Points for persistance? Or just in denial?

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 08:29:37 GMT

Like there's a chance that I'll make 50,000 now. Although that's always been the best kind of motivation...

Word Count: 2,581

It wasn’t as thought Faith hadn’t realized that things could go badly for her here. That had been one of her first concerns. And even though she’d only known Schafren for a short time, his betrayal stung. Not so much because of what he’d done, but because she hadn’t expected it. She’d expected him to help her because it was the right thing to do.

She forced herself, as best she could, not to think of what her visitor might have meant by having her ‘dealt with.’ She hadn’t eaten anything since he left, but she still felt as though she might be sick at any moment. Her stomach was twisting and burning with sour dread.

She couldn’t stop listening for the sound of footsteps outside her door.

They never came. Instead, she heard voices. Two of them, and they were whispering.

She got up from where she had been lying, not sleeping, on her bed and crept over to the door. The voices weren’t much easier to hear close to the door, and her own pulse seemed too loud, but she listened fiercely anyway. She thought they might be arguing.

“…the right one…” one voice said.

“I know!” snapped a second. That one sounded female. She wasn’t sure about the first.

The door rattled a little bit and Faith tensed. If someone was going to open this door, she was going to fight with everything she had to get out. The door opened inward, so she’d have to move quickly and it probably wouldn’t work, but she had to try.

“…thinks he’s being tricky,” the woman said. “On three,” she continued and Faith felt she had just had her first bit of good luck. She got ready…

“One.”

“Two.” Set…

“Three.” Go! The door swung inwards and Faith launched herself out. It was pitch black out; evidently the middle of a night. She hit someone but didn’t stop to see who. There was another somewhere, but she couldn’t see or feel him.

Someone grabbed her ankle and she tripped. She tried to kick at him or her, but another person was grabbing her arms, pinning them to her sides, covering her mouth.

“Quiet, quiet!” whispered the first voice. It belonged to the person who was holding her ankles.

“Faith!” hissed the second, the woman who was holding her arms. “Stop it, now!”

She didn’t care that these people knew her name. She kept kicking and fighting.

“For the love of all things holy,” the woman said, sounding more insistent and a bit worried now, “Stop moving! We’re here to help you. Faith! Please!”

She did stop moving. Not because she particularly wanted to, but because the other person had let go of her ankles and was now sitting on her. The woman’s hand was still over her mouth, although Faith was pretty sure that screaming wouldn’t help her much. Would probably put her back in her cell again.

“Faith! Don’t you recognize-” the woman started and then made an irritated sound. “Of course you don’t,” she said suddenly Faith could see. It seemed like they were sitting in the middle of a dimly glowing ball. A young man was sitting on her stomach, helping to hold her arms down, and a woman was crouched over her. The woman took her hand away from Faith’s mouth.

“You!” Faith said, having just enough sense about her to keep her voice down. The woman nodded. Faith had only seen her once, but she did recognize her. She had dark skin, almost a reddish-brown color, black hair and was wearing a white, flowing tunic over white hide trousers. It was the woman she’d seen from the coffee shop. The one who’d winked and said “I see you.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“We don’t have time now,” the woman said. “We need to get you out of here. If we let you up, are you going to run?”

She thought of Schafren, how she’d thought she could trust him. How he’d seemed to be helping her. She thought about this city that she’d seen only briefly and what chance she had in it.

“No, I’m not,” she said. They let her up.

“Come on,” the woman said, and started off down the tunnel. The glowing ball of light moved with her, surrounding her. Faith and the young man followed. She was able to tell, by what little light reached the sides of the tunnel, that they were backtracking to the center of the mountain. At the end of the tunnel, she thought she could make out light from the stars and the moon.

They reached the ledge and the woman turned to the young man. “Gavin, can you carry her? I’m not much used to flying anyway, and I’d rather not have a passenger. ”

“Of course,” he said, and in an action that looked like a reversal of the first moment she had seen Schafren, he turned into what she would have called a hawk. Except that it was roughly the size of her dinning table and pure white. The hawk turned and looked at her.

“Go on, get on,” the woman said.

