Caramel meets Butterscotch
Elderberry #26. Enduring Renewal with Hot Fudge, Butterscotch and Caramel
Story : knights
Rating : PG
Timeframe : 1280's and, er, a looong time ago
Word Count : 1920
Gold Medal for the Rainbow Brains for the Butterscotch-Caramel Challenge. Heaped with Spoilers Not entirely sure yet if this is canon or not. It doesn't directly affect any of the main storyline, so I have time to decide that. But I find the possibility of this intriguing and I may eventually have to spin another story out of Kuro's ensuing adventures. Incidentally, his very existence has not been mentioned yet, so bonus points to anyone who has a clue where he comes from.
The humming woke him. Kuro rolled to his side, his legs tangled in the loose blankets. He blinked for a moment at the flicker of light and shadow that played across the back wall of the cave.
It wasn’t so much a sound as a sense, a throbbing buzz that filled his ears and his blood. He jerked upright, sudden realization sweeping away what remnants of sleep still held him. She’d started without him.
“Reida?”
Kuro kicked off the blankets, snatched them up and shook them out in search of his shirt. She’d promised him, for whatever that was worth. And she’d started without him. A rumpled sheet of green tumbled out of the mass of wooly covers, and he quickly turned it about, found a sleeve, and thrust an arm through. He shrugged into the rest of it, pulling free long, silver locks as the fabric pinned them to his back.
“Reida?” he called again, and his voice bounced off of stoney walls that pulsed with magic. How many years had she spent on this, and she couldn’t wait another hour? She could at least have the decency to drag him out of bed first. It was his work too, after all.
He crawled to his knees, crouched under the low stone ceiling, and crept around the divide between the chambers. Turning the corner into the central amphitheater, he righted himself, no longer worried about cracking his head on anything. Before him, the floor dipped down into a broad, shallow bowl and the ceiling rose a good twenty feet into a rough dome from which an assortment of rocky protrusions hung.
Just barely past the mouth of the corridor from which he’d come, Kuro stopped and his jaw dropped. The sigils that stretched from floor to wall to overhead glowed in a painfully vibrant array of hues, casting the whole chamber into a flood of dancing light.
Amidst the flickering show, crosslegged and hunched low over some form on the ground, was Reida. Judging by the cloak thrown across her back, she hadn’t taken much time to dress either. The line of sigils tattooed up her spine lay exposed to the chill morning air of the cavern where the cloth slung over her shoulders dipped low. A stump of chalk in hand, she continued scratching away at the stone, seemingly oblivious to his arrival. Kuro doubted that was true. Nothing ever went past Reida’s notice. He folded his arms against his chest and cleared his throat. Without bothering to look up, she waved a hand his way and grunted a distracted “Morning.”
“Morning yourself,” he said. “I thought you were going to wait for me.”
“I am,” she said. “For the parts I need you for. Until I get to those, you can go on keeping the bed warm for all I care.”
Kuro sniffed. There was a clink as Reida laid her chalk on the floor. She turned to peer at him over a shoulder and raised a brow as her eyes swept slowly up and down his frame. There was something unnerving about that look whenever she gave it to him. Something older than it looked. Of course, everything about her was older than it looked, a thought that had the most disturbing habit of asserting itself at the worst times, like now when she was sitting in front of him, half hanging out of her cloak.
“You want to be useful?” she said, and without making mention of having noticed his stare, hiked the cloak up around her shoulders.
Kuro shook himself from his thoughts. “Of course I want to be useful,” he said. “This is my-”
“Great,” said Reida. “Make us some breakfast.”
“Bre- What?”
She flashed him one of her toothy grins. “You heard me.”
Reida had snatched up the fork before the plate had even fully settled on the ground. Kuro stood back, drumming his fingers against his arm, as she set to shoveling eggs in her mouth.
“Well?” he said, after a moment had passed with no sound but chewing.
“Well, what?” said Reida, around a mouthful. “Yes, yes. You’re very useful.” She waved the back of a hand his way and scooped up another bite. “Be happy.”
“The forms.” His fingers ceased their agitated roll, tightening over his arm instead. “What of the forms?”
Reida grimaced and swallowed. She pushed the nearly empty plate aside and dropped the fork on top of it. “Nearly ready,” she said.
She dropped down on her hands and picked her way, on her knees, through the sigils that already covered the floor. Lines in chalk, traced in paint, coated in wax, not one among them he didn’t know. Did she really trust him so little?
“I’ve got two left,” she was saying. “And then I’ll need you to help me lift them.”
As she waxed the last two forms, Kuro picked up the discarded plate. He eyed the remains of the eggs, pushed them around a bit with the fork, and set it down again. Eating didn’t really seem like the thing to be doing right now.
