JOYCE SULLY :: Why Not Wonder

Prompt: photography; bodyguard betrayal

Sarchie snapped awake to see sunlight filtering through the fabric of her tent. “Oh, my moons and oceans!” She lurched up, kicking at the blankets tangled around her. She could not believe it was morning. It had felt like she would never be able to fall asleep. With her limbs still weak from sleep but her mind racing ahead, she staggered out toward the campfire.

Letro’s tent was still closed. The fire was nothing more than a few embers. Sarchie cupped her hands by the tent flap and shouted, “Let’s go! Wake up, wake up!” The whole tent rocked as big Letro got up. Sarchie bounded away again in search of something quick to eat.

Letro burst out of the tent and scanned the area for danger with faceted onyx eyes. “Trouble?” he asked in a voice made of gravel and glass. The great golem could barely speak at all; he had only been given a voice to shout warnings to his client. But he was the best bodyguard the convention could buy–strong enough to carry an oxcart with one arm and at least smart enough to not set it down on top of someone.

Sarchie pawed through the bags of provisions. “The first prints will be ready! Let’s hurry.” She crunched on a handful of dried vegetables, technically intended for reconstituted soup. “I can’t wait to see what images I got. The ruins are sure to be full of magical traces. I just can’t believe the convention finally agreed to let me study them.” She horked down another mouthful and continued to talk. “I mean, after what they said last time, I thought I would have to start requesting at other witches’ conventions or, gads, even ask the provincial government to make it a joint effort.” Sarchie took a deep breath and nearly choked on a dried corn kernel.

Letro lumbered around the campsite, putting away cooking supplies and dousing the fire and arming the alarms and booby-traps. He had his teeth closed around a fist-sized lump of turquoise, eating it like an apple. Sarchie had grown so accustomed to being told to shut up and keep her “wild imaginings” to herself that Letro’s silent companionship constituted the friendliest conversation she’d had in, well, years.

Sarchie took a buoy sack out of her pack and lashed it to the bag of food. She smashed the buoy against the ground to activate the float stones inside. Reaction started, the buoy rose away from the ground steadily, pulling the supply sack up behind it. Suspended ten feet in the air with nothing around it, their food would be safe from even the cleverest scavengers. “Right, now, let’s get moving.”

Sarchie kept talking as they hiked across a grassy hillside to the ruins. “I haven’t brought it up, because, really, I know everyone thinks I’m just crazy. But you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” She looked up at Letro, towering over her and taking one stride for her three. He said nothing, of course, and Sarchie smiled. “I think, if we’re lucky, the memory plates won’t just show the residual vibrations of the people massacred the temple. I think we could see the people who did it. It takes some pretty strong hate to kill that many people–that doesn’t just leave a place.”

Sarchie’s toe caught on something sticking up from the ground. She stumbled and the weight of her bag of supplies threatened to dump her face-first in the grass. Then Letro’s arm caught her, hard and thick as a tree branch. Yet he set her back on her feet as gently as if she were made of glass. Sarchie patted his hand fondly. Letro might have been a golem, not really a person, but he seemed so kind and patient with her. “I know you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, and even if you did, you might not care. Most people don’t. But thank you for listening anyway.”

Sarchie looked up and realize she had tripped over a fallen column. They had reached the ruins. Sarchie caught herself holding her breath. Cracked spines and domes split open like eggshells created a heap of rubble. Sarchie could see in those bones the glory it had once been. “Who would’ve thought,” she said with a breathless laugh, “that a psychic archaeology student would be excavating something from less than fifty years ago? Let’s go check the memory plates.”

The plates, protected from interference by enchanted boxes, were stashed around the accessible parts of the ruins and surrounding grounds. Sarchie led Letro to each one and he carried the growing stack of boxes for her. When the boxes were all collected, they settled down in the grassy field, site of so much bloodshed, and examined what the plates had to show.

Sarchie placed fixing enchantments on the first plate and took it from the box. Letro stood behind her, blocking the sunlight so she could see. The plate, once flawless and milky white stone, bore etchings of shadow that emerge from within the stone itself. The etchings formed visual imprints of the residual psychic energies of the place. The first one, taken from the field and aimed at the ruins, showed nothing surprising, just the buildings as they had appeared fifty years prior. With a special quill, Sarchie labeled the bottom edge of the plate.

