her. All the times she had spent in his room, dreaming and laughing and loving, loving, loving him. Until one day, there was no one left to love anymore. Her dreams died along with him that day, and she had never dared to say goodbye or think of him.

But here he stood now, right before her as though he had never left. As though he weren't just a faint shadow of himself.

His eyes fell on the knife in her white-knuckled hand, then rose to meet hers. "What happened to you, Aderyl?' His gaze was an unbearable thing, heavier than the ravaged world.

The Creed had warned them of a test not too long ago, a test that many before her had failed because they had let their guard down.

This is not real, she told herself over and over. She squeezed her eyes shut and told herself that over and over again. This is just a test.

She had given life to the monster in her, and this was where it meant to devour her, in a house bursting full of tears and memories, a house from another life.

"That’s not my name." Her voice cracked like a whip, renting the tight air in a brazen move. Revenge was her name now. She had liked that, how she was labelled and known by her purpose only.

"That’s who you’ll always be to me," he said. "Aderyl."

It wasn't a goodbye, this unexpected encounter, but she felt it as keenly as the cold air brushing against her skin when he reached for her hand. She gripped her knife tighter, afraid to let go of her weapon, of herself.

It was only after the night claimed him that she allowed her knife to clatter to the ground. Her mind, once wired for the kill, now tripped over itself, and her limbs were clumsy, awkward things, unsuited for wielding weaponry of any kind.

The Creed was right. Memories were dangerous; they were monsters. Memories awakened every nerve and pulse, and left her vulnerable. They became her.

They were her.

The Creed should never have set this test.

*

Flash fiction Friday - The Girl Who Couldn't Cry

Thanks, Yiruma.

***

The Girl Who Couldn't Cry

She shed glitter the way people shed tears, and she shed them for the same reason too.

People thought she never cried. Her face was an exquisite slab of polished marble, fair and rouged. But if ever there was a way to fathom what she was feeling, it was by watching for the trail of gold dust she left behind.

No one knew it but me and her mother, who used to dust her skin every night when she settled in the cushy, worn ottoman with a book she wanted her mother to read to her.

I would lean out the window and listen in. It was better than focusing on the conversation going on at home.

The stories were usually about girls with secret identities and abilities - girls who could fly, who turned into swans at night, girls who could speak the language of flowers and stars - and she listened to them with rapt, keen attention, as though she could figure out the answer to her condition in them.

I should have told her that there wasn't an answer to how special she was. But I wasn't any much older than her then and didn't know how to put that into words. By the time she got older, she had stopped believing in fairy tales and their happy endings, and there was nothing more I could say.

*

She bled glitter the way people bled pain, and she bled them for the same reason too.

I watched her roll up her jeans and kick off her shoes by the river the day after her mother's funeral. She stretched out her legs on the grass, the exposed parts of her skin glistening as they caught the late afternoon sunlight. All the while, her face was as smooth as porcelain and just as brittle, her eyes dry as baked earth and just as wanting.

She didn't respond when I joined her by the river, just sat watching the stream of water cresting over the ridges in the riverbed. I took her hand, feeling the specks tickling my palm. There was a world of words in that inch of space between us, and I imagined them floating like dust motes, illuminated by the light she gave off.

A while later, she leaned her head against my shoulder. "She said she was glad the last thing she saw was my light." She lifted her head and fixed her wide, heavy gaze on me. "Do you think she believed me when I said I was too?"

I drew a hand across her cheek, collecting her tears on my fingertips, if they could fall. "I think she'll only believe it when she sees it."

*

She walked in stardust the way no one else did, and it was my aim to make her see it as the wonder that it was.

No amount of pricking herself with a needle or watching the sappiest tear-jerkers, letting her heart get broken or trusting in the wrong person could evoke any tears. I would hold her hand and stretch out my legs next to her by the river, watching silently as the water washed away the dust on her feet.

The words finally tumbled out one day, hard as bricks, after I noticed a new bruise the colour of midnight on her pallid skin.

"Stop it. Just stop punishing yourself, will you? When are you going to see that there is more than one way to hurt? Why do you keep putting yourself through all this pain just to be like everyone else?"