“You ready?”
“Hmm?” He looked up and caught Reida on all fours at the other end of the chamber, hands already set to the sigils awaiting their activation.
She rolled her eyes. “To be useful,” she said
He nodded, moving stiffly into place. This was it. Five years worth of work and study, and now everything was in its place, as it had been before it was destroyed. What exactly any of it would do, they weren’t sure. Or at least Kuro wasn’t; he often harbored the thought that Reida didn’t share with him even half of what she knew.
There was a temple. He’d never seen it, but he’d gathered enough from Reida’s accounts of the thing that he figured he could have built its likeness from the ground up. Not that that would have mattered. It was the sprawl of sigils that fell over the floor and walls about him that gave the place its power. Did that mean it would materialize here, below the ground, once they were activated? Or would it spring to life elsewhere? Would they even know if anything they had done had worked at all? As he sank to his knees before the circles, Reida was watching him with a look that suggested she would.
Kuro splayed his hands over the lines. No more time to wonder. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen, and soon. He swallowed hard, shook the hair from his face, and looked up to catch Reida’s eye. She gave a nod in return.
There was a snap at the base of his spine, the softest crunch, like the breaking of an egg, and the hum grew and shifted pitch as the sensation coursed up his back. It spread to his fingers and seeped into the stone. The wax beneath his hands, though it remained cold, began to melt. In tiny, colorful beads, it rose into the air. His ears throbbed, his lungs burned, every inch of the cavern flooded with magic. He looked across the carpet of sigils to where Reida crouched, and the set of her jaw told him she was straining against it too.
From both sides of the room one form and another dissolved and lifted itself from the stone. Kuro’s hands began to tremble, and his arms ached to tear them from the floor and break the link to the ache the forms kept pumping through his veins, but he held still.
There was a splash, like a boulder thrown into a deep lake, as the first airborne sigil burst, and Kuro dug his fingers against the stone as the sound hit him like a blow to the head. The beads of wax that made up the form disintegrated, leaving a haze of color where the air itself seemed to have ignited in light in their wake.
Another and another followed suit, and Kuro let out a gasp of pain as the magic bombarded him. Chest heaving and eyes watering, he looked again across the room. Reida held herself high off the floor, arms stiff, teeth gritted, eyes locked on the sigils exploding between them like some ethereal fireworks display. The circles twisted and linked themselves together in the air until one giant, three dimensional form hovered there.
The last form slid into place. The hum had swollen to a chorus of inhuman voices beating at Kuro’s ears. A thousand pinpricks danced through his lungs and he felt as if a cord had been pulled around the heart that threatened to pound its way out of his chest. There was a crack like lightning striking just beside his head.
Then he was sliding, falling. He clutched at the stone and it slipped from his grasp as though it were a sheer cliff. His legs flew out behind him. He swung his arms at the floor that should have been beneath him but was now in front of him. He should have connected with stone, but his hand kept going, the stone replaced with nothingness, as there was emptiness above and below him.
The sigils were gone, and with them the buzz and the pain. All that remained was the rush of air as he descended. No floor, no ceiling, no walls, no Reida.
“Reida?” he yelled, more panicked now than he had been when he started to fall. He whipped his head around, scanning the void. “Reida?”
And then there was ground again. It was soft and flat and firm beneath his hands and knees. It puzzled him for a moment that he’d gone from falling back to kneeling without movement or impact, and then he clutched at the tufts of grass between his fingers and tried to banish thoughts of the void.
Kuro heaved a deep breath and looked up. There was sky overhead, great expanses of grey, the view unhindered by rock or tree. And the smooth, grassy ground continued on before him, not a single obstacle, man-made or otherwise, in sight. No Reida in sight either, for that matter.
Still shaking and tingling from the onslaught of the spell, he pushed himself slowly to his feet and looked around. The same view met him from all directions. He kicked the dirt with a curse. He’d contemplated the location of the temple’s arrival, he’d never thought he might be the one displaced.
So, did that mean it had worked?
There certainly wasn’t a temple here. Nor was there anyone to ask. He wondered if Reida was still in the cave or if she’d been flung somewhere else as well.
Had it worked? Well, one way to find out for himself, he supposed.
Kuro fished about in his pockets for a moment until he came across a tube of paint. He popped off the cap, sank back to his knees, and traced the simplest of forms over the stalks of grass.
He set his hands to the ring and concentrated. There was a pop and a tingle, the way magic always felt, but then there was something he hadn’t seen since he was a boy. The form elicited not a flickering whisp of flame, but the full, burning tongue of a torch doused in oil.
With a giddy cry of delight, quite unbefitting of a man of his size, Kuro leapt to his feet. Why yes, he thought as he stomped the fire out, it had worked indeed.