More plates showed scenes, tableaux of suffering and waiting and murder. Some were just faces, close-ups of the lost, some famous, others forgotten. Some, Sarchie realized, were not just the long-dead. “This–this can’t be right.” She shuffled through the plates quickly. “Did someone else visit this before me? But how could they leave such strong residuals?”

Sarchie froze as the fan of plates revealed a face far too familiar and very much alive. “The headmistress? But why?”

Two big hands closed on either side of her head. She looked up that Letro. “It was all a set-up. They knew this was the only way to silence me.” And as Letro twisted her head and broke her neck with one clean snap, Sarchie smiled because she saw quicksilver tears in his eyes. At least she had been right about Letro, her only friend even then.

—

This post is part of a series written for the A to Z Blog Challenge. See other entries in the challenge series here.

Prompt: oversize; pajama clad hero

For a moment, Vicki remained asleep and dreamed of an unstoppable alarm clock, one which even unplugging could not silence. Then reality broke in and she awoke. From the nightstand, she grabbed her gun and badge and the shrilling Paranormal Field Detector. Pounding down the stairs from the loft, she slipped the badge onto the chain around her neck and awkwardly stuffed the PFD into the pocket of the shorts she slept in. At the door, she stuffed her feet into shoes and prayed whatever was out there did not require full gear or shielding to fight.

She hardly needed the PFD to tell her where to find the problem. All she needed to do was follow the piercing shriek and the concerned neighbors rushing toward it. Great. Nothing like weird incidents in the middle of the night with lots of witnesses. The PAU wasn’t paying her enough for this. Everything converged on the neighborhood park; a good crowd had already built up.

“FBI, folks, make a path,” Vicki barked. People parted and the chatter increased. She got the usual disbelieving looks, though for once she did not know if it was because no one had seen in almost 300-pound FBI agent or if they had never seen an FBI agent show up to a scene in her pajamas. Over everything, the shrieking noise continued. Damn dramatic bogeymen.

“What’s going on?” Someone asked. “What’s that noise?” “What’s the FBI doing here?” Questions pressed in around her. No one wanted to leave the scene, even though they had every reason to be afraid and should have been at home in bed. Vicki reluctantly dropped her gun into a pocket and turned to the crowd.

“Okay, everyone, sorry for the disturbance. You all need to clear the area. There’s a possibility of a broken water main.”

“Why’s it making that noise?” A chorus of voices asked.

“Most likely that’s the result of highly pressurized water escaping a small crack. For your safety, I have to ask everyone to leave.” She pushed the crowd back from the concrete perimeter of the park. They began, reluctantly, to disperse on their own. Vicki mentally urged him on, hoping to get them clear before anything weirder, and less explicable, than the noise started.

Some guy stuck around, clinging close to Vicki. “Isn’t that unusual?” He asked. “Don’t you normally see breaks with cars hitting hydrants?”

“Sir, I really insist–”

“And what’s the FBI got to do with it?” People started to linger, listening to them argue. Vicki looked him over in the yellow light of the street lamps. Early twenties, street combat attire choices, carrying concealed. What the hell?

“In case you couldn’t tell from my clothes,” Vicki said coolly, “I’m just from the neighborhood.”

Back on the park’s playground, the noise suddenly died down, the auditory equivalent of water leaving a bathtub after the plug is pulled. Just the opposite started visually; white mist or steam started pumping out of the ground just by the merry-go-round. It rolled in slow waves from that center point, out toward them and everything else. Vicki pulled her gun.

Then all of a sudden, the guy was in front of her. He stood, legs spread and feet planted, like he had superhero aspirations. “If you can run, now would be the time to do it.” He pulled a gun from a shoulder holster, something that looked like a water pistol.

“Excuse me? ‘If?’”

“I’ll hold it off,” the guy said and started pulling the trigger on his little water gun. It shot a stream of liquid at the approaching fog. It made contact with the leading edge of the wave. Like a living thing, the fog recoiled, hesitated, and then started a rapid retreat. It coalesced as it went until it looked like a white arrow shooting in the opposite direction.