Faith balked. This felt too familiar. “Who are you?” she asked again. She had a million more questions she wanted answered before she was going to climb on the back of a giant bird, but couldn’t even begin to put them in words.

The woman made an exasperated noise and looked over her shoulder. “It’s complicated and we don’t have time for that. I promise, as soon as we’re safe, I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Until then, you’re just going to have to trust me.”

She wasn’t sure she could. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, it wasn’t even that she thought it a good idea to keep her options open. It was that she didn’t even know what her options were anymore. This wasn’t a matter of making a choice. In all reality, she didn’t have one, and that’s what she didn’t trust.

“That’s it!” Faith was sure the woman would have yelled if it hadn’t been so important to keep their voices down. “I’m not leaving you here even if you wanted to stay, so get on!” And she pushed Faith back onto the bird.

“Go!” she yelled, giving him a smack and then Faith had to hang on for all she was worth because they were airborne. She looked back and didn’t see the woman, but another hawk, this one black, was in the air next to them.

Faith would have given anything for the pegasus back again. For one thing, there was a comfortable place to sit, and a style of riding that she was at least passingly familiar with. Secondly, there was something to hold on to. Feathers were slick and she didn’t want to risk choking him by holding too tightly around his neck.

There was no light now except for the stars, and Faith looked at them as they flew. She did this for two reasons-to keep her from noticing how high they were or what they might be flying over, and because they were the first thing so far that looked exactly the same as it did at home. She felt an odd mixture of homesickness and comfort over this.

* * *

The sun was beginning to come up when the black hawk swooped lower. They had been following the mountain range all night, and Faith looked around for what they might have been making for. Perhaps another one of these mountains housed a city.

They flew close enough that Faith could almost have jumped off and landed safely as they crested one peak and made their way into a valley. There were animals in the valley, things that looked a bit like sheep and cattle, but Faith couldn’t be quite sure. But she still didn’t make out any homes or anything that looked like a settlement. When they reached the far side and landed, she realized why.

She had seen pictures of the homes of the cliff-dwellers in the southwest United States, but had never been there herself. The structures in front of her looked remarkably like the pictures. These mountains weren’t the fine, polished marble or granite of Schafren’s home and Olympus. It was black, but sparkled when the light hit it, making it seem like the walls were on fire.

They were standing on a ledge slightly raised from the valley, with a wide path that led down into it. The carved dwelling wasn’t as grand in decoration as Schafren’s estate and seemed more welcoming and less pretentious because of it.

Her companions had changed back into their human shapes. The woman looked visibly relieved. She stretched her arms, looking like she was getting used to having them again, and arched her back, rolling her shoulders in a fluid motion. She turned to Faith and smiled. “Well, here we are,” she gestured to the structure in front of them. “This is Obsidi. You’ll be safe here.”

* * *

Faith was so tired she couldn’t see straight. Every muscle was sore from tensely holding onto the back of a giant hawk, and the adrenaline she’d had marching around in her system during the flight had finally dissipated. But there was no way she was about to sleep.

The woman had lead her inside, after sending Gavin off to find some people whose names Faith couldn’t recall at the moment, and shown her into a large guest bedroom. She looked around a bit, impressed at how spacious it was. From the outside, it was impossible to gauge the size of the entire home-she would have believed anything from cramped, dark chambers to the expansive space she currently found herself in.

There were no windows, of course, but she didn’t miss the natural light. The walls, still the same black stone-obsidian, she was sure, or something enough like it to merit the name-caught the source-less light of the room, preventing it from seeming like a featureless surface. There wasn’t much else in the way of decorating, just practical considerations.

It was clear that the woman was trying to talk her, gently, into getting some rest, but Faith would have none of it. For a minute, judging by the look on her face and the energy in her stance, Faith was sure that there was going to be some kind of face off, but the woman just sighed and relented. She did insist that Faith sit down and try to relax a bit first.

“What do you want to know first?” she asked.

“How about your name?” Faith said pleasantly.

The woman smiled in a strange way to a joke that only she got. “You can call me Luck,” she said, very slowly, still smiling. “Strictly speaking, it’s not my name, but I’ve been known to answer to it.”

