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rainbowfic2016-05-23 03:54 pm
wallwalker) wrote in rainbowfic2016-05-23 03:54 pm
Color Party 48
Name: Wallwalker
Story: The Witch and the Tower
Colors: Color Party #48 (Labrador)
Supplies and Styles: Canvas? (This is definitely before the story itself starts, but since this is my first post about it here...)
Word Count: 840
Rating: SFW
Warnings: No major warnings. Minor drug/medication mention. (Well, potion, anyway.)
Summary: Before she lived in the forest, there was a little house, and her mother, and the blue sky above. The Witch wants to remember more about that life, but the memories just aren't there.
---
The sky is always the same in her dreams - a soft greyish-blue, with no clouds in sight.
She is a little girl again, dressed in a white smock or perhaps a grey dress that feels rough against her skin. Her eyes are wide open, staring at everything around her, and somehow - even though she is a little girl in the dream - on some level she knows that she is not in the right place.
Her Aunt crashes into the room. "Hurry, little one," she says. Or is it something else? She can't remember now if her Aunt ever called her anything else. It would make things feel more real if she ever had a real name. But names don't come easily to anyone, not in the forest. "We have to leave. Now!"
"Why?" she asks, in her little-girl voice, not because she doesn't want to leave, because the wrongness has settled into her mind so deeply that she can't escape it. She just can't understand - the dream never starts from the beginning, it always starts with a greyish-blue sky in the window of a cottage full of dried herbs and her mother's careful knitting, socks and caps they made from the wool of their own few sheep. She still remembers that in her dreams, sometimes.
Sometimes she sees her mother's face, kind and full of sadness and with long brown hair just tinged with grey. But this time she doesn't remember seeing her mother at all.
"There's no time! Your mother is talking to the others." Her Aunt hesitates - and the Witch is not a little girl outside of the dream, so she knows that her Aunt only hesitates because she's not sure how much of the truth to tell.
But in the dream she is still a little girl, and the little girl asks, "Why can't Mama hurry and come with us? We can wait for her, can't we?"
"No," her Aunt says firmly, taking her by the hand. "Listen to me. Your mother asked me to take you somewhere safe, and that's why we need to leave now. All right?"
"Will she be able to find us?"
She watches her Aunt's face soften for a moment. She is old enough now to recognize when she is fighting off tears. "She knows where we're going," she says softly. "I promise that she knows."
That's all she can do to reassure her, and it's just enough. When she was a little girl she thinks that she dreamed of seeing her mother again. Now she knows the truth. She knows it too well.
They run out of the little cottage. In the distance she thinks she can hear yelling, the voices of people who don't want to be friendly. Cruel people, she thinks now, and starts running faster.
The run is never as clear as she wishes it could be. She can barely remember the scenery that she sees. She knows that her Aunt finds them a horse to ride - did she somehow steal it, or was it something that belonged to a friend? There are so many questions she still has, and she knows she will never find the answers, no matter how good she ever becomes at scrying or dream-sifting. The memories simply are not there to be found.
She remembers how much it hurts, riding on the back of the animal, her Aunt's arms tight around her. The wind was cold, and the winter trees were nasty and cruel, sharp limbs jutting up into the sky. She holds on, afraid of the monsters around her.
The dream always ends in mid-travel - she loses her grip and falls off of the horse, opening her eyes as she nearly strikes the ground. Or she closes her eyes tight against the wind and opens them again, and finds herself safe in her bed. If only she could see more of the journey - she would, in a way, like to know how she arrived there. She would like to know how they came to this perpetually dark and still forest, from a place full of trees with jagged branches and screaming men and a sky so strange and blue.
She hasn't told anyone about her experiments yet. She drinks potions that she's made herself, brewed from a certain moss that grows only on dying trees and from the dried-out leaves of a bush with a foul-smelling flower. She knows that they aren't very strong, mostly because she doesn't dare experiment with the Land Stars that peek through the ground and release black clouds of spores into the air; they induce a deeper sleep, but in the wrong amounts they could cause her to fall asleep forever. Someday she means to try, but not yet. Not until she can learn more.
She should tell her Aunt, at least. But her Aunt shudders as she asks her about the past, and so she pities her. These voyages into her own memories are the only way, even though the dreams are too vague and too heavily filtered through her grown-up eyes.
If only she could go back for long enough to find the truth. If only she could learn how to find that strange blue sky again, just to see if it's the same color that she remembers.