Vicki cursed and chased after it. She could feel the shorts riding up as she ran and it made her feel like she had just charged into battle in a bikini. The fog decided to take a corner and she raised her gun to fire as it presented its broadside.

“Don’t!” Something crashed into her, then ricocheted off. Vicki aimed again, but the fog had disappeared around the corner. Her chance was gone.

The guy sprawled on the ground, knocked over when he slammed into her. “Bullets won’t do anything to it,” he explained as he got to his feet.

Vicki grabbed him by the collar and jammed her barrel under his chin. “You stupid dick, what do you think you’re doing?”

“You don’t know what you’re up against,” he said in a high, frantic voice. “Don’t you realize that?”

Vicki said, “Do you know what will happen to you if I pull the trigger right now?” She ground the barrel into the skin under his chin for emphasis. Then she shoved him away hard enough to almost knock him on his ass a second time. “Not damn thing, except a bruise and a week of smelling like sulfur. Which is more than I can say for your toy there.”

“You knew? You’re carrying for–what, demons?” He at least had the decency to look a bit embarrassed as he holstered his gun.

“Banishing rounds. And you, you’re an amateur hunter? Exorcist-for-hire?” In her pocket, her PFD’s tone cut off as it lost track of the fog.

“A hunter.” He opened one of the pockets on his camouflage vest and took out a business card. Todd Murphy, paranormal investigation and removal. Great, Vicki thought, a hobbyist. “You’re not really FBI, are you?”

Vicki held up her badge then, because pulling rank on him would be the only upside to this, she flipped it to the second badge.

“Victoria Lightman, FBI, Paranormal Analysis Unit? We have one of those?”

“Plan on getting to know them. You’re coming with me and telling me everything you know about that fog and how you knew it would be there.”

“I’m not really–”

“It wasn’t a request,” she snarled.

He held up his hands and walked where she pointed. “By the way, you sure can run for such a big girl.”

“I can still shoot you, you know.”

—

This post is part of a series written for the A to Z Blog Challenge. See other entries in the challenge series here.

Prompt: newcomer; apocalypse maiden

Lana waved goodbye to the driver. The car’s tires kicked up a little cloud of dust as it pulled off the dirt shoulder and onto the road again. The day was hot and Lana’s legs and back felt damp where they had been stuck to the vinyl car seat. She had half a bottle of water, though, and some food in her pack. She shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare and looked toward her destination.

The driver had seemed surprised when she announced he could let her out at the side of the road. He had agreed to take her into town, another fifteen minutes on, but she had to stop. Once she spotted the postage stamp of a town, Lana knew she had to stop there. She loved small towns, with their weird little shops and funny locals. Plus, she could usually find someone’s couch or porch to crash on. If not, they still tended to tolerate sleeping outdoors more than the cops in the cities and suburbs. This one looked like the sort of place where you could sleep on the floor and get a hot meal in the morning, which suited her tired body just fine.

Lana ambled into the town which seemed deserted. Carson’s Landing Garage had a Back Soon sign in the window. Carson’s Landing Diner said “gone fishing.” Carson’s Landing General Goods and Pharmacy just had all the lights out. Lana laughed to herself. “Well, at least I know where I am.” The only welcoming party for her was a cat on someone’s front porch and it just closed its eyes and went back to sleep.

Lana finally found, in the town center, a windowless meeting house with a couple of cars parked out front. A young guy paced around in front of the building. He kicked at rocks and scuffed his shoes, clearly bored to tears. He had on dress clothes. Lana wondered if there was some kind of religious event on that day. She hoped it wasn’t a funeral. People weren’t too keen on meeting new friends after one of those.

“Howdy,” she called to him as she walked over. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

He jerked his head up and looked at Lana like she was the most unlikely thing he could see. “Where’d you come from?”

Lana jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Back thataway. Just passing through.” She stopped in front of him, on a scraggly patch of grass. “What’s in there?” she asked him and peered around him at the meeting hall.

