writing

Short Story: Unquiet Jenny

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There’s something you need to know about magic and about the people who get mixed up in the real stuff. It’s all about the power of stories, and how we get caught up in them and by them. I used to say that all magic was about lying, but that turned out to be too simple a view.

I used to tell people that magic was the art of lying to the universe. I would say that the best liars could do it so well that people and places and events began to believe it. If I was feeling particularly facetious on any given day, I could point to any number of populist politicians to illustrate my point.

It turned out I was doing the universe a grave disservice in doing so, and it pushed back – but that’s a story for another time.

Did you see what I did there? Anyway, I was talking about the power that lies not only in tall tales but also in deep truth – and how both can be transformative. We talk of how people become local legends, if we’re kind, or about people being legends in their own lunchtimes if we’re being less kind.

People begin to be obscured sometimes by the stories we tell. If that sounds odd, go look up the origins of some local legend and see what happens when you dig in to find the person beneath it. Stories expand and embellish people, places, and events. They also simplify and streamline and softly erase the bits that don’t quite fit – like water across stones.

Magic is the art of recognising stories and using them.

There’s an oracle I occasionally call upon when I’m in search of lost things or lost people. They’re a reclusive soul, or at least that’s how I characterise them. Before they became what they are now, they lived a life that became smaller over the years. They were known simply as Jenny.

No one knows where Jenny came from. They’d laid claim to the small side alley between a sports equipment shop and a fried chicken franchise on the High Street for a few years before I came on the scene. The alley led to a rarely used fire escape from the back of a multistory carpark that I’m fairly sure had been all but forgotten by its owners.

Jenny had a stash of blankets, boxes, and assorted scavenged items that marked their spot. It was a hard life, with no end of attempts at intervention by police and social services. Those never came to much. There were ugly encounters with others surviving in the area, and with predators seeking easy meat.

Jenny wasn’t easy meat, and they looked out for newcomers too. Simple thuggery and threats were seen off with razor tongue and a handmade shiv if need be. More unusual things occasionally seeped into the story however – and that’s where we met a few times.

Jenny never talked about where they had come from. Their story was rooted in the simplicity of who they were now. Their magic came from the stability of being unyielding, and how that story cemented expectation on top of reputation and painted it with a veneer of watchfulness.

Jenny was always on the lookout, always watching. They always had a vigilance that underlaid their demeanour. They were always unsettled. They might be steady in the face of fae on the hunt for names or the blood of the guilty, but they were always Unquiet.

I always knew that Jenny could tell me things if they felt I needed to know it, but they always kept things close. Life on the streets is hard, and a diet of scavenged or donated fried chicken rarely helps health bloom. Jenny kept their own counsel even as they faded and wasted in their rough sibylline shelter.

No one knew they were fading. Their legend as a permanent resident and acid-tongued speaker of truths made people’s gaze slip past the real person. They became that person who would tell sudden observations from the shadows of an unlit alley. They would demand food for answers – a tribute for their time.

Over time, the whispered voice grew quieter, but was still there for those who listened. The owner of the voice may not be among the living any more, but Unquiet Jenny was still to be heard, and still offering words of advice to those deemed worthy.

The shrine to whatever resides in that alley now is decorated with old chicken bones and placated with fast food offerings by those in the know. If you’re lost in life, and you see a stack of old cartons by a wall, try to listen for a quiet but defiant voice. It may be looking out for you before you realise how lost you are.

Jenny became a story, like the witches of Pendle Hill or the pirates under black sails. I’m doing my part to keep that story going, and now you’ve heard their story, you’re keeping it alive for as long as you remember it.

And what do I get out of all this? Unquiet Jenny doesn’t want to rest. They still watch and advise, keeping ahead of something they never talked about in life – and I’m curious to find out what that untold story is. When they trust me, they’ll tell me. After that, we’ll see, and perhaps when all is done they won’t be restless any more.

Keep your ears open, believe your eyes, let’s find out what happens next.

Writing and Reinvigoration

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The recent leaps in writing lore backgrounds for the regular D&D group has reignited my interest in telling stories in other media, so I went digging in my emails yesterday evening for the serial number for my Scrivener installation. I had to do a rebuild of my laptop a month or so back, and just hadn’t got round to putting it back on. Various conversations I’ve had over the last few weeks around writing kept pivoting back to Scrivener as a useful tool, so I decided to take the hint. It also helped that someone in the D&D community has put together a template and tools for Scrivener for creating adventures. The link therefore came full circle – or something like that.