Faith raised an eyebrow at her, but felt it wasn’t an important enough question for the moment. It was an odd name for a person, certainly, but given how many things she’d seen in the last few days that she would classify as “odd,” there didn’t seem to be much point in picking that one to wonder about.

“Okay then Luck,” she said. “Where am I?”

“Well, like I said, the house is called Obsidi. It’s my family’s home. Beyond that, you’re in the North Country, and the planet is Earth,” Luck was watching her closely for a reaction, but Faith didn’t give one. She wanted to hear all of this before she decided what to think about it.

“How did I get here?”

Luck made a disgusted noise at that. “In about the most troublesome manner I could have imagined,” she fixed Faith with a pointed look. “It would have been asking too much for you to Cross right where you were, wouldn’t it? You had to jump have a continent. Bloody show-off.”

Faith blinked, completely confused. “I’m not following you,” she said.

Luck shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, absently. “You got here the same way anyone goes from your world into ours. You just crossed the border. You’d been doing it a little at a time for a while. I thought it would take you longer to actually get across bodily.”

It still didn’t make a lot of sense, but Faith suspected that to fully understand she’d need a better grasp of a kind of physics that hadn’t even been discovered yet, to her knowledge. Not her kind of science anyway, even if it was interesting.

She put aside those concerns. “So how do I get back?” she asked.

Luck took a deep breath and her face took on a guarded expression. “How badly do you want to get back?”

She mostly wanted to know that she could. Whether she wanted to go back was another question. She certainly wasn’t aching to get back, not when there was something so new and interesting and, for the moment, seemingly safe for her to explore. How could a sociology student pass up the chance to investigate an unknown culture? But the idea of being trapped scared her, too.

“Is it possible?” she asked.

Luck nodded. “It is. It’s not common, but it’s not extraordinarily rare to be able to do so,” she gave Faith a fond smile. “I’m sure you’ll be able to. It just may take some time.”

“Do I know you?” Faith said, abruptly. It had been niggling just at the back of her mind for a while now, that there was something familiar about this woman, and not just that she’d seen her before. It was in the looks she received, and the familiar tone just now and a few moments ago.

Luck smiled, but looked guarded. “That’s complicated,” she said. “I think that’s something we should talk about later.”

“No, I’d really like to talk about it now,” Faith said. That answer just compounded the peculiar feeling.

“Well, that’s too bad, because I’m going to win on this one,” Luck said, and stood up. “And mostly because it would take a long time, and I’m dead tired. You weren’t the only one up all night, and you weren’t flying, either.” Faith hadn’t thought of that and felt a little guilty. But only a little bit. It wasn’t like any of this had been her idea.

“My room is just down the hall. The red door,” Luck said, starting to leave. “Come get me if you need anything.”

She left the room and Faith looked around a little more. She didn’t get much further than the wardrobe, where she found a pair of pajamas hanging up like they were waiting for her. It was a two-piece set, of the kind she favored anyway, and made of a meltingly soft fabric. They made going to sleep seem like the best idea she’d had in a long time.

She changed and curled up in the bed. Like they had back at Olympus, the lights dimmed as she closed her eyes. It was rather a handy feature, she thought. Beat having to get up and hit a light switch. The bed was soft and the blankets were warm, and if she’d been in the worst mood of her life, she would have fallen asleep happy right now.

Sometime later, she thought she felt a cat jump up on her bed, but couldn’t wake up enough to check.

meh

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 07:25:49 GMT

Faith is difficult. I can't get in her head. Which is a problem, considering the story is from her point of view. She won't talk to me.

And the rum and tequila are marching around in my stomach and not getting alone very well. Not actually sick, just feeling....peculiar.

For all interested parties:

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 20:54:20 GMT

This journal was created for my use during nanowrimo to post my novel as I write it. To keep this from qualifying as publication, every post will be friend-locked. If this sounds like something you're intersted in reading, friend me, or leave a comment here, and I'll add you to my friends list.

I warn you, nothing will be edited before it makes its way onto this journal. Much of it will probably be burned later.

Hope and Memory have one daughter...

Points for persistance? Or just in denial?

meh

For all interested parties: