Some Stuff I Wrote For the Inconveniently Defunct 1Sentence Community
(Warning for excessive and criminal comma and semicolon abuse.)
1. Hood
Nadir Knight calls his son a hood many times, but it is days after Cliff turns fourteen that his father first uses it to show shame.
* * *
02. Buzz
When he turns five, Cliff expresses an enthusiastic interest in spiking his hair and learning the ways of the sword like his grandfather once did; his father shaves his head instead.
* * *
03. Wish
When Cliff makes a wish on the fluff of a dandelion when he turns fifteen, none present ask what he wished for, and Cliff smiles secretly, because he knows what they thought he wished for, and that, this time, they were wrong.
* * *
04. Seasons
Cliff is the only child in Daldain that detests summer, but he imagines that he is the only child who is foisted off on a screeching, misanthropic harpy for the entire summer.
* * *
06. Portrait
Of all the many portraits hanging in the halls of his ancestral home, Cliff thinks the only one that looks like something he'd want for himself aren't the multitude of depictions of unsmiling families with adorable, mature young children and beautiful, vaguely proud parents, but the portrait of his grandfather, Sir Hayden Morosco Knight, long sword in hand and blood on his cheek.
* * *
07. Loud
Cyprian is sure that Cliff is loud because of some deep-rooted psychological problem he wants to know nothing about, while Cliff is only sure that Cyprian's hair is the loudest thing ever.
* * *
08. Energy
When Cliff tells Jaida he can go for two whole days, she scoffs at him, and Cliff wonders what's so unbelievable about not sleeping for two days.
* * *
09. Purge
When Cliff's parents die in an accident no one claims to know anything about, Cliff decides that now is the time for him to set out on his own and reject his destiny as the Knight heir apparent - but he will keep his name, he thinks as he unconsciously thumbs his father's signet ring, at least until he can wash away the memory of his parents' ragged faces.
* * *
10. Mouse
After eight years of growing up with his father asking him if he's a mouse or a boy (and one year whether he is a mouse or a man), Cliff's pretty sure he's going to grow up a mouse.
* * *
12. Second-Rate
Cliff dreams, sometimes, of marrying Kristen, and on the stroke of midnight on their wedding night, he shrinks and the world grows and he becomes smaller than his father's ghostly shadow, smaller than his three-year-old cousin Serita, smaller than anyone he's met, and he scurries into the nearest hole in the wall, tiny and furry and twitchy, a second-rate mouse escaping a second-rate human shell, and he will never be happy, just as his father predicted of him.
* * *
13. Dash
When Cliff takes Kristen's hand and runs in the valley, it's more than getting into the moment and more than playfulness, but, minutes later when they're both laughing breathlessly and perhaps a touch hysterically, he thinks she may already know that, and between frantic beats, his heart spasms oddly with pain, exertion, joy, and something wonderfully, madly different.
* * *
14. Attitude
Whenever someone said in the past that his attitude was reprehensible, Cliff would smirk proudly; now, as the question mostly comes up at adventurer hangouts in the form of, "I don't think I like your attitude," he only looks pointedly at Jaida, who is usually conveniently rubbing up against someone unwilling and tracing their jawline with a razor, and says, "Seriously, dude?"
* * *
15. Wisdom
When seeking knowledge, Cliff will often go to a person and demand an explanation or try out what he wants to learn himself, because all he's learned from books are lies - and never have lies been as boring as told in print form, with the words all bleeding into each other and refusing to explain themselves - and what eighteen-year-old in his right mind knows what in the hell a "tangential causality" is?
* * *
16. Sight
The sight of Cliff, eighteen and able-bodied but still wide-eyed, stringy, and a bit puffy-cheeked with remaining baby fat, is hardly intimidating; the sight of his sword - broad, well-cared for, and wielded expertly - is just a little more so, but Cliff has always relied on and relished being underestimated.
* * *
17. Address
Cliff likes to think he speaks calmly and confidently, with just enough hint of his noble upbringing to be on the right side of wise, and so puts out of his mind the eighty percent of his life thus far he's given off the impression of a mercurial-tempered, sweet, easily confused little upstart.
* * *
18. Minute
It takes Cliff eighteen years to see Kristen across a crowded avenue, three months to think of something worthy to say to her, and exactly one minute of shy, awkward conversation and shoe-scuffing for him to decide she was entirely too perfect for him; it takes Kristen exactly that same minute to realize Cliff is perfect for her, for entirely a different set of reasons.