Anger was an emotion reserved for normal people - people who could feel pain, who could cry and laugh and feel the burn of emotions. But there were some who couldn't cry, and some who could not feel rage.

She wasn't the only one surprised at my outburst.

She turned and walked away - quickly at first, before slowing to the pace of memories - oblivious to my calls. When I caught up to her, the apology sitting on my lips, she stopped and looked up at me. In her eyes was a telltale glimmer. She blinked, freeing a tear. I caught it with my thumb, then rubbed it away.

We didn't know if this was a fluke - her tears and my anger - or if it would ever happen again. But it was enough for us then, enough for her to feel the release of hurt and enough for me to feel the fire in my chest.

She didn't completely believe it yet that we could feel and cry like everyone else, but maybe she would when she saw it: the light on her skin that shone like tears.

***

Flash Fiction Friday - Makeshift

Today, I discovered that the amazing dancing violinist Lindsey Stirling (from America's Got Talent) has a new album out. 'Tis a good day.

This track in particular, Roundtable Rival, stood out as I was wrote today's flash fiction:

Yup. THAT is Lindsey Stirling.

So with that, as well as this writing prompt,

here is this week's short story.

*

Makeshift



It was there in the dusky, dusty chamber of the abandoned building that they made camp. Settling by the missing clock face, where the only shaft of light managed to edge in past the rusted hands, they got to work.

Mietha's soldiers were trained for speed and accuracy, be it in battle or menial tasks like forging weapons. The best of them had had years of training in the sky children's primitive technology. This time, they had one more thing on their side: Earth magic. It was not quite as advanced as that of the sea children, but here on this island in the human world, they were able to acquire what they needed from the black market.

Now, they set up their equipment: glass bowls and tin canisters, sandalwood for accelerated kindling, and rows and rows of bones meant for more meticulous arrangement later.

Their exiled general had been stranded at the island for long enough. In times like this, ranks were a secondary consideration, hierarchy demolished. And if anyone thought it was madness to trust in the two girls who would help conceal them from the rest of the human world, none of them voiced their dissent.

There in the quiet isolation of the abandoned building, with its crumbling walls and splintered roof shutters that let in the faint moonlight, the renegade rebels worked at twice their regular speed, creating more bodies for their disguise, their deception ... never realising how close they came to being discovered by the white-tailed kite circling in the sky.

*

The Raptor, second in command to the missing prince of the renegade army, was having no luck with the bloodstone. After shifting into her human form and settling into a decrepit red-bricked building for more privacy, she had spent the better part of the hour trying to exhume the magic within the stone.

But the stone had a will of its own, and it was not relinquishing its secrets, no matter how she strained over it.

The Raptor -- or Kivyn, as she was more commonly known among her kite family -- flung the bloodstone across the room. It made a resonant clatter in the drafty, hollow quarters.

Curse these humans and their crude magic! How barbaric, how elementary -- and not to mention messy -- to use blood for magic.

It struck her as ironic that a Raptor, notorious for her ability to shred her enemies with her claws and blind them with her beak, would find something barbaric.

Time was running out for her. The monarchy was disintegrating back home, and the soldiers were rebelling. If she couldn't find the crown prince, then the very least she could do was restore some order. 

But prince or not, she couldn't leave this world without Eylar. She didn't know what he was to her, but she knew he was the only person she had ever trusted and cared for. And she would be damned if she let this world steal him away.

*

The rebel renegades froze at the sound of the clatter, the blood slowing in their veins. They were so close -- it would be a terrible shame if they were forced to abandon their near-complete work now. 

With renewed intensity, they completed the ritual. The sisters would be here soon, but first the soldiers had to get used to their new flesh, and learn to shift in and out with relative ease. It was tricky to grasp the intricacies of shifting -- the best of them took weeks -- but now they were to master their new bodies in the space of hours.

This rescue mission was doomed from the start, but they had to take whatever chance they had to steal their general back from the forgotten coast of Bastiron before the new emperor could recruit her -- recruit being a far kinder term than what he would actually do.

This slaughter campaign was not for them, nor was annihilating the sea kingdom. What they would fight for, however, was the restoration of the old civilisation, the one that was now buried under this avalanche of hate and jealousy and fear.