“But you’re a newcomer,” the fellow said. He looked back toward the meeting hall, back to Lana, and back again.

“Well, sure,” Lana said. “I’m new everywhere. I’m hitching across the country, zigzag like.” She thrust out her hand. “I’m Lana.”

The fellow looked at her hand like it was a two-week-old dead trout. “We’ve never had a newcomer in Carson’s Landing before.”

Lana grinned and cocked her head. “You must’ve done at some point.”

Deadpan, the guy said, “No, we haven’t. You better come inside to meet the elders.” He sort of edged around Lana, like he was planning to herd her inside.

“Sure,” Lana said as he urged her toward the hall door. “If I won’t be intruding.” Mentally, she shrugged and chalked it up to small-town eccentricity.

The door opened on a room set up like a chapel; rows of wooden pews faced a lectern and stage at the far end. Three dozen heads swiveled around to look at her. The woman at the lectern said, “Cory, what is this?” in a stern tone that suggested he better have a good story.

“She walked into town,” Corey said. Lana thought the consternation that followed bordered on excessive. Her instincts, honed from a long time on the road, told her she just might have found some real nuts.

The woman at the lectern, however, looked like she’d just been given a new pony. “Then you have come at last.” She waved Lana forward, up to the stage.

“Er,” Lana suggested.

The woman went to a wooden chest, closed with an ancient-looking silver lock. A key on a chain around her neck unlocked it. “We’ve waited so long,” the woman said. She lifted something out of the chest. She peeled back a fated square of patchwork to reveal an unearthly lump of clear crystal and tarnished metal. “Take it.”

Lana accepted the object is one would accept a newborn lion–with trepidation and very gentle hands. It sat there like an evil antique. Nothing happened. Lana said, “And, ah, what do I do now, exactly?”

The woman exchanged heated looks with Cory and the rest of the assembled people. “But don’t you want to activate it?”

Lana tilted the object side to side to examine it. “You mean it’s got an on-off switch?”

“You’re not the one Carson sent, are you?”

“Who?” Lana asked. Then something hit the back of her head. As she fell forward into darkness, she felt the strange object being plucked from her limp hands.

—

This post is part of a series written for the A to Z Blog Challenge. See other entries in the challenge series here.

Prompt: magnetism; nice job breaking it, hero

Amelia’s morning began with fixing breakfast, doing the dishes, and expanding the grocery list. Then she went to collect Chris from where he was playing with his blocks. They had eaten the last of the oatmeal, which meant Mom and Dad would probably make good on their threat to stop shopping at the science center’s market, the only place to get imported food on the island. Amelia hated the thought of eating the local stuff, which didn’t smell or taste like home.

At the door, Amelia slipped on her sandals. “When the tide goes out, we can look for starfish,” she told Chris. On the railing for the front steps, a bright green bird perched. It sidled closer when Amelia came up to it. She tried whistling and it chirruped back at her. Chris reached out for it, but it took off in a flash of colors. Amelia took Chris’s outstretched hand instead and led him out of the village and across the sand dunes to the shore.

A knot of other kids shouted and played just at the edge of the incoming waves. Amelia thought about turning around and going home. Before she could, the kids spotted them and, following the biggest boy in the group, charged up the shore. The biggest one, a native kid in cutoff shorts, sized them up. “Where’re you from?”

“America,” Amelia answered. Her hand was tight and sweaty around Chris’s. “Our parents work at the center.”

“Flora’s parents, too,” one of the other kids said. An Asian girl got shoved forward by the rest of the pack. She lifted her eyes long enough to flash a smile that looked more like a grimace.

The boy scoffed. “I thought Americans were white.”

Amelia, whose skin shone a darker brown-bronze than even that of the island’s sun-soaked natives, scowled. “Well, you’re wrong.”

The boy jutted his chin. “I’m Manny. I’m in charge around here. We’re going up to the Shell Cliffs. You come too.”

“No, thank you,” Amelia said. She started to pull Chris away.

“What, are you scared?” Manny asked in the universally recognized singsong tone of mockery.

Amelia gave him a withering look. “What on earth is there to be afraid of?”