* * *
19. Cotton
Cliff's favorite sweet, and the only sweet he will eat without hesitation, is fluffy and pink; he thinks maybe this is why he occasionally gets the urge to chew on Cyprian's bedhead, until he remembers "Cyprian" and "sweet" are rather antonymic.
* * *
20. Claw
The first time Jaida says she's going to have her nails done, Cliff asks if she doesn't mean her claws; Jaida drags him along to show just how displeased she is with his assessment, and, after he's done dry-sobbing about his soul being as dead as the skin cells on Jaida's heart and feet, he promises never to compare Jaida to a monster again - or, as he moans to an unsympathetic Cyprian later, "She isn't like a monster, she is one."
* * *
21. Limit
When Cliff is thirteen, he opens the front door to his house, the cold, dead air of winter embracing him like a mother, and he listens with awe to the wind as he realizes from just what distance it travels, how far its domain must extend, and thinks, looking at the gates that fence in his home, "These iron gates are not the beginning and end of the world."
* * *
22. Unique
Cliff looks at his friends - cool, effortlessly regal Kristen, deadly, idiosyncratic Jaida, intelligent, alien Cyprian - and knows that he, Cliff, is unique only because of his family and his normality.
* * *
23. Gravity
Cliff likes to think that his group banded together because of gravity, because of deep and undeniable (mostly) platonic attraction, but somewhere dark and forgotten in his heart he believes they're really traveling together because each of them was lonely, and the others were just there.
* * *
24. Yesterday
Cliff can't remember what he did yesterday, so he pretends he totally bagged that hot chick with the legs from Amlaine; unfortunately, the hot, leggy chick is in his party and psychotic besides, and now he's doing all he can to wish today into a yesterday, bound at the ankles and wrists as Jaida threatens him with a scramsax she named Dr. Edgeworth.
* * *
25. Jungle
In Strathclyde, a woman demands to know what Cliff has done to save the planet lately, and he blinks, takes a moment to mull it over, and says, "Well, I don't own anything papery, and I haven't brought about the End of Days yet, so - oh, wait, I killed a shit-ton of human-killing vampires a week or so ago, so never mind, that probably lands me somewhere special on your shit list, huh?"
* * *
26. Garden
Watching Cyprian work, maybe it's not quite so shocking, the disparity between his greenhouse and the Knight gardens, because in the warmth of the greenhouse, Cliff recalls suddenly that the Knight gardens were always just a little colder than the rest of the manor.
* * *
27. Question
It isn't so much a question of if Kristen will leave him, Cliff knows, so much as it is of how and when.
* * *
28. Text
When Cliff yells at Cyprian for bringing him books by Ladim Dunais, his chief complaint seems to be that he could have written it at five; Cyprian, a fan of children's books when the situation calls for it, merely raises an eyebrow and says, "Yeah, but you didn't, and this was the only book at your level."
* * *
29. Plastic
Cliff often wonders, counting his now meager silver, if Kristen would complain about a plastic ring.
* * *
30. Block
Some things, like Maevren Knight's voice, were worth remembering, Cliff thought; and other things, like walking in on Cyprian and Sorensen, were totally worth looking into lobotomies.
* * *
31. Escort
It was being escorted home from his funeral with Aunt Norua, listening to her demonize his father, his sister, and his mother that made the decision: Cliff would wander and Cliff would beg, but never would he see that woman again and call her family.
* * *
32. Insult
Cliff never forgets an insult; he has been taught that all good insults have in them grains of truth, and what else could he better improve himself with most effectively than working on actual faults?
* * *
33. Blood
Blood is precious, thicker than water and livelier than the angriest dusk; blood is beautiful, close to every living creature's heart; blood is the thing that sets Cliff's teeth most on edge about his job, the only thing that makes him question his choice to become a slayer, because to draw blood and all it entails, pain is a necessity.
* * *
34. Gold
When Cliff was younger, gold was just some color all the poets liked to wax lyrical about when they couldn't think of anything better, but Cliff knows now that gold is so much more than that - the hair of his sister, the metal of his father's signet ring, the color of a gentry he will never again be part of, and good riddance.
* * *
35. Spot
Cliff has a place in Daldain he's sure no one else knows about, a secret room behind his bookcase at home, the room deep and dark and musty; he loves it because it is his, and because his voice carries and echoes as if there is someone there with him, and it is the only thing he misses in all of Daldain.