Story : knights
Rating : PG
Timeframe : 1280's and, er, a looong time ago
Word Count : 1920
Gold Medal for the Rainbow Brains for the Butterscotch-Caramel Challenge. Heaped with Spoilers Not entirely sure yet if this is canon or not. It doesn't directly affect any of the main storyline, so I have time to decide that. But I find the possibility of this intriguing and I may eventually have to spin another story out of Kuro's ensuing adventures. Incidentally, his very existence has not been mentioned yet, so bonus points to anyone who has a clue where he comes from.
The humming woke him. Kuro rolled to his side, his legs tangled in the loose blankets. He blinked for a moment at the flicker of light and shadow that played across the back wall of the cave.
It wasn’t so much a sound as a sense, a throbbing buzz that filled his ears and his blood. He jerked upright, sudden realization sweeping away what remnants of sleep still held him. She’d started without him.
“Reida?”
Kuro kicked off the blankets, snatched them up and shook them out in search of his shirt. She’d promised him, for whatever that was worth. And she’d started without him. A rumpled sheet of green tumbled out of the mass of wooly covers, and he quickly turned it about, found a sleeve, and thrust an arm through. He shrugged into the rest of it, pulling free long, silver locks as the fabric pinned them to his back.
“Reida?” he called again, and his voice bounced off of stoney walls that pulsed with magic. How many years had she spent on this, and she couldn’t wait another hour? She could at least have the decency to drag him out of bed first. It was his work too, after all.
He crawled to his knees, crouched under the low stone ceiling, and crept around the divide between the chambers. Turning the corner into the central amphitheater, he righted himself, no longer worried about cracking his head on anything. Before him, the floor dipped down into a broad, shallow bowl and the ceiling rose a good twenty feet into a rough dome from which an assortment of rocky protrusions hung.
Just barely past the mouth of the corridor from which he’d come, Kuro stopped and his jaw dropped. The sigils that stretched from floor to wall to overhead glowed in a painfully vibrant array of hues, casting the whole chamber into a flood of dancing light.
Amidst the flickering show, crosslegged and hunched low over some form on the ground, was Reida. Judging by the cloak thrown across her back, she hadn’t taken much time to dress either. The line of sigils tattooed up her spine lay exposed to the chill morning air of the cavern where the cloth slung over her shoulders dipped low. A stump of chalk in hand, she continued scratching away at the stone, seemingly oblivious to his arrival. Kuro doubted that was true. Nothing ever went past Reida’s notice. He folded his arms against his chest and cleared his throat. Without bothering to look up, she waved a hand his way and grunted a distracted “Morning.”
“Morning yourself,” he said. “I thought you were going to wait for me.”
“I am,” she said. “For the parts I need you for. Until I get to those, you can go on keeping the bed warm for all I care.”
Kuro sniffed. There was a clink as Reida laid her chalk on the floor. She turned to peer at him over a shoulder and raised a brow as her eyes swept slowly up and down his frame. There was something unnerving about that look whenever she gave it to him. Something older than it looked. Of course, everything about her was older than it looked, a thought that had the most disturbing habit of asserting itself at the worst times, like now when she was sitting in front of him, half hanging out of her cloak.
“You want to be useful?” she said, and without making mention of having noticed his stare, hiked the cloak up around her shoulders.
Kuro shook himself from his thoughts. “Of course I want to be useful,” he said. “This is my-”
“Great,” said Reida. “Make us some breakfast.”
“Bre- What?”
She flashed him one of her toothy grins. “You heard me.”
Reida had snatched up the fork before the plate had even fully settled on the ground. Kuro stood back, drumming his fingers against his arm, as she set to shoveling eggs in her mouth.
“Well?” he said, after a moment had passed with no sound but chewing.
“Well, what?” said Reida, around a mouthful. “Yes, yes. You’re very useful.” She waved the back of a hand his way and scooped up another bite. “Be happy.”
“The forms.” His fingers ceased their agitated roll, tightening over his arm instead. “What of the forms?”
Reida grimaced and swallowed. She pushed the nearly empty plate aside and dropped the fork on top of it. “Nearly ready,” she said.
She dropped down on her hands and picked her way, on her knees, through the sigils that already covered the floor. Lines in chalk, traced in paint, coated in wax, not one among them he didn’t know. Did she really trust him so little?
“I’ve got two left,” she was saying. “And then I’ll need you to help me lift them.”
As she waxed the last two forms, Kuro picked up the discarded plate. He eyed the remains of the eggs, pushed them around a bit with the fork, and set it down again. Eating didn’t really seem like the thing to be doing right now.
“You ready?”
