Saga "Lovely Dark and Deep" / Kessel Run Challenge 2023

Findswoman: Ooh, Adé! Nice choice! (And very cool Shakespearean title, and spot on for the story!)

Thanks! I could have gone with any number of my characters for this one (though I'm not about to start "The Childhoods of Pandora's Heroines" series), but when I saw Kahara had chosen Adé as one of her Favorite Original Characters in the fanfiction festival, I was inspired and my choice was made.

As for the title, I was stumped on that--and then that last speech of Puck's to the audience came almost magically to me. "And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream..."

Intriguing dreamscape here, and interesting porous boundaries between the dreamscape and walking life; I think that old lady is onto something in saying children live life like a dream (or at least it’s how we adults tend to perceive our own childhoods later on). Though I get the feeling that Adé is starting to wish her life were less like a dream; at nine going on ten, she’s starting to get a sense of independence, and she wants to be able to explore the outside world on her own terms.

Childhood tends to be a time when you live more through your imagination then actual experience. (Which has been made clear you're not old enough to get.) When dreams are your first life, rather than your second one, in many ways. This mightn't be true for everyone at the time, or even their memories later, but the old woman is talking to Adé, for whom it is true.

I have noticed that childhood, since it was first idealized by the Victorians *waits for a historian to pop up and inform me that I'm wrong on all counts and it was actually...* is often regarded as a time before one's actual life begins. Life brings knowledge and experience, which put an end to innocence and its ignorance. (To be clear, I'm not using innocence in its usual definition, as in lack of sexual knowledge, but more broadly.) Because on some level, I think for a lot of people, children aren't real people. They would deny this to the ends of the earth, but I think their actions and words bear it out. Children know they're real, even in their limited worlds, but as adults, they forget.

But Adé is a bit overconfident here in her ability to handle the weather. She's more capable than Vittoria will ever give her credit for, but things can go wrong. I was reminded of this recently when a local woman was found frozen to death a mere 200 yards from her house, after her car broke down at some point on her two mile driveway up on top of a hill and she started walking in street clothes. And this isn't Hoth, though it has felt that way more than once this winter.

[Though Adé would have known to wear layers and a coat. She would share my father's opinion on the situation, and he has been told in no uncertain terms that he is to stay far away from the grieving family at this time.]

I of course recognize the tall, blue-haired woman from her drawing in The Winter Queen; in that story Adé insists she’s just made up, but this story shows us that she isn’t just (or at least that it’s more complicated than that).

This woman from Adé's experience/vision/no need to decide almost certainly inspired her artwork going forward. Or perhaps the artwork inspired her--Adé has been drawing pretty women in pretty frocks for a few years at this point, not all of whom have blue hair. But yes, the woman in the drawing she was working on in "The Winter Queen" did, and I think this woman's image is one she's been going over in her head, and changing, and dreaming over, ever since this day.

In the strictly regimented society on this post-Saga Hoth, I could see her thirst for independence running her into trouble, and of course it does later on—but from this story I see why she’s so taken with that blue-haired lady, who’s kind of an emblem of the independence Adé longs for. (The lady’s stands out to me, too; Adé notices that it isn’t “rottensweet” or the first stage of a laugh, but can’t put her finger on what it actually is—and I think that may be because it’s a real, sincere smile, and Adé hasn’t experienced many of those in her short life. Being used to the cold isn’t just being used to low temperatures; there are other kinds of cold.)

All of this is true. I can't really think of much to add.

Though Adé has encountered some sincerity--Lady Mericat is always sincerely sentimental and painfully sincere about it--she's used to smiling used as a social tool, of which Vittoria is a master by necessity. And nothing keeps a social situation light like laughing at something that wasn't even that funny. No matter how old she gets, I don't think Adé will ever much understand that.

Another wonderful addition to your series—you are really nailing all of these prompts, and I’m so glad you decided to take part in the Run!

Thank you, and thanks as always for reading and commenting!

-------------------------------------------

pronker: Compelling imagery ... and it may even snow here tonight, as it did yesterday, rare as that is, so this sentence sounds wonderful.

All the imagery in this story was inspired by the winter experience of my too-many years living in what is known as a "snow belt." We always have snow, and at least a few mornings where the temps hit -40 C and F both. There's a reason that people come here to go snowmobilling from both instate and Minnesota--there's probably a t-shirt that reads "[Town Name Redacted}. If you can't ride here, you can't ride anywhere."

The yearning that Luke felt in ANH when watching the suns set echoes here ... excellent prompt response with a nine's ultra-clear desires.

Her yearnings aren't as defined as Luke's were at nineteen--she can only just imagine the far away future when she'll be Grown Up, whereas Luke is a fresh adult chafing at the responsibilities that are holding him back from moving on with his life. But she knows quite clearly what she wants, even though she's going to be quite disappointed when she turns ten and they continue to treat her like a Dumb Little Kid.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

-----------------------------------

earlybird-obi-wan: In week 6 more world-building on Naboo with likeable characters and the rules they have to follow.

I'm pleased to hear you found them to be likeable, and as for rules: I have heard, for many situations, that once you know them, then you know how to break them.

and now in week 7
Living on Hoth; a cold planet. It must be difficult for a nine year old child. Vivid descriptions of her and her dreams

"Hoth ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact it's cold as hell..."

It isn't easy, that's for sure, but Adé has the advantage over the adults in her life in that she was born there, and so it all she has personally experienced. She knows the rest of the galaxy only from pictures and books, but she has taken those and gone for an imaginative ride.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

------------------------------------------

Chyntuck: I'll be back later for comments on your latest story (it's a busy family weekend here) but I wanted to give my thoughts on this before I forgot:

[My venting about That One Line in Revenge of the Sith went here.]

That line makes me cringe too; however, I find that there is enough context to it that it can be interpreted in somewhat less absolute ways (although they're hardly more charitable than the one you chose). One possible interpretation would be that the issue is not strictly getting pregnant, but having a child out of wedlock, since Anakin and Padmé's marriage is secret and they can't make it public without getting Anakin kicked out of the Jedi Order – a very old-fashioned approach to respectability and, as I said, hardly more charitable than yours. The other main possible interpretation is the scandal that would erupt when it became public that the father of the baby is a Jedi who got sidetracked from his duties in the middle of a war etc. Again, not very charitable given the potential to blame it on the woman who distracted him and so on and so forth. Which isn't to say that I disagree with your interpretation! I find that it allows you to take your stories and worldbuidling in an very interesting direction, and as you said there is no way to "excuse it as a good thing" (also, yes, it's a product of the world Lucas grew up in, most definitely, and the mere fact that Padmé became a whimpering damsel in distress once she was pregnant is also part of that).

Before I let the post loose on the internet, I looked up that line to see what the exact wording was (as memory is notoriously fallible), and I don't know that your first interpretation isn't the more correct one. I had actually intended that as I wrote, but I tired of writing "outside of marriage" over and over ad nauseam, and so I dropped that bit there as I plowed on ahead. When I was looking over it after posting, I realized that it read as though any woman in Naboo politics--and perhaps in other professions, but we'll just leave it at the one Padmé knows best--who gets pregnant is required to leave the public eye and get back to the kitchen. And I considered that reading could work just as well as the one I had meant to go with. So I left it as it is, and I probably shouldn't have.

The thing is, all of these interpretations work equally well, because Padmé is vague about the circumstances under which she would lose her position as Naboo's Senator. She opens this line with the preamble that "This baby will change both of our lives," which is why I went with the reading that it was her pregnancy alone that would cost her the work that has been her entire life, not the reveal of the oh so secret marriage. Unless, that is, the baby's birth would necessitate that marriage being made public (though it wouldn't have to, which leads back to the original question) and that would be the true issue brought to the Queen's attention.

Earlier, in Attack of the Clones, the only reasoning she really gave for why a relationship with Anakin would be a bad idea on her end was "I'm a Senator." Which I guess does say it all: a Senator is a high profile politician who is supposed to be above reproach. And on Naboo, where politics would be "the noblest of all arts,"--my phrasing alone, and 100% never to be seen in E.K. Johnston's Naboo YA canon--and Padmé is its most beloved girl-queen, well. She didn't really need to say more.

I get the impression that certain members of the tumblr set prefer to forget/pretend away--either because it is so cringe-inducing in a way that can't reasonably be excused after 1974, or just doesn't suit their Naboo "headcanons"--that Padmé ever uttered that line. That includes the aforementioned Johnston. Apparently, in her It's Canon Now Naboo, Sola Naberrie never married, and had both of her daughters via artificial means, and Johnston has posted on her tumblr that this was not uncommon practice on Naboo, and no one gave one damn about it.

Now, this does explain the absence of Sola's husband in the family scenes in the movie--especially at Padmé's funeral, when there is no way, if he was around and existed, he wouldn't be there. (Personally, I just had them get divorced when the girls were little, and he lives on another world with a second family-- and I'm not sorry, and I'm not changing my mind.) But it doesn't work if you remember That Line, which indicates that when women have babies when they shouldn't (alone, with the wrong man, in the wrong job, we can all decide that for ourselves) people on Naboo give plenty of damns.

I could go on, but I've probably written enough for now. I should have known what the risks were when I opened up the sarcophagus of That Line.

Regardless, I think both of your interpretations--as well as the more severe one I considered because I was too lazy to type three words one more time--work with the worldbuilding in my story. Theda is (I think obviously) unmarried as she faces down her pregnancy, and that is the issue. Whether she would have still had the same problem if she had been married to the baby's father is hard to tell from what I've written. Since it isn't relevant, it doesn't come up.

[Though Amilia and Theda's original conversation at the tearoom would have made those things much more clear. Perhaps I should write that one of these years?]

------------------

The next story is complete, but it still needs a good bit of editing. I should have it up sometime tonight before the deadline--so watch the skies, and watch this space.

 

Week Eight:

Title: Happy Endings
Timeframe: The distant future
Characters: All Original [Crix Lu (OC)/Yalena (New OC) and Lysinora Ving (OC)/All by Myself]
Genre: You can't always get what you want
Summary: "But if you try sometimes, you just might find--you get what you need."

*Those of you who have read my story The Winter Queen will know who Lysinora and Crix are, and that I have just demolished my OTP without mercy. Don't worry, though--this is an AU, and they're still together in the real timeline.

*For those who haven't, well: enjoy (for whatever value of that word applies) what follows.

The prompt:

• Write an AU (alternate universe) story of at least 400 words where a character ends up in a committed romantic relationship with someone other than the person they ended up with in canon or in your existing AUs. That’s right, guys, it’s time to break up your OTP, or never let them get together in the first place. Whether or not the characters are happy about this turn of events is entirely up to you.
• Minimum 400 words, no maximum limit

-----------------------------------------------------

Happy Endings


The night closes in early this time of year. After the rubyrose sunset burns down over the foothills, the sky fades into grey, and then, in a flash, to a deadblack, the nothing color it has before you can see the pinsharp lights of the first stars. It is not at all the time for being outside—exposed to the cold, and the dubious mercy of the winds racing the sky—but I was still out there, and still riding towards my next stop. To the hole I could hide away in for the worst and darkest hours. I wasn’t worried yet, though I knew (as everyone still living does) I ought to be. Sometimes, I don’t know if I’m just stupid, or if I have reached a state of living where I’ve already accepted whatever happens next.

Besides, I have heard it doesn’t hurt to freeze to death. You don’t even feel the cold that is killing you. You’re just warm, in the fadedsoft way of dreams, and then you fall asleep. That’s what Estrella, that woman I know only from stories, must have considered the final night of her life as she waited for the time when everyone else was asleep, so she could walk out into the darkness to die.

Since I am going to die, in the end that awaits us all, there are worse ways to go about it. I can’t stand the slightest of pains. I handle the first icecracking warning shot of an oncoming headache with a punchout numbing relief dose. I don’t endure it one minute if I can.

My mind tends to gnaw away on itself when I go for too long without speaking aloud to another person, and as I rode through the dark, I did my worst to keep my attention on the world existing around me, and on my tauntaun, Vasilissa, bearing me along, and the raw-warm animal smell of her rumpled fur. She was moving at a steady trot, the steady blowing of her breath matching each of her steps.

But you can’t actually think of “nothing,” and so long as I’m conscious, I’m always thinking. Though oftentimes, it’s more like I’m attacked by a blitz of the greatest nastiest hits of my memories. I’ll start out thinking over my agenda for the day: and then that will lead into my remembering that day when I was eleven, and the wisewoman from mumsy dear’s Mistress’s court on Arabanth was sent to visit me. She looked older than she most likely was, her ash-white hair in long schoolgirl braids.

She smiled (hopefully, I would say now) as she presented me with one of their fabled thought puzzles—and then waited for me to explain the meaning for her. I don’t have it figured out now, so I certainly didn’t know it then. She continued to wait. I began to turn hot with a cringing feversick blush. If I had learned anything in my school experience, it was that there was one correct answer. And I need to know it instantly.

Then that led on to the rest of the year of my life when I was eleven, and into the coldest winter ever allowed in New Aldera: and the morning my whisperkitten was found in the courtyard, standing frozenstuck to the ice of the bird pond, dead. Naturally, I found her first, after I searched over our entire apartment for one final time and went outside, already bereft of any possibility of a happy ending.

Once I started screaming, I couldn’t stop. I had to get the worst pain I have yet known—far worse than I have experienced over any human or non-human—out of me, the sort of pain no numbshot can end. Finally, my father appeared in front of me and took me by the shoulders, and when I continued to scream, he gave me a light leaf-drifting shake to make me stop. And I did stop—but mainly because my voice was wearing out, and I never wanted to speak again.

You’re upsetting everyone, he said. Referring to the moon-eyed crowd of neighbors, who had gathered to stare at me at shock, that I hadn’t realized as there.

Professor Ving did have enough sense not to tell me my kitten was “just an animal.” He might not have even thought it. He isn’t good with most emotions, so he did his best when he told me that at least, sad as it was, she didn’t suffer for long. But he didn’t know that. I don’t know that.

It was just my luck that a man who lived in the neighboring house, who I had seen without much noticing him in passing, was a refugee from the succession wars on Onderon. Worse still, he claimed “near-human” status, while being half-Hapan means I’m still all human. He was the one who said, who screamed at me, No one cares about your stupid cat, little girl!

My stepmother had to assist my father in holding me back, or I haven’t any doubt that I would have brought that little man down and had my hands gripped around his throat.

No, writing this down for the record doesn’t make me feel any better.

But as the old woman who visits us in dreams, who Adé calls Mother Hoth, might say, There’s a virtue in not pretending otherwise.

Anyhow, I was flooded with a riverrush of relief when I made out the faint fey-glimmer of a light ahead of me in the near distance. We were almost there, almost safe. I pressed my knees against Vasilissa’s flanks, and gave the reins a tug, but she needed no encouragement. She sped up into a bone-jarring run, flying across the darkness and the moonlight glowing snows, and soon, the hillside bulk of the research station was looming up in front of us, the front windows burning with light.

Vasilissa headed straight over to the stables. There were only two other tauntauns present, having their evening repast in their stalls, the old male and the new young submissive female—neither of whom Vasilissa needs to prove herself to. Once she was settled in, I stayed there in the aisle next to her stall door for another few minutes, in the easy shadowedlight, listening to the tauntauns’ lives. Then I reached up and gave Vasilissa one last knuckle-rub, and headed back out.

My fingers were thick and shiveringclumsy in my gloves, and I had to enter the code into the door lock twice before it worked. But it did work before I had to try my luck with the buzzer, and I went inside, into the main hallway, and the warmth and hard white lighting of civilization.

The hallway was empty, without any sign or noise that someone else was present. There was a fan blowing from the heat system, but otherwise, it was quiet as I walked in. The air smelled plain, of hot water, and the snow on my boots was melting on the moongrey stone flooring. My reflection stood out too bright and real in the glass of one of the display cabinets, over the collection of local plain fossils that Antero takes his pride in. I didn’t notice any new ones since the last time I came through.

As the heat sank into me, my face thawed, starting with my nose. I wiped at it, and looked into the shadows at the end of the hall. I don’t mind being alone with my echo and my shadow (especially when I suspect it isn’t in my best interests) but I knew quite well there was at the least one other person in the building, and the silence was beginning to have an nerve-shivering buzz to it.

“Hello,” I said. I have a deep voice, and that one word thundered forth through the silence, before falling back into my face. I waited, but all I received in response was the fan-drone.

I felt awkwardly out of place in the world--the way you should outgrow for good by the age of around twenty--but I pressed on: “I decided to let myself in! Hope you don’t mind!”

Then: “Thank you,” a man’s voice said, approaching from an adjacent room, followed by the echoing thud of his footsteps. “And I heard you the first time.”

With that, Antero entered the hallway. He walked with his shoulders slumped forward, and his hands stuffed into the pockets of his dark Corellian army issued greatcoat. I don’t know how tall he is, but he has more than several centimeters on me, and he is built like a mountain. His stocking cap was pulled down over his thick curly hair (the exact sort of hair that princesses in stories have), and the lights directly over him gave his long pale face a sunblurred glare.

When he came closer, and I could actually see him, he smiled. A small flickered acknowledgment for me, though I don’t have to worry about saying that one thing that will offend his sensibilities and end our association. I don’t think he can be offended.

“It’s a good thing you’re here,” he said. “There’s a northern storm due in within the hour, and it’s going to be a howler. You got in just before I put the shields up.”

“Well, I must thank something in the universe for that,” I said.

“Anyhow,” he said, moving on to his main point. “Feel free to settle in. I’ll turn on the heat in the observation room once I’ve dealt with the shields, and the pantry is all stocked up. We just got in a shipmentload from Bespin a few days ago.”

That said, he went off on his way, and I went off on mine to the common room. The white overhead lights had a moth-flutter buzz over the two long farm tables, the sort that I’ve heard are common on such worlds as Taaanab, from whence my father’s side spawned. I set my pack down, and went to see what was on offer in the pantry-cupboard. It was indeed full--with a bounty of packaged foods in identical pristine snowbright packaging with the same holo-shimmering logo. I wouldn’t say the sight was an appealing one, but it was oddly soothing.

After recovering from the cold, I had gone from being warm enough to entirely too hot. I unwrapped my scarf, and then took off my great coat, that one that once belonged to Dr. Mannen’s long gone husband, and draped it over my pack. Then I went about the business of my approaching meal, heading straight to the refrigerating unit. Antero is not the sort to survive on grainmash and chocolate ration bars that taste like sweetened plastine.

I had just poured out a glass of fizzyglug--which Antero doesn’t even drink, so I can only speculate that he was actually thinking of me when he put in the order—when the outside alarm buzzer gave forth its snarling fly buzz. After a waiting pause, it sounded out a second time.

Someone else was out there in the night, seeking refuge from the looming storm.

Of course, I knew Antero would lower the shield long enough to let whoever it was in, even if it was one or more of the wampa hunters. Regardless of his opinions on them, Antero keeps to the etiquette of the wastes, and they do stay at the station on occasion. As I wandered back to see for myself, I could hear the rhythm of Antero’s voice, though the words were too smudged together for me to make out. Then Crix Lu answered him. I recognized his voice at once, and without much surprise.

They both turned to see me as I came down the hallway. “And Ving stopped in to keep me company as well,” Antero said. “Obviously, as you can see.”

“Obviously,” Crix said. “Hello, Lysinora. And well met on this most lonely of nights. I expected I would have to tolerate the company of hunters, so I am most pleased to see you.”

He was pleased enough to see me, but I knew he was exaggerating it for effect. You can do that with people you’re friends with. I returned his greeting, and: “Well met indeed. Though I suspect that the hunters are much better conversationalists than I am, for which I should probably apologize.”

Crix hahaed at that. “Your apology is accepted. So let’s get on to the niceties like the civilized animals we’re supposed to be. How have you been, Lysinora?”

I shrugged: which is usually the most I can do in answering that question. “The same. Running around wild and getting paid for it. And you?”

“I only just escaped the gravity well that is the bustling town of Aprill. It’s now two thousand beings strong, and I don’t know what it says about me that I thought there wasn’t air enough to breathe,” he said. He kept his tone light, but I understood the rest of his meaning.

Antero had been content to let us handle the speaking, but now he was inspired to join in: “You said it. I left Winterhelm the moment that thirtieth person showed up to stay.”

“So having thus escaped, I’m now returning to the land of Hoth City before Yalena forgets about me and finds a new love,” he said.

“I wouldn’t worry about that last one, “ I said.

Yalena is Crix’s true love, and as of earlier this year, his handfasted bride. She is the financial secretary for the H.C. council, and a dainty Pantoran beauty with heaps of burgundy hair who never seems to be affected by the cold. Oh, she feels it—it just doesn’t bother her. Even Raeka, the Pantoran aide, doesn't do so well. She will be huddled up in layered sweaters and mittens while Yalena charges ahead on the afternoon walks wearing but a light ruffled dress with a silkvelvet jacket in a floating drifting steam-cloud of her breath.

She belongs here in a way I can’t even pretend to. She was installed in her position at Hoth City when I arrived to take on the teaching position at the mansion almost two years ago, because she had been living here for years before I first heard this planet’s name.

And yes: I knew Crix was Yalena’s lover (her boyfriend, her gentleman companion) before I knew anything else about him. She doesn’t know that I had that crush on him in the beginning, and--even though that is in the past tense--I would rather she never does. It might seem too late to matter now, and it wasn’t as though I was ever a threat to her. But you never do know, and I don’t need to alienate every single person I know. Especially the woman who signs off on my paycheques.