* * *
36. Melt
Kristen may have found her way into Cliff's stupidly large heart by smiling, but for the rest of existence who don't have heart-stopping, dazzlingly lovely smiles, Jaida finds, it's best to just offer Cliff a tuna melt with extra cheese, because the boy is that simple.
* * *
37. Guilt
"This is all your fault, you know," Cliff says to the bedridden Cyprian, and he knows if he were braver the words would be directed at himself (but then, if he were braver, Cyprian would be well and they'd all be dining at the Beknighted Cock and laughing at Kristen's innocence and oh, if wishes were horses-)
* * *
38. Duel
In school, Cliff was a premier duelist, but upon his first week of real fighting, he learns dueling in a polite and gentlemanly manner is nothing more than a foolish nobleman's sport that will pose no greater threat to a monster than a little irregularity trying to process your rapier.
* * *
39. Stranger
Cliff isn't completely stupid - he recalls hearing about Stranger Danger in primary school quite vividly when he ushers Kristen into the Corvo Greenhouse and Flower Shoppe, but if Stranger Danger spends as much time gardening as the flourishing state of the greenhouse suggests, what precisely could the lifeless, creepy molester expect to do against a trained swordsman?
* * *
40. Wait
(Cliff doesn't have to wait overly long to discover that the answer is, in fact, quite a bit, if the man ever set his sights on swordsman-molesting instead of swordsman-nagging.)
* * *
41. Glow
Jaida looks at Cliff glowing at Kristen, and privately, she promises that if he looks her way, she'll make it good for him - the boy, she will admit in her head and nowhere else, has charm.
* * *
42. Action
"Cliff," Cyprian says one day, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, "actions may or may not metaphorically speak louder than words, but metaphorical indoor voices are better than words spoken louder than actions."
* * *
43. Chain
Cliff figures the chain of command works something like this: Cyprian is the leader, Cliff is the person the leader deludes himself into thinking is the leader, Kristen is the faithful follower, and Jaida is the rogue agent, because anyone telling Jaida what to do usually leads to gross unpleasantness - Cliff still remembers waking up with glossy hot pink nails, despite many attempts to forget.
1. Hood
Nadir Knight calls his son a hood many times, but it is days after Cliff turns fourteen that his father first uses it to show shame.
* * *
02. Buzz
When he turns five, Cliff expresses an enthusiastic interest in spiking his hair and learning the ways of the sword like his grandfather once did; his father shaves his head instead.
* * *
03. Wish
When Cliff makes a wish on the fluff of a dandelion when he turns fifteen, none present ask what he wished for, and Cliff smiles secretly, because he knows what they thought he wished for, and that, this time, they were wrong.
* * *
04. Seasons
Cliff is the only child in Daldain that detests summer, but he imagines that he is the only child who is foisted off on a screeching, misanthropic harpy for the entire summer.
* * *
06. Portrait
Of all the many portraits hanging in the halls of his ancestral home, Cliff thinks the only one that looks like something he'd want for himself aren't the multitude of depictions of unsmiling families with adorable, mature young children and beautiful, vaguely proud parents, but the portrait of his grandfather, Sir Hayden Morosco Knight, long sword in hand and blood on his cheek.
* * *
07. Loud
Cyprian is sure that Cliff is loud because of some deep-rooted psychological problem he wants to know nothing about, while Cliff is only sure that Cyprian's hair is the loudest thing ever.
* * *
08. Energy
When Cliff tells Jaida he can go for two whole days, she scoffs at him, and Cliff wonders what's so unbelievable about not sleeping for two days.
* * *
09. Purge
When Cliff's parents die in an accident no one claims to know anything about, Cliff decides that now is the time for him to set out on his own and reject his destiny as the Knight heir apparent - but he will keep his name, he thinks as he unconsciously thumbs his father's signet ring, at least until he can wash away the memory of his parents' ragged faces.
* * *
10. Mouse
After eight years of growing up with his father asking him if he's a mouse or a boy (and one year whether he is a mouse or a man), Cliff's pretty sure he's going to grow up a mouse.
