Friday Flash: Queen’s Quill

Trying to figure out a Friday Flash story whose title started with Q was a challenge, but I think I managed.

The queen’s quill lay on the desk, temptingly close. Its carved silver handle gleamed in the sunlight.

Qut wanted to touch the beautiful orange feather. So strange. What bird could have such iridescent orange and red feathers?

She stroked the smooth silver. It was warm to the touch. She glanced over her shoulder, listening. She heard only the slither of silk. The queen was still getting dressed.

She picked up the quill pen and caressed it softly, like a mother touched her baby’s head. Qut dipped the quill in the red ink and wrote a word on a blank sheet.

“Excellent choice, dear.”

Qut whirled. “My Lady, I was -”

“I know what you were doing.” The Queen smiled. “I am quite pleased. Quite pleased.”

“Oh – I, uh, thank you.”

“Go on.”

Qut turned back to her sheet and wrote another word. There was a sharp pain her left palm and when she looked, she saw her palm was spotted with blood.

“Quite beautiful, dear.” The Queen smiled, took the quill from her hand jabbed it into her heart. “You’ll make such perfect ink.”

H is for Hard Fantasy

I may be behind the times, but I never heard of hard fantasy before. In fact, I only discovered this sub-genre on a Goodreads discussion forum. (One of those where people try to figure out what the difference is between science fiction and fantasy.)

The person provided quite a few links, including a wiki article. Wikipedia says the Recluce Saga, a Song of Ice and Fire and Magic, Inc. are examples of hard fantasy. Looking through Goodreads and LibraryThing shelves, people have also tagged Lord of the Rings, the Farseer trilogy and The Family Trade as hard fantasy.

There is an article that was posted in 2008, but I’ve never heard of hard fantasy until now. Well, shows what I know, huh?

From what I understand, hard fantasy is the fantasy where magic has rules. Truthfully, I am stunned there is even a sub-genre for this.

Though, yeah, the magical rules of most fantasy don’t have scientific rigor. Some books do treat magic just like it was a science, have schools and everything. Though truthfully, of the books I’ve listed here, only the Recluce Saga comes close to doing that. The others? I don’t know.

I haven’t read a lot of hard science fiction. Maybe that’s where my own disconnect is coming from. But most science fiction don’t have a lot of a scientific rigor, either.

But since people have tagged them as hard fantasy, I don’t think I understand what makes a book hard fantasy at all.

Teaser Tuesday: Magic’s Price

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Stefen groaned and covered his eyes. “Kernos’ codpiece, don’t remind me. My bed is as you see it. Virtuously empty.”

- Magic’s Price by Mercedes Lackey

Friday Flash: Reborn

This flash was inspired from an image on 500px. I cannot find it now, but it was gorgeous. It has 312 words.

A handful of children gathered around the storyteller. The children were sleepy from a rich dinner and the warmth of the fire, but still they clamored for one more story.

“Hush,” she said. “Very well. One last story.” And she began to speak.

Blood seeped across the sky like slow-moving clouds.

She watched and feared.

Around her the villagers paused to watch for only a few wing-beats before hurrying to their homes. They knew what it meant, too. They wanted to be gone before the thrice-cursed priests arrived.

She ignored the pitying glances. Ignored, too, the icy cold and red pellets that fell from the sky and froze in her hair.

She knew her beloved would come back to her; he had promised and he never broke a promise. No matter that the foreign priests turned him and the host he commanded into so much red mist.

The priests, grim in their bright red trousers and robes, did not see her. Fools. Perhaps they thought her a statue.

One pushed past her to the village square she guarded. But the moment his sleeve brushed her arm, he turned to ice. The other priests, seeing this, charged her with knives and scimitars. All of them disintegrated into the cold night.

“And that is why none dare attack us even today,” concluded the storyteller. She smiled and shook her head at the shouts for more. “Off to bed with you now. Go.”

When they were all safely asleep and the room rang with silence, she rose and went to look out the window. There, the same bit of land she had defended so many centuries before. Others had built a white marble statue of her there, but glorified the details of her face.

Still her beloved had not come. But she would abide until he was reborn as the man he was meant to be.

Friday Flash: Without Me

This Friday flash is inspired by this image from Wiki Commons:

A soft, warm wind stirred his hair and he looked around, grateful anew for his luck. Lush green growth provided fresh food all year around. He would not leave it.

His brother cleared his throat and he turned toward the canal. His brother, poor sod, wore a fine woolen tunic. The boy was too proud to wear more appropriate clothing.

“The first summer caravan leaves in the morning. You’ll go with it.”

“Father said -”

“I don’t care what Father says. If you want to live, you won’t either.”

The boy shook his long, blond hair. Northern men didn’t cut their hair. Another tradition he’d broken.

“I won’t leave without you.” Stubborn conviction rang in his voice, as hard the mountains buried under mounds of snow ever year.

“Father is murdering, conniving coward. He killed our mother. I won’t ever serve him, brother.”

“Not him. The village, the reason our mother sacrificed herself. The omens -”

“-are wrong.”

No belief in the boy’s eyes. He only stared like a wolf with his prey in sight.

Shivering at the image, he turned and walked to the house. “You leave tomorrow. Without me.”

Teaser Tuesday: The Lightning Thief

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“Ah, gods, plural, as in, great beings that control the forces of nature and human endeavors: the immortal gods of Olympus. That’s a smaller matter.”