*

When the rebel soldiers each stripped off their worn, battered bodies and stepped into their new flesh, so too did the Raptor shift into her creature self before taking off into the night in search of the blood she needed.

So opposing in their causes, but so similar in their execution. Chance was a concept often scorned by the renegades. But here they were, stepping into a makeshift life and taking all the chances they could to save their mangled home.

Flash Fiction Friday - Dream Kingdom

I don't know if this should be considered flash fiction, since it's longer than 1,000 words. Maybe it should be "what the hell am I writing" fiction, except it's not an official genre yet.

Anyway, done with this. Back to Blood Promise. Have a good weekend! :0)

*

Dream Kingdom

No one else saw the palace in the reflection. Which didn't surprise me as much as it should have.  I was used to being privy to the secrets of the world – I paid attention to it, and in return it let me see its hidden beauty, listen to its favourite songs, and dream its magical dreams.

When I first told Josie about the palace I saw on that rainy day, I hadn't even expected her to believe me. But she only said, “Show me,” with that dire look in her eyes that meant I had better not let her down.

I did, though. I didn't mean to, but I did. Even when I pointed hard at the image in the water – it’s just right there, can’t you see it? – and even when she scrunched up her face and glared at it like it was offending her by not appearing, all she saw was a smooth blank puddle and on it, the light scattered by a recent storm.

She didn't see the glimmer and gloss of the high glass windows as the sun slid across the sky, the iridescent lights the palace walls gave off, the weird clouds of mist that danced around the palace and entangled themselves with the spires, or the great birds that roosted atop the clock tower, which housed not a clock but a constantly shifting map of the stars. I knew they shifted because I had observed them long enough, days and weeks and months of staring at reflective surface – a mirror, a puddle of water, a window.

Josie always said I was good at building castles in the sky.

But this was no daydream. If only I could convince Josie so! But people find it hard to believe the things they can’t see. And they find it hard to accept the things they don’t believe in.

*

When I finally managed to enter the palace, it was only in a dream. By then, it was obvious this palace wanted to stay hidden, so I was almost unsurprised to see it in my dream.

It was hard to look at the palace directly at first. Not only was it too big for the scope of my vision, every inch of the palace was covered in precious stones – dazzling diamonds, lush emeralds and sapphires and rubies fat and red as crystallised blood – that broke the sunlight into iridescent shards.

There were the giant birds going about their slow, lazy circles in the air. Guards, I soon realised. They were not ordinary birds: their wings could span as wide as building heights and shrink to an arm’s length, and in their eyes was a canniness that was more human than bird, more thinker than soldier.

The palace was rich not because of the jewels and stones its walls were encrusted with, or the gilded marble floors that gave off its own music when you tread across the high-vaulted halls. It was rich with the scent of some exotic bloom I had never before encountered, the mellifluous voices that broke into song the moment I pushed open the doors to the hall, and the splash of pastel-coloured lights everywhere.

The palace was alive, and it had a mind of its own. It had ideas on where to take you, sliding around freely as though in mid-air, so that you tumbled down hallways and bustled through doors. Deeper and deeper you went into its heart.

And then what? More birds?

As it turned out, it was a queen.

There in the heart of the labyrinth she sat, on a burnished dais. Her crown was spiked with crystals against the scarlet and ebony headpiece that fanned out behind her head. Her robe, a crimson river that flowed from her shoulder down the steps, was matted with dust. She looked like a mannequin in a store – an exquisite display in a glass case – but there was something strangely, keenly, alive about her, as though she was silently observing you the way the palace was.

I kept waiting for her to open her eyes or acknowledge me, but no amount of throat clearing or greeting could rouse her. It was like she was trapped, waiting, in that dormant state.

“She won’t wake,” came a voice, no louder than a whisper in my ear, making me cry out in surprise. My voice bounced off the high walls.

In spite of myself, I said, “Not ever?”

“Not until the sea children cease their petty games and release us from this spell. Whoever heard of a palace cast adrift from its kingdom?”

I had no idea where this was leading to, or where it even started, but I tried to offer the best suggestion I could think of. “So talk to them. Can the sea children be made to see reason?”

“You won’t be able find them even with reason on your side. They've disappeared. They've all disappeared. And now the queen is in limbo, as is the fate of all her people.”