*

Thanks to Crix’s assistance, we were able to get something decent together for dinner. More or less, that is, considering what we had to work with. I do know how to cook. But I never developed a knack for meals of the appropriate amount for just one person when I still lived on New Alderaan, and since I came here, I haven’t had regular access to a kitchen. The housing-in-progress on the street is being reserved for Families First, so I don’t expect that to change. (Mirah and Sebastian have invited me to share their claimed condo, but I think we all know why that isn’t a good idea.) So it had been some while since I had prepared anything beyond the most humble of dishes.

Antero came in after his rounds to help out at the end, and soon enough, we sat down with the results of our labor. It turns out Crix has a heavy hand with spices, of which Bespin City’s supplier had provided a wide variety. Antero uses those to make the local meat acceptable for him, but as Crix is a vegetarian—just like Yalena—we had a repast no one had needed to kill off first.

“This isn’t half bad,” Antero said, after his first tentative bites. “And I’m not just saying that because the two of you did most of the work for me. Though that helps.”

“Coming from a carnivore like you, that is the highest of compliments,” Crix said, providing an additional teasing wink with an insolent arch of his sharp black eyebrows.

I was seated across the table, which gave me the perfect view of him at all times. He looked good, flushed with warmth and satisfied with life. Since he does feel the cold, he was still wearing his wilderness gear. His bright black-as-midnight hair was slightly mussed in his usually firm bun, and his hands, his long sharp fingers, rested lightly on the table in front of him, the lights dancing off the silver of his family ring, and the gold double-handed ring of his marriage.

I believe I can say now that I find him attractive, without being attracted to him. There’s no feeling behind it--unless you count a sort of burned-out numbness that remained when I got over him. I know better than to think on that one for so much as a minute.

Antero finished his second plateful, and excused himself. “I have to check the status on that storm outside,” he said, as he slid his half of the bench back with a mouse-pitched shriek. “Well. That and I’m expecting a call on a network made of holosteel, so I can’t even hope to avoid it.”

“Good luck with surviving that,” I said—with probably too bright and chirpy-droll an edge to it. But people like me best, like me at all, when I’m amusing them. It is ever been so since I was ten, at the earliest, when I went from being naturally tall to too tall, too soon, for my own good.

(That was the year my father attempted to have me bumped up a year ahead in school, though he thought I “wasn’t being challenged” with the class I was currently stuck with. I wasn’t privy to what the headmistress said in the meeting where she turned that idea down. Which may be just as well.)

After he left, we continued with our meals in silence for a few minutes. The fans turned on with their familiar breathing-drone, and I felt the muscles in my shoulders relax. I hadn’t decided which route I would take in the morning, but that could wait. For now, I was safe in my chosen hole.

“So,” Crix said, settling his fork down on his emptied plate. “How were things going back at the Mansion when you last saw it? And though I fear the answer, how are Mirah and Sebastian?”

“The same,” I said. The morning I left, they had arrived in the hangar in full on bickering: Mirah walking in a stiff marching trot, her swollen-high belly (which I am not about to ever touch) swaying with each step in her open woolen knit coat, and Sebastian hurrying to keep pace with her.

The matter turned out to be merely the mattress for their new bed in the promised condo. As Mirah once said to the dinner table crowd: We don’t have a relationship. We have a joke.

“I expected nothing less,” he said. “Though Sebastian has done his best to man up lately, and I must say I’m rather proud of him. I still understand why you declined their housing offer.”

“I don’t know that I mightn’t change my mind on that,” I said, admitting to what I haven’t told them yet. “After all, I won’t be there too much of the time. I just need a room that belongs to me when the coldest of nights come along. Much like this one.”

Crix lifted his glass of the garnet-red juice Bespin City had provided. “So very true.”

“And trust me,” I said, pushing my plate away. “I will not be taking on any nanny duties once the baby shows up. I should hope Mirah will know better than to ask.”

“But if she does ask, you’ll know what to tell her,” Crix said.

He stared off into the air for a minute, and I could tell his thoughts had gone elsewhere. Then: “Since we’re on the subject, Yalena wants to add our own addition to the native Hothian population. I agreed to go along with her, but honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it.”

“If this means anything, I think you would be great as a father,” I said. “The kids at the school all adored you. I think at least several of them hoped you would adopt them.”

“Oh, I like kids well enough. It’s not that,” he said. “But I think I’m much better suited as the fun loving immature uncle. I don’t have to set the rules, or the punishments for the breaking thereof, or deal with any temper fits. Then when the day is over and the visit is at its end, they return home with Mum and Daddy, and my time is my own again.”

He continued: “That isn‘t the least of it. Yalena wants to return to her birthtown to have her mothers and her sisters and her cousins and her aunts all around her for the hypothetical birth. So we would be away for as long as a year for that. Perhaps more, and with little change of scenery. And I have been talking with that new Arts Minister about a possible teaching position. I would still get to travel, though nowhere near as much as I’m used to. I’m just following Sebastian’s example, and trying to man up here. Of course, none of this is settled yet. It could all change.”

“This is all completely outside my experience,” I said. “Which I admit I’m grateful for. So I’m afraid I can’t offer you any useful advice.”

“That’s all right. I should probably thank you for tolerating my incoherent thoughts,” he said. “We can just blame this all on the old lonely night if you like.”

“Absolutely. It was just the night getting to you,” I said.

He smiled at that: and for a second there, I felt a twitch in the burnmark left of my feelings for him. I wouldn’t say I was concerned. It’s been long enough that I can be certain I won’t feel that old way again. But as I smiled back at him, in a shared hahahaha, I reminded myself of the truth.

He hadn’t once, for so long as a moment, felt what I had then: I had been alone with that raging mess about to burst forth from my chest, that only Mirah and Arty Three had a glimpse of. I had told them never to speak of it to anyone else, and they had kept their agreement. It still makes me cringe with remembered stupidity that I let on even that much.

But even if life had gone otherwise, it wouldn’t have worked out between us.

I’m too much of a loner, drifting with the snowwinds, wanting to have things only and completely my own way. I would be bad for him, and he would be bad for me. He was drawn to Yalena, with her graceful mind to go with her bold curving form, for a reason. This is how it was meant to be.

If he had commented on my suddenly gloomy mood, I would have said (oh so bright and arch, I’m just joking along with the night here): Oh that’s just a death rattle. Don’t pay it any mind.

That was when his comlink rather conveniently emitted its tell-tale chirp, released into life now that he was in range again. “Excuse me,” he said. “My own true love is calling.”

It was indeed, as I had also surmised, Yalena on the other end of the call. While they caught up on each other’s news, I took my dishes over to the sink, and turned on the heated water. The noise blurred out their voices, both his real one in the room, and her voice translated through the holosignals. When I returned to the table, I had a droll, light-minded thing planned to say as I excused myself. They wanted to talk in private, and I wanted to be alone again.

*

After riding through the day, I was tired when I trudged up to the observation room, the place with the new forest-green carpeting and suntrapped heat and glossy stuffed animals in the Kuat pop style, where I could crash for the night. I made an attempt to read, to calm my mind down, before I attempted to sleep, but my eyes were stickyheavy, and I kept fading off in mid-sentence. Soon enough, I gave it up. I set the book-pad back on my pack, and switched on the guidelight. The sky was a white howl outside, so I couldn‘t count on any lighting from the stars or the moons. But of course, it happened again: as soon as I lay down, turned onto my side, and shut my eyes, I was wide awake.

Not only that, but I couldn’t manage the right position with the mattress. I shifted my legs, and tried to slump enough so I wasn’t lying perched upright on the side of my hip. Then I closed my eyes, and listened to my breathing as I made my way towards sleep.

But before long, the itching began, like wooden splinter teeth stabbing into the skin on my right hip. I clenched my teeth. I didn’t have the energy to reach down and adjust my pants for a good scratch, let alone to get up and move through the shadows to retrieve the lotion in my pack.

I was already tensed against the itching when it sparked down my legs, and soon my left leg from the knee down felt as heavy as stone, the muscles braced up into a cramped knot. I tried to breathe through it. But that pain wouldn’t budge, and as I wrote: I can’t stand even the slightest of pains.

Eventually, after tossing back and forth, and back and forth, and clawing at my thick warm flannel skin, I gave in. I got up off the bed. I pulled my pants down in the dim ghostlight, and smeared on the cool lotion. Too much is still not enough at such times. I rubbed it into my arms, and my stomach. I took two pain capsules with a glass of fizzyglug.

Then I shuffled off to the fresher-toilet, which I did need to use, before I returned to the bed. I lay down once again, grimly resigned to the hours ahead, and folded my sore heavy legs up close to my stomach, and closed my eyes onto more darkness, and waited.

*

When I opened my eyes, I was walking along a pretty cloudgrey stone street in the sunshine of a spring day at the beginning of the year, in the shopping district of a city I still believe I will see again. I knew where I was, and where I wanted to go, and I made haste towards it: towards the kaffahouse with the grass-green and white awning in an old-fashioned style off the second side street, the one where he worked, where I might finally, after years of searching and never finding, see him again. Even though I knew him at university, when I was in the first years of my twenties, and now I’m years older, already thirty-five, and I’m long past the point when I should have “manned up.”

This time, I made it to the right kaffahouse, with the row of scattered romance-sized tables outside on the sidewalk. I went inside, and up to the counter, and the glass cases full of delicate lavender and pink and summersky blue cakes, and turnovers, and thick scones. I could only hope my voice would work when I spoke to tell the girl what I wanted to order.

When he stood there, pleased to see that I had returned from the past.

I never quite saw him, those times when I was still able to find him, and yet I know what he looks like: He’s pretty, but not in that terrible angelic way I don’t dare to approach. He has long dark hair, a sweet crooked mouth, and gnawed short fingernails. His only jewelry a single ring with a garnet blood-drop. I watched him play with it as we sat together at a table outside.

The girl appeared in front in me, and I spoke well enough so she could hear me order. She looked at me as she collected the words I told her, without enough interest to remember me later.

She was the only one there at work, and this time, I was prepared for that. He was gone. When she asked me, I said: “He doesn’t work here anymore, does he.”

He hadn’t worked there for years, because he moved on with his life, while I keep coming back to fix that moment in university where everything went wrong. She didn’t have to tell me I was right. I could only accept my order (the scone and chocolate drink) and finish it, and go on, go away--


I fell from the dream like a fish sliding from the water, into the hard real air, on the rumpled bland white sheets of the bed. The windows were flooded with the cold light of morning. I rolled onto my side to hide away for a few more hours. Ones wherein I hoped I wouldn’t dream again.

*

Crix had already gone when I emerged later and went down to the common room. The silence around me was so hollow I suspected Antero had left as well, and when I checked the stables, I deduced he had gone off on his rounds on elderly Sábado, his usual mount. I returned inside, and ate a pastry with a cup of chocolate standing at the counter. I almost didn’t notice the note Crix had left out on the table where we ate the previous night, pinned down underneath a saltglass. I read it over twice, as Crix’s own tall looping hand has a shivering wobble from lack of use.

Off to the glories of Hoth’s first city, he wrote. I will tell everyone who needs to know that you are in good health, and I expect you to catch up with me before much longer.

Once I had finished deciphering it, I folded the note back together, and tucked it into my skirt pocket. The words would rustle around there as I headed back out across the wastes, on my next journey, to the tall black tower flinging its shadow across the snows. The one example of a dream made true—though Adé did have a few of the details off—I have ever yet encountered.

I knew, of course, that I would see him again. I drift with the winds over the wastes, and through the mountain passes, alone with my tauntaun—but eventually, I return to dear old Hoth City, where most of the people I know live. I don’t know if that has any true meaning. But if it does, I’m fine with that.


*

 

Your piece brings all the beauty and cold wastes of Hoth into the picture. With Crix just a visitor gone when she returns to the common room to find that Antero has left too

 

Thinky thoughts below ...

It's good to know one's limitations and who can argue with the sentiment "no pain = good"?

There are joys in riding any mount, though it's been years since I've ridden, I remember the feel of muscled power underneath me ...

Ugh, she may say later, is this "hail and well met" coincidental meetup all that "well"?

Now this reminds me of poor Robert Falcon Scott's expedition

Nope, me neither.

Oooooh, man-bun alert!

There's no substitute for solitude ...
Excellent prompt response.

 

earlybird-obi-wan: Your piece brings all the beauty and cold wastes of Hoth into the picture. With Crix just a visitor gone when she returns to the common room to find that Antero has left too

Winter is a cruel season (and "when it's springtime in Hoth City, it's 60 below...") but it can be a beautiful one in a harsh way, with the contrast of darkness and light.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

--------------------------------------------

Findswoman: "For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'" Life on Hoth is definitely much bleaker for Lysinora in this universe, and I get the feeling she does not totally accept Crix's choice of Yalena, but she's not really able to do anything about it, either.

Well, in this universe, he isn't so much the one who got away, because she never had a chance with him to begin with: when she first met him, he was already in a serious relationship with Yalena. I think that if he had met them both while single, it might have gone otherwise. As it is, there wasn't anything she could do except get over him. Take a feeling and burn it to the ground, which you must do. A feeling that never counted because the only love that counts is that which is returned. You get over it, or you're a weird obsessive creep.

[All I Have are the Scars from Unrequited Love, Parts One and Two.]

Overall, as Beck once sang, "Ain't it hard, ain't it hard, to want somebody who doesn't want you."

It's notable that Crix is on friendly terms with Lysinora all the same, as if in this universe he never knew her feelings for him—and that may make it worse for her than if he, say, never talked to her anymore at all.

They started out as friends in the main universe, and so I figured they would still be friends in a universe where they could not get together. Which is far better--in my experience based opinion--than if he ceased to talk to her at all. She can't have the relationship she would have wanted with him, but friendship isn't nothing. And oddly perhaps, that friendship remaining helped her in moving past the feelings she had had.

Also, even though Lysinora seems so scornful both about Mirah's pregnancy and Crix and Yalena's plans to go that route themselves (and I don't doubt that she really and truly isn't the kind to want to have kids), it still seems, in its way, to intensify what feelings of regret and resignation she has about this "man that got away."

Crix is obviously feeling somewhat ambivalent himself about having kids (and who knows if he has shared any of this with Yalena, or if he has chosen to spare her feelings). In the main universe, when he is with Lysinora (spoiler alert?) he agrees with her not to have kids. Which she does feel strongly about, and which I can easily admit is completely autobiographical in nature.

I will say, though, that I am glad the two of them are together in your main universe, because they did seem well suited to each other—and yes, I do owe you a comment or two on The Winter Queen and am sorry I've been so slow about that. And finally, I have to say, I love the names of both tauntauns, too!

As I said, this is just a dream of What Might Have Been, and over in "The Winter Queen" they're still together. And don't worry about commenting over there. Given that I have managed about one comment so far this year, I am in no position to judge. And as for the tauntauns, they are both (along with Antero) around in the main universe, and they might well show up there at some point in the future.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

----------------------------------------

pronker:
Thinky thoughts below ...

It's good to know one's limitations and who can argue with the sentiment "no pain = good"?

I certainly can't--especially after the last few days, after I pulled this muscle in my back that is basically like an old worn out sock at this point, and experiencing the rippling waves of pain that advil can't touch.

There are joys in riding any mount, though it's been years since I've ridden, I remember the feel of muscled power underneath me ...

I'm glad to hear that bit worked for you--and quite honestly, surprised, as I was last on horseback when I was around twelve years old, when the most patient old mare in the stable carried me along the trail.

Ugh, she may say later, is this "hail and well met" coincidental meetup all that "well"?

She isn't entirely without mixed feelings about it.

Now this reminds me of poor Robert Falcon Scott's expedition

I wasn't thinking of the polar expeditions when I wrote this, but I can see how it works.

I don’t endure it one minute if I can.
Nope, me neither.

*Me neither, except for the pain that was rippling over my back for the last day or so.*

fizzyglug-


Yes: Diet Coke in space.

His bright black-as-midnight hair was slightly mussed in his usually firm bun
Oooooh, man-bun alert!

I have a thing for men with man-buns, and I am unable to lie concerning this matter.

Pandora said: ↑
I wanted to be alone again.
There's no substitute for solitude ...

Absolutely.

Excellent prompt response.

Thank you, and thank you for reading and commenting!

-----------------------

That feeling when you were stuck with a prompt all week (because the possibilities were endless, and *my freedom was too much for me!*) and then you get it all written one late night, and now you're going to edit it and put it up well ahead of the deadline.

In other words: the next post shall be up shortly.

 

Week Nine:

Title: “This weak and idle theme” / Or: the young Master Player prepares me for my attempt at the stage
Timeframe: The far distant future
Characters: All Original
Genre: The Original Drama
Summary: What the subtitle says.

*This is set in the same world as "Personal Essay" (as yet unfinished and unposted), "Untitled" (barely started with a file containing one sentence), and Death and the Maiden.

*It takes place around the same time as "Untitled," so about a year before the story that is actually available to read.

*The reason they're all being written/posted out of order is for one simple reason: because those stories with deadlines have to come first.

The prompt:

• Write a story between 300 and 1,000 words in the form of a dramatic monologue. This can be either poetic or prose in nature, but the idea behind the dramatic monologue should be observed: a speech or narrative where a silent listener is addressed, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while describing a particular situation or series of events.
• Word limit = 300-1,000 words

---------------------------------------------


“This weak and idle theme” / Or: the young Master Player prepares me for my attempt at the stage


First of all, you needn’t concern yourself so much with what the playwright thought. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not at all saying you shouldn’t consider how he interpreted this character as he wrote her lines. But that is only where you begin. We don’t know what he thought, and given that he’s no longer with us on this mortal plane, we can only guess. (I rather suspect he was thinking ahead to getting paid, but that admittedly lacks poetry.) You need to take on what he has written, and transform that into your version of this fictional girl.

That’s what acting is about, Caterina. Transformation. You don’t need to be in costume, though I won’t deny that can be helpful. You need to climb into her mind and feel out how she thinks. You have the words she speaks, that dear old H.D. provided, and that is all you need.

Oh yes, your composition teacher. That woman again. I haven’t had the pleasure yet of meeting this sterling master of the classroom, and I’m not so certain I want to. You should point her out if she ever crosses paths with us, so that I will know to avoid her.

No, you’re right. She should avoid me. I suspect from how you’ve described her that after only one exchange of words with me, she would cross the street if need be to get out of my way.

But let’s return to the point. You know what you think of Almira. You’ve read the play thoroughly. You’ve even had time leftover to start memorizing the others’ lines. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that during rehearsal. I’m waiting for a few of them to catch up myself.

I haven’t any doubt that you have imagined her into being in your head, based off what’s there in her lines. What you have seen in them. How you heard them spoken in your mind.

You seem surprised. You do realize you’re not the only person here to have lived your first life in the stories you read, and your dreams at night.

But we’ll save the confessions of my younger years for some other time. Trust me, you wouldn’t find most of it to be too entertaining. Amusing and pathetic, perhaps.

You’re right. You should play her as though she is the bright heroine of her own story, unaware that she has actually been assigned a supporting role. That’s what I used to tell myself when I was starting out in minor parts. Oh, the existential torment of the messenger with two lines!

See? You already know what you need to do. I can’t say I’m surprised. I believe, and I hope that now you believe, that you’re more than capable of succeeding at doing it. And thus ends my advice for today. I hope some of it has proven useful. It has to be better than the nonsense you’ve quoted from that teacher. Don’t give her any more thought. You’ve left her behind in the dust that is your schoolyears. Just listen to me. Only me. I’m oftentimes wrong, but at least I know it.

Don’t worry. If you don’t want any more elder brothers offering their dubious words of wisdom, I already have enough sisters. That’s right. I have three sisters. You should get to meet at least one of them for yourself soon enough. Evelina has promised she’ll make it to our premiere.

Yes, this is all fake in the end. Just a story, a dreamed up imitation of life, that never was. But the thing about the theatre is that it’s better than what people refer to as real life. It’s perversely more real. You put on the mask of a figment, of a lie, and make it alive as best as you can. Make the oldest tales, the ones with the endings everyone already knows, seem like they truly happened.

This way, people will walk out into the night, back home to reality as we’re stuck with it, and they will think, they will feel as though, they know you. But they only know that creation you were on the stage. They don’t know one thing about you.

Oh, you know a few things about me. If you want to know more, you should ask.

But all that said, let’s get back to the speech in Act III. Almira’s one glorious burst of poetry. You know what my thoughts are. Everyone does by now. Tell me what you think. Show me.

*

 

Teaching her and telling more about how she performed and what she has done. A great way to respond to the prompt

 

First of all, thank you for the detailed reply about Naboo women, pregnancy and politics. As you said, any of these interpretations works for your worldbuilding, so I'll wait until you write that conversation in a coffeeshop that will give us the specifics of this particular 'verse.

Second, apologies for falling so far behind. I thought that I'd come back here and left a review for week 7, but clearly I didn't, so here goes:

"No more yielding but a dream"

I've had The Winter Queen on my reading list for longer than I care to admit, and I'm hoping to get to it sometime this year, but meanwhile I want to say that this story and the next one really made me curious about it – in particular, the fact that I thought that I was out of little Adé's dream, but then maybe I wasn't?