Manny grinned. “You’ve never heard of Drifter?” Amelia shook her head. “It’s the turtle the island’s on. We’re all standing on its shell. There’s a palace, but you can only get to it if you wake Drifter.”

Amelia would have told them how ridiculous it was, but Chris tugged on her hand. “You want to go?” He looked at her hopefully. “There isn’t really a palace.” Chris had decided, possibly at birth, to be an architect. He loved weird and old buildings. They were the only things that got the shy eight-year-old to act like an excited kid.

“Yes, there is,” Manny insisted and Chris looked determined.

So Amelia was obliged to go with them. The beach sloped upwards. Ahead, a rocky breakwater rose out of the sand. The rocks were white, like marble. Up close, she saw the stones had been cut into huge cubes and slabs, like they had once been part of stone pyramids. Chris eagerly pulled her along.

“Hey, wake up!” Manny shouted. He picked up some small stones and flung them out to sea. He looked back at the others and said, impatiently, “Well, come on. Do something.”

Amelia and Chris watched while half a dozen children shouted insults at the sea and threw anything they could pick up. Waves splashed around the breakwater, sending up sprays of salt water. Amelia’s mouth tasted like seaweed. “This is dumb,” she grumbled.

“Maybe Drifter will come out for something to eat,” Manny said after they had exhausted themselves and their supply of throwable stones. He grabbed Flora and shoved her forward on the rocks. “Come and get it,” he called.

Flora stumbled on the rocks. “Oh, um, I don’t–” she protested. Her voice barely rose above the sound of waves. Manny bulldozed her farther out on the rocks.

“Leave her alone,” Amelia said. She picked her way forward on the rocks. Chris could not keep up and fell behind her. “Stop it,” Amelia said as she got closer.

Manny glared at her and grinned. “Maybe we should throw the little one instead,” he said and jerked his chin toward Chris, stranded on the rocks. “You try to wake Drifter or I throw your brother in.”

Amelia gritted her teeth. Flora looked like she would die of fright and Chris just kept walking closer to them. “Fine,” she snapped. She traded spots with Flora at the end of the spit of white rock. A turtle, huh? She knelt down on the rocks and bent her head so the sun stopped blinding her. Sea spray left droplets in her hair and dampened her clothes.

“What are you doing?” Manny demanded. Amelia just ignored him. No animal would show itself for shouts and threats. She didn’t say anything. She knelt with one hand on the nearest stone and waited. Like the bird on the railing, something edged closer.

The water level just below Amelia dropped, like the tide suddenly rushing out. What had looked like a rock jetty showed itself to be a wall of stone columns and arches, as man-made as the science center. Streamers of sea grass hung from it and mussels colonized corners of windows. In the open water beyond, another white stone structure rose up, perched on the leathery, weather-worn head of a massive turtle.

Water drained from the windows and doorways of the palace. It cascaded down the turtle’s neck, which now formed a bridge between the two islands. Amelia stood staring at it until she saw Manny clamoring down the stones toward the neck below. Chris followed at his heels. “Wait,” Amelia cried out, but Chris had started to climb and slide down. She hurried after him.

At the bottom, the air smelled of salt and decay, like a dead seagull. The cliff of rock opened up into shadowy ruins of buildings. While Amelia, Chris, and Flora stood huddled in the cold shadows of the turtle’s shell of rock, Manny made a dash for the palace.

The moment he stepped off the rock and onto the skin of the turtle’s neck, something happened in the ruins behind them. A noise, like a stone falling or door opening, split the air. Amelia thought she saw something moving in the darkness there.

Then the darkness itself, a tentacle of shadows, stretched out and wrapped Manny up. In an instant of panicked shouting, he and the tentacle disappeared. The three of them stood, gaping and breathless, unsure what they had just seen.

As if from a long way away, Manny’s voice drifted back to them “–anyone hear me?”

“Do we help him?” Chris asked. He had ended up in her arms, though she hardly remembered picking him up.

Flora said, a little louder than Amelia had heard her speak before, “Must we?”

Amelia gulped. “We can’t just leave him. I guess.” She stepped toward the ruins and the living darkness therein.

—

This post is part of a series written for the A to Z Blog Challenge. See other entries in the challenge series here.