The first thing I did? I opened up my novel, took one look at how complicated the first paragraph was and spent ten minutes reordering the first two thousand words. My next priority when I get home will be to roughly plot out the missing bits between where I got to and the endgame scene roughed out and start plugging away at it.

A gentle push in this direction also came from a chance conversation with one of our weekend staff which veered into writing and groups in the libraries – and the enthusiasm by this person for writing and creativity just clicked a lightbulb in my skull. Time will tell what comes of it – but apparently the sum total of writing in this blog comes to about twenty five thousand words – or about half a nanowrimo. Perhaps that’s something I should gear up to try this year properly for the first time in well over a decade.

Anyway – one more thing for my hyperactive grasshopper brain to bounce around..!

DDC – Karkanna Back Story

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We had a lot of lore drop in Sunday’s game – not least of which was a whole load of filling in the blanks for the group as to what’s been going on, and some of the stakes of their current conflict. That’s a story for tomorrow, but here’s the back story to Karkanna – Thorin’s elder sister.

Karkanna Amberhammer fought in the Underdark during the Last War. A trained and experienced Gloomstalker. she fought to protect the Clan against creatures from the Pit, and against spies and saboteurs from all sides. Overcome by the fire of the hunt, she became a feared legend of the night – striking down all intruders from the shadows and fading into the dark. Trails of blood and terror marked her passage as constant lonely war made her cruel. While her brothers protected Clan and neighbours on the surface, she fought and bled and killed in the dark and slowly became a monster herself.

In time, she stopped coming back to the Hold, seeing the fear she evoked as she strode back into the light, stinking of blood and wearing grisly trophies. And so she left, because killing was all she had. In her lonely war she entered Khyber and was overtaken by the creatures of the Daelkyr who remade her as one of their own. Reformed as a werewolf, she has returned

Fiction Fragment – Ambush Aftermath

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Once the bushes had stopped shaking, and the outraged cries had reduced to a soft moaning, the various hides and camouflage screens could be safely opened – and indeed were. Leaves dislodged from the trees and whipped up by ripping ropes were still swirling and dancing in the disturbed air in the clearing, and these lent an air of hurried readjustment to the proceedings. The group emerged into the open air, brushing themselves clean of errant twigs, leaves, and dirt.

Farren took it upon himself to check the pit on the other side of the now-swept space. He was heard to chuckle before he returned. “Well,” he said, “we didn’t get the monkey, but we did get the organ-grinder. Not sure he’s necessarily the brains of the outfit, mind.” He gestured vaguely behind at the ragged opening in the ground.

Pel and Raak bounded over to peer down. Pel had a coiled rope looped over his arm and shoulder and looked ready to shake it loose. Raak had knocked an arrow and was aiming it generally down into the pit without drawing. Em was the last to emerge from her concealment, and she took a moment to scan the perimeter of the clearing before engaging with Farren.

“So, all that and we didn’t get what we came for?”

“Yet” Farren replied. He jerked his thumb back to the pit where Pel was lowering himself down to their captive. “I can’t imagine he’ll be particularly difficult to persuade to talk.”

“Hope so – that was a lot of work.” Em sat on a large fallen tree trunk on the edge of the trail that had led here and cracked her knuckles. “Remind me again why we took this job?”

“Coin, same as ever, and a promise of passage on the next ship west.” Farren rubbed the back of his neck, then turned towards the pit to see Pel and Raak hoisting a dirt and leaf-covered youth back to the surface. “You’ll see, we’ll be on our way soon enough.”

Fiction Fragment – The Door Beyond

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The door had reappeared sometime overnight between the cleaners clocking off at eleven the previous evening, and the office manager arriving at six in the morning. Even then, nobody commented on it until a few hours later. The first mention was when a courier mistook it for the entrance to the IT team’s area and came to ask what was going on. From such mistakes and near misses are these things noticed – and if luck is with people, connections made to old stories and warnings.

As it happened, the office manager had been hazed by the refit project manager with stories of the doorway that wasn’t on the floorplans and that led to areas that hadn’t been listed for renovations. Jokes about their back rooms had mixed with internet memes and gamer’s jokes about glitches to fuel a nagging fear of the ill-defined. The office manager – Eileen – had promptly signed for delivery of the package and stowed it in a locker before going in search of hazard tape.