- The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

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Book Review: The Siren Depths by Martha Wells

The Siren Depths is the third in the series and I think it’s probably my favorite in the whole series. It might be confusing without reading the previous books.

The word is gorgeously described and very, very imaginative, just like in the first book. And it just keeps getting better. I love it.

I love the characters, too. The main character, Moon, finds the family that abandoned him when he was born. Apparently he’s the spitting image of his father.

Moon was born a consort in a winged, matriarchal race. Consorts are the only males that can breed with a Queen. There are rules to govern the behavior of Consort. But Moon, having grown up in the wild, never learned any of the rules. Indeed, he never knew the name of his race until half way into the first book.

Because of the rules governing the life of a consort, Moon is forced to go back to his family. The relationship rules are kind of complex, IMO. But explained because Moon is an outsider. (I think trying to explain the rules to the reader if the main character were not an outsider would very, very difficult.)

Because of the life Moon had (he has been wandering the world ever since he was a child, always hiding, always ready to move on) trust is difficult for Moon. Very, very difficult. There is lots of action, lots of drama, but Moon’s insecurity about his place always pops up. He even says something like that to his new-found mother: if the Fell treated me well and told me I belonged with them, I would have.

The Fell are the enemy, and very, very different from his own people. Any physical similarities are misleading. It highlights how Moon felt in the first book and though he has learned to trust a little, he still has a long way to go.

The one thing that is clear to me at the end of this book is that Moon will never, ever be like a normal consort of his people. He can pretend for a few hours maybe, but in the end, he will always do something no other consort would ever do.

His Queen accepts that, which is just as well.

I don’t know which is my favorite scene in this book. There are so many good ones, I just don’t know. Nothing stands out for me right now.

Definitely worth reading, but after the first two in the series. I am pretty sure I will re-read this again. I will figure out then which scene I like best.

Friday Flash: Sacrifice

This Friday Flash is based on this picture from wiki commons:

He staggered forward and fell to his knees. The gray stone in front of him was silent and unmoving. Rough to the touch, when he pressed his fingers against it. He imagined he was tracing the soft, worn cotton of his mother’s dress.

Why had she done it? Even for her, the sacrifice was breathtaking.

“Son, she -”

“Don’t.”

The word hit the air like a shard of ice in boiling water, soon to disappear under his father’s gaze. Like his mother had disappeared.

He pushed himself to his feet. “This is your doing. Yours. Don’t give me any shit about her choices. You never let her have choices.”

Bitterness coated his words like ice in winter. He wished he taken her away from this a long time ago. Somewhere south, to a warmer, softer land. “I am leaving. I am not coming back.”

“Her sacrifice will be for nothing. She gave herself to the ceremony to make you head -”

“Her sacrifice was for your dreams. Not mine. May you have the best of it, Father.”

He was leaving. He couldn’t stay here any longer.

Friday Flash: Land Grave

So . . . yeah I had speeches on the brain today. Don’t ask me why.

Greetings, my people

I come to you today fresh from the land grave of my beloved daughter.

She has surpassed all expectations. She has left this world, but she took with her many hundreds of the enemy. Hundreds more of them may yet follow, as their frail mortal flesh deteriorate in hardship.

Her forward waters and winds caused such damage to the enemy as to make recovery a long, costly affair. Their homes are destroyed and most mortals in the vicinity are left without life’s essentials.

We do not intend to allow the enemy such time as they need to recover.

To this end we have sent our youngest son to their shores, to coat their world in ice and darkness.

For the first time in her life, our second daughter knows joy. The poison the enemy slips into our waters has crippled her limbs, but in the wake of our enemy’s destruction, she knows joy. As do your children.

Our people who are poisoned, we shall starve the enemy in turn. Our people who are dying, you shall be avenged! We will poison their earth, as they have poisoned our waters.

And we shall live! We will move forward as the true heirs of this world.

Our waters will rule.

We will rule.

On Reading Character Descriptions

So I was reading a book today – Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines. Good book. Funny. Odd. Has a type of magic that sounds ideal for a reader such as myself. LOL

Anyway. One of the characters, a sexy, hot dryad bodyguard, is vaguely described. I pictured her like a sexy female warrior, you know? Like Xena, the warrior princess. Buffy. Lara Croft. Catwoman. Other characters like that.

But when she was finally described, she was described as a fat woman. Well, so not what I was picturing! Okay, okay, so when someone tells the character is a sexy female warrior, I am really not picturing anyone overweight. That may not be PC, but it’s just not.

But that’s not the weird part. No. Jim Hines described this character like that – by size, I mean, not by hair or eyes or weapons or clothes or something else – maybe three times. Always at the perfect moments, of course, when the main character would most notice it (i. e. when he was out of his head with magic and didn’t remember who or what he was. Or wondering what he was doing with a woman in love with someone else.)

It’s just that each time Jim Hines described her, I was a little surprised because I had somehow forgotten it between descriptions and then when she was described again, it screwed with my mental image of her. It happened about three times. This forgetfulness might have been helped by large gaps between each reading. Even so.

It’s odd. That she is over weight isn’t important in the story – it doesn’t bother her, it doesn’t get in the way of anything, it isn’t important, it just enhances her own sex appeal. There is no drama, which is why Jim Hines doesn’t refer to it all that often. Plus, that probably helps the reader form their own mental picture of the character.

That’s why I was doing, twice in direct contrast to how she was actually described. That bothers me. Makes me wonder how many other characters I have done that to and never noticed.

Also, has anyone else done that? Someone please tell me they have and that I am not alone in this.

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