This was truly a striking visual, especially in the snowy plains of Hoth, and it made me wonder if I was seeing a product of Adé's imagination, or some sort of vision she was having. This ambiguity worked really well with the child POV. Very nicely done!

(As a side note, it's actually a good thing you mentioned the source for the title, because those of us who didn't grow up on a steady diet of Shakespeare – meaning the entirety of the non-English-speaking world – completely miss that sort of reference!)

Happy Endings

Again, I'm not familiar with the prime version of these characters, but there were just enough bittersweet comments in there to get a feel of what might have been.

What really stood out to me in this story (probably, again-again, because I haven't read The Winter Queen) was your worldbuilding. I'm familiar with all the work you've done on Naboo – the planet, its culture and its society – but I never knew that there's a whole other world for me to discover here: these settlers, the "research station on Antarctica" feel of the place where everyone is welcome, especially when a storm is looming, the supply of foods from Bespin, the social structure, the fact that everyone essentially knows everyone else because this would necessarily be a small community, and the contrast with the world of Lysinora's dream with grass, cafés with tables on the sidewalk and open sociability. And I'm curious to find out, when I get to the prime story, how this AU relationship has impacted this character's view of her environment.

“This weak and idle theme”

I just love how you one-upped the prompt here with a dramatic monologue talking about acting! I really got the sense that the speaker-director was hamming it up, and at the same time he's quite cynical, which made me wonder if Caterina understood the full range of his intention as he spoke. As he says himself, acting is about giving others the impression that they know you while they don't, and it doesn't seem to cross his mind that what he shows to Caterina while playing his role as the director actually says a lot about him.

 

I don't know if the speaker is alien or not, well done, Author!

Wise words.

And more wisdom, I like the tone of the piece, imparting wisdom, knowing one's limitations, really quite endearing a character to get to know. The "dramatic" part of the prompt brought forth a fine story.

 

Firstly, I have written my rather long delayed responses to the comments for Week Five/Earlier Weeks. You can read them back on page two in post #41.

*

earlybird-obi-wan: Teaching her and telling more about how she performed and what she has done.

He's certainly doing his best (that, and he likes to talk).

A great way to respond to the prompt

Thank you, and thanks for reading and commenting!

--------------------------------------------------

Chyntuck: First of all, thank you for the detailed reply about Naboo women, pregnancy and politics. As you said, any of these interpretations works for your worldbuilding, so I'll wait until you write that conversation in a coffeeshop that will give us the specifics of this particular 'verse.

You're welcome about that obsessive dissecting of about two lines. (Does that count as meta, of all the fanworks? Since I have always worked out my Star Wars thoughts/issues in fanfictionial form--skipping right over the critical essay stage--I'm both skeptical and amused at that possibility.)

And I might someday get to writing that conversation. But I can't say now what approach I might choose to go with. My Naboo worldbuilding is a constant shifting work in progress.

Second, apologies for falling so far behind. I thought that I'd come back here and left a review for week 7, but clearly I didn't, so here goes:

Don't worry about it. I have only managed to write one review during this whole challenge, and for this entire year so far, so I can hardly look askance at anyone else.

"No more yielding but a dream"

I've had The Winter Queen on my reading list for longer than I care to admit, and I'm hoping to get to it sometime this year, but meanwhile I want to say that this story and the next one really made me curious about it – in particular, the fact that I thought that I was out of little Adé's dream, but then maybe I wasn't?

"Though her breath flew out in a white smokescarf, her arms were bare, and flowers were growing from her skin."

This was truly a striking visual, especially in the snowy plains of Hoth, and it made me wonder if I was seeing a product of Adé's imagination, or some sort of vision she was having. This ambiguity worked really well with the child POV. Very nicely done!

She's awake (that much I think I can make plain) and moving about in the real world, but otherwise--I don't think she knows what's real and what's an illusion of her imagination. Or perhaps the woman is a figment of her imagination made real. It's hard to say.

(As a side note, it's actually a good thing you mentioned the source for the title, because those of us who didn't grow up on a steady diet of Shakespeare – meaning the entirety of the non-English-speaking world – completely miss that sort of reference!)

That is the reason why I did give the source for the title--though admittedly without actually naming Shakespeare or the play in question. It's one of his more famous monologues--when Puck addresses the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream--so I would gather most English speakers would recognize bits of it at least from cultural references, even if they only read and promptly forgot reading Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade English class.

(Even though I grew up in the backwoods country, I was introduced to Shakespeare, and acting in general, thanks to my late junior high teacher. I guess I owe that man more than I thought.)

Happy Endings

Again, I'm not familiar with the prime version of these characters, but there were just enough bittersweet comments in there to get a feel of what might have been.

It's sort of the echo of a universe where things went differently, in a way Lysinora knows would only be pointless for her to imagine here.

What really stood out to me in this story (probably, again-again, because I haven't read The Winter Queen) was your worldbuilding. I'm familiar with all the work you've done on Naboo – the planet, its culture and its society – but I never knew that there's a whole other world for me to discover here: these settlers, the "research station on Antarctica" feel of the place where everyone is welcome, especially when a storm is looming, the supply of foods from Bespin, the social structure, the fact that everyone essentially knows everyone else because this would necessarily be a small community, and the contrast with the world of Lysinora's dream with grass, cafés with tables on the sidewalk and open sociability. And I'm curious to find out, when I get to the prime story, how this AU relationship has impacted this character's view of her environment.

My three main worlds of interest are probably (in order of the most words writ) Naboo, Tatooine, and Hoth. (The only memes I save are about either Hoth or Jawas, but that's another issue.) I first wrote about this version of Hoth in the far distant future in 2005 on a challenge-inspired whim. Then I wrote about 20,000 more words to THE END. Then years later, in 2018, I returned to fix what the truncation had broken, and I found that, like a Certain Whining Padawan, I had much to learn about what I had myself created.

And yes, Lysinora is somewhat different in the prime universe. She still has issues and frustrations to deal with--even the best of lives won't be perfect--but overall, I would say she's more content.

“This weak and idle theme”

I just love how you one-upped the prompt here with a dramatic monologue talking about acting! I really got the sense that the speaker-director was hamming it up, and at the same time he's quite cynical, which made me wonder if Caterina understood the full range of his intention as he spoke. As he says himself, acting is about giving others the impression that they know you while they don't, and it doesn't seem to cross his mind that what he shows to Caterina while playing his role as the director actually says a lot about him.

As I wrote (both here and the in the challenge thread) I was sort of overwhelmed with all the possible stories I could all write for this prompt, and all the characters who could monologue. Once I decided to go with the obvious--taking the monologue right to the stage--I whipped this out in a night.

He is hamming it up a bit--especially when he tells her to listen to him, and only him. I was afraid that, without any external cues, it would come across as narcissistic rather than playful, but I had to just cross my fingers and do my best. He is probably also cynical, but that is in large part because he has sprung forth from my head.

And oh yes, per the prompt, the speaker-director is revealing aspects of himself as he plays his new role as the master player and director of the theatre troupe. "All the world's a stage, and we are the players" (badly quoted Shakespeare). If Caterina sees--and as the subtitle reveals, she is the narrator standing behind the narrator delivering this monologue--what he shows, and knows how to interpret what she notices, she knows a few more things about him.

Finally, thanks again for reading and commenting!

-------------------------------

pronker: I don't know if the speaker is alien or not, well done, Author!

He is human (all too human...) but it's true that all you have is his voice here.

"You should point her out if she ever crosses paths with us, so that I will know to avoid her."


His "I'm the bigger bear" moment.

"You do realize you’re not the only person here to have lived your first life in the stories you read, and your dreams at night."
Wise words.

True enough. When you were alone in your room at night, pining for the life you couldn't seem to reach, there were others out there alone in their rooms as well.

"It’s perversely more real."
And more wisdom, I like the tone of the piece, imparting wisdom, knowing one's limitations, really quite endearing a character to get to know. The "dramatic" part of the prompt brought forth a fine story.

He is young (about twenty-five at this point, WHICH MEANS HIS BRAIN IS NOW FRESHLY FULLY DEVELOPED!) but he has learned a few things, and he's going to share.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

 

Week Ten:

Title: Excerpt from The End of Beauty
Timeframe: Long long after the saga ended
Genre: My Nightmare Theatre/Better Get a Bucket
Characters: All Original

*This takes place in the same universe as Death and the Maiden and "This weak and idle theme"--and the two as-yet-unfinished stories--but around four years later.

*After writing a few more light-hearted stories (at least by my standards), I'm returning to pure pitchblack darkness/nasty/awful here. You have been warned.

The prompt:

• Write a story between 100 and 400 words, and include these three words: carmine, intoxicate, solace
• Word limit = 100-400 words

-----------------------------------------------------


Excerpt from The End of Beauty

The Queen favored them then with a flickered smile. But there was a carmine light in her dreamblack eyes, and she leaned forward to whisper to the man crouching at her side. Lady Mirellé turned her head, and that was when she noticed what her husband hadn’t yet seen. The Queen was looking past her page, and past them: at Camilla standing behind them in the pale creekwater light from the windows, and Edain standing next to her. Her mind froze silent, and she remained in place, obediently, only through years of good manners.

(Besides that: Lord Lovelace was there, hovering in too close, on their guard. He had been amused, but now the scene seemed to intoxicate him—and if she hadn’t already known, she would have understood at this point there would be no solace here.)

The Queen nodded down at her page, and he answered by swaying to his feet. “Yes,” she said—as he approached Camilla and Edain, as he slid his hand onto Camilla’s arm. When Camilla flinched back, he tightened his grip. “I do believe we can come to an agreement.”


This afternoon, I wrote out the opening book of my novel for the third time. It feels, with each word I trap into existence, into a sentence, that this might be my final work. And yes: I know that doesn’t make sense--and that surely I will live to write boldly and madly for years yet.

It has been snowing all day, and there is a crystalglittering dust of it across the floor, blown in from the cracks in the walls. I have my heater gasping forth its hot breath next to my desk, but it’s still so cold inside, with the outside coming in, that I’m wearing my coat and gloves with the fingertips worn off. But I do have this room (for now, for today) and I need to work while I can.

Mostly, I want to see what I’m writing rather than what happened. How the Princess leaned over me, her spectacles slipping down her nose, and: You’ll always think of me. With every woman, every man you have. Because I own you.

The memory was bleeding again, and I hunched down, my arms locked tighttight over my chest, before I could write the next word. I want to prove her wrong. But so far, she continues to win.

*

 

What a mood to cherish as long as possible as a writer because the novel must prove to be a best seller --- all of us angst-adoring readers savor the grim feel herein.

 

writing like that is beautiful. But in a cold place. It sure gives her the shivers

 

pronker: What a mood to cherish as long as possible as a writer because the novel must prove to be a best seller --- all of us angst-adoring readers savor the grim feel herein.

It should at least prove to stand the test of time as a "cult classic"--though she needs it to be a bestseller, as notoriety tends to pay in literary reputation only.

But yes: she suffered, and now she's endeavoring to make art of the experience.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

------------------------------------------

earlybird-obi-wan: writing like that is beautiful. But in a cold place. It sure gives her the shivers

She's in a cold place, with bad memories, with not much more than her writing to fight it all off with.

Thanks for reading!

-------------------------------------------------

Findswoman: Catch-up time! But I always catch up gladly with your work.

“This Weak and Idle Theme”: You know, this actually sounds like some very good, solid acting advice! It very much is about making the audience feel they know the character, personally or near-personally. And it’s very true that literary and theatrical interpretations—the difference between what the speaker does and what that composition probably used to ask for in assignments—can be very much at odds with each other, and what’s effective in one isn’t always going to be effective in the other.

Clearly, the young Master Player learned from the best, and now he is passing his wisdom on.

In reality, these are mostly thoughts I have had myself regarding acting. Mostly onstage, but also the method acting required to take on writing a first person narrator. And of the Woes of the Spear Carrier in the background who thinks this whole play is about him when it really isn't.

When I think about it, writing and acting are much the same thing for me--though my dreams of acting were good as dead by the time I was fifteen. (There was a vague plan of my attending a high school in [City Name Redacted] with an acting program instead of the local small town school with none, but that was doomed from the very start.) I made a few audition attempts in college, but as it has turned out, my performance in The Belle of Amherst when I was fourteen would be the last time I ever took the stage.

So no wonder Caterina may have been confused, but she’s got a good guide here, and an encouraging one, too, who clearly believes in her ability to perform the role.

It's pretty clear he believes in her ability to take this role and make it her own when she's still not sure why he asked her to take it on to begin with. (The story of which is in the barely started "Untitled," hopefully coming to the boards around 2024.)

For some reason, knowing that this is the same Caterina as the one in “Death and the Maiden” makes this hit all the deeper, as that story, too, told of a very specific variety of acting. Very cool and thought-provoking link there!

The speaker--who is not named for obvious reasons in this piece--also appears in "Death and the Maiden"--and in fact, towards the end of the story, Caterina tells him (whilst still stripped naked) that he can take some of the credit for her performance. This monologue shows that in action.

"Excerpt from The End of Beauty”: First of all, I love that the title could be an actual title or a descriptor of what this vignette is, given its relationship to a longer, yet-unposted story. I guess that’s part of the point! Just as you encapsulated some important truths about acting in the last piece, here you’ve very effectively summed up the mixed and varied feelings an author has upon beginning a new piece of writing.

The End of Beauty is the title of the novel that the narrator is working on. Originally, I was just going to have the whole story be an excerpt, but then the fourth wall crashed down, and I went with what I have here. It still feels like a fragment of a longer work, though I don't know if I will write it.

And oh yes, the beginning of a story is the most fraught part for me personally. I will take the so-called "dreaded middle" over stamping down that all important first sentence anytime. Being in the middle means that you're half way there to THE END.

Though the character here--and since I don't mean to make this a secret, I will come right out and say that this is Caterina--has already begun, and is now in the process of rewriting what she wrote before. (Which might not have been clear, given the tight word count, but that's what I mean when she says she's writing out the first part for the third time.) Which is another issue. This is another chance to "get it right."

Writing is really an existential thing, in a way, and that fraught feeling of “will this be it for me?” is there with every new story that’s begun, even when you’re in perfectly fine health. Of course, it takes on a more immediate meaning for this writer, who has to bundle up inside her (?) apartment, which she might not have tomorrow or next week and where cracks in the wall are letting the snow through.

Every story one writes could always be the last one. Most likely, of course, it won't be--but that possibility is always true. But here, Caterina is really working with her back up against the wall, and though I lacked the word count to get her situation across in more than the tiniest of hints, it's obviously not too good.

There is clearly some interesting and complicated history at work between the speaker and this anonymous Princess, whom I imagine we’ll meet once the unfinished stories are finished; once again, you’ve set up a very intriguing view of what might be to come, and my interest is piqued!

That's an understatement. It's also bad enough that I'm not certain I can go through with it for Caterina in the main story timeline--which would then make this an AU. But I'll have to see on that.

The Princess is the Princess of Rori. (She is actually mentioned a few times in "Death and the Maiden," but never appeared on-screen.) She might show up briefly in the unfinished stories, but not much more than that--as overall, it's hard to write about her in a way that's safe for the TOS. This is an Empire at the end of its days in all its decay and decadence, as inspired by Thomas Cole's "Empire: Decline," the painting I received in the Romanticism challenge which started this all.

[And I should go into this more in the replies for "Death and the Maiden" when I get to writing those.]

The Queen of Naboo is still the same idealized girl-god with a heart as pure as gold as ever, so it's the Princess--whose childhood nickname was literally, like a certain Roman emperor, "Little Boots"--who is the decadent debauched and corrupt tyrant.

Exquisite work once again, as on all your contributions to this year’s Run! You really went to town.

Thank you, and as always, thank you so much for reading and commenting!

 

Before I get to Excerpt from The End of Beauty, I just want to say that I went and read your replies to our week 5 reviews, and I just wanted to thank you for remembering Khaleen's zenji needle. I'm flattered

So, Excerpt from The End of Beauty, and the warning:

That would be one way of putting it, with a narrator in dire circumstances writing a story about a character who is in dire circumstances

This line:

... was such a powerful way to pivot from the story within the story to the object of your fiction itself. I'm assuming that the narrator here is Caterina from the previous entry in this thread, and the novel she is trying to write in order to process issues from her own life has such an evil-Alice-in-Wonderland vibe that her Princess must really be quite a handful! It also sounds like she is far removed from the Naboo gentility that we are accustomed to, so I imagine that your far-future Naboo fanon is going to develop in an unexpected direction.

Am I correct in understanding that Caterina is now on Hoth, and that we will see the two head-canons collide at some point in the future?

Thank you for keeping us readers on our toes with your unusual, disturbing, creative and intriguig stories for these three months! If you ever come around to writing and posting the reverse narrative vignette, please make sure to tag me, and congratulations for your exceptional contribution to this challenge!

 

Chyntuck: Before I get to Excerpt from The End of Beauty, I just want to say that I went and read your replies to our week 5 reviews, and I just wanted to thank you for remembering Khaleen's zenji needle. I'm flattered

Ah, thanks--and I must admit I'm glad to hear you read those belated reviews. Since everyone had already "liked" the post when I put up the placeholder, this is the only way I can tell anyone did. (Which is probably the reason why most people in that situation move on to a fresh new post for the comments, but oh well.)

So, Excerpt from The End of Beauty, and the warning:
"After writing a few more light-hearted stories (at least by my standards), I'm returning to pure pitchblack darkness/nasty/awful here"
That would be one way of putting it, with a narrator in dire circumstances writing a story about a character who is in dire circumstances

Indeed.

This line:
"This afternoon, I wrote out the opening book of my novel for the third time. It feels, with each word I trap into existence, into a sentence, that this might be my final work"
... was such a powerful way to pivot from the story within the story to the object of your fiction itself. I'm assuming that the narrator here is Caterina from the previous entry in this thread, and the novel she is trying to write in order to process issues from her own life has such an evil-Alice-in-Wonderland vibe that her Princess must really be quite a handful!

The narrator here is indeed Caterina. With the exception of "This weak and idle theme" (where she's actually the narrator behind the narrator) she is the narrator of all the stories in this particular world. I hadn't thought of the novel as having an evil Wonderland vibe, but now that you mention it, I can see it. And that small fragment is probably all I can show here, as the whole would make the TOS explode in flames.

As for the Princess, well: she too isn't suitable for the TOS. She's certainly quite different from the denizens of the Naboo court (which is itself somewhat different than it was at the time of The Phantom Menace.) Which leads to:

It also sounds like she is far removed from the Naboo gentility that we are accustomed to, so I imagine that your far-future Naboo fanon is going to develop in an unexpected direction.

Caterina is just one of the "common people", the people seen only in background crowds during pivotal movie scenes --so yes, she's far from the aristocratic set, let alone elected royalty. It isn't mentioned in this particular story, but she actually lives on Rori, one of the moons of Naboo, so she's removed from the Naboo upper classes in more ways than just one.

Am I correct in understanding that Caterina is now on Hoth, and that we will see the two head-canons collide at some point in the future?

That's an interesting theory, and one I must admit I wouldn't have thought of, but no: there isn't any connection between Caterina and my Hoth stories. She is actually on her homeworld (moon?) Rori. One of the bits I scavenged from the wookieepedia article for my version of Rori* is that weatherwise, it isn't as temperate as Naboo, and that was one of the reasons that neither human nor Gungan settlers took much to it for a long time.

Thank you for keeping us readers on our toes with your unusual, disturbing, creative and intriguig stories for these three months!

Well, I must say I did my worst/best--even though there were a few moments that were about as lovely dark and deep as one of Kylo Ren's temper tantrums. But I shouldn't be surprised that even that plan didn't entirely survive contact with the prompts.

If you ever come around to writing and posting the reverse narrative vignette, please make sure to tag me, and congratulations for your exceptional contribution to this challenge!

As for that story, I am still working on it (though quite slowly, at the rate of a few sentences every day or so). So I do hope to post it, but I'm not sure when.

Thanks so much, and thank you again for reading and commenting!


--------------------------------------

*What canon there was for the Naboo moons was a bit of a mess before Disney took over--and then Disney proceeded to complicate it further. Rori isn't amongst the current lineup, so it must have been left behind with the old EU. So as far as I'm concerned, this is all a Choose Your Own Adventure situation.

 

Week Twelve:

Title: Heroes
Timeframe: Original Trilogy
Characters: Mostly original
Summary: "We can be heroes, just for one day."

*Nearly six months after the deadline flew past... Here it is.

*This story began as my first idea for Week Three, which I put aside in favor of the story I actually wrote after I decided against cramming it into 1000 words. There are a few elements left [for example, a new OC still interacts with an EC] of its origins for that prompt.

*It is also doing double-duty as my entry for the OC Name Challenge.

*As it is quite long (19000+ words long), I will be posting it in three installments.

The prompt:

• Write a story using a reverse narrative, or a backwards story. This could be a story where the final events occur first and the first events occur last, or it could be a story where time literally flows backward rather than forward.
• Click here for further details
• Word limit = minimum 2,000 words, no maximum limit

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Heroes


Picture this: It was the early hours of the afternoon on a glaring bright winter day, and I was out on the slope of our westward field with the gathering of people who had followed us from town. The wet snow was smashed up with our footprints, exposing the dead blonde stubble that was the memory of the last harvest. Everyone was staring up into the plain bluebell sky, past the randomly floating smears of cloud, towards what we knew was there beyond our capacity to see. There were only the occasional stardust-burning fireworks, over before I could be sure I had seen them, to show that far above us, in the black night of space, there was a battle in progress.