Ten minutes later, the door was adorned with black and yellow stripes and sticky vinyl warning signs forbidding entrance. She’d found them stuffed at the back of the office supplies cupboard. The calm lasted for maybe an hour or so before a grumpy IT helpdesk lad called Khurrum took a closer look after picking up the delivery. Despite Eileen’s protests, he swept aside the tape and poked his head in. He reported a corridor with some empty rooms off it – and while she held the door open, he went in to investigate a little further. To humour her, he didn’t leave her line of site and so didn’t go too far. Each room seemed to be decorated in an identical slightly yellowed off-white colour with unbroken beige hard-wearing carpet. Old fluorescent lights lent an unflattering blankness to the whole place by washing out what colours there were.

He pretended boredom, but he had to admit later that he was unnerved by Eileen’s nervousness. For her part, Eileen was even more troubled as the space described couldn’t possibly fit into the floor layout as she knew it. If there was a corridor there, it should have come out by the meeting room by the kitchen galley rather than opening into other rooms.

It might all have stayed a minor oddity, consigned to obscurity as a thing that made people scratch their heads as a ripple in reality, if other people hadn’t also had the same thought and started to try and use it as a cut-through. Eileen even caught a member of the sales team trying to set up a secret private office in there. That had come to her attention when he’d come round to complain at her desk about a lack of network ports and wifi signal. She’d sent him packing back to his assigned desk with a flea in his ear and a sheaf of new leads freshly printed from the calls database.

People, however, can’t resist an empty office space, and before long the department head got to hear about unused floor space and put in a call to IT. Despite Eileen’s private misgivings and attempts to appeal to the detail of rental agreements, the tapes were torn down and contractors hired to quote for running new cabling into the rooms beyond.

To Nano or Not?

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Its November, officially the start of Nanowrimo – National Write a Novel Month – and I’m toying with the idea of at least taking a stab at it. No planning, no notes, just throw words at the page. Its been a few years since I gave it a go, and a few more since I succeeded. I’ve a couple of weeks off – why not? I didn’t do Inktober because my head’s just not been in it so might be nice to set a soft challenge. It could be argued that blogging every day would be a good way to do it.

Okay, that’s it – it won’t necessarily be a full Nano fifty thousand words, but I’ll do my best to blog every day – even if its absolute drivel – because I haven’t done as much here as I might like and I have a virtual lake of story concepts that bubble and roil in my head on a regular basis.

Also – there’s D&D sessions to write up and Draconic Prophecies to make up – and I’ll start doing Fiction Fragments again so, yeah, let’s do this…

So – last night was Halloween and the younger families on the estate met up to trick or treat as an organised activity. People were polled for whether they wanted to be involved and lists of “do not knock” given to the organisers to direct the children discretely. Our block of flats put out a basket by the front door, and while I was wrestling with a stubbornly cantankerous laptop I could hear the sounds of children laughing and shouting out to each other as they made their way round. It was a good backdrop to the evening as a contrast to the earlier fireworks and certainly made it feel joyous even as we kept a quiet evening for ourselves

As a bonus – I think I worked out what was causing problems on the machine and am now seeing if the Discord instability resolves – so fingers crossed…

Eberron Draconic Prophecies

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We’ve not played this evening as my stomach has decided that today would be a good day to play up – so instead here’s some unused Draconic Prophecy snippets I made up as ancillary things to make the players go ‘ooooh’ and as some world building.

Some context: in the game world of Eberron there is a complex prophecy that touches on all sorts of things that is researched and debated by the dragons of that world and acts in-game as a mcguffin to explain or prompt whatever portentous things the GM wants to have happen – or in other words a nice motivation for dragons or their followers or opponents to get out and cause mischief as needed in the story. Its deliberately left vague for the GMs pleasure.

I decided to write a few verses that could be dropped into the game, or possibly discovered in some dusty tome as the players research things – but they’ve shown a marked tendency in the Sunday game to be entities of action rather than of research, so I may never get a chance to crowbar them in. There is the faint chance that the players will read this and then try their best not to metagame (and good luck to them if so)

So – here are three that should ring bells for anyone who’s been following the game recently:

The inter-twining god serpents’ lights follow the lightning and make slumbering prophecies hatch golden wings. Even madness’ sting deters not the seekers and the passage of the Heir

The Draconic Prophecies – Scale 532, chapter 4, verses 32-33

This refers to the dance of the coatls that accompanied the lightning rail train that the characters rode on as they left Windhaven on their way back to see Thorin’s unwell father. The slumbering prophecies and wings verse is about the vision where Caeluma rejected their bloodline’s demonic patron and sacrificed themself to protect their family – being rewarded with golden wings by their celestial patron as a change to their tiefling features. The sting refers to the assassins sent by one of the factions involved in the underlying conflict they are stepping into