“I don’t understand.” By now, I was half yearning to leave this dream.

But the palace was not letting me out of its thrall until it had made its point. “You have to find the sea children. Save us, save our queen.”

“But I don’t know how to.”

The desperation in the air came in waves. First as a shrieking wind that ripped through the hall, then as a tectonic disturbance.

As I cried my apologies, the ground juddered beneath my feet. My arms flailed for balance, but I only tumbled to the ground, then rolled across it and slammed against the wall as the palace continued to rock in fury.

“Find the sea children,” it implored. “Save us.”

The light outside had dimmed to a sickly shade of yellow, and a frosty draft swirled around the hall. Gone were the music, the kaleidoscope of colours, and the warm sunlight streaming in through the windows. I saw this cold marble and glass palace for what it truly was: encrusted in jewels but bereft and barren.

“Find the sea children. Save our queen.”

*

When I opened my eyes again, there was only Josie’s face hovering above mine. Her breath, shallow and hot, fanned my face.

“Melly!” she cried, gripping me by the shoulders. She gave me a violent shake that jolted me wide awake.

“We have to find the sea children,” was all I said as I struggled to catch my breath. “We have to save the queen!”

Josie’s grip went slack. “How did you know about the sea children?”

*

(To be continued??)

Flash Fiction Friday - The Old Ones

Mountain gods, they were called among some tribes. Others believed them to be the children of the stars. Behind closed doors and in hushed tones, though, they were known as demons. But everyone agreed on one thing: they were old, very old. Hence their common moniker, the Old Ones.

The Old Ones were easily recognised by their eyes. Milky and eternal, their gaze was said to hold the secrets of the world since it was born. Of course, no one had ever lived long enough to verify that.

When the first war broke out, they stood atop their mountains, silent and unmoving like boulders, shards of sunlight playing off their marble-like skins as they watched. Helping was not what they did – empathy eluded them the way warmth did – especially when it meant getting involved in the trivial disagreements of the beasts. Because to the Old Ones, that was all they were. Beasts that whiled away their fleeting time in this world fighting over territory and power, shifting in and out of their skins gleefully like children who didn't know better.

Soon, they will cancel each other out. It was as simple as evolution sometimes. The humans had one theory right, at the very least.

The Old Ones rather hoped they would destroy each other before any of them managed to unearth the Ash City. Buried under the cinders of the old civilisation before it crumbled, the Ash City was home to a million souls out for vengeance. Souls that had long forgotten love or mercy –

Rather like the Old Ones.

No, Rajaveik thought. They were different. They were more. They were better, infinitely better. They had the power of knowledge, reaped from endless cycles of creation and destruction, life and death and everything in between.

When the horns and bells cried out their strident warnings for the second time in history, Rajaveik was standing amongst his brothers and sisters atop the ragged jaws of the snow-capped mountains. Frost sat upon his eyelashes, his skin, but he felt neither the sting nor bite of the cold. A perpetual winter sat within his calcified heart, protecting him from the cruellest of elements.

From a distance, they would appear a strange sight: a row of proud, silent guardians anticipating the clangour of steel against steel, the shriek of claws and beaks and the primal calls of the shape-shifters.

They anticipated the dissolution of two enemy clans.

Rajaveik could almost taste the end – if it had a taste, it would be this: the sweet, heavy scent of a gathering storm, mingled with the acrid fumes from distant forest fires in the south. He sent a fervent wish to the heavens, even though his people scorned the notion of a higher power. Would that the world be spared of the petty squabbles of its children at last!

The Old Ones waited and waited. For the flurry of feathers, the terrible cries of petulant beasts, the songs of the sea children as they worked their magic.

But none came. There was only a thick, curdled silence as the world rested on its haunches under the dense grey sky.

And then the clouds rained blood.

*

It came without warning. One minute there was only the silence that folded in on itself infinitely, and then a crimson deluge was upon them, like the blood of a furious sun.

Rajaveik took a while to understand. Blood ran in rivulets down the planes of his muscled chest, arms, face, and it was not until the metallic taste registered on his tongue that he came to the realisation.

The sea children had fooled them all. They had relied on the oldest trick in the book – not their secret ocean magic, but a ruse that allowed them to steal out of this broken world and straight into an arguably better one.