The sunlight was sleek as icemelted creek water, and as I stood over at the side, where I could survey the rest of the scene, I kept my hands pushed into my coat pockets. But while I felt the cold in the breeze that whisper-swished over my face, I wasn’t bothered. Quite the reverse, actually: after the long rushing tromp over the fields, I had been too warm, with a blushing-rose heat. The air was soothing, with a faint mintsweet taste, when I took in a breath.

And oh yes, I wasn’t the only person present who was heated up. I noted from my vantage point that several of the men, and one woman, had shucked off their outermost coats. Their breath danced in vanishing cigarra-smoke clouds as they talked amongst themselves. As they paused and returned their gazes skyward, squinting through the glowing light.

The majority of our followers had collected into an assortment of cliques, but a few outliers were still drifting around. Of course—and true to his usual nature—Karellen was one of them. I was well aware of him wherever he happened to be, with his long black-as-a-battlecrow's-scream coat, and his hair done up in that flock of braids with the wagging floral ribbons.

For the first time since I’ve known him, I didn’t know how I would talk to him, or even what I wanted to say, when he reached his stop next to me. Which he would. That much I did know.

Meanwhile, Lisette, my half-sister, was wheeling about in her personal excitement. She had blushed a wild wind-smacked pink, and her skirts heaved in a flashing wail of petticoats as she turned. My mother was keeping one eye on her from her group of ladyfriends, but for once, she didn’t appear to be concerned that the little darling might trip over the very air and fall, twisting her doll-boned ankle.

Another dust-pale meteor fire flashed up across the sky, there and gone as soon as I had seen it. If I had chanced to blink, I wouldn’t have known about it.

There were a few impressed Ooooohs from the ranks of the spectators.

Someone whose voice I couldn’t identify screamed “Westley! That’s our boy!” As if the man could possibly hear him where he was: up beyond the atmosphere in orbit, guiding the long-winged songbird of his ship through its blasting silent song.

This was as close as I have been to a clash of battle, and I didn’t know how to decipher what we were able to see. It could have been any of the ships up there exploding into flames. Their side, or our side. There wasn’t any way to tell what was happening, and when the battle would be lost and won.

Karellen appeared next to me. “The landing area’s set up. Maybe too well at that. Some of the boys mistook it for a suitable limmie field, and I had to escort them off.”

“Oh, I trust you weren’t too mean with them,” I said.

Well, really: there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t talk with him as I always had. Even if we had just kissed (to seal my forgiveness, but that story can wait) before an approving audience. Believe me, I didn’t lack for previous experience in the sexual arts, and I could still feel the impact. I looked at his mouth, and as though he guessed my thoughts, he gave me a crooked shrugged-off smile.

“Just mean enough,” he said. “They listened to me.”

There wasn’t anything for us to do then but wait, along with everyone else there, for what was going to happen next. A few older men were still chewing away at the latest news, but the rest of them had drifted into silence, the better to hear the first rumored hint. The blank sky shone in my eyes, but I stared it down. I moved a step closer to Karellen, into his body heat, until my hip nudged against him. He took up my hand, and I returned his grasp, twisting my fingers up with his.

“Westley will make out all right,” I said—even though, of course, I didn’t know that. I did know his chances of getting blown into spacedust were good.

“Better than all right,” Karellen said. “He just took out another imp. Blown back into nothing. He’ll tell everyone all about it over a victory pint.”

The battle is question is now known to the newsfeeds—and perhaps history itself—as the Battle of Taanab. Not at all as the Battle of Nygaard’s Field: we weren’t mentioned, even as a passing reference, in the stories that rampaged (through the rebels’ network, and Imperial news rageouts) about the sector. Only those who were present that day know any of what I’m relating here.

It was Lisette who saw the tiny bird-winged whipping motion in the sky first. She turned back to Karellen and me, and shouted: “It’s coming!”

Then I saw it with her as the x-wing cut in through the sky, wheeling and swooping down before the pilot got it under control. Its engines sang forth a knife-edged whine, and it headed down towards the drowsypale lights hidden within the sunglow dotting the long empty field below us, down to the blank snow and trampled black mud my mother had left fallow for the past two seasons.

Karellen took his radio link from his pocket. It was hardly noticeable against his black gloves, and to all appearances, he looked to be playing with a small skipping rock. Only a few people knew he was numbing-out the electric moth-winged signal before it could so much as reach the sky.

As I took off, as I ran towards the fields and the blinking gleam of our lights, I smelled the x-wing first. Then I heard the sighing as the engines shut down. It stood rampant and safe on its little landing feet towards the north end of the field, melting the snow around it into steam. The cockpit popped open, and Westley Janson emerged. He took off his helmet and shook his head before he climbed down.

Karellen had caught up with me, and so had Lisette: I could hear the clack of her herd of bow barrettes dancing about with her hair. It turns out she can run with the very speed of a gazelle when she wants. Wes gave us all a salute, and: “Thanks for the landing pad, Antares. There’s nothing like a good old backfield. Makes me feel like I’m back wilding after school.”

“Just doing our humble part to rebel,” I said.

He grinned. “Good girl. Though to be honest, I never once doubted you.”

As we spoke, I could hear the diving enginesong of a second x-wing. We all turned to watch it make its approach, hovering down in close above the field. It had taken some battering and was smudged with black smoke-bruises, but it was otherwise intact. “That’ll be Antilles,” Wes said. “That man. Someday, I’m going to have to borrow one of his extra lives off him. But not today.”

His voice blew away with the wind as yet another x-wing came swirling down, gliding in closer and closer, until it landed down hill from us off in the woodside pasture. Wes shook his head. “Not today. Buckle up, friends and rebels. Because we have got quite the story to tell you.”

*

I don’t know how exactly the word got out. I didn’t tell anyone outside of our planning circle. Certainly Karellen hadn’t. But someone (Lisette, or Karellen’s mother Berhta, when they encountered one of the neighbors) did, and that’s all it ever takes. In the end, I don’t suppose it mattered. All I knew personally was that when we parked at the crater ledge paths, we were not alone. People were arriving behind us, on swoopbike and land vehicle and speeder. They parked as though they were just out for a refresher, before joining us on the path. It wasn’t long before the path was crowded around us. And loud, as our company was not walking in meditative silence.

There were only a few of them who I would say I actually know well. But then, there are eight hundred residents in Nygaard’s Field, a number of whom are newcomers. You can’t know, truly know, that many people. But I recognized most of them by sight, from the grocer’s, or nights at the dancehall in Gowrie, the town we refer to as an actual town.

Berhta didn’t at all mind this state of affairs. She soon encountered Lavender, one of the primary school teachers, and they talked in rhythm with their footsteps as we made our way down the narrow trail looming over the whitesheeted fields. Both women have decades on me, but they had obviously been out walking whilst I was backstage, because I could just barely keep pace with them.

It was enough for me to focus on walking, without breathing in an obvious pant, to the thrum of their voices as they hashed out the weather forecast, and attempted to predict what its whims would be over the next week. Always a relevant topic where we live, and a safe one.

Though I was moved to speech when Lavender said: “I see you cut your hair.” She still wears her long dustgrey hair in two scrawny braids, the same style I had had only two days before.

“I know,” I said. My hair was in a short knight-style bob, and a wild one at that. Enough time had passed since I cut it that I wasn’t aware of how changed it was, and it helped that I had only needed to comb it with my fingers before I had gone forth into the morning.

“It suits you,” Lavender said—and Berhta nodded. “And if you decide you don’t care for it, well. It is only hair. It will grow back with enough time.”

“Right,” I said. I was too distracted to recite the proper phrases. Karellen was walking along some distance ahead of us, but still fully in view. He didn’t move in a forceful charge, attacking the air around him. He just walked, his shoulders in a doleful fist-clenched slump.

And I remembered how he had looked earlier, when he deigned to speak to me. How his eyes had been blank, the deadblack hole of the pupils showing naught of his thoughts, let alone whatever it is that philosophers call a “soul.” When he looked at me, but chose not to see me.

Berhta was watching him as well. “I think you really hurt his feelings, Antares.”

My mind cringed around thinking of it in that exact phrasing. But that was how I knew it was true: he wasn’t only angry, or disgusted. Those are responses I can understand. No, he was hurt. I had smashed his feelings underneath my bootheel in the pursuit of amusement. I had bunged it all up.

“Unfortunately so,” I said, still watching Karellen as he moved further and further away from me. He hadn’t once looked back. “But I don’t know what I can do about it.”

“You could just apologize,” she said.

“Look at him,” Lavender said—though she must have noticed that I hadn’t once looked away from him. She exhaled with a flute-whispered sigh, and: “He’s really quite upset.”

Lavender had kept her voice at a modest indoor volume, but somehow, one other person had paused during their own conversation long enough to hear her. “You know what to do now,” Erik (the manager from the feed store) said. “Tell him you’re sorry and make it up right.”

“Just tell him,” his wife Greta said (sternly). “That’s all there is to it.”

That was all it took. Once begun, the cry went out through the crowd, and soon it felt as though everyone around me was voicing their opinion. Their rather unanimous opinion: “What are you waiting for?” said a woman in the farmhands' gang. “Apologize.”

“Oh, he’s so sad. Tell him you’re sorry. Do it now.”

“Apologize.”

“Apologize. Apologize immediately.”

“Apologize to that fat boy right now.”

(“Did you just call my boy fat?” Berhta said. Her voice was lost in the overall flood, and I don’t know that anyone else heard her. Traditionally, we have described him as “sturdy”--and even though he goes out hiking every chance he gets, and is a hurlyburly in the dances, he is that. And yes, he tends to be what I would call “plump.” He has never in his life been a slender willowy sprite.)

Meantime, Lisette was watching all of this with her wide-opened midnightdark stare. The ingénue having been blessed with the sudden gift of insight. She frowned. She followed my line of sight ahead, past all the people she still hardly knows, to Karellen. She had been asleep, far away on her long nightly voyage, when Karellen and I had returned from the dancehall. I hadn’t wanted to tell her about what happened next, and she hadn’t thought to ask.

She turned to Berhta for confirmation. She did not then proceed to stamp her foot to go along with her sullen locked-up pout, but it came close: “That’s why he’s been acting so weird all morning. It’s your fault. What did you do?”

Karellen, the big boy his own self, had taken note of all the noise. He had stopped at the guard rail and turned back, though I couldn’t tell if he saw me. The light was blurring out his pale full moon face, but I could still see his expression. He looked blank. He looked cold, so cold it would burn to touch him. And I know him, and thus I know what that means when he shuts his face down, and speaks, when he can’t avoid doing so, in snapped-out monosyllables.

When I acted, I didn’t think first. I was already in motion, dashing forward, only just aware that the people between us were stepping aside to give me an open path. “I’m sorry, Karellen!” I said as I reached him, my voice bleeding away from me. “I was a ****. I know that. Forgive me?”

He crossed his arms over his chest. He shook his head. But otherwise, he didn’t respond. I dropped down onto my knees before him, the tiny fists of the path gravel underneath the soggy-loose snow punching me through my skirt, and prostrated myself. My face pointed downward, and my arms out. “I’m sorry, Ellie. Please forgive me. Please.”

When I peeked up, he was standing in front of me. I was looking straight at his boots, the laces knotted in doubled loops, and then at his exposed calves and the hem of his black kilt. I looked further up at him. He was watching me, his (pale and rather dainty-drooping mouth) caught between expressions. He hesitated. Then he leaned down and offered his arms to me.

“Ah, it’s all right, Annie,” he said.

With that, I was flooded with a wild rush of what I can only call “joy.” He still liked me. He still wanted me. And I leapt up and accepted his embrace, flinging my arms about his neck, flinging my self against him, my body joining with his body. He spun me around under the force, and I was aware—off in the back of my consciousness--of the surrounding approval being beamed upon us.

When I landed back on my feet, I looked up at him. He smiled at me, without planning it out, without a care for the overall effect. It suited him: his dark eyes weren’t as ordinary a brown as dirt, and even his steel-blue dyed goatee didn’t look so foolish. I felt myself smile back in answer.

And we kissed. No, we didn’t merely kiss: the space left between us vanished as I pressed myself to him, and when his mouth touched mine, it was like a spark bursting open into flames. With it, I tried to tell him, to let him feel, that which I haven’t the capacity to say with words. But trust me, beyond that, it was also physical. For that moment, he was all I felt and knew.

The first thing I heard as we stepped apart was the sound of slow clip-clopping applause from two of the farmhands. One of them even whistled.

Karellen lifted his hand to toss them a well-deserved finger, but he smiled to let them know that he wasn’t too bothered. “You’re welcome. Now get along,” he said.

“Thank you, oh my hero,” I said, as they went rattling ahead up the path, towards the main group on the next rise. “You knew just what I would do.”

His mouth was still swollen-flushed from the kiss—and I had to remind myself that the follow-up would have to wait until later. Until afterwards. “Well, of course. No mind reading required. Now let’s go catch up. We’ve got an act of true rebellion to add to our resumes.”

When we reached the boundary wall at the path’s end on the border with my family’s lands, my mother was waiting there to greet us. She stood at attention beside her field-cart, while the two farmhands she had pressed into accompanying her were lounging in the vehicle. I didn’t know what she had heard, but it was clear she knew enough. She watched me approach, our local supporters striding along with me, as though she saw what she had expected.

Then she looked past both me and Karellen—and straight at Lisette, who came bounding, with a dancing high-stepping skip, to catch up with us. Her braids bouncing and glossy with reflected sunlight. Berhta walked along at a more measured pace behind her.

“Mama-Annika! We’re back!” Lisette said.

See? I thought at my mother. She’s perfectly safe and intact.

But I only thought it: I knew precisely (down to the exact word choices) what my mother would say if I were to voice it aloud. She is nothing if not predictable.

And well: Karellen had wanted to forgive me for my admittedly shallow behavior. But my mother was not going to forget in silence how I had refused to babysit a great girl, who is all of fourteen years old, as though she were a toddling bebe who might put rocks in her mouth.

My mother twitched her mouth into her version of beaming affection. She patted Lisette on her shoulder, and: “I can see that. And from what I’ve heard, you and your sister have been busy.”

“Oh yes,” Lisette said. “You won’t believe who we met at the saloon the other day. We wouldn’t have ever guessed who they were if they hadn’t told us.”

“According to Ingë, you met with a pair of rebel pilots, and offered up our backland for them to use as a landing pad after they help take on our Imperial Forces in orbit,” my mother said. Her voice (the dulcet aelf-bell pitched tones I assume Ragnar first noticed about her) was flat. Deliberately so: this way, any meaning we heard in it would be on us.

“You should believe it,” I said. Lisette was good enough to nod. “Because it happens to be true. Which you should see for yourself quite soon. And now, we should get on our way.”

With that said, we did: the farmhand at the wheel started the engine up with a snarled cough, and Lisette took her seat next to my mother, and they were off. Lisette looked back and waved once before they vanished into the evergreen grove. The rest of us started out across the fields. As I walked, I noted that I was smashing the thick ragged lace blanket of snow into melting slush inside my bootprints. The midwinter thaw had arrived.

Aside from our mission, I was pleased to be just be there. Outside walking underneath the sky. My heart had started beating too fast, and I needed to catch up with it. I had even outpaced Karellen, but I knew he wouldn’t be behind me for long.

If I’m to be honest, I couldn’t quite believe that events I couldn’t see, that properly belonged in gossip-stories, would lead to whatever happened next. But I understood it was true, and it had been since I made the choice to offer our most remote fields as a landing pad to Westley Janson. That with every step, and every minute that passed, I was walking towards it.

*

The morning was struck open by a thundercrack boom that burst into the darkness I had been sleeping in. It was gone before I had fully returned to a waking state, where I was lying in the bed in Isolda’s former bedroom, in the first watercolor grey light from the window. But I could feel the echo it had left lagging behind it. I couldn’t tell from which direction it had struck, but I didn’t need to. There was but one cause for that noise. It had emanated from the garrison airfield on the valley road, as one of their starfighters took flight. Which meant it was time, the rawest early hours be damned, to move. And quickly too: before I snapped back to sleep again.

The house outside my room still felt dark and quiet as I pulled myself out of bed. I stretched my back, and yanked my fingers a few times through my new hair. Short as it was, it was still a rumpled mess from my restless thrashing as I had attempted to find sleep. I picked up the same tweed skirt from the previous day to wear once more.

When I entered into the sitting room, I saw Berhta was up as well. She stood in the thin light from the front window, watching the street. The light was on behind her in the kitchen, and I could smell the koffa she had already made up.

“Good morning,” she said, turning without surprise to see me.

This time, I felt and heard the boom echoing through the air from klicks away, as another fighter charged into flight. A sound that meant only one scenario: and even though I had been expecting to hear it, that didn’t mean I was ready for it to be real. “Let’s hope it is a good one,” I said.

She returned to her ritual communion with her koffa mug, and I went into the light of the kitchen. I poured a mug of the boiled hot nightblack koffa and dumped a heap of sugar into it, and drank it for the heat rather than the actual flavor. While I worked my way through it, and smeared sticky butter onto a leftover twist roll, I was aware of the thud of a bedroom door shutting, and then footsteps coming towards me. For once, I wished it were Lisette, while I knew very well it wasn’t.

(Lisette walks with floating-light grace, like a lady, like a fey-maid, as that aunt of hers must have trained into her. Karellen walks in a stalking march even when he isn’t trying to announce himself.)

When Karellen entered the kitchen, I was almost relieved. Since--even aside from the obvious fact that I was staying at his house--I was going to see him that same day, there wasn’t any use in putting it off. And well: I had just had hours of darkness to hide away in by myself, alone with the memory of the quarrel we had left off with. Most especially, of course, of his parting words.

Worse still: I had remembered my own hahahaing voice back at the dancehall, and I stood there awash again in the dirtyhot blush of my own idiocy. It hit me like a sonic blow, and I took it.

He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. It seemed the best I could do, as little as it was, in the aftermath was to leave him be, and so I did. I focused on the task of eating the twist, hyper-aware of each bite I chewed through, but I could still feel his presence, and see him from the corner of my eye. The shadow swish of his kilt, and the warrior braids he had chosen to affect. His oh so silent presence. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t matter. We don’t need to talk merely to take up space. But this silence was crushing and thick. I could feel it in the air.

Karellen shut the cupboard door with a smack, and then: “The garrison has sent out the pie rat code. Which could mean actual pirates, or it could be their code for rebel activity. You never know. Let’s just hope your friends are all prepared.”

He was speaking to me, but I knew this only because I was the one other person in the room. When I made myself turn to see him, in an attempt at normalcy, I wished I hadn’t bothered. He was looking in my direction, he was looking at me, but without actually seeing me. His eyes were as blank as windowpanes, reflecting nothing of his mind.

But wouldn’t you know: in spite of that, and what sense I possess, I still longed for him. I ached, with the new gnawing sense from being in the same space with him, to touch him. When I stepped back, moving further away from him, I did so more for my own sake than for his.

I swallowed another lumpyheavy bite of the twist, and opened my mouth. It was time that I said something at least: “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”

Before I was finished speaking, he had left the room, and I was left staring into the air behind him. In the meanwhile, Lisette had arisen: I could hear her voice roaming about the sitting room, and Berhta’s voice in response. I forced myself to finish the twist, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. It was time to leave. Time to keep my attention on the present, and what I had promised to do. Though if I failed, at least Captains Westley and Antilles would forgive me.

“No! It means what you think it does,” Karellen said suddenly. I startled. His voice was too big and echoingdeep for the house. “I just told you, Mor. I’m not hungry.”

[EXIT KARELLEN, IN PERSONAL GLOOMCLOUD.]

[EXIT LISETTE, WITH THE IGNITION KEYS IN HER FIST.]

[BERHTA turns to the audience, and sotto voce: Oh, dear. It looks like last night didn’t end too well. And if I know Ellie, he won’t want to talk about it. Whatever it was, I’m sure he and Antares can sort it out. They’ve been friends a long time. Right?

[EXIT BERHTA CENTER STAGE.]

Before I joined them outside, I went to the fresher-closet to check the status on my vest. It was still only just slightly damp, though perhaps that was due to my imagination. And oh yes: when I held it up underneath the glowing overhead light, I made out the smudged blur of the stain.

*

When the night was over, I escorted Karellen up the walk to his front door. The other houses in the row were all dark humped shadows, without a single starlit window awake. It reminded me of those nights when we would return, at a similar hour, from the youth dances. The darkness was soft, and it rang (from the spheres above, or my tired mind) with a shivering silver bell sound. The snow had a ghost glow underneath the light from the streetlamp. When I looked up, all I could see of the moon was a little white light leaking out from behind the dark cloak of a cloud.

All was paused, all was dreaming-quiet, until I spoke: “Well, Karellen,” I said, and offered him a high courtly bow. “Thank you for taking me out for a date tonight.”

“A date,” Karellen said. He shook his head. “Ha ha ha. You’ve got to be joking.”

“If that’s what you want, then yes. I was only joking,” I said: but I could tell from his dark tone that he was not amused, and I had not said the right thing.

