I write things. It's a serious work/hobby. I have a critique group for my important work but don't really want to burden them with my deer-with-people-faces stories. So here it is. But it's uncommon for people to read things on this site. Rather than make new posts for my stuff, I'm squirreling everything away here in the past.
I like serious writing critique both for grammar and style. I realize I often make typos that I fail to catch. I also like editing things and will edit anything you send to me for grammar and content (either or).
Blog title is a reference to the Dewey Decimal System. Books sorted in the 800's are fiction.
Click the name of something to reveal the story. The oldest are at the bottom and the newest are at the top.
(A story requested by player NikaGika about her character Nika, who was a knight in the human world. This story contains violence and swearing and I would consider it quite mature. Not recommended for the squeamish or the young.)
Two days of chase and things were getting tiring.
It wasn’t a chase anymore, because she’d already found his mule steed abandoned next to a lake. Or maybe it had run away from him and he had been unable to recover it. Her prey was on foot now, and instead of following roads that horses could easily take, Nika had been forced to dismount Johann and and go by foot in front of him to see the bootprints.
The big warhorse kept breathing on the back of her neck, getting his wet nose hair to tickled the back of her neck that neither her armor nor cloak quite reached, and which her bunned up hair couldn’t protect. Nika couldn’t fault the poor steed for breathing but it certainly stretched time out.
Soft spring trails meant clear footprints in the wet earth. Flowers were starting to wake up for summer but they were still drowsy and the woods were almost entirely brown and green. And at night, it was all black and the treetops scared away the moon and stars.
Nika gave up on following the trail at dusk when her eyes started to hurt and ache and the footprints she followed swam and wavered in her vision. She led Johann off the trail and they stood under an enormous oak where the last of the sun’s rays couldn’t quite find them.
“Tomorrow,” she told the horse. Whether or not he believed her, he didn’t say, but he nickered and nosed her until she took his bit out and fixed a feedbag over his face.
Very intentionally, she did not light a fire or a lantern. What was she, a target for bandits? No matter how knightly her armor, she’d found in the past that there would always be an idiot dumb enough to try to rob her. She could have made a necklace out of the hands that she’d taken from would-be thieves, but that would have been neither knightly nor ladylike.
In the dark, animals stalked around them. Nika could hear them touching branches and twigs and it kept her awake, because even though she knew for certain that it was a deer twenty feet west of her because of the sounds it made chewing and digesting leaves, she jumped slightly every time it moved.
It was too easy to imagine that her prey was stalking her back. Johann slept more than she did, and at dawn they moved on and followed more footprints. The distances between feet shortened as she went on, a sure sign of slowing down. She smirked and felt warm in her heart thinking of how infuriated he would be to find that his pursuer was a woman.
She looked forward to it, to the look on his face. It made her fingers curl around the sword at her hip, but the sword she most looked forward to using was the much heavier blade that was so long she had to wear it across her back. Its weight was a constant comfort no different than Johann’s hoofbeats.
---
She caught him sleeping. It was most definitely Wolfram, he was the man that witnesses had described fleeing and that the girl had described. He was a mason from somewhere up north, come down to work on an enormous church so large that it probably wouldn’t be completed in Nika’s lifetime. A completed cathedral should have been a sign of devotion and love to God, and it made Nika’s red lips pull back from her teeth in a snarl to think that pigs like Wolfram could contribute to such a colossus.
The knight stepped carefully to his side and looked down with her braid resting calmly over her left shoulder, swaying ever so slightly like a pendulum. In sleep, was he the same monster he was when he was awake?
Yes, probably. She imagined that the sleeping smile on his face meant he dreamt something sickening. Nika swept back a leg and kicked him in his lower back as hard as she could with a metal plated boot. The man squealed like a pig, she thought, and as he got up to flee like one she stepped on his cloak.
He stumbled, fell, had the sense to pull a knife.