The king’s abandonment – the sea king, who would soon rather suffer all the fates of his people than desert them – and the secret stash of bones in the bottom of the sea all made sense now.

This rain was the last of their escape plan, meant to distract and obscure. And everyone – even the Old Ones, who thought themselves canniest of all living creatures in this world – had fallen right into their plan.

They should never have let them have those bones.

Flash Fiction Friday - Infernal

I realise nothing may ever come out of these free-writing pieces, and a lot of them don't make sense or have much of a plot, but whatever. I'm just having fun!

Short stories are brilliant in that they don't require as much commitment as novels, so there's little stress in "getting it right". You can give free reign to your imagination. It's freeing, writing with so little expectation and pressure; it lets you rediscover your love for writing fiction. At least, it does for me.

And now, thanks to this song, 

I just had to get this story out.

*

Infernal

The fire-breather had three lives in total. One for discovery, one for degradation, and one for redemption – and only after he had undergone the last stage could he find peace among the ashes of his people.

Lately, though, he was seriously reconsidering that option. Redemption was far too complicated a route. Up in flames seemed like a glorious way to go. No aftermath, no room for regret. Many a fire-breather had failed to make it to the final phase, being run out of their minds by their sins. He had heard tales where they set themselves on fire in an effort to purge themselves, only to remain in cinders for all eternity, scattered by loose breezes that whispered their names –

No, he thought as he caught his torches before they clattered to the ground, their blistering breaths roaring close to his ears. He would not end up like his predecessors; he was stronger than that.

Your strength comes not from what you hold in your hands, but what you hold in your heart, the old emperor had told him. He was still trying to fathom his words.

All he understood now was the malaise in his mind, and the steel cage that was his body wrought tight with age and helplessness and regret. Fire was the only remedy, the only gratification, his only friend.

When he spotted the gypsy, watching him with a quiet intent, his first thought was that she might be his redemption. Her eyes seemed to promise that.

There in the bustling courtyard, she should have gone unnoticed, lost in the milling crowd that had gathered to watch his performance. But there was no missing her. She moved with a feline grace that was at once otherworldly and inhuman. With her face shadowed by her veil, he couldn't discern her age. Her eyes were eternal, like jewels in the night sky. They conveyed a message he was unable to read. He had never felt so wrong-footed by a single glance before.

His older self might have approached her instantly, unapologetically. But now he only observed from where he stood, trying to retain his grip on his torches. The world spun on its errant heels around them, and it was far too long before his performance came to an end.

Instead of waiting for the audience – particularly the women – to lavish their gifts and adoration on him, he pulled out from the crowd and slipped into the evening fog after the gypsy.

In the cobbled labyrinth of narrow, winding alleys, the walls leaned close with their overheard secrets.

She was waiting for him. It occurred to him that she could be one of Them. The Old Ones, with inextinguishable souls and calcified hearts. The ones who were untouched by anything, even fire. Weren't they rumoured to have eyes like hers?

It suddenly seemed like a foolish thing to do, following her here.

Her first word to him, though uttered low, struck him hard. “Khushka.”

Kushka. It took him a while to recognise the cadence of his name, the clatter and slither of the consonants. It had belonged to a tongue lost during the old war.

“How do you know my name?” he said. The question came out in a growl.

“I know a lot more about you that I shouldn't have to, even though I am only a messenger.”

Just an errand girl. The fire-breather felt his muscles unclench, although not entirely. Her eyes told a different story that he was equally willing to believe.

He sent her a look askance. “Which begs the question of whose messenger you are.”

“The emperor’s.”

“That is no emperor,” he spat. “That is a war-monger. A despot. His father remains the most worthy ruler of the realm.”

“Whatever he is, the fact remains that you are our last hope. The world has run out of fires to kindle and magic to plunder.”

“And the world is better for it. How presumptuous of us to go around taking that which doesn't belong to us.”

“Your skill, your weapon” – her gaze flitted to his extinguished torches – “can save us all. Every day you spend entertaining crowds with cheap tricks on your matchsticks, the forgotten kings remain buried under the ash city.”

His torches hung limply by his sides, and not for the first time he felt incredibly exposed under her long, measured gaze.