“It wasn’t a date.” He unlocked the door, and charged into the dark house, and I caught it in the instant before it slammed closed, and followed him. He snapped on the lights, bringing the room back into reality, and turned to face me. He gifted me with a tiny fist-clenched smile, and I wished he had left the darkness alone for even another minute longer.

He continued to speak: “You proved that pretty well. To me, and to your girlfriend. But hey. You had me there for ***** and giggles, and you’ve never been one to waste an opportunity. If I didn’t know what I was along for, that’s my fault.”

It wasn’t like that I wouldn’t do that, I thought in a scrambled flurry. But when I spoke, I said only “She isn’t my girlfriend.”

He snorted. “Pathetic, Antares. That isn’t even remotely the point.”

I could only just bear to meet his cold ferocious gaze. But I did: without looking away, or so much as blinking. I don’t think I could have moved my eyes enough to blink. Of course, I had seen Karellen when he was angry, and when he expressed it in the bluntest of terms, before then. But this time, it was directed at me—and moreover, I deserved it. “Then tell me. What is the point?”

“You should already know that,” he said. “But fine, I’ll state the obvious. You wanted to show off for a good-looking woman, and you did so at my expense. And no, I don’t blame her. You need not worry yourself about that. I blame you.”

“You know how I am,” I said. And oh he does. Most people around here know what they’ve heard about me (Antares is a tease Antares is a show-off a two-face a rake in girl’s clothing) but he has observed first hand how much of that is true. “But I don’t think you’re a joke, Karellen.”

“You sure as **** treated me like one,” he said. “I don’t pretend to know much about human interaction, but I’m fairly sure it isn’t the thing to use your friends as entertainment. I think I know that much at least. And even if we are Just Friends, we have been friends.”

He paused for breath, but he wasn’t finished. “Would you like to know the worst part?” He made his voice sound flippant, even amused, but I wasn’t fooled. “There was this one moment back there in the dance when I thought, I thought, there was this spark between us. That it wasn’t only happening on my side. Oh, believe me, I know just how stupid that sounds now. Feel free to laugh.”

That had to be the last thing I felt like doing. It wasn’t only on your side, I tried to say, but the words couldn’t quite get out. You didn’t imagine it. I felt it. I still do.

There was nothing left to say then: he retreated to his room, and shut the door against me and all other human communication. Berhta and Lisette continued to sleep. I took off my coat (stiffly moving one arm at a time) before I went to my room and proceeded to collapse across the bed. I didn’t want to think about what had just happened, so I endeavored to just not think at all. Which you can’t actually do. As my loving father Ragnar once snapped at me, when I was only around ten years old: Nothing. I don’t believe that. You can’t turn your mind straight off and think about nothing.

After a short while, Karellen’s door opened again. He went into the kitchen, and then on to the fresher-closet. As penance, I allowed him the first use. The shower water crashed on, and for one long moment that is all too typical for me, I thought of him being naked. The very mention of which made me press my legs tightly together. Do not laugh. Judge me if you must, but don’t laugh.

I didn’t much feel like standing upright long enough for a shower. But I couldn’t justify skipping it for the second night in a row. As the Rules for Young Maidens teaches, “cleanliness”--being a fresh sweet-breathed flower—is the first of all virtues. By that standard, I was already a true slag.

The rest of the house was black again when I made my move. After I got out of my clothes, I sniffed the underarms of my shirt. They had that tell-tale overripe fruit sweat smell, and I hung it over the edge of the sink to deal with. It was then, and only then, that I noticed the dark mark perched on the bottom of my vest. Up front and in plain sight. Somehow, I had dribbled something (and it looked to be the grease-plump gravy) at dinner, and had proceeded to go about the rest of the night without the first idea it was there. I clenched my teeth, and then set it aside in the sink.

Thankfully, Karellen had left some hot water for me, and I stood under the crashing raindrops for a minute before I turned to the task of washing my hair with Berhta’s snowrose perfumed shampoo.

Once cleansed, I stepped forth from the stall to see that I had not remembered to bring in my next pair of underwear, or my borrowed nightshirt. But my room was only a few steps, and a moment’s time, away, so I figured I could manage. I wrapped my towel around myself, cinching it together in a knot just above my breasts, and after I propped the door open just enough to let the steam leak out, I set about washing my blouse, and then dealing with the vest.

I’m surprised they haven’t figured out a way to use bacta to treat stains. I mean, think about it: they use it for literally every ill that can befall a sentient being. But they haven’t, and so I hovered down over the sink, scrubbing at it the best I could with the aid of Berhta’s pearlpink hand soap.

After washing and rinsing and washing it in the burning cold water, I gave it up. My fingers were starting to hurt, and now that my skin was dry, the towel was sliding loose. I knotted it shut again, but it only just stayed together. All I could was hold it down underneath my left arm as I picked up the fainted heap of my remaining clothes with my other more dominant hand. Which I clutched against my chest as I pushed the door open with my elbow.

As soon as I did so, Karellen appeared in front of me. His hair was a wild snarling stormcloud, and he was still squinting from sleep.

That changed: as I shifted my arm back, my clothes slipped loose, and as I grabbed for them, my towel fell open, and it all hit the floor at my feet.

[KARELLEN looks upon ANTARES, his mind blasted wide awake. She is standing inside the light from the fresher, and he can see all of her. The reality, oh the glorious reality. He couldn’t possibly speak any of his swarming thoughts. Even if there were any use in letting her see them, and there isn’t. He is himself securely and fully clothed: and yet somehow, as illogical as it is, he feels exposed with her in the same light.]

[ANTARES is startled into a shivering giggling blush, but not into shame: She isn’t at all ashamed of her body, and she hasn’t ever been modest. (Quite the opposite, to quote a certain local scold who still teaches literature arts at the secondary school.) But the moment isn’t at all what it might have been if they were going off to bed on good terms. She can only hope he knows what it is—an accident, an awkward stumbling through life.]

It took me but a few seconds to grab up the towel, but longer to get it wrapped back into place. More or less. Karellen handed me my clothes without a word, which I accepted with a (stupid-weak) attempt at a smile, and then he went into the fresher, and I dashed on to my room for the night. Somehow, I managed to keep the towel in place until after I had closed the door.

After all that, I was nowhere near readied to sleep. But I needed to be awake, and in possession of my wits, in mere hours, and so I went through the motions. I got into bed, and turned off the glow of the bedstand lamp, and then proceeded to toss back and forth as I waited for sleep to take over my mind. To quite literally “fall asleep.” Eventually, and finally, I did.

 

Thanks for the "likes," everyone.

-----------------------------

As soon as we exited the dancehall, the night waiting outside hit me with the same shocking cold as the deepestdark lake water. I had to brace my shoulders as I took it in. But as my eyes opened, and adjusted to the fragile light from the streetlamps, I saw it wasn’t even that dark. That and the all-hours crowd had already gathered around the herd of parked vehicles. I didn’t see Westley, I mean Wes, at first. It took me a few seconds, and coincidence, to notice him. He was lounging next to one of the speeders parked towards alongside the lawn talking with several other men. His wig of red curls stood out, the glaring color of speeder headlights, showing off in the gloom.

He saw us as well. As we approached, he straightened to attention, and once we were in range, he tossed off a salute. “Ah, the couple of the hour. The two of you have honestly inspired me to improve my skills. Or at least make a spectacle of myself while trying.”

“Thank you, Westley,” I said. Karellen hung back behind with his hands in his pockets, but he did offer forth a lop-side smile. I could feel the muscles in my shoulders sigh as I relaxed. “Once you have the time, I’m sure you’ll do just that.”

Wes arched his eyebrows at my formality, but that was his only response. “May it someday be so. But for now, this particular night hasn’t aged out yet. Come on over.”

Of all his compatriots, Wedge was the only one I recognized. Since we had last met only the night before, he nodded at us with acknowledgment. I didn’t ask either him, or Wes, what they had been discussing when we showed up. Contrary to my reputation, I am aware it isn’t the done thing to mind other people’s business. But as it turned out, I wouldn’t need to ask.

Wes didn’t waste any time before he filled us in. He glanced around the perimeter, and when he was satisfied, he slumped back down against the speeder. “Time to get buckled up, kids,” he said. “Things are still a work in progress, but it looks like the situation’s about to get interesting.”

“What do you mean?” I said, making certain to keep my voice at a conversational pitch. As if we were only talking about the latest forecast.

“That’s the damnest part of it. We don’t know,” he said.

“But something is going to happen,” Wedge said. “The word is that Commander Jast left the bar earlier than usual, and he’s not known for changing his habits.”

“I can confirm that,” I said. “I saw him leave myself.”

“The man won’t act tonight,” Wes said. “As I was just telling my fellow scum here, he’s not paid enough, and his good men and true sure as **** ain’t. But otherwise, yes. The Imp signals are hopping like squinnies, and it’s all deep-coded. Could just be pirates, but I doubt it.”

Karellen was looking up into the dark lake of the sky. When I looked up as well, I saw the frostbright white moon, just half full and lying on its side, had floated into view. The dreaming moon, the winter-starved maiden sleeping with the snow. I hadn’t thought of those old names for years. Since then, I have learned that our moon is but a satellite like a thousand million others out there, a dead rock caught in our orbit. But it flew straight back to my mind.

(And above the moon, far beyond my ability to see, awaited what would happen next. The pirates lurking in their shadowed ship, all armed and toothed. Or the rebel cell, known only as that numbed-out static scratch lost in the roar of the general noise.)

Karellen spoke, startling me back to reality. “It’s time to sound the gjallerhorn then.”

“Exactly that, boyo,” Wes said. His teeth gleamed with reflected streetlight. “Those who need to should know by now. Hopefully, when we rendezvous with our friends, we’ll be in early for the game. Then we’ll see. Antares, my friend. How goes the situation with your backfield?”

“The same as I told you,” I said. Someone I couldn’t see in the shadowed darkness further on down the row of speeders had begun picking out a tune on a lap harp, an old winter lullaby I remembered from a memory so long ago it had faded into a dream, and the sound muffled our voices underneath it. A song from the first era of my life, and the earliest times someone (most likely my mormor) told me Don’t say that where someone can hear you. Sssshhh.

So I spoke using my normal voice: “I’m going out there tomorrow morning. Just to check in on the herd, and the boys my mother hired to look after them.”

“We’re going to be outnumbered,” Wedge said. “Even more so than usual.”

“And that’s with the best case scenario. Where the local pirate element doesn’t show up to play,” one of the other men said. “But if I know you, Janson, you wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I don’t know any other way,” Wes said. His curls bounced as he shrugged. “Well, here we are. Again. Poised to dance upon the raggedy edge. You ready, Calrissian?”

“That’s what I’m here for,” the man I gathered was Calrissian said. “The Mama’s a freighter, but she was built to evade the authorities, so I think I can keep up with the rest of you.”

“Good luck with all of that.”. My voice came out as a giddy starbright blast I hadn’t intended. [UNNAMED PUB WENCH strikes again in voice and thrusting ta-tas.] I reigned myself in. “And with that said, we should be heading out.”

Wes hadn’t so much as twitched his eyebrows at my tone. “Of course, of course. Are you in need of transportation back to the Field? This isn’t mine, but I can borrow it.”

“No, we’re fine,” Karellen said. “But thank you.”

Somehow, I refrained from amusing them by saying, as a parting hahaha: Oh yes. It’s almost Karellen’s curfew, and I promised to get him home safely. But I must admit to thinking it.

*

As I exited the femme-room, I encountered Silvain on her way in. It took me a startled moment to believe I was seeing her. Of course, I recognized her at once, but she looked different in the dim shivering starlights of the dancehall back hallway. And not only because she was one of the few people there, masculine or feminine, wearing trousers. She has the looks of a heroine, the clever girl who has no need of a man. (And trust me: Silvain had little interest in them.) She had her sleek black hair done up in a messy shrugged-off bun, with a knifepen thrust through it, and wore a pale jacket with the ruffled cuffs slipping down over her hands that she must have borrowed.

“Antares! I thought I saw you out there,” she said in greeting, and we embraced. She smelled cool, of the night air lurking outside, so she must have only recently arrived. Whereas I must have thrust the hot ripe smell of my fading sweat all over her.

As I would tell Karellen later, she wasn’t my girlfriend. Though she had been, briefly: we had met the previous summer in the travelling theatre troop, where we shared what scenes we had as the heroine’s elder sisters. (One fair, and one tawny, and both there to cause trouble.) Towards the end of the season, we had fallen into a fling. We hadn’t made any promises, and at the season’s end, we had parted ways as I returned to university, and she went off to face down the very real world.

When we parted, she examined me, and: “You cut your hair.”

At the reminder, I patted the halo-light weight of my new hair. “Just last night. I was inspired, I suppose. What do you think?”

“It suits you,” she said. “It really does. It emphasizes that roguish air of yours. And who knows. I might just follow your example and free myself of this mane.”

“Well, I do like to set a roguish example. Fashion wise, anyhow,” I said.

While she washed her hands, she filled me in on how she had come to be there, as I hovered in close enough next to her to hear over the bustle of voices surrounding us: “So yes. I showed up just in time to see you work your art out on the floor. I can’t say I was surprised. Oh, and your boyfriend was pretty impressive too.”

“He isn’t my boyfriend,” I said—and even though that was the objective truth, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like an excuse. But I shrugged that thought (and the resulting fist tightening in my chest) away. “That was my friend Karellen. I’m sure I mentioned him at least once.”

“That’s the friend who was spending his summer working in the game preserve wilds, right? The one who couldn’t be reached by civilized means? Yes, you told me about him a few times.”

The musicians were still on their break when we joined Karellen back at our table. As we sat down across from him, I made the introductions, and: “As it would turn out, her old friends were all far too busy to join in, so I have invited her to make do with us.”

“Right. If you’re going to settle for someone, might as well be us,” Karellen said.

Karellen is not without a sense of humor, though I know people claim he is. It’s more that he has standards as to what merits amusement. Trust me, he likes a bawdy joke as much as I do. When I first knew him, when I was fourteen and he was twelve, he had a talent for self-deprecating humor. Which always lands with the impact of a blimp crash, but he kept at it. He was also heavy, much more so than he is now, and well—we all know that the fat boys are jolly golly comic relief.

Karellen turned serious, even sour-tempered, in the aftermath. He has told me, more than once, that he does not remember that part of his personality with any fondness.

“Yes,” I said, keeping my attention on Silvain. “Karellen has to be the best hayseed we can offer for company around here. I believe he even read a novel this past year.”

Silvain arched her eyebrow in an expression I couldn’t read. “Really.”

“So he told me.” I leaned in towards her and the bench startled as I shifted my hips. “He didn’t give me a summary, so I can’t tell you if he liked it.”

While we were touring with the troupe, Silvain and I visited many a hamlet in both the farmlands and the forests, sometimes providing the only live theatre the people there would get a chance at all year. But this was different. She was seeing me as a local in my homeland. Gowrie is the closest we have to proper-sized town, but I knew Silvain wouldn’t see it that way. She’s from Thorsgate. The city. For her, Gowrie would be a spot in the road. Nygaard’s Field would be even less than that.

So I can explain the urge that seized me then, without excusing it. I had been in this situation before, with my group of theatre friends at university: I had to let them know that I wasn’t a backfield hick. I needed to be the one who laughed first.

Karellen shoved his bench back. “I need to get a drink. Want anything?”

Silvain produced a credit-coin from her coat pocket, and slid it over the table towards him. “That’s enough to cover one of the local pints, I hope?”

He nodded as he picked up the coin, and I just had to continue: “You’re taking your good taste into your hands, Silvain, if you drink that stuff. Which Karellen wouldn’t tell you. He has been exposed to decent ales before, and yet he still comes back to the good ol’ local brew.”

“Oh, the stakes can’t be that high,” she said. “I think I’ll be all right.”

“Right,” Karellen said as he stood to leave. “I’ll be back in a minute. Antares can go fetch her own drink if she pleases. I wouldn’t dare to choose.”

He took more than that one minute. After a few minutes had passed, Silvain went over to assist him in the loud braying crowd at the bar, and I didn’t see either of them again until they were walking back towards the table with their chosen drinks. Silvain had gotten a pint glass of straw yellow ale, while Karellen had gone for an electricbright purple punch-soda.

Honestly, I don’t much care for alcoholic drinks any more than he does. The last time we had gone out, we had both gotten punch-sodas. But I knew well how gauche that looks. Artists of the theatre feed their muses on black wines and icepale gins. Never mind that it all tastes like hoof glue.

“I see you’ve decided to give way to the little boy within, Karellen,” I said. “That or you’ve been spending too much time with Lisette. And I think even she prefers tea these days.”

“Get your own. I’m not sharing,” he said. He took another drag off his drink, and set the glass down with a thump. His mouth was already smudged bruised-purple. I wondered, idly, if it would stain my mouth if I were to kiss him. I shook the thought away.

“So tell us, Silvain,” Karellen said, taking control of the conversation. “You can see for yourself how we’re spending our time. What have you been doing?”

“You mean when I’m not taking a chance on new experiences in beer?” she said. “As I was going to tell Antares a few minutes ago, I’ve started on with this theatre company in Pandath. Scorpia. It’s all women, and we only perform works by femme playwrights. But you’ve no need to worry. I don’t have an irrational hatred of men. Or even a rational one.”

“If there is any reason or justice in Pandath, you’ll be leading the stage before the end of this year,” I said. She gave me a blushing rose-kissed smile. “But you already know what I think. What else have you got going on? Any social adventures and daring deeds?”

“Well. I’ve been seeing someone for a while now,” she said. “His name’s Ayden. It started out as just a few dates of conveniences after work, and then. You know how it goes.”

“Do tell,” I said. She reached into her pocket and took out a comlink, and released a small static-shimmering holoimage of the man in question. It’s hard to make out details with holos, but he was a pale butter-blond with a dainty ill-advised beard that made Karellen’s goatee look vastly improved by comparison. He wore a swaying pearlglow earring in one ear, and his dusky-purple shirt was opened in a long vee, exposing his chest and his floursoft skin. I could tell just what she saw in him.

“He seems rather theatrical,” Karellen said, speaking my own thoughts.

“He can be.” Silvain snapped the image shut, with a long lop-sided smile I hadn’t ever seen on her before, even when she played the role of the Queen’s Fool in that one encore play. But then: I had known her for only three months. Hardly any time at all. There was too much I didn’t know about her.

“It’s your turn now, Karellen,” I said. “You should tell her the true story behind that forest fire last summer, and what the true wages of stupidity are.”

“That would be one way of putting it.” He looked over at Silvain. “Did you ever hear anything about the Senni Creek Fire last summer?”

“It does sound familiar,” she said, hesitating as she searched her memory. “Or maybe I’ve just heard of Senni Creek. So what’s the story there?”

“How it all began,” Karellen said. “This gang of kids had gone out on a lark of a hike on the Wuthering Pass trails. They didn’t have the first clue what they were doing, and it wasn’t going well for them even before they took the wrong turn. Though in fairness, that can happen to anyone, even me. So I won’t blame them for that part. They wandered and blundered about, trying to find the way out, and eventually it got dark. And they got cold. So they decided to start a fire. And they decided to make their fire in this space in the center of a piled-up circle of deadfall.”

“And that was what started the forest fire,” Silvain said.

“Precisely.” Karellen leaned forward, riding the story, and there was that tell-tale gleam in his eye. He shook his head and: “So the poor ************ idiots ran for it. There was nothing else they could do. And since they were the only people seen leaving the area, they got caught. I was there. They were going for the hoverlights, since they hadn’t a torch between the lot of them, and came crashing forth out of the trees, and onto the road where we were meeting with the fire crew.”

He paused for effect. “The light in the darkness led them straight to the middle of a bunch of rangers and firefighters. They were panicking and dirty and a few of them were actively sobbing. I have to say I almost felt sorry for them.”

“But only almost,” I said.

“It was close,” he said. “Trust me, if they hadn’t known before just how much **** they had landed themselves in, they figured it out when they saw us. Ewain and Verner were there, and Antares can tell you how they are. But we could tell they didn’t do this on purpose. So. I think they were assigned to a few hundred hours of cleanup and trail work as penance, and they lived to learn another day.”

The musicians had returned to the stage, and Donal, the fiddle player, was tuning his instrument of power with a string of plinking raindrop notes. “Excuse me,” he said.

He didn’t invite me to join him, and I watched him stalk away without comment. His boots stamped a rhythm on the floor, and his kilt hem swayed, and his compatriots already on the floor received him with more than a few whoops and knowing grins. I remained sitting in silence. Moreover, I didn’t know anything to say, and that was (considering the fading echo of my mocking-bright voice) for the best. For the first time, I didn’t know how to look at him, but I couldn’t look away.

It was that one moment in the couples’ dance. When—I knew now after it had ceased to be—I could have so easily kissed him. When I had wanted to kiss him.

But it was just as well I hadn’t tried. No matter how it seemed at the time, I knew from experience how it could have ended: Sorry but I don’t feel that way about you. You know that. We’re friends. Isn’t that good enough.

But I did know how to look at Silvain. I turned back towards her, and she smiled. But before she could speak, her pocket shivered, and there was a flybuzz from her comlink. She was already flipping it open as she said: “Sorry about this. But if I don’t take it, it will be one of my parents.”