“You are slow,” she said, and had time enough to roll her eyes at him before she drew her own blade lazily from her hip to block his knife. It was long, a blade of almost a foot. If he could have wedged it between her armor, it could have done some damage. But she feared nothing from this animal.
Her blade deflected his with the satisfying scrape of metal. She glared into his eyes. “I guess you thought I’d give up and you could take a nap?” she asked.
“Oh you bitch,” he snarled. “They send a woman to arrest me?”
“No,” she said coldly. Her voice was more clear than the morning air and it promised pain. She stepped in, closing the distance between them, and lifted her arm to smash his face with her elbow. He was soft like a melon and blood started to drain out. “They sent a woman to execute you.”
He went for another stab but he was sloppy, she caught his wrist in her left hand. They were matched in strength but in skill he was a child next to her.
“You should have stuck to masonry, Wolfram, you’re the worst warrior I’ve seen, and you’re going to pay interest for what you put that girl through,” Nika brought the tip of her sword up to his adam’s apple. She could have shaved his dark beard off, but instead she drove him backwards into a tree.
“Arrest me,” he begged.
“I will not,” she said. Never was there so much as a splinter of doubt in her voice, let alone mercy. She searched his face briefly when she held him against the tree, and drove her sword through his abdomen, into the tree.
Nika stepped back, confident that it would hold him in place. “I will not arrest you. I will not try you. I will not hear your testimony. We both know you are guilty.”
They did. Nika drew the heavy sword from her back. It was easily half again as long as the one that held Wolfram to the tree. He started to try to speak, but she wasn’t paying much attention to him.
“Father,” she whispered in prayer, looking to the sword, herself, and the heavens all at once. “Guide my blade and let me be thy justice.”
A moment of silence interrupted by Johann’s heavy breathing and Wolfram’s sputtered pleading followed, and then in a swift motion she lifted the blade, lined it up, and took his head cleanly.
“Amen,” she said.
(La buddied up with Vaq the magic-obsessed fawn, mostly because she can’t get him to stop pranking her by painting her pelt when she sleeps (something he would only do to close friends, he’s not usually one to prank a snoozing deer). Despite this, she loves the little trickster dearly and I tossed together a very short story the other day with the intention of capturing the gist of their relationship.)
La held the book open with a hoof, chewing on the flower patch around her. Vaq settled down at her side and craned his lanky neck to get a look at the book, with his ears standing straight up at attention.
“What are you reading? Is it boring? I bet it’s boring.” He hoped it was boring. No one else was asleep in the forest and he needed to get his hooves on some magic. If he could get La to sleep, he’d be all set.
“It’s about naves in architecture,” La said.
“Oh! Knaves! Like pirates and stuff?” He sprang to his feet so quickly it was as if he had been lifted up an invisible hand.
For a moment La processed the homophone. “No, no k. I’m reading about churches, a nave is a part of a church.” She smiled proudly and shifted her weight and the way she rested in the flowers and nodded her head toward the ruins over her shoulder.
Vaq’s disappointment was palpable, and he settled down unhappily, folding his long legs under him and setting his head down like a grump.
“Would you like me to read to you?” La asked him, looking at his small frown as he snuggled up against her flank.
“No,” he said, determined to resist education that didn’t involve adventure or magic.
“Suit yourself,” the older deer replied, and she ate another flower while she read, then turned a page with a dainty hoof. By the time the chapter was finished, Vaq was snoring ever so slightly and La could feel his long breaths when he inhaled and exhaled.
She shut her book with the gentle sound of pages slapping together and pulled a few of the streams of magic that Vaq’s dreams were producing to weave into a spell. After a moment of holding onto the magic just for the sake of hanging onto it, she tossed it back at him and let swirls of blue and purple ripple across his once dappled pelt.
La stood and gave the sleeping fawn a smooch on the forehead, then gently whispered, “Payback, dear boy.” She was quick to abscond.