* * *
12. Second-Rate
Cliff dreams, sometimes, of marrying Kristen, and on the stroke of midnight on their wedding night, he shrinks and the world grows and he becomes smaller than his father's ghostly shadow, smaller than his three-year-old cousin Serita, smaller than anyone he's met, and he scurries into the nearest hole in the wall, tiny and furry and twitchy, a second-rate mouse escaping a second-rate human shell, and he will never be happy, just as his father predicted of him.
* * *
13. Dash
When Cliff takes Kristen's hand and runs in the valley, it's more than getting into the moment and more than playfulness, but, minutes later when they're both laughing breathlessly and perhaps a touch hysterically, he thinks she may already know that, and between frantic beats, his heart spasms oddly with pain, exertion, joy, and something wonderfully, madly different.
* * *
14. Attitude
Whenever someone said in the past that his attitude was reprehensible, Cliff would smirk proudly; now, as the question mostly comes up at adventurer hangouts in the form of, "I don't think I like your attitude," he only looks pointedly at Jaida, who is usually conveniently rubbing up against someone unwilling and tracing their jawline with a razor, and says, "Seriously, dude?"
* * *
15. Wisdom
When seeking knowledge, Cliff will often go to a person and demand an explanation or try out what he wants to learn himself, because all he's learned from books are lies - and never have lies been as boring as told in print form, with the words all bleeding into each other and refusing to explain themselves - and what eighteen-year-old in his right mind knows what in the hell a "tangential causality" is?
* * *
16. Sight
The sight of Cliff, eighteen and able-bodied but still wide-eyed, stringy, and a bit puffy-cheeked with remaining baby fat, is hardly intimidating; the sight of his sword - broad, well-cared for, and wielded expertly - is just a little more so, but Cliff has always relied on and relished being underestimated.
* * *
17. Address
Cliff likes to think he speaks calmly and confidently, with just enough hint of his noble upbringing to be on the right side of wise, and so puts out of his mind the eighty percent of his life thus far he's given off the impression of a mercurial-tempered, sweet, easily confused little upstart.
* * *
18. Minute
It takes Cliff eighteen years to see Kristen across a crowded avenue, three months to think of something worthy to say to her, and exactly one minute of shy, awkward conversation and shoe-scuffing for him to decide she was entirely too perfect for him; it takes Kristen exactly that same minute to realize Cliff is perfect for her, for entirely a different set of reasons.
* * *
19. Cotton
Cliff's favorite sweet, and the only sweet he will eat without hesitation, is fluffy and pink; he thinks maybe this is why he occasionally gets the urge to chew on Cyprian's bedhead, until he remembers "Cyprian" and "sweet" are rather antonymic.
* * *
20. Claw
The first time Jaida says she's going to have her nails done, Cliff asks if she doesn't mean her claws; Jaida drags him along to show just how displeased she is with his assessment, and, after he's done dry-sobbing about his soul being as dead as the skin cells on Jaida's heart and feet, he promises never to compare Jaida to a monster again - or, as he moans to an unsympathetic Cyprian later, "She isn't like a monster, she is one."
* * *
21. Limit
When Cliff is thirteen, he opens the front door to his house, the cold, dead air of winter embracing him like a mother, and he listens with awe to the wind as he realizes from just what distance it travels, how far its domain must extend, and thinks, looking at the gates that fence in his home, "These iron gates are not the beginning and end of the world."
* * *
22. Unique
Cliff looks at his friends - cool, effortlessly regal Kristen, deadly, idiosyncratic Jaida, intelligent, alien Cyprian - and knows that he, Cliff, is unique only because of his family and his normality.
* * *
23. Gravity
Cliff likes to think that his group banded together because of gravity, because of deep and undeniable (mostly) platonic attraction, but somewhere dark and forgotten in his heart he believes they're really traveling together because each of them was lonely, and the others were just there.
* * *
24. Yesterday
Cliff can't remember what he did yesterday, so he pretends he totally bagged that hot chick with the legs from Amlaine; unfortunately, the hot, leggy chick is in his party and psychotic besides, and now he's doing all he can to wish today into a yesterday, bound at the ankles and wrists as Jaida threatens him with a scramsax she named Dr. Edgeworth.
* * *
25. Jungle
In Strathclyde, a woman demands to know what Cliff has done to save the planet lately, and he blinks, takes a moment to mull it over, and says, "Well, I don't own anything papery, and I haven't brought about the End of Days yet, so - oh, wait, I killed a shit-ton of human-killing vampires a week or so ago, so never mind, that probably lands me somewhere special on your shit list, huh?"