Prompt: luckless; you can turn back

I’ve wondered, in the past, if my unnatural lack of luck was some kind of punishment for past sins. This time, at least I knew it was true and I knew what I had done. Now I just had to survive long enough to fix it. The wolves put a serious kink in my plans, though.

They treed me while I hunted for something borderline edible. In what felt like interminable forests, there should have been plenty to eat and drink, right? Miona had been able to find more than enough for the five of us when we first passed through the forest. It hadn’t been delicious or anything–moss soups and roasted unidentifiable animals and green-skinned fruits–but it kept us going. When I got back to the forest alone, I assumed I could just find the same things. Of course, I had spent all those nights huddled by the fire, fulfilling my duties as team coward, and had no idea how or where Miona had found that food.

I sort of thought something was wrong when the forest went quiet. I don’t know how late I was in noticing that, though. By the time a flight of birds started up out of the underbrush in the direction of what I had reluctantly called “east,” I knew I had better do something. Unlike Miona’s foraging, I had watched Rewdan shinning up trees to scout out a path often enough. When I heard something, a quantity of somethings, moving toward me, the only thing I thought of was climbing. I promptly ended up in an isolated tree, separated from any others by a death-defying, arm-wrenching leap, barely tall enough to get me away from attacks.

The first gray hackles and black muzzles appeared in the closer shrubs and I was grateful. Wolves couldn’t climb trees. I was safe. Then they stepped into the open and the filtered light at the forest floor. The breastplates they wore identified them as Sarkej’s hounds, but I didn’t even need to see that. I knew when I saw their eyes, bloody amber and supernaturally hungry. Normal wolves might get bored or hungry and move on to more readily available prey. Not these. One would die of thirst, hunger, or exposure before it abandoned a target. With three of them, they could take turns watching me and hunting and I knew they would.

I had a knife, a few fire starters with a box of tender, and a dart gun with no poison. The last thing I wanted was to let them take me alive. I considered the logistics of cutting my own throat or wrists and just dying up a damn tree. I found it difficult to think of a better plan with three wolves pacing under me. That was when I saw one of them had an arrow lodged in its shoulder. It limped on that leg. The feather in the end shone silvered brown and blue–Lebriga’s colors. They had encountered the wolves before me. Had they been captured? Or had they driven the wolves off? If the wolves lived, they would report where the others were last seen. Reinforcements would be sent. And if they were already captured…

When Talbyt told us that we didn’t have to follow him, I was the only one who took the offered out. I was, I argued, doomed to die if I followed him. No one tried to stop me. I took that as confirmation that I existed as just another dead body waiting to happen. Everything up to and after that point suggested someone with power had it out for me. Possibly the whole world. Try to get through the forest, though, I started to realize that I had chosen my own miserable path. I had paved it with my cowardice and ignorance and stupidity. And now I was still going to die.

Death can make a coward out of a hero. It can also make a marginally less terrible coward out of a coward. If I had nothing but death awaiting me, I decided I might as well try my hand at heroism at least once before that. Thinking about Talbyt and Lebriga made me think of how they took out a mounted soldier with a flaming arrow. I might not be able to kill the wolves, but I might be able to keep them busy.

I unpacked my dart gun, glad I had not discarded it when I ran out of poison. I lined up a row of darts and twisted a few fragile shreds of tinder around the tip of each. I wouldn’t have much time, once the wolves realized what I had done. Three perfect hits, with untested flaming darts, on three moving targets. Oh, yeah, that did not require any luck.

I chanted “shut up” at myself as I took out the starter. Forget luck. Just do something.

Fur goes up like a torch and stinks to high heaven. I made three perfect hits. The wolves howled and thrashed and I hit the ground, well, not running, but scrambling. I ran hard in the direction of brighter light, hoping for some end to the forest. When that end turned out to be a waterfall and a jagged cliff face as far as I could see in either direction, I figured that was just my life. It still couldn’t get any worse and I had decided I would find the friends I had abandoned or die on the way.

So I jumped.

—

This post is part of a series written for the A to Z Blog Challenge. See other entries in the challenge series here.