“Hmm?” He looked up and caught Reida on all fours at the other end of the chamber, hands already set to the sigils awaiting their activation.
She rolled her eyes. “To be useful,” she said
He nodded, moving stiffly into place. This was it. Five years worth of work and study, and now everything was in its place, as it had been before it was destroyed. What exactly any of it would do, they weren’t sure. Or at least Kuro wasn’t; he often harbored the thought that Reida didn’t share with him even half of what she knew.
There was a temple. He’d never seen it, but he’d gathered enough from Reida’s accounts of the thing that he figured he could have built its likeness from the ground up. Not that that would have mattered. It was the sprawl of sigils that fell over the floor and walls about him that gave the place its power. Did that mean it would materialize here, below the ground, once they were activated? Or would it spring to life elsewhere? Would they even know if anything they had done had worked at all? As he sank to his knees before the circles, Reida was watching him with a look that suggested she would.
Kuro splayed his hands over the lines. No more time to wonder. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen, and soon. He swallowed hard, shook the hair from his face, and looked up to catch Reida’s eye. She gave a nod in return.
There was a snap at the base of his spine, the softest crunch, like the breaking of an egg, and the hum grew and shifted pitch as the sensation coursed up his back. It spread to his fingers and seeped into the stone. The wax beneath his hands, though it remained cold, began to melt. In tiny, colorful beads, it rose into the air. His ears throbbed, his lungs burned, every inch of the cavern flooded with magic. He looked across the carpet of sigils to where Reida crouched, and the set of her jaw told him she was straining against it too.
From both sides of the room one form and another dissolved and lifted itself from the stone. Kuro’s hands began to tremble, and his arms ached to tear them from the floor and break the link to the ache the forms kept pumping through his veins, but he held still.
There was a splash, like a boulder thrown into a deep lake, as the first airborne sigil burst, and Kuro dug his fingers against the stone as the sound hit him like a blow to the head. The beads of wax that made up the form disintegrated, leaving a haze of color where the air itself seemed to have ignited in light in their wake.
Another and another followed suit, and Kuro let out a gasp of pain as the magic bombarded him. Chest heaving and eyes watering, he looked again across the room. Reida held herself high off the floor, arms stiff, teeth gritted, eyes locked on the sigils exploding between them like some ethereal fireworks display. The circles twisted and linked themselves together in the air until one giant, three dimensional form hovered there.
The last form slid into place. The hum had swollen to a chorus of inhuman voices beating at Kuro’s ears. A thousand pinpricks danced through his lungs and he felt as if a cord had been pulled around the heart that threatened to pound its way out of his chest. There was a crack like lightning striking just beside his head.
Then he was sliding, falling. He clutched at the stone and it slipped from his grasp as though it were a sheer cliff. His legs flew out behind him. He swung his arms at the floor that should have been beneath him but was now in front of him. He should have connected with stone, but his hand kept going, the stone replaced with nothingness, as there was emptiness above and below him.
The sigils were gone, and with them the buzz and the pain. All that remained was the rush of air as he descended. No floor, no ceiling, no walls, no Reida.
“Reida?” he yelled, more panicked now than he had been when he started to fall. He whipped his head around, scanning the void. “Reida?”
And then there was ground again. It was soft and flat and firm beneath his hands and knees. It puzzled him for a moment that he’d gone from falling back to kneeling without movement or impact, and then he clutched at the tufts of grass between his fingers and tried to banish thoughts of the void.
Kuro heaved a deep breath and looked up. There was sky overhead, great expanses of grey, the view unhindered by rock or tree. And the smooth, grassy ground continued on before him, not a single obstacle, man-made or otherwise, in sight. No Reida in sight either, for that matter.
Still shaking and tingling from the onslaught of the spell, he pushed himself slowly to his feet and looked around. The same view met him from all directions. He kicked the dirt with a curse. He’d contemplated the location of the temple’s arrival, he’d never thought he might be the one displaced.
So, did that mean it had worked?
There certainly wasn’t a temple here. Nor was there anyone to ask. He wondered if Reida was still in the cave or if she’d been flung somewhere else as well.
Had it worked? Well, one way to find out for himself, he supposed.
Kuro fished about in his pockets for a moment until he came across a tube of paint. He popped off the cap, sank back to his knees, and traced the simplest of forms over the stalks of grass.
He set his hands to the ring and concentrated. There was a pop and a tingle, the way magic always felt, but then there was something he hadn’t seen since he was a boy. The form elicited not a flickering whisp of flame, but the full, burning tongue of a torch doused in oil.
With a giddy cry of delight, quite unbefitting of a man of his size, Kuro leapt to his feet. Why yes, he thought as he stomped the fire out, it had worked indeed.