* * *
26. Garden
Watching Cyprian work, maybe it's not quite so shocking, the disparity between his greenhouse and the Knight gardens, because in the warmth of the greenhouse, Cliff recalls suddenly that the Knight gardens were always just a little colder than the rest of the manor.
* * *
27. Question
It isn't so much a question of if Kristen will leave him, Cliff knows, so much as it is of how and when.
* * *
28. Text
When Cliff yells at Cyprian for bringing him books by Ladim Dunais, his chief complaint seems to be that he could have written it at five; Cyprian, a fan of children's books when the situation calls for it, merely raises an eyebrow and says, "Yeah, but you didn't, and this was the only book at your level."
* * *
29. Plastic
Cliff often wonders, counting his now meager silver, if Kristen would complain about a plastic ring.
* * *
30. Block
Some things, like Maevren Knight's voice, were worth remembering, Cliff thought; and other things, like walking in on Cyprian and Sorensen, were totally worth looking into lobotomies.
* * *
31. Escort
It was being escorted home from his funeral with Aunt Norua, listening to her demonize his father, his sister, and his mother that made the decision: Cliff would wander and Cliff would beg, but never would he see that woman again and call her family.
* * *
32. Insult
Cliff never forgets an insult; he has been taught that all good insults have in them grains of truth, and what else could he better improve himself with most effectively than working on actual faults?
* * *
33. Blood
Blood is precious, thicker than water and livelier than the angriest dusk; blood is beautiful, close to every living creature's heart; blood is the thing that sets Cliff's teeth most on edge about his job, the only thing that makes him question his choice to become a slayer, because to draw blood and all it entails, pain is a necessity.
* * *
34. Gold
When Cliff was younger, gold was just some color all the poets liked to wax lyrical about when they couldn't think of anything better, but Cliff knows now that gold is so much more than that - the hair of his sister, the metal of his father's signet ring, the color of a gentry he will never again be part of, and good riddance.
* * *
35. Spot
Cliff has a place in Daldain he's sure no one else knows about, a secret room behind his bookcase at home, the room deep and dark and musty; he loves it because it is his, and because his voice carries and echoes as if there is someone there with him, and it is the only thing he misses in all of Daldain.
* * *
36. Melt
Kristen may have found her way into Cliff's stupidly large heart by smiling, but for the rest of existence who don't have heart-stopping, dazzlingly lovely smiles, Jaida finds, it's best to just offer Cliff a tuna melt with extra cheese, because the boy is that simple.
* * *
37. Guilt
"This is all your fault, you know," Cliff says to the bedridden Cyprian, and he knows if he were braver the words would be directed at himself (but then, if he were braver, Cyprian would be well and they'd all be dining at the Beknighted Cock and laughing at Kristen's innocence and oh, if wishes were horses-)
* * *
38. Duel
In school, Cliff was a premier duelist, but upon his first week of real fighting, he learns dueling in a polite and gentlemanly manner is nothing more than a foolish nobleman's sport that will pose no greater threat to a monster than a little irregularity trying to process your rapier.
* * *
39. Stranger
Cliff isn't completely stupid - he recalls hearing about Stranger Danger in primary school quite vividly when he ushers Kristen into the Corvo Greenhouse and Flower Shoppe, but if Stranger Danger spends as much time gardening as the flourishing state of the greenhouse suggests, what precisely could the lifeless, creepy molester expect to do against a trained swordsman?
* * *
40. Wait
(Cliff doesn't have to wait overly long to discover that the answer is, in fact, quite a bit, if the man ever set his sights on swordsman-molesting instead of swordsman-nagging.)
* * *
41. Glow
Jaida looks at Cliff glowing at Kristen, and privately, she promises that if he looks her way, she'll make it good for him - the boy, she will admit in her head and nowhere else, has charm.
* * *
42. Action
"Cliff," Cyprian says one day, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, "actions may or may not metaphorically speak louder than words, but metaphorical indoor voices are better than words spoken louder than actions."
* * *
43. Chain
Cliff figures the chain of command works something like this: Cyprian is the leader, Cliff is the person the leader deludes himself into thinking is the leader, Kristen is the faithful follower, and Jaida is the rogue agent, because anyone telling Jaida what to do usually leads to gross unpleasantness - Cliff still remembers waking up with glossy hot pink nails, despite many attempts to forget.