It turned out to be one of her ladies-in-arms from the theatre company. While they carried on a long storytelling session, I excused myself. As I walked onto the floor, the band started in with a banger jig that snatched me up like a wind. The sort of music that makes you forget what you should remember. It’s just as well, I suppose, that when it’s gone, everything comes back.

*

Everybody had come to the dancehall that night. Both those who are so blessed as to live in town, and the hoards from the surrounding hamlets from up to two hours’ travel away. We weren’t at all the only ones from Nygaard’s Field, and as soon as we walked inside, I saw Ilseborg, one of my former classmates from Osgood’s Creek who I had heard never moved away, but only for an instant before the crowds shifted around her. The tables were filling up for dinner, and Karellen and I did not waste time before claiming the seats we wanted.

Yes, everyone was there--and that included the commander of our local overlords. Jast had taken his regular seat at the bar and was having his first drink of the evening in grim and furious silence, while his driver reported for duty in the serving line with the rest of us.

The hallwomen had prepared beef and vegetable pasties with onion gravy, and a thick slice of bread with herb butter on the side. It was my fourth decent meal in but two days, and I wasn’t about to take it for granted. Honestly, I can admit that I use most of what intellectual capacity I possess, all five brain cells’ worth, on the basics of my physical comfort, food, and sex.

“Women are more pleasing than men in nearly every way,” I told Karellen. I had finished all I was capable of eating, and having gifted him with the leftover fragment of my pastie, I was leaning in towards him with my elbows planted on the table. “It’s the aesthetic truth. A beautiful woman with luscious hips is like her own work of art. It’s almost enough just to look at her walk away.”

“You don’t have to convince me,” he said. [KARELLEN opines, rather glumly, as one who has admired a beautiful well-shaped woman more than once.]

“Aw, Karellen,” I said. “As is often the case in this reality, there are those few exceptional men out there. As your friend, I daresay you might be one of them.”

He smiled at that, and as ever, I was pleased to have inspired it. “As your friend, I’ll accept that as a compliment. Thank you. And I have actually been described as luscious on a few occasions.”

One of the hallwomen swooped in to collect my dishes. The musicians were taking the stage, and I heard the first windwhistle note as the flutist tested his instrument. That was the reason we were all there, including those who weren’t about to expose themselves in the dance. The only true way to hear our music is live and in person. Our local district band has been doing this for many a year, and they are all silverhairs. I think the newest member, Finnegan on the crawdy drum, is well above sixty. But trust me: they play more ferociously, and daydreaming-soft, than you can imagine.

“It’s been a while,” I said, as the band swung directly into one of the bachelors’ dances, and the first men strode out onto the floor. Well over a year, to be more exact, but he knew that.

I recognized more than a few of them: including Mikkel, who worked with Karellen and me the last summer I partnered with him patrolling the wilds, and several of our former farm employees. One of whom was Trevor, my mother’s right hand assistant back in my secondary school years. And oh yes, Westley Janson. Though I almost didn’t recognize him at all with his wig of long burning-red curls. With that hair, and dressed in his hills clans kilt, he was just another one of the lads.

Karellen paused on his way to join them, and leaned in close, his shadow swaying over me, so I could hear him speak: “Then I guess I’ll have to remind you how it gets done.”

He is transformed into a different person when he is out on the floor. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that is where he shows his truest self. I don’t have to know which is true. While I prefer to act in life—and I haven’t hesitated to crash the bachelors’ dances on several notable occasions, even though only my given name is masculine—I was content to watch on, from my perch in the front rows, for the first few rounds, to see him in action.

The original purpose of the bachelors’ dances, back in the long ago time days, was to awe the women they wanted with their prowess. Karellen did just that. He flew through the circle-turns, and bounded into the leaps. He pranced. He thundered. His steps, when he touched down on the floor, slammed an echo into the air around me. His hair flying about him in a dark roar. But he didn’t do this to impress anyone. While some of the other men (Westley most especially amongst them) tossed smoldering taunting looks at the audience, Karellen didn’t seem to be aware of us.

He had entered his own reality, one I could only observe from the outside: his eyes fluttering almost shut at times with a moth-winged beat as he followed with the music.

When Finnegan played the first beats on the crawdy drum, I could feel my heartbeat leap forth and answer it. There’s a reason it was known in the old language as “the thunder.” My thighs tensed with the urge to move, to join with the music instead of sitting outside it. Finally, during the pause between songs, I walked out to the floor and made my appearance at Karellen’s side.

He was pinning his frenzied hair back with a couple of Isolda’s abandoned clips, but he saw me straight away. “I’m ready,” I said, and then the fiddle leapt forth into the next song.

As I followed, I wouldn’t say I entered the same experience he had, but I daresay I came close enough to see it. Well— to sense it close by me, as a blur just past the corner of my eye.

After we had thrashed through the next few songs, while most of the musicians refreshed themselves with a drink of water, and good old Jonas wiped at the sweat a-glow on his face, Donal took the opportunity to announce the forthcoming conversation dance. At that, a number of those who had been with us in the dance drifted back to take their places with the audience.

“Oh come on now, you lot,” Donal called after them. A few of the women answered with the most bashful of smiles, but they were not moved. “Remember! Fortuna loves those bold enough to dare the risk of playing the fool.”

Meanwhile, I extended my hand to Karellen, and beckoned him with a skittering of my fingers. “Care to join me, my dear boyo?”

He raised his eyebrows in a swooping arch, and: “You know the answer to that.”

A conversation in dance is one of the free forms, for both the musicians and the dancers: you respond both to what they choose to play, and to your partner. If there are any rules, you don’t know what they are until the music hath begun. Since people tend to want rules—need them, even—to guide them in life and thought, they tend to prefer to watch. By now, I shouldn’t need to tell you that Karellen and I have danced upon the line between boldness and public mistakes many times over the years. I have danced the conversations with a few other people, but he has ever been my favorite partner.

Karellen and I staked out our positions on the floor, and I was only dimly aware of the footsteps shuffling around us from the other dancers. We waited. Our audience waited.

It began with a low thump thump from the crawdy drum, and I arched forward with my hips. Then the harp joined in, with its light raindrop silk notes, and I threw out the first move.

The fiddle began with the vigorous melody, and Karellen answered me. The fiddle sang, and I moved with it, prancing straight into my answering response. And we were off.

I don’t know that I am a particularly good dancer. People--and not just my mother and the sister-aunts--have told me I have the body for it, and I suppose I do: I was tall even before I shot up towards my full height like a tree when I was ten, thanks to Ragnar’s genetics. (Too tall to play the witty and beautiful ingenues in favor these days.) I’m more or less thin, but I have big hips. And yes, I have a mighty creamy screaming ass. Thanks to that, I literally split this slinky droidskin silver dress, the one I had for my costume for my performance as Second Party Guest, wide open.

But when I’m on the floor, I don’t have to think about that. It’s irrelevant. Because after years of experience, I know what to do. The music tells me. Always.

On a whim, I threw in a modified version of a step form the social dances I learned in that same particular play.(Self-Portrait, about an artist and her younger politician sister.). I bowed before I made my move, strutting through a circle-loop, my breasts thrust forward.

And Karellen followed my example: he snapped me a knowing look that made me flush all the warmer, and echoed back my bow. He stamped into a stalking prance, almost touching the space that shivered out between us. His shoulders, his hips, moving like water.

As the end approached, the music roaring forward to a midnight darkness, I came in for my final move, my skirt smacking against my legs. When it ended, when we landed, the space between us was gone and we stood together, back to back, in a heroic romance stance.

There was a thunderstorm of clapping, and accompanying cheers, as the audience reminded me of their existence once more. When we took our bows, a few of them whooped their respect.

Before they left the stage for their break, the band finished the set with a couples dance. The flutist, Matthias, led off into one of the oldest spring airs, and I took Karellen’s hand. As we followed each other through the familiar pattern of steps, I felt a fluttering in my chest where my heart is located. I was--in the most obviously simple of terms--happy. But that wasn’t all of it. As we met, and came apart, and happily met again, we shared a look. He smiled at me, and only for me—and I flushed with a bursting warmth as the flutter sang within me.

As I have already made clear, I haven’t been a virgin for more than a few years, and I couldn’t pretend (like the girl-heroine “who feels with her mind”) I didn’t know what it was I felt. Oh yes, I wanted him. But it was more even than that. I loved him. I was in love with him.

Even though I knew Karellen had not been pining in silence for more than the friendship we had. Quite the contrary, actually: whenever anyone assumed he was, that he must be, he had made that quite plain. What we have is more than good enough, he told his elder brother Sturla only the year before. Besides, I know her far too well.

The song ended with one abruptly hushed note, and the very breath-warmed air seemed to guide me as I spun about one last time, and came to a stop in front of him. He was so close that, for that long sweetly painful moment, I could hardly breathe. And oh yes, I knew this moment as well: I had only to exhale, and then we would touch, and meet completely, as we kissed.

His eyes widened, and then I knew, as though I could feel his thoughts. He longed for me as I longed for him. The air sparkled around us, and my hips swayed forward. It had to happen.

And then: it didn’t happen. He released my hand, and I stepped back. My mouth ached, and I could almost taste the kiss that had only happened in my imagination.

“I should probably make a trip to the femme-room,” I said. It was one of the most inane things I could have said just then, though it was true enough.

“All right,” Karellen said. “I’ll reclaim our seats while you’re at it.”

The path to the washrooms led me past the bar. As I made my approach, I remembered Jast, and my promised intention to keep the occasional eye on him. So much for that: I hadn’t given him the first thought for most of the night. He was still installed on his stool, his glass of berrybrown brandy locked into his oh so aristocratic fingers, and a lieutenant stood just behind him delivering a message in a sotto voce whisper, directly to his ear.

Jast did not care for what he was hearing. I wouldn’t have thought it were physically possible for him to surpass his normal level of fury, but somehow, it was. He finished the last gulp of his drink and picked up his greatcoat, and then snapped straight to his feet and marched off towards the doors, the lights gleaming in his mirror-bright black boots. The lieutenant could only trot along behind him.

There was one second when Jast turned in my direction, and underneath the force of his stone-dull glaring gaze, I thought he was looking at me. Then he walked on.

Before he was gone, I pushed what I had seen, and my suppositions about it, away. It had meant something, and I suspected I would know what that was all too soon enough. I continued on to the blue gently lighted sanctuary of the femme-room. If nothing else, I did need to use the toilet.

 

(And the conclusion--or the beginning...)
-

Karellen’s elder sister Isolda hasn’t returned to visit her old home since she ditched our entire world for the glories of Imperial Centre. Only the most overrated and populated would do for her aspirations. Since I knew who she was when she was one of the older girls towering years ahead of me, well before I had spoken to Karellen, I remember her well. She has the same coloring as Karellen (the dark eyes and thick brown-as-wood hair and lily-fair complexions), which they inherited from Berhta, but otherwise she couldn’t have been more different. She was stunning, a thin slippery pale fairy maid with glossy free-flowing hair and burning doe’s eyes. Her mouth in a constant sullen smirk.

Oh yes, when I would see her—particularly that one concert-night when she wore this defiant black velvet dress—it just confirmed that I love and desire pretty girls. I wouldn’t say it went so far that I had a crush on her. But I was awaiting the day when I would be old enough to speak to her.

Since then, I know Berhta has the occasional erratic comlink call with her, but no one else has seen or heard one word from her. Berhta has indicated that thus far, Isolda’s hopes for an acting/modeling career have come to naught. Her looks can’t make up for her limited talents on a world where she has to compete with a thousand other species, including twi’leks.

I shouldn’t need to mention that Berhta has not said—nor even so much as thought—that last bluntly put bit. She’s still young, she told me once. And she isn’t ready to give up just yet.

As you would expect from my description of her, Isolda had an impressive wardrobe, most of it still stored in her bedroom where she left it. I had raided it, with Berhta’s permission, a few times in the past when I was in dire need. Most of her clothes aren’t my style, but I always found something.

After we returned from a bracing late morning walk with Karellen that fully woke me up, Lisette and I went back to searching through the storage bins of her clothes. I found a long black tweed skirt that still smelled of crisp perfumed shop air. Isolda must have received it as a gift she didn’t want, but it suited me. While Lisette continued to sort through her bin, I tried it on.

I proceeded to then stare down my reflection standing in Isolda’s full length mirror tilted back on its joganwood stand, and examined how the skirt fit me from multiple angles. I’m taller than Isolda by at least a few significant inches, so the hem barely brushed over the tops of my boots. But as that happens to be my preferred skirt length, I wasn’t going to complain. It swished against my legs as I turned back and forth another time, the satinsleek lining as cool as water.

While I did this, I caught a shadowed glimpse of Karellen from out in the hall. I watched my image as I raised my hand and waved at him. In response, he came over to the doorway.

“I believe I will keep this one,” I said, still watching it inside the mirror.

Lisette nodded behind me, as she picked some fuzz from the sweetheart rose pink sweater-jacket she had lying across her lap. “You should. I think it looks good on you. Don’t you agree, Bror?”

Before Karellen could begin to answer, I beat him to it: “He knows that the only opinion that counts here is my own. But I’m sure he agrees this is my style.”

“Ah, as it happens, I do,” he said. “I know a few things about fashion. Though I would not recommend wearing it on the trails. I have an old kilt you can use for that.”

“I may have to hold you to that next summer,” I said. I went back to the pile I had been sorting through, and picked out a cloudsoft white blouse with embroidered forest lilies, which I set aside for later consideration. If it fit Isolda’s fabulous breasts, I was assured that I could wear it. Then a few more sweater-tops, and a mauve silk blouse, and a number of rose-bruised dresses—all of which smelled of faded perfume, of the ghost-shape of Isolda’s body, and the nights when she wore them. Most sadly, the black velvet dress of my long ago daydreams wasn’t amongst them.

“You know what I think?” I said, looming back up to my feet. I picked up one of the dresses and shook out its skirt. “We should make a fashion show of this. Put these to use one more time.”

Lisette wrinkled her eyebrows, and I knew her answer before she spoke: “I don’t know about that. Remember, these aren’t our clothes. Isolda didn’t tell us we could play with them.”

“Trust me, she does not care,” Karellen said (helpfully taking my side), but she wasn’t moved. She had her mouth set in a prim locked-up rosebud, and she looked down at her lap, and set the eyelet lace camisole she had been holding back into one of our piles.

“Berhta gave us her permission to take whatever we wanted, but all right,” I said.

According to both Karellen and Berhta, Lisette doesn’t invoke the specter of Aunt Manette this and Aunt Manette said that as often as she did in the beginning, but she has not at all gotten past the years of her influence. I never knew the woman. I only met her once or twice when I was a kid, during the all too brief honeymoon when her most beloved sister was technically my stepmother. But I have to say that if she were still residing here on this mortal coil, I would happily kick her ass.

That glitch aside, it had been a good day. A lazy, pleasant, undemanding day. Berhta had made up a classic breakfast while I was still sleeping, and I had even managed an appetite for it. We had gone for that long walk with Karellen on the hillside trails under bright limondrop sweet winter sunlight, and returned at the end of it to the warm house.

In short: we had acted as though we had never so much as heard of the fabled Alliance to Restore the Republic—let alone personally met two of their X-Wing corps.

Meanwhile, the wilderness radio had been on in the background, the lights scrambling with a variety of local signals that came and went in the same instant. Not once, no matter how I tried not to listen for it, had I heard the numbed hiss of a self-erasing Rebellious transmission. All was as usual, and so far, there had only been an agricultural council communique that came through in full, which only Berhta had been there to hear.

I was putting Isolda’s clothes back into storage, putting my borrowed room back into order, when she appeared in the doorway. “It looks like we’ve got something here.”

We all took our places in the sitting room in the vicinity of the radio. The lights froze staring in place as the signal stabilized. The sound quality had the wavering yawning backdrop I recognized as that from a hyperspace transmission, and a man with a stickydeep voice was speaking.

That’s what I mean, he said. I’ve done too good a job here, and as thanks, I have this sodding brat with his squeaking fresh rank bars taking over things on my watch. Honestly, I should be happy to leave him to it, along with this entire planet. But here I am.

It was Aris Jast, the commander himself, in a confessional moment. Since I hadn’t ever overheard him in speech before, that explained why I didn’t recognize his voice. His confidant’s reply was lost in a snarl of blazing static, but from his response, Jast’s connection must have caught it.

Precisely, he said, and paused both for effect, and to consult his drink. I am not saying that I absolutely need a placement on Imperial Centre. I am prepared to be reasonable. But I do need to get off this benighted grain field, and on to better things. Force knows, I’ve earned it.

According to the local rumors, Jast doesn’t get drunk. Cannot get drunk, actually: he drinks as much as he does in a ceaseless quest to reach that blitzed-out state. So only his emotional state could explain how he had slipped into invoking the actual mythical Force. I wondered if he was even consciously aware that he had done so. When they took out the agricorps commune near Wilhelma’s Meadows, in the opening days of the Empire, they burnt it all down and sowed the grounds with salt. According to my mother, the one time she talked about what happened when I was nine, it wasn’t enough just to kill them. Their very memories had to be wiped out.

“That poor man,” Berhta said. Only someone who knew her would have recognized the sarcasm behind her banal tone. “I’m so glad he has someone to talk to.”

Lisette giggled (in a guilty escaped burst) at that. Otherwise, there wasn’t much to say, and we moved on with the day. As the evening faded in swiftly outside, Karellen and I readied ourselves to leave for Gowrie and the dancehall. Most of that was on my part: I decided to continue wearing my new skirt, with the plainest creamwhite shirt I had been able to find, with my original vest and boots. Though Karellen did change into another black shirt.

Lisette and Berhta were having a game of Castles at the kitchen table. As I pulled on my coat, and Karellen picked up the speeder keys, he said, “You ought to come with us, Lisette. Really, it will be fine. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn‘t. You won’t even be the youngest one there.”

Lisette shook her head, and shuffled through her hand before she replied. According to the late Manette Guvois’s rules, she was too young and tender for such social functions, and that was decidedly that. “No, I think I’ll stay here this time. Go out and have fun.”

Berhta set her hand down, spread out in a boneless fan, and: “I expect Commander Jast will be putting in his usual appearance at the bar.”

“The chances of that are good,” I said. Karellen was waiting at the door, and I fancied I could almost hear the teeth shivering of the keys in his hand. “I’ll endeavor to keep the occasional eye on him. Half an eye, at the least. In the interest of discretion.”

*

Since the hour had grown well into the night, Berhta invited us to stay over at their house. Lisette has stayed with them often during her time installed in my mother’s house, and she went along with the idea as soon as Berhta proposed it. All I had to do was accept, and I did. There was only one problem. I had not planned on my escape from my visit home lasting overnight, and I wasn’t prepared. Lisette was even less so. While we stood outside the speeder in the hovering darkness, I looked through my shoulder bag to see what I did have on hand.

That wasn’t much, as it turned out: it had been some months since I had last used it, and I could see that, for once, I had remembered to unpack it afterwards. There was my university id chip, and a doll-sized tin of toothpaste, and the three creekside rocks I had left in there during my summer-ranger days. Finally, I found something useful. A pair of underpants from that same summer.

When I flashed the evidence at Lisette, she said: “That doesn’t help much, Antares. And don’t even think I am going to wear them. That’s repulsive.”

She was on the verge of actually, and defiantly, stamping her foot. I decided against pointing out the obvious fact that I hadn’t offered them to her. “That’s fine with me. After all, I shan’t be the one washing my things in the sink tonight. And trust me, I won’t be taking care of it for you.”

Karellen shook his head off in the background, and I knew he was taking her side: “Well, don’t hold back,” I said. “Tell me just what you’re thinking.”

“All right,” he said. “Usually, I admire your ability to be a scorching bitch. At the right time, and this isn’t the right time. And condescension doesn’t become you.”

He was right, and he knew he had me when I withdrew into sulking silence. Lisette knew it as well: “Yes, and I don’t need you, or anyone else, to wash my things for me.”

“Goodness greatness, kid,” Westley said. Somehow, he refrained from smiling, but I could just hear the grin lurking in his voice. “With that much fire, I would have thought you’d been offered the choice of either my grey and ghastly undergarments or death.”

Lisette attacked him with a whispercat growling glare for that one, before turning her attention back to me. “And don’t forget we haven’t got anything to wear tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to remind me,” I said. Not that it made much difference: Ragnar paid for my tuition, but he wasn’t about to hand over even one cred for “frivolous matters,” and so I didn’t have much of a wardrobe. I did my best with what clothes I had, but my options there were limited. I had last added something several months prior, when I claimed my black velvet frockcoat from the wardrobe room. From the men’s section, though it was female enough now that I wore it.

“Come on now,” Berhta said. “We can get this sorted. The Lil’ Bit should still be open, and we can run over and see what they’ve got. And you know you’re both welcome to anything you might want in Isolda’s old things.”

That spoken, she turned to Westley and Wedge. “If you need a place to stay tonight, gentlemen, you’re welcome to join us at my house.”

“The more the madder, eh?” Wes said. “Since you’ve asked, we would be happy to intrude. But we have our ship, and that’s all we need. That and as men of action, we have certain responsibilities. You know which ones. We need to be ready to move on a swivet.”

“But thank you for the kind offer,” Wedge said (with a stern note aimed at Westley). He held out his hand to Berhta, and they shook. “As it is, we may yet meet again.”

“Until then,” I said, and offered them both a short old-fashioned bow I learned from one of my more interesting minor roles. They both returned the gesture. “For now, we need to hasten to the Lil’ Bit if we want to get there before closing time.”

