flashfic
Ink
The ink comes in a small glass jar with a black lid, and it sloshes pleasantly when the jar is tilted back and forth. The ink itself smells like earth, like ash, like the world’s patient breath.
How the Andan Court
Actually, I cannot offer you roses. Roses that taste like crystallized desire when you try to smell them. Roses whose buds are softer than the hands of the morning mist. Roses pierced through by the needles of nightfall.
Hibernation
Dormice know nothing of Charlemagne or Orlando Furioso, but they, too, have their paladins. Every winter, when the sun ebbs in the smoke-colored sky and the frost scribes farewells to flowers and butterflies on the fallen leaves, the quiet, plump dormice huddle next to each other, lulled by the keening song of the woodland winds. They dream of springtime buds and summer blossoms, spindrift seeds and the slow-blinking eyes of hungry birds.
Harvesting Shadows
They say the mountains in this land are so numerous that the smallest of them have no names. This is not true; it is just that mountains are circumspect about the people they tell their names to.
The Gate of Bells
At the northern border of a land where badgers play board games with comma-shaped stones and poems are inscribed on the very sycamores, a traveler paused at the Gate of Bells. She wore a bow at her back, and her hair was the color of sentinel nightfall.
The Garden of Rust
For the most part, starships are pragmatists. The keen minds that live in those star-voyaging carapaces know, better than most, that what is written into the space-time substrate cannot be unwritten.
Forever the Stars
In times future, music will not be played upon vibrations in the air. Harp, flute, drum all cast aside, trill and tremolo burnt from the page, damped vibrations, dead equations. Some songs are too vast for human hearing. Discard your scores and libretti; let them fall from your hands the way generation ships fall away from Earth, carrying their harvest of souls in keys minor, keys major, modes sweet to the ear. The oscillating pattern of fleets launched toward points half-known, planets orbiting stars we see time-veiled: this is the symphony we shout into the void.
The Firziak Mountains
The Firziak Mountains have many charms, from the spectacular springtime displays of cherry blossoms to the shrines with their gilded statues of the Blind Falconer, who is considered an apostate elsewhere in the region. Then, too, there are the hawks, whose cries echo in the gorges and whose silhouettes punctuate the storm-lashed skies.
Dew-Weighted Roses
In a convent high in the mountains, where the stars hang barely out of reach and the wind sings stories of frozen songbirds and silvered firs, a sister-of-the-snow tends her garden. It is not truly her garden, of course. It belongs, insofar as it belongs to anyone on the wheel of the world, to all the sisters. And it belongs most of all to that presence whose face is different in each season but whose name never changes, and who set the sun and moon in their courses. But for all that, the sister spends more time in the garden than anyone else, so she thinks of it as hers.
The Crane Wife
Once a peasant woman found a crane with a wounded wing in the woods.
“It is a hungry winter,” the woman said to the crane, “but it must be just as hungry for you as it is for me.”