It wasn't long before he felt his insides freeze over. Winter blew swiftly into his heart, threatening to destroy him from within with a fire completely opposite of what he knew.

She was one of the Old Ones. He should have known. Those eyes were fire and ice, flame and frost. They contained an ice storm more savage than any fire he would ever wield. To think the emperor managed to find an ally in these isolated mountain dwellers who never used to concern themselves with taking sides in their war.

His lips were numb – was this what frostbite felt like? – but he choked out, “Why are you helping them? What’s in it for you?”

She answered his question with another chilly stab to the gut. “Not everything is about personal gain.”

In the midst of the brutal snowstorm she had inflicted on him, her unspoken words hailed like a call of the wind. You will save this world because you know it’s the only way you can live with yourself.

In his wildest dreams and deepest desires, he had hoped for redemption. Never had he expected it would come in the form of setting the world ablaze.

Flash Fiction Friday - Beyond the Hour

Flash Fiction Friday! After agonising endlessly over Neverland, I figured I should just shut up and distract myself for now. At least until I find a way to power through it without feeling the need to tear off my face.

Man, it feels good to charge through to the end again! Always nice when you can see the end of a story in sight. 

I didn't really have a story in mind for this one. I just saw this prompt in my file 

and the first few lines came to me. I didn't let myself stop until I got to the end - which is probably the whole point of a flash fiction writing exercise - and only figured out what the story is about when I got to the end.

This one is about a guy who is reeling in the immediate hour after the death of his childhood sweetheart. It doesn't really stick to the prompt very closely, though. You'll see.

* * *

Beyond the Hour

A lot can happen in an hour. And a lot can’t.

You can lose someone in an hour – your entire being will slow to the rhythm of her pulse against yours; you will be aware of every sigh and whisper and twitch of her hand, your heart leaping as you fear that is the final sign of life you would detect from her.

You can gain a friend in an hour – or at least, an ally. There is intimacy in loss. The common enemy, Death, will drive you and all the broken-hearted people towards each other, like a bottomless middle through which no sound can escape. A fleeting look, a hesitant pat on the shoulder, a hand grasped in yours, carries more weight than words strung out like listless kites.

You can disappear in an hour – the world is full of nooks and crannies and abandoned places no one thinks to look anymore. It is not difficult. And it’s comforting to know there are pockets to fold yourself into if you wanted – needed – to.

You can condense your memories into an hour – a plodding drive to your usual haunts with her will uncover everything you never realised you remembered. The corner of the pier where you used to watch ships blink their secret codes to each other in the night. The cramped old bookstore at the end of the street where you would spend hours browsing – occasionally brushing against each other in the aisles – before emerging with armfuls of books. The brunch place where you both placed the same orders every time without tiring of them. The coffee shop still keeps the picture of her you drew when you were sixteen. You probably want it back now.

In an hour you can learn more about her than you ever had – the brother she looked up to, the mother who called once a year from halfway across the world, the father she missed dearly but made no mention of. You will ask her brother if you could have a photo of her, when what you really want is to hear the sound of her voice again. The silence, a ghostly shadow that clings to your shirttail, makes a maddening companion.

Close your eyes and you can see her again for an hour – your dreams are a garden in which wild things, beautiful things, things of her, about her, her, are in bloom.

In an hour, you can die and live again. Your eyes will adjust to the colours that she left in her wake. Her name will carve a familiar groove in your skin, your chest, your heart, and you will remember the special way light rippled around her.

An hour later you will live, live and live again. And so will she.

There is always one more hour.

Flash Fiction Friday #1: Lights

They told her to follow the jars of light. And really, it should have been that easy.

But it was impossible to reach the end of the path when the lights wouldn't stop calling out to her. Like restless jewels - emerald and sapphires, rubies and amethysts - they were captives knocking on windows for help.

She could feel the ache behind each glow, each desperate to tell its tale.

She had always loved a good story.

The glass was cool to the touch, dewed with the night’s breath.

A gasp – and the meadow became a circus of spun light, consuming her. When she opened her eyes again, the air pinned her down with its icy grip. She was a fever, a self-consuming fire, a wild thing now trapped in glass.

Don't touch the jars, they said. Just follow them. And really, it should have been that easy.