Story: The Witch and the Tower
Colors: Color Party #48 (Labrador)
Supplies and Styles: Canvas? (This is definitely before the story itself starts, but since this is my first post about it here...)
Word Count: 840
Rating: SFW
Warnings: No major warnings. Minor drug/medication mention. (Well, potion, anyway.)
Summary: Before she lived in the forest, there was a little house, and her mother, and the blue sky above. The Witch wants to remember more about that life, but the memories just aren't there.
---
The sky is always the same in her dreams - a soft greyish-blue, with no clouds in sight.
She is a little girl again, dressed in a white smock or perhaps a grey dress that feels rough against her skin. Her eyes are wide open, staring at everything around her, and somehow - even though she is a little girl in the dream - on some level she knows that she is not in the right place.
Her Aunt crashes into the room. "Hurry, little one," she says. Or is it something else? She can't remember now if her Aunt ever called her anything else. It would make things feel more real if she ever had a real name. But names don't come easily to anyone, not in the forest. "We have to leave. Now!"
"Why?" she asks, in her little-girl voice, not because she doesn't want to leave, because the wrongness has settled into her mind so deeply that she can't escape it. She just can't understand - the dream never starts from the beginning, it always starts with a greyish-blue sky in the window of a cottage full of dried herbs and her mother's careful knitting, socks and caps they made from the wool of their own few sheep. She still remembers that in her dreams, sometimes.
Sometimes she sees her mother's face, kind and full of sadness and with long brown hair just tinged with grey. But this time she doesn't remember seeing her mother at all.
"There's no time! Your mother is talking to the others." Her Aunt hesitates - and the Witch is not a little girl outside of the dream, so she knows that her Aunt only hesitates because she's not sure how much of the truth to tell.
But in the dream she is still a little girl, and the little girl asks, "Why can't Mama hurry and come with us? We can wait for her, can't we?"
"No," her Aunt says firmly, taking her by the hand. "Listen to me. Your mother asked me to take you somewhere safe, and that's why we need to leave now. All right?"
"Will she be able to find us?"
She watches her Aunt's face soften for a moment. She is old enough now to recognize when she is fighting off tears. "She knows where we're going," she says softly. "I promise that she knows."
That's all she can do to reassure her, and it's just enough. When she was a little girl she thinks that she dreamed of seeing her mother again. Now she knows the truth. She knows it too well.
They run out of the little cottage. In the distance she thinks she can hear yelling, the voices of people who don't want to be friendly. Cruel people, she thinks now, and starts running faster.
The run is never as clear as she wishes it could be. She can barely remember the scenery that she sees. She knows that her Aunt finds them a horse to ride - did she somehow steal it, or was it something that belonged to a friend? There are so many questions she still has, and she knows she will never find the answers, no matter how good she ever becomes at scrying or dream-sifting. The memories simply are not there to be found.
She remembers how much it hurts, riding on the back of the animal, her Aunt's arms tight around her. The wind was cold, and the winter trees were nasty and cruel, sharp limbs jutting up into the sky. She holds on, afraid of the monsters around her.
The dream always ends in mid-travel - she loses her grip and falls off of the horse, opening her eyes as she nearly strikes the ground. Or she closes her eyes tight against the wind and opens them again, and finds herself safe in her bed. If only she could see more of the journey - she would, in a way, like to know how she arrived there. She would like to know how they came to this perpetually dark and still forest, from a place full of trees with jagged branches and screaming men and a sky so strange and blue.
She hasn't told anyone about her experiments yet. She drinks potions that she's made herself, brewed from a certain moss that grows only on dying trees and from the dried-out leaves of a bush with a foul-smelling flower. She knows that they aren't very strong, mostly because she doesn't dare experiment with the Land Stars that peek through the ground and release black clouds of spores into the air; they induce a deeper sleep, but in the wrong amounts they could cause her to fall asleep forever. Someday she means to try, but not yet. Not until she can learn more.
She should tell her Aunt, at least. But her Aunt shudders as she asks her about the past, and so she pities her. These voyages into her own memories are the only way, even though the dreams are too vague and too heavily filtered through her grown-up eyes.
If only she could go back for long enough to find the truth. If only she could learn how to find that strange blue sky again, just to see if it's the same color that she remembers.
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eta: Your story tag has been added! I also added your supply tag while I was in there. Welcome to the comm!
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