As it happened, we arrived at the Lil’ Bit’s doors mere moments before closing. Thanks to the knowing ways of the hamlet, we still had time to dash through the aisles, and purchase a few necessities, one of which was a package of plain bandage-white underpants Lisette claimed for her own, before we headed on to the town house road on the crater bluffs.

All the houses in the row were built in the same summer, back in my parents’ parents day, and have the same layout. My mother sold our house when I was sixteen, but whenever I walk inside the one Karellen’s family continues to own, it feels as though I have returned to the past. While knowing that the present—where that Sweet Newcomer Family with three kids lives in our old rooms—is still here. You might say it’s a melancholy feeling, even though I have only had over six years to adjust. It’s a feeling my mother doesn’t at all share, but my younger brother Augustus understands. He still holds a grudge over the sale, even though he knows why it happened.

Naturally, when we were sorting out the sleeping arrangements, Lisette wanted to share Isolda’s room with me. All in the interest of sisterly bonds, of course. “No,” I said. “Absolutely not. I need to be alone. But given that it’s usually your space, I will take myself off to the sopha.”

Thankfully, and mercifully, Berhta solved the matter by inviting Lisette to stay with her before Lisette could plead her case, or Karellen gave in to the urge to roll his eyes. “Remember, I had to share a bed with both of my sisters growing up. You won’t bother me a bit.”

While Berhta made up some coffee, I followed the short hallway to Isolda’s room, in the same place where my room—which I only visit now in the occasional dream—was in our old house. Isolda has been gone long enough now that it is properly a guest room, with additional storage, so I didn’t at all feel as though I were invading her territory. I set my bag on the bed, and sat down nearby and commenced to unfasten my braids in preparation for washing my hair.

My hair landed in a heavy slapping veil down my back as I set it loose. When I was done, I was disinclined to continue, to stand up and walk to the fresher-closet. I held up a long section of my hair and examined it with a critical zoomed-in eye. I have been complimented on it many times. It’s a dark autumnal blond that Aunt Dagmar insists, against the evidence, has a “copper” tint, and I inherited a bit of curl from some unknown ancestor. But there were too many times when it was just a burden I dragged around with me. It was simply too long.

The idea came to me as suddenly as though the long gone Force had bopped me on the side of the head: I could just cut it. I didn’t know why I hadn’t done so before.

As for the potential impact on my acting career, well: it wasn’t as though I was having any luck with the choice ingenue roles as it was.

When I returned to the sitting room, I hesitated a moment in the hallway before I made my entrance, to observe them all without being seen myself. Berhta was on the settee, with Lisette sitting on the floor in front of her while she braided her hair. Karellen had taken the black leather armchair, with the wulf-clawed feet, that I still thought of as belonging to his father, and was (absently, dreamily) picking at the polish on his thumbnail. A light waltz was drifting from the radioset, and Lisette was regaling them with the latest story from the local Year Eight set.

This was the most I had ever heard from her about her classmates. I thought I recognized a few of the names involved, but from their responses, Karellen and Berhta knew the whole cast. It occurred to me that this was a typical scene for them, and that I was watching what their lives were like when I was away, a thousand klicks across the mountains, at university.

Lisette stopped in mid-sentence as soon as I entered. Her new rose-crowned braids swayed as she leapt to her feet, and: “Antares! What did you do to your hair?”

Karellen laughed, with a gruff snort, before he controlled himself.

“What does it look like?” I said. I reached up and patted at it. After having had my glorious flowing locks for so long, too long, it felt odd. As though my head were about to float loose. “What can I say. I was struck with divine inspiration.”

“Hey, you don’t need to answer to us,” Karellen said. “It’s your hair.”

Before she went off to bed, Lisette insisted on trimming my hair to even it out better, especially in the back section which I had only seen in flashes across the mirror. While I sat in one of the kitchen chairs under a pool of melted light, she went to her work with a pair of Berhta’s sewing scissors. Her breath dancing lightly on the back of my neck as she concentrated.

When she had finished, she collected the dead leaf pile of my old hair from the rubbish bin, and I went outside into the snowlit night with her as she fed it to the winds. The hags of winter must have taken it up in their claws, as I was told in my earliest memories, because she seemed pleased.

*

ACT I, SCENE III:

[The following takes place in the void where the sounds of human voices ride upon the wind of the signal waves.]

MOR: Antares. You know I haven’t asked much of you while you’ve been home. This is your break. And I realize you have a lot on your mind about school right now. But I do expect you to look after your sister. And here you’ve gone and abandoned her.

ANTARES: She was safely in the bosom of your home when I left. That’s hardly abandoning her to the cold and cruel wilds. She made that choice. She took it on herself with her own free will. And moreover, she’s fine. She made it into town both unharmed and in possession of what wits she has.

MOR: She wouldn’t have gone off like that if you hadn’t left her. Consider yourself lucky that she didn’t fall into any troubles on the roads.

ANTARES: Oh come on. She’s fourteen great girl years old. When I was that same exact age, I was out on rambles all the time. I know you have to remember that one twoday hike up Frejason’s Pass I did with Karellen. And he was only just turned thirteen.

MOR: Then you might remember I was not impressed with your feat at the time. But that’s not relevant here. Lisette isn’t at all like you were, and you know that. Certainly nothing like Karellen. She’s just. She’s just a sweet little girl who’s used to being looked after.

ANTARES: Looked after, my fat ass. That’s no excuse for riding my back the way she does.

MOR: Honestly, I don’t know why you say things like that. You do not at all have a “fat ass.” You have a very nice slender figure.

ANTARES: …..

MOR: But that’s getting off the main point. Lisette is your sister.

ANTARES: Yes, I know she is. But I still hardly know her, and sisterhood doesn’t just magically come into being. Something she doesn’t seem to realize. It has to be earned.

MOR: Then perhaps you should give her the chance to earn it.

ANTARES: Um. Well, she’s here with me now, so all’s well that has ended well.

MOR: Indeed. So what are the two of you planning to do next.

ANTARES: Karellen finally answered his comlink, and so he met up with us a while ago. Then he called Berhta, and now we’re going out to the Woodland Rose for dinner. And I swear I will not flirt with a single girl there, however pretty, in front of Lisette. On my word of honor.

MOR: How very thoughtful of you. Well. That sounds like a plan.

MOR: Oh, and before I forget. Your father called again. He wanted to know why you ignored his call, and if you’re certain you’ll be graduating this summer.

*

Soon after we finished our call, Karellen made his entrance at the bar. He appeared from out of the dense shadows at the stairwell, and nodded greetings with the barman before he continued on towards me. He would describe himself, and has done so, as “tall, fat, and dorky,” but I disagree. He was a striking and handsome figure in his long black coat and walking kilt. With just the whimsical touch of his blue and fire-orange striped socks I could see above his boots. Some of the men at university, including more than a few of the ones in the theatre arts program, have taken to the new short haircuts. My favorite man has done no such thing. His magnificent russet-tinted dark hair was loose over his shoulders.

(Somehow, as I made haste to greet him, I did not identify the joy I experienced for what it was. Though with hindsight, I realize I had known for years, in a way I felt more than thought. I could only consciously admit that he was my beloved friend. Which he was and is. When you have someone who knows you for who you are, with all your flaws and scars, you should keep them around.)

After I made the introductions, Westley clasped Karellen’s hand in a fearsome shake, and looked him over. “Correct me if I’m wrong here, but you strike me as the artistic type.”

“Me? I’m not any kind of artist,” Karellen said. “I’m in school for forestry studies. If Antares told you about that play back when we were kids, she was the future actor. I don’t know why exactly they recruited me to help out. It was fun at the time, but I haven’t needed to do it again.”

“Then I stand corrected,” Westley said. Now he sounded as though he was flirting with Karellen, though Karellen didn’t appear to notice. “Obviously, you are a strong and mighty woodsman.”

After Lisette finished with the chocolate soda she had permitted me to buy her, we headed out into the sunglaring day for a walk and talk. “What do you know about Commander Jast?” Wedge said, as we ambled along the creekside path.

There isn’t much to know about Aris Jast, the man who runs the garrison at what my mother’s generation still refers to as the old defense force base. He is a thin faded pastygrey man of ambiguous middle age, who seethes with a perpetual teeth-grinding rage at his fate being stationed here with us. “I know who he is. I know what everyone else does,” I said. “What about him?”

“Then I’ll fill you in,” Westley said. “Jast is actually not a bad commanding officer. Especially considering he’s one of the original Imps. He had sense enough to take on some of the old defense force types, and he listens to them. Which could be the problem here. He’s been too competent. Sector headquarters might have sent in all this new blood to keep him in line. Might have. That’s one theory.”

“Right,” Karellen said. “And what would the other theories be?”

“That would be telling.” We walked in rambling silence for another few minutes. “Some of the old defense officers have been keeping grudges older than the Empire itself. Especially the ladies in their ranks, who would like Jast to offer them employment just so they could spit it back in his face. That’s a direct quote, by the way. To the point. They’ve joined their forces of late with a group of our friends. The rest is classified access only. But I think you can figure it out from there.”

Once during my last summer in the wilds, when Karellen and I were trying to contact our supervisor Verner (a legend and a true strong and mighty woodsman) there had been a second where the radio froze, and the only sound that emerged was the absence of sound. A numbed static blank. The one sign left of code being written out of existence.

“Yes, I think we have,” I said. “It’s too bad we aren’t having this discussion over in one of my family’s furthest back fields. They can’t get a signal there half the time even when they want to.”

“That’s some useful information there, Antares,” Westley said. “But enough talk for now. Let’s just enjoy this nice winternoon stroll like civilized people.”

That was indeed that, and we walked on. Once we were in range of the bluffs, Karellen gave Berhta a call, and I could hear the ghost of her voice telling him she would come meet us. Soon enough, she appeared ahead of us on the path, walking brisky and firmly forward, her furry plumred shawl blurred around her in the shaking wind. She remembers well the olden days when the defense force, strong and true, took care of our matters without any offworld permission. And that’s not all.

“So,” she said, after I introduced her to Westley and Wedge. “I know there are certain details you can’t talk about, and I don’t expect you to. Just fill me in on what you can.”

It was Lisette who suggested that we go to the Woodland Rose over in Gowrie for dinner. I was hardly about to object: the owners only hire the best looking girls. Before we left the warming hut near the river confluence, I girded myself, and took on the inevitable call home to my mother. Lisette had left out a note for her, but she was going to want an update.

*

Picture this, if you will: At the end of my journey into town, and civilized life, I was sitting at the bar in the golden-dim lighting of the underground saloon over the last of my meal. The noontide lunch hour assault was over, and there was only a scattering of other customers, all of whom were minding their own business. Thankfully so: this way, I could sit alone with my own thoughts. Time ticked by slowly as I finished the last of my iced chocolate drink, and pushed the glass aside. Aside from the occasional thumping of footsteps from the floor above the ceiling, all was quiet.

The saloon isn’t the only eatery on offer in our modest hamlet, but it is the best one. That isn’t merely my personal opinion, either. It’s the place where you can take visitors from out of town. (And from off-world, for those who actually know people on other planets.) With the long silverwater mirror at the bar, to the grassthick floral forest carpeting, it feels more like a sitting room than a public place.

After I accepted the barman’s offer of desert, I took my comlink out of my shoulder bag to make another attempt to reach Karellen. The state university is on the old term schedule, and I wasn’t sure if he was still on break. Aside from trekking out to his house, this was the best way to find out.

“Come on,” I implored him, just under my breath, as the comlink at the other end rang and rang and rang again. “Just pick it up and answer. I’ll make it worth your while.”

Thus occupied, I was unaware that Lisette had entered the room until she made me aware of it by attacking me with my own name: “Antares! What are you doing here.”

“Having lunch. What does it look like?” I said. I set the comlink down (with a careful chrono tick tock) on the counter, and turned to face her.

Lisette is my half-sister, but I had met her for the first time not even two years before. After her mother died from giving birth to her (exactly like in one of the old folksongs) she went to live with her aunt, her mother’s elder sister and only living maternal relative, in Pandath. Then when her aunt died off after a long illness, she ended up staying with my mother, the woman Ragnar left for her mother. I know how that must sound. But my mother doesn’t at all blame her. It was even her idea.

Lisette takes after her maternal side, the fragile and most doomed House of Guvois, and her mother—the aelfling sweetheart beauty with eyes as black as dreams—in particular. Since I take after Ragnar’s family, we don’t look as though we are even related. But she had recently achieved a growth spurt of her own, and she was now almost taller than my mother.

She was standing just behind my stool, her hands locked up into fists at her sides. And she was alone: if my mother had been with her, she would have swooped in already. Lisette hadn’t taken her leave from the house dressed for the elements. She wore a light woolen coat with a velvet collar made for spring winds, and her hands were blushing a burnt pink from the cold. Her bright black hair was bare without a hat. She wore her silly little houseboots, and from the state of them, she must have walked at least a short part of the way.

But somehow, she had made it. “How did you even get here?” I said.

“Enda had to go to the feed store for something,” she said. “I convinced him to take me along with him, and once I got into town, the rest was easy enough.”

She halted her narrative while the barman set my dessert, a woodberry custard cake, down in front of me. I took up my fork, and then paused. My mother had sweetly, but relentlessly, beaten into me and Augustus during our formative years that it is not proper etiquette to eat in front of those who haven’t anything. That would be rude.

“Since you’re here, would you like me to order you something?” I said.

“Thank you. But no,” Lisette said, with a primly-flat snap of her voice. “I shouldn’t even be in here. Aunt Manette didn’t like to walk past pubs on the pavement. And I wouldn’t be if you hadn’t taken off like that, Antares. Without telling me. As though I wasn’t going to notice.”

Oh for ****’s sake, I thought—but had sense enough to only think. “Since the barman is well aware of your presence, I dare to say you have permission to stay. But feel free to leave.”

Of course, she did no such thing, but I expected that. She had been thrilled when I came to visit (and hide away) for my winter break, and had been hanging on me the whole while. This was the most time I had spent with her since our initial meeting, and as I told my mother, I hardly knew her. She had actual sibling relationships with Augustus and her honorary elder bror Karellen. But in her mind, I was special, all because I was her sister.

She stayed. She also found the initiative within to mount the stool next to me. The barman lifted an amused paternal eyebrow at us before he returned to his tasks, which I chose to ignore. I returned to my desert, which I succeeded in eating, one bite at a time, without any guilty pangs.

Lisette’s attention fell on the comlink lying next to my plate. “I have been trying and trying to reach Karellen, but he isn’t answering, “ I said. “Maybe he’s already back at school.”

“No, he isn’t. He still has another four days of break,” Lisette said. “I thought you knew that. Give it over here and let me try.”

“Since you’ve been bold enough to ask, go ahead,” I said, and pushed the comlink down to her. She turned her back to me for the illusion of privacy as she made her call.

“You must be Antares,” the man sitting on the other side of me said then.

“I am. How did you ever guess?” I turned around to face him. While I had been aware of his presence, and that of his friend, since I had first sat down, I hadn’t really seen him. He was younger than I had assumed, only a few years my senior. Perhaps twenty-five at the most. Both he and his friend, who looked alike enough to be brothers, wore loose naval-blue trousers, and had their scruffy dark hair kept short. The sort of style you see mostly on newcomers, or pilots.

“Oh, just the power of eavesdropping,” he said. “For which you have my sincere and abashed apologies. It’s an interesting name. I don’t think I’ve heard that one before.”

“It’s also a male name.” I shrugged, and: “I know, I know. My father wanted me to be a son he could raise up in his image. And so he selected just the right strong masculine name. When things didn’t go his way in the end, he figured he could still at least use the name.”

Which Ragnar had made certain of by signing the birth registry papers while my mother was in a knock-out recovery sleep. She had not been happy when she awoke to the news. Then of course, after another four years, he finally got his boy when Augustus was born. My mother struck back at him, when his back was turned, by gifting the new wee barn with a powerful dominating name she was well aware that Ragnar didn’t like. That probably sums up their marriage in one sentence.

“Hey, I’m not about to judge,” he said. “According to family legend, my parents were this close to dubbing me Westmore. Luckily for us all, my farmor shamed them out of it.”

“Then what did they name you? If I may ask,” I said.

“You may ask, and I’ll answer. I’m Westley Janson. My friends, and nearly everyone else who knows me, call me Wes. Feel free to follow their examples. And this man with me would be Wedge. My wingman and my personal lucky charm.”

“It’s been an experience so far meeting you, Antares,” Wedge said.

“Likewise,” I said. Wedge sounded like a nursery-name, but I suspected it was the full one his parents had given him. Since I started university, I have met enough newcomers, as well as those students who want to take their degrees while seeing our bit of the galaxy, to know that sort of thing, going straight for the everyday nickname, happens elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Lisette had tired of having the comm ring in her ear, because she handed the comlink back over to me. “He didn’t answer.”

“I’ve been trying to reach my friend,” I said, tucking the stoneweight of the comlink under my fingers. “So far in vain. He must be off on far more interesting pursuits.”

“Then this will be his loss, to regret in time,” Westley said. “Or at least, that’s what I always like to tell myself. But hey, this way you get to meet us.”

He smiled. That, and the roguish sassing glint to his eye, made me wonder if he was making an overture at flirting with me. “He’s probably out on a snowshoe walk,” Lisette said. “Though he ought to be back by now. Also, he doesn’t like dealing with the comlink.”

“Yes, he doesn’t like talking on the com,” I said. “He could well just be ignoring the fervent ringing of my calls. Though he does always pick up eventually. So. What brings you here?”

“We really do look like a pair of newcomers, don’t we?” Westley said. I must have startled, because he laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m not offended by reasonable questions. Wedge here is a visitor from other worlds, but I’m local. More or less. I hail from Ortberg’s Hill, but I always like to come over to the Field’s finest when I have the chance. We know we’re amongst friends here.”

“Thank you, Wes,” the barman said from his post chopping limon slices, revealing that he too knew the power of eavesdropping. “We like to think so.”

Westley was trying to tell me something. I could hear the nudges in his voice, but not what they were leading up to. I gave him my full attention as he continued his narrative: “We flew in just this morning. Since then, we’ve been checking out the lay of the land. Listening for the signals on the wind. Did you know there’s a whole gang of reinforcements at the base?”

No, I hadn’t: and gossip about the goings on of the local Imperial pirate fighting forces gets around, so I would have overheard something even if I was actively ignoring it. “Until just now, I hadn’t heard one thing about that. So. I see. You must be pilots.”

“Indeed we are, most fair and clever maiden,” Westley said. He didn’t add in the details, but I had begun to hear them from the background: Oh yes, they were pilots. But not working for the military. And not the sort who hire out for shipping companies and joyrides. These were rebels. Actual hotboys from the X-Wing squadrons. Real and in person.

That was the moment when my comlink shrieked forth its first ring. Once I had ascertained that it was Karellen—and not Ragnar calling to nag me again--I opened the audio channel to answer him.

*

After two weeks of life in my mother’s house, I had come to regret my recent choices. I had come back for winter break because I wanted to get away from school. The last semester had been an epic level disappointment: I had not only failed, even now that I was in my fourth year, to ascend to the leading roles, I had been assigned to the stage crew for our main production. My advisor was pushing me to take my forthcoming thesis in directing, not acting. Then, if all that wasn’t enough, Ragnar had been pushing me to make certain I graduated on schedule, and I hadn’t escaped from that.

He had called me again to go on about the subject only the night before. It was the unhappy end of another day wasted in solitude, while my mother worked and Lisette was in school, and I had barely possessed the energy to engage the comlink. But I had to go through the motions with him: he commanded the purse that was paying for my degree, and we both knew it.

Look here, sweetling, he had said, his voice looming in across field and mountainside from his new manor house. I don’t mean to rush you, but when I put my credits down on a venture, I expect results. Now you just control your urges for a few months and buckle down, the way I know you can. And you can have all the girls, and the boys too, you want when you’re done.

My friends were sympathetic about all of it. But they did so from hundreds of klicks away, back at school. When I had ranted to Aline, my friend and comrade in the stage crew, about Ragnar, she had listened on while sitting in the social warmth of the white house koffashop.

I had known better than to whine one word about my state to Augustus. He had used his smarts to secure a part-time internship that made guaranteed he would need to stay on campus. He would have laughed at me, and I wouldn’t have blamed him, because I had brought this all on myself.

But I had finally endured enough—of the solitude, and Lisette’s voice yammering in my ear when I finally had human company, and my mother’s meager pantry. As soon as I rose from my bed, I brushed out my hair into order, and braided it. I dressed in my warm flannel-lined wool skirt, and a red wine velveteen vest from my secondary school days. I put on my boots, and picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder. I ate a few nourishing crackers, even though they tasted of road dust.

Time that has been wasted cannot be made up for. Ragnar is wrong on oh so very many things, but he was right enough when he told me that. Too right.

Thus prepared, I began walking out to the road. After too many days inside, the cold was a relief to my system, and I relaxed into an easy stride. I was prepared to walk as far as necessary. Even all the way into town. So I considered it a happy accident of luck when our neighbors, Stefan and Mirriam, came into view behind me in their distinctive old metal can of a land-speeder. They continued on past before they pulled up next to the field just ahead. They waited for me. As I rushed up to meet them, I had hopes that this day, at least, wouldn’t be ruined.