The Seeker of the Mark risks all in the face of the fiercest winter – risking EverIce for the sake of a lost sibling. The Forgotten Mark but slumbers even as lights throng in display

The Draconic Prophecies – Scale 1042, chapter 2, verses 4-5

Kerne has a long-standing interest in rediscovering the lost Dragonmark of Death. They’ve heard that it was something to do with the creation of her people – the dragonborn – and wants to get to the bottom of it, mostly because they enjoy the academic discovery involved. Kerne’s adventures have brought them into contact with The Winter’s Knight – a being of the Feywild/Thelanis that seems to have become the patron of Kerne’s long-lost sister and have driven that sister to studying with Hags. EverIce is an arctic region in Eberron that may or may not have ties to Thelanis or lost civilisations. The Forgotten Mark is the Dragonmark of Death, which is currently completely suppressed by the elves of Aerenal. Kerne discovered a statue that depicts what she thinks may be the Mark. It is currently on loan to the University of Wynarn in Aundair.

Golden wings and divided bow, Amber hammer, scale, and guardian low. The wolves fall back. The shadows smile, and Xoriat watches and waits. The Triumphant Dead numbers lack, yet gather by the mile. A favour for a favour links gates

The Draconic Prophecies – Scale 538, chapter 5, verses 1-5

This is fairly simple in that it identifies everyone currently active in the DDC. The wolves is a reference to the werewolves they just defeated on their way to the Amberhammer Holdings west of Cragwar. Smiling shadows and Xoriat is a vague description of the forces arrayed against them. The Triumphant Dead is a faction that has been encountered once in the recent past working with the Emerald Claw when Coal was used as a power source to reactivate a Warforged Titan in the slums of Windhaven. As the prophecy says, they are small in number but seem to be travelling and gathering allies perhaps. The favour for a favour was the deal done with House Sivis to allow the creation of a teleportation circle out of the remains of the planar portal and favourable trading for that House in the AmberHammer lands.

So there you have it – three obscure statements that can be read in all sorts of ways and that will certainly get people thinking in the campaign and referring back. I may make a habit of these to drop between sessions as a stinger. That appeals to me and I think it will keep people busy – what do you think?

Write-ups and Sign-ins

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So, back to work today following my unexpected derailment with a kidney stone yesterday. That was my body telling me to be sensible in hot weather (like the whole of Saturday at Pride and then a glass or two of wine on Sunday). Cue a day of painkillers, a hot water bottle, and the consumption of my own bodyweight in water to flush everything through.

I had (mostly) meetings spread through the day, but also got asked to put my Staff Network hat on to write up the corporate Pride report for the network. It seems to now be an annual tradition to get me to write such things, and as I was halfway through doing something specifically for the library intranet anyway it was only a quick skip and a hop to turn it into something more extensive and stick some photos in there.

That made for a positive end to the day at work, and since then I’ve caught up on TV and started to set up for a second D&D group to run monthly, with some colleagues from work. That’s a nice little side project. With any luck we’ll also be back into the adventures of the DDC this weekend as well.

Busy, busy.

Unexpected Quiet

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We’re looking after the cub this evening while boy s is visiting Lady B back in Portsmouth for their tabletop D&D group. Well, I say looking after, but he fell asleep on me about quarter to six in the evening after I’d fed and watered him. At first a nestle against my arm, it soon turned into an arm shoved through the front pocket of my hoodie and a nestle under my arm and lights completely out.

He has what can best be described as a “burning the candle at both ends” approach to being awake, which largely comes from a fear of missing out on anything interesting going on around him. Today was the day that his body said enough, and so I had a small sleeping person curled up on me. It was very sweet.

Lady M and I eventually manhandled him into bed in the spare room and he slept for a good five hours before briefly surfacing just as I was switching lights off to go to bed. I brought his phone in, plugged it in to charge it, and he was asleep again as soon as his head hit the pillow.

So it’s been a quiet evening, and I’ve largely been working on my short stories to polish up the collection. Silver linings, and all that.

Creative Evening

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As the dust settled on a weekend full of the laughter of children and the shifting of furniture, I decided that the best way to wind down would be to do some editing of one of my short stories for the collection.

So I’ve been working on one of the pieces I wrote as background to the novel – a combined history and travelogue style bit of fluff I wrote to firm up some of the mythology of the setting and embed it in my local area. My original piece was just shy of 500 words, and now it’s over 1500 in length – which isn’t bad for a quick descriptive piece.

I had intended to record some podcast material, but I think it’s a bit late at 1am to start on that now. Not the end of the world, I can do some tomorrow.