*

 

I LOVE THIS GENRE! Unexpected journeys and all, the "everyday" heroes are so often my favorites.

This is such a brilliant way to tackle the battle scene, with everyone on the ground knowing what's happening and what's at stake, but unable to make out any but the slightest hints. And the blue sky description just adds to that feeling of how surreal it would be to watch such a thing from the ground.

Another bit of description that was just chef's kiss levels of great -- the crowd acting the way that crowds of people tend to do no matter what world-shattering event is in progress.

KARELLEN! I really liked his unique description from the first (stylish but totally different from what you usually see with male fashion in SW), and it's so fun to see him "introduced" after reading through further into the past. And we do get Very Strong Hints even from that first paragraph of his importance to Antares.

I really like how there's a sense of what went before even though we don't see what it is yet -- it's enough to know that there's definitely Something There with these two.

Ah, sibling rivalry at its finest. Though it sounds like Antares gives her sister more credit than her mother does, even if she's generally a bit annoyed by the presence of Annoying Little Sister.

This is such a poetic description of space flight, and I also really like that Wes is known to most by what's probably the childhood version of his name since this is evidently not only his homeworld but his hometown! The obvious pride that the watchers in the crowd have in "their boy" flying into battle is just so much fun as well. I get the feeling that there's as much hometown advantage as there is anti-Imperial or anti-pirate sentiment involved there, and it's very endearing.

The suspense here is really good! Not much more to say but it was a section I really liked; it seems like a very "real" reaction to what is going on above them.

You definitely get a feeling for the community here! I can just imagine all the kids running half-wild at the break in routine.

They're so cute! And Antares has such a humorous, dry way of describing herself and the whole situation; one can definitely see the bit of acidity that gets the better of her earlier and the complicated nature of her feelings. But there's also such genuine love and affection there, and it's clearly mutual.

Again, aww! These two are such a lovely combination of great chemistry and social awkwardness.

The feeling of "well, there's nothing we can do about it so let's assume the best" is definitely strong in the air. I'm glad that they turned out to be right about that!

I really like that there ends up being little known to outsiders about the planetside element of the battle -- which is probably for the best for everyone involved. But Antares and company know the whole story, and that is something that will stay with them a long time, no doubt.

This was so cute! I think even Antares can admit that. And I really like that description of the X-wings; the space battle is offscreen but you make the sheer presence the ships have really thrilling and cool to read.

Very interesting detail; it sounds like Karellen has some part in helping hide the X-wings, which is pretty nifty as heroism goes.

This was a really fun exchange!

Wedge does have a knack for survival, alright. Really liked this little bit of the side of the story that we'd probably see in an X-wing comic/novel; it's a fun reminder that there is this whole saga of Rogue Squadron going on out there and it just briefly touches on the lives of Karellen and Antares and their community.

That is an excellent conclusion/beginning!

There is just no keeping secrets, is there? Pretty much said this before, but I really enjoy everyone turning out to watch a space battle they can't quite see.

The worldbuilding of this corner-of-a-world makes it feel like a real place, GFFA-style.

Ouch, that's definitely a picture worth a thousand words.

The painful emotions here are so palpable and it gives the reader a strong sense of how bad this trouble between them is at the moment.

Yikes. That is a hard kind of thing to come back from in any relationship. And beyond that, I get the feeling here and there that Antares sometimes has a less than stellar opinion of herself in an "I'll get out there and say it first" kind of way. Which isn't an excuse but it does make her reactions here that much more complex. But yeah, definitely feeling terrible for both of them in this moment!

The whole town peer-pressuring her to apologize is probably not the recommended way to go about it, but it's hilarious and I appreciated it. The everyone-knows-everyone is definitely strong with this bunch.

Someone has no filter. But more seriously, I like that you have a romantic lead who is fat; that's such a rarity in both profic and fanfic and it's nice to see.

WOE, THE DRAMA OF IT ALL. Antares can never do anything halfway, can she. And it really is a serious and difficult moment at the same time -- I'm amused but it's an ouchy sort of amusement!

And it seems that Karellen knows her well enough to realize that it's an apology for real, dramatic drooping aside. I really like the feeling of a whole history behind these characters leading up to this point, even as we haven't discovered the reason for their estrangement yet.

AWW!

This is such a fantastic description, I'm definitely playing "This Magic Moment" in my mental playlist.

And we're back to not as usual but something more like it.

Things are looking up! (And they are looking up. At the sky.)

Yes, I can see how that wouldn't go down well. And it's interesting to meet Mama Antares; the hints from earlier about her are expanded a bit and you get an all-too-clear sense of her strained relationship with her daughter. But at the same time, she does show up for this and doesn't even try to stop anything -- so I have to wonder if she understands a little more than Antares thinks.

NO SECRETS ON TANAAB. NONE WHATSOEVER.

And here we get to see a bit more of what brought everyone there. Sure enough, it turns out she and Karellen have quite a bit of heroism to accomplish -- the support they're providing is crucial even though it doesn't end up in the space-news.

I liked this as a way of upping the tension; hearing the sound of the starfighters from the local garrison would definitely bring home the reality of things. (And if it's TIEs, those things are noisy too. So noisy you can hear them in space. )

Here we start to get to The Big Argument after seeing the fallout, and I like that there is a bit of mystery at first but when the events are revealed it all starts to fall into place.

Oof. That is all.

Antares's stage directions are the best.

Yeah, ouch.

Somehow I don't get the feeling that Antares appreciated said Rules at any point.

And interesting that stage directions do reveal that Antares might have more than half a clue about just why Karellen was so upset. Which at least leaves her something to ponder and stew over.

 

WOW. A perfect story to complete your Kessel run

 

Kahara: I LOVE THIS GENRE! Unexpected journeys and all, the "everyday" heroes are so often my favorites.

They're certainly my preferred characters to write about. (If they wouldn't even qualify for a quick out-of-focus shot in a crowd scene in one of the Disney + shows--well, the chances are good they're the protagonists in my totally free fanworks.) Besides, you can only have so many Chosen Ones out there saving the galaxy from itself.

This is such a brilliant way to tackle the battle scene, with everyone on the ground knowing what's happening and what's at stake, but unable to make out any but the slightest hints. And the blue sky description just adds to that feeling of how surreal it would be to watch such a thing from the ground.

This was one of those many times in the course of writing space opera where you just have to wing it and make something up. After all, there isn't anywhere to research exactly what observers on the ground might reasonably see of a battle up in orbit. But as Harrison Ford himself said when asked for his advice, it's all made up and it's in space. I'm going with what the original space cowboy said.

[Bet you weren't ready for that.]

So basically, this is just how the scene came to me. That and I like the disconnect between a placid midwinter sky and what is happening up above the atmosphere...

Another bit of description that was just chef's kiss levels of great -- the crowd acting the way that crowds of people tend to do no matter what world-shattering event is in progress.

Of course, they are. And only a small percentage are talking about said world-shattering event.

KARELLEN! I really liked his unique description from the first (stylish but totally different from what you usually see with male fashion in SW), and it's so fun to see him "introduced" after reading through further into the past. And we do get Very Strong Hints even from that first paragraph of his importance to Antares.

I think it is safe to say that there are very few male characters in Star Wars with his sense of style. That I know of, anyhow. (And don't forget his dyed goatee--and yes, I took that detail from one of my sister's high school classmates c. 2000.) Which he doesn't even realize *is* a sense of style. And yes, there should be hints from his description alone that he is--as she will refer to him at the beginning/end of the narrative--Antares's "favorite man."

I really like how there's a sense of what went before even though we don't see what it is yet -- it's enough to know that there's definitely Something There with these two.

Oh, there definitely is.

Ah, sibling rivalry at its finest. Though it sounds like Antares gives her sister more credit than her mother does, even if she's generally a bit annoyed by the presence of Annoying Little Sister.

You have a point there--Antares' mother may be fonder of Lisette than Antares usually is, but Antares at least gives her enough credit to walk and chew gum at the same time.

This is such a poetic description of space flight, and I also really like that Wes is known to most by what's probably the childhood version of his name since this is evidently not only his homeworld but his hometown! The obvious pride that the watchers in the crowd have in "their boy" flying into battle is just so much fun as well. I get the feeling that there's as much hometown advantage as there is anti-Imperial or anti-pirate sentiment involved there, and it's very endearing.

I'm fairly certain--having scoured over the relevant wookieepedia articles--that the legendary EU didn't have Wes's name even mentioned in connection with the Battle of Taanab. An oversight I have seen fit to correct: if there was something that needed fighting going down on his homeworld, there wasn't any way he wouldn't know about it, and that he wouldn't be there to fly and fight it.

Otherwise, as you'll notice, I chose not to fill in much background on the actual battle, mostly leaving it as the mystery it has been for the past forty years. (Forty years. I can't believe what I just typed.) The legendary EU already attempted to write out the details, including the reveal of just what exactly Lando's "little maneuver" was--and the results were underwhelming. It's better to leave some spaces open in any given story, rather than trying to fill in every detail.

The suspense here is really good! Not much more to say but it was a section I really liked; it seems like a very "real" reaction to what is going on above them.

It would be an odd experience to know this event is going on, but not be able to see any of it--save for an occasional burst of meteor fire. (Interestingly, I wrote those descriptions months *before* I saw an actual meteor like a flash of gold fireworks that was gone as soon as I saw it.)

They're so cute! And Antares has such a humorous, dry way of describing herself and the whole situation; one can definitely see the bit of acidity that gets the better of her earlier and the complicated nature of her feelings. But there's also such genuine love and affection there, and it's clearly mutual.

"I moved a step closer to Karellen, into his body heat, until my hip nudged against him. He took up my hand, and I returned his grasp, twisting my fingers up with his."
Again, aww! These two are such a lovely combination of great chemistry and social awkwardness.

Aww, I'm glad you like them.

They are poised in that awkward transition moment of moving from being friends to being lovers (who are also friends), but it will be just a moment before they land on the other side of it.

The feeling of "well, there's nothing we can do about it so let's assume the best" is definitely strong in the air. I'm glad that they turned out to be right about that!

That they were, but they didn't and couldn't know that at the time.

"The battle is question is now known to the newsfeeds—and perhaps history itself—as the Battle of Taanab. Not at all as the Battle of Nygaard’s Field: we weren’t mentioned, even as a passing reference, in the stories that rampaged (through the rebels’ network, and Imperial news rageouts) about the sector. Only those who were present that day know any of what I’m relating here."
I really like that there ends up being little known to outsiders about the planetside element of the battle -- which is probably for the best for everyone involved. But Antares and company know the whole story, and that is something that will stay with them a long time, no doubt.

Yes, it probably is for the best that the whole story stays planetside, considering there are still going to be consequences for aiding and abetting the Enemies of the Empire.

"It was Lisette who saw the first tiny bird-winged whipping motion in the sky first. She turned back to Karellen and me, and shouted: “It’s coming!”"
This was so cute! I think even Antares can admit that. And I really like that description of the X-wings; the space battle is offscreen but you make the sheer presence the ships have really thrilling and cool to read.

Perhaps--but not, shall we say, without considerable reluctance. And I'm glad you liked the descriptions of the X-wings, especially considering that I am about as far from a pilot/fleet junkie type as you can possibly get and not be escorted from the premises of the fandom.

"Karellen took his radio link from his pocket. It was hardly noticeable against his black gloves, and to all appearances, he looked to be playing with a small skipping rock. Only a few people knew he was numbing-out the electric moth-winged signal before it could so much as reach the sky."
Very interesting detail; it sounds like Karellen has some part in helping hide the X-wings, which is pretty nifty as heroism goes.

Just a little extra precaution...

Wedge does have a knack for survival, alright. Really liked this little bit of the side of the story that we'd probably see in an X-wing comic/novel; it's a fun reminder that there is this whole saga of Rogue Squadron going on out there and it just briefly touches on the lives of Karellen and Antares and their community.

Three whole movies' worth of survival.

[As an aside, it turns out that Wes and Wedge really do have a We Few, We Happy Few Survivors' Club bond after Hoth in the old EU--but I didn't find that out until after I had given them that same bond in this story. So the EU and I were on the same wavelength this one time. It's not likely to happen again.]

I don't usually try to imagine how my original characters would fit into the larger story--in this case, of the whole Rogue Squadron saga--as presented by Disney, because the answer is quite simple: They wouldn't. That is definitely the case here for Antares, her annoying little half-sister, her friend Karellen, and his mom. Aris Jast, the local garrison commander, might possibly get a villain cameo not much bigger than the role he has in this story--but they wouldn't even make a blurry crowd shot.

"Wes shook his head. “Not today. Buckle up, friends and rebels. Because we have got quite the story to tell you.”"
That is an excellent conclusion/beginning!

It does lead into quite the story telling session, the sort from which legends are made.

There is just no keeping secrets, is there? Pretty much said this before, but I really enjoy everyone turning out to watch a space battle they can't quite see.

Word sure spread with the speed of a grassfire. Apparently, everyone who heard proceeded to tell everyone else they know, and lather rinse repeat.

"But I recognized most of them by sight, from the grocer’s, or nights at the dancehall in Gowrie, the town we refer to as an actual town."
The worldbuilding of this corner-of-a-world makes it feel like a real place, GFFA-style.

Ah, thanks. The worldbuilding could actually be best described as "the US Midwest in Space"--as that was what instantly sprang to my mind when I was reading about Taanab on wookieepedia. And since I am a native Midwesterner from the "Land of the Tall Corn," well.

(Gowrie, by the way, is the name of a small town in Iowa, the former "Swedish-American stronghold" where two sides of my mother's family had their farms.)

Ouch, that's definitely a picture worth a thousand words.

"And I remembered how he had looked earlier, when he deigned to speak to me. How his eyes had been blank, the deadblack hole of the pupils showing naught of his thoughts, let alone whatever it is that philosophers call a “soul.” When he looked at me, but chose not to see me."
The painful emotions here are so palpable and it gives the reader a strong sense of how bad this trouble between them is at the moment.

They have almost certainly had minor fallings out before this, but yes--this time, Antares really stepped in it. And she knows it too. She just doesn't know how to handle this level of feelings.

Yikes. That is a hard kind of thing to come back from in any relationship. And beyond that, I get the feeling here and there that Antares sometimes has a less than stellar opinion of herself in an "I'll get out there and say it first" kind of way. Which isn't an excuse but it does make her reactions here that much more complex. But yeah, definitely feeling terrible for both of them in this moment!

She can play into that sort of routine, and she certainly likes to get in the first shot.

But this time, she isn't making any excuses. (Originally, as I approached the scene where it all comes out after the dance, I saw her as taking a flippant approach at first, almost teasing, in that "Oh, you know how I am and you know I'm bad" way--but when the time came to write it, I went in a different direction. She can hardly speak, let alone tease.)

And now, well: it's time to eat some crow and apologize.

The whole town peer-pressuring her to apologize is probably not the recommended way to go about it, but it's hilarious and I appreciated it. The everyone-knows-everyone is definitely strong with this bunch.

It's basically a social media comment section in real life. Literally.

Someone has no filter. But more seriously, I like that you have a romantic lead who is fat; that's such a rarity in both profic and fanfic and it's nice to see.

I wonder exactly who it was amongst the crowd who said that...

While I didn't write Karellen for "Representation Matters" reasons--that's just how the character came to me--I'm certainly aware that it's unusual to have a large man as the romantic lead for whom the protagonist is genuinely attracted to, as in "lean and a-thirst," and who is not comic relief. And the truth is that in the real world, fat people find happiness and love all the time. It's just life.

WOE, THE DRAMA OF IT ALL. Antares can never do anything halfway, can she. And it really is a serious and difficult moment at the same time -- I'm amused but it's an ouchy sort of amusement!

It's the only way she can get past the block in her throat from the previous night to tell him the truth: she really is sorry.

And it seems that Karellen knows her well enough to realize that it's an apology for real, dramatic drooping aside. I really like the feeling of a whole history behind these characters leading up to this point, even as we haven't discovered the reason for their estrangement yet.

Oh yes, he knows.

This is such a fantastic description, I'm definitely playing "This Magic Moment" in my mental playlist.

I'm glad to hear it worked, because I wracked my brains rewriting and rewriting that bit.

And we're back to not as usual but something more like it.

He knows just what she would do.

Yes, I can see how that wouldn't go down well. And it's interesting to meet Mama Antares; the hints from earlier about her are expanded a bit and you get an all-too-clear sense of her strained relationship with her daughter. But at the same time, she does show up for this and doesn't even try to stop anything -- so I have to wonder if she understands a little more than Antares thinks.

Antares is not interested in babysitting anyone--and especially not a girl who is old enough to earn some lunch money babysitting herself. (Or at least that was how it was in my day and time, when it was the only real way girls in their early teens could make money. Since I lacked that gift, I learned to do without.) Lisette has always been very sheltered--first by her aunt, who did her best to make sure she grew up as little as possible, and now by her stepmother--and personally, I see her as being immature for her age in a number of ways.

Antares has a rather complicated family situation, and her relationship with her mother probably isn't always the best. (Though it's still far better than her relationship with her father who is on his third marriage with more half-siblings who are not mentioned in this story.) But as you said, she does show up, and she doesn't get in the way of any heroics.

Pandora said: ↑
According to Ingë, you met with a pair of rebel pilots, and offered up our backland for them to use as a landing pad after they help take on our Imperial Forces in orbit,” my mother said.
NO SECRETS ON TANAAB. NONE WHATSOEVER.

None. Especially after Inge told literally everyone she knows.

And here we get to see a bit more of what brought everyone there. Sure enough, it turns out she and Karellen have quite a bit of heroism to accomplish -- the support they're providing is crucial even though it doesn't end up in the space-news.

Those who were there, and who knew, certainly appreciated it--and I would not be surprised if Wes bought everyone a "Thank you" drink after the end/beginning of this story.

I liked this as a way of upping the tension; hearing the sound of the starfighters from the local garrison would definitely bring home the reality of things. (And if it's TIEs, those things are noisy too. So noisy you can hear them in space. )

Well, remember: there are no physics (and no underwear) in spaaaace.

Pandora said: ↑
And well: I had just had hours of darkness to hide away in by myself, alone with the memory of the quarrel we had left off with. Most especially, of course, of his parting words.
Here we start to get to The Big Argument after seeing the fallout, and I like that there is a bit of mystery at first but when the events are revealed it all starts to fall into place.

It would certainly fit into the category of things Antares doesn't like to think about.

The Big Argument was one of the trickier bits of the story for me: as the cause thereof had to be something serious enough that Karellen was understandably angry/hurt/upset, but not so bad that they couldn't come back from it. I hope I pulled the right balance off, and I'm presently all right with it, but it remains to be seen if it worked that way for anyone else reading it.

"Worse still: I had remembered my own hahahaing voice back at the dancehall, and I stood there awash again in the dirtyhot blush of my own idiocy. It hit me like a sonic blow, and I took it."
Oof. That is all.

And this would be one reason why she can't escape it, whether she consciously thinks about it or not.

"[EXIT KARELLEN, IN PERSONAL GLOOMCLOUD.]

[EXIT LISETTE, WITH THE IGNITION KEYS IN HER FIST.]

[BERHTA turns to the audience, and sotto voce: Oh, dear. It looks like last night didn’t end too well. And if I know Ellie, he won’t want to talk about it. Whatever it was, I’m sure he and Antares can sort it out. They’ve been friends a long time. Right?

[EXIT BERHTA CENTER STAGE.]"
Antares's stage directions are the best.

Her way of dealing with certain types of emotions and situations: stay witty, and keep it safe.

"He paused for breath, but he wasn’t finished. “Would you like to know the worst part?” He made his voice sound flippant, even amused, but I wasn’t fooled. “There was this one moment back there in the dance when I thought, I thought, there was this spark between us. That it wasn’t only happening on my side. Oh, believe me, I know just how stupid that sounds now. Feel free to laugh.”

That had to be the last thing I felt like doing. It wasn’t only on your side, I tried to say, but the words couldn’t quite get out. You didn’t imagine it. I felt it. I still do."
Yeah, ouch.

That there was the parting line that haunted her all night long.

"As the Rules for Young Maidens teaches, “cleanliness”--being a fresh sweet-breathed flower—is the first of all virtues. By that standard, I was already a true slag."
Somehow I don't get the feeling that Antares appreciated said Rules at any point.

You should trust your feeling on this one...

*Snipped stage directions quote*
And interesting that stage directions do reveal that Antares might have more than half a clue about just why Karellen was so upset. Which at least leaves her something to ponder and stew over.

And I'm sure they will laugh about this, someday quite soon. But right now, the last possible thing you want to do after your friend (who it turns out totally does Like You Back) gives you a dressing down is to flash him, however accidentally it might be.

She does know why he's upset (which I believe, or hope, should be clear in the scene where said bad behavior takes place) which might just make it all worse.

Finally, thanks for reading and commenting!

-----------------------------------

earlybird-obi-wan: WOW. A perfect story to complete your Kessel run

Thank you so much, and thank you for reading and commenting!

--------------------------------------

Findswoman: Just wanted to stop in quickly and say that I haven't forgotten this story, that I'm thrilled to see it posted, and that I've ebooked it for ease of catching up, which will hopefully allow me to leave a proper comment and appreciation in not too long. Congratulations on finishing this up, and more real soon!

Thanks! And this story will be here when you're ready to comment.