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Post by Rikku on Oct 2, 2011 6:41:34 GMT -5
There were forests once.
There are forests still, a few, in the wild places, the hidden places, the places Pakeha found no use for because they were too rocky or too wild or too far away. High in the mountains where the mists never leave there are still woods that have not felt the burn of fire, and in those live the patupaiarehe, the mistfolk, far more beautiful and strange than anything your mind can hold. In their quiet misty places live the patupaiarehe, and they play their games of strings and sticks, they play their flutes though there is no one there to hear them. In their distant mountains live all the patupaiarehe, save two.
One of them, Hinewai woman-of-light-mists, moved to Wellington recently - it's the wind city, you see, there's life to it, and enough strangeness to it that she thought perhaps she'd fit in there even though there was no mist to hide her. Hinewai was bored of not having a story; her sister Hine-pukohurangi had quite an interesting story involving love at first sight and great tragedy and rainbows, and Hinewai wandered into the human world expecting to fall in love fairly quickly, but it's been a whole month and she has yet to fall in anything, perhaps, she decides, because patupaiarehe are so sure-footed; what's needed is someone human, because from what she can tell after her month's stay there, if there's one thing that humans are good at it's being clumsy. Always tripping over their words, over staircases and into each other's arms. It's ridiculous. Plainly the advice of a human girl is necessary, so Hinewai kidnaps one. She's practical like that.
Except Brooke turns out to be a mass of trouble, on account of not being human at all. Half taniwha, in fact.
Taniwha are many things; they are monsters of a sort, they are guardian spirits, they are whopping big lizards. What they are not is particularly good at life coaching. At all.
... Particularly when, as it happens, they were more or less raised by the only other urban patupaiarehe, a man named Whai, quick and clever and charming and very, very banished. Whai runs the Hikurangi Cafe, which is a refuge of sorts for other iwi atua, others of the family of supernatural beings. It's good that there's a safe place there for them, because iwi atua aren't very good at dealing with anything invented after ... well, anything invented at all, in fact. They're old fashioned, as mythological beings tend to be. Still, they're adapting. Well. Sort of. Maybe.
There's a whole other world hiding in the corners of the known one, a world full of feather-haired strangers and half-glimpsed eyes that glint like paua and nails long and sharp as knives, a world of pale beautiful people that bleed in sunlight and eat their food raw and bloody and play their music in the mists. And there are the gods, of course, or there were, if you can call them gods - the seven strong sons of Sky and Earth, those who have power over the elements and all the things on the world. Except things are going horribly, horribly wrong. Impossible storms are raging, and the ground is shaking, and no one knows why, but Hinewai is determined to stop it. Well, Brooke is determined for her to stop it. Hinewai herself couldn't really care less if a bunch of silly humans get themselves drowned, but on these matters Brooke turns out to be surprisingly persuasive.
... She makes up songs. Snide songs. And she glares. Sarcastically. Seeking out the gods that no one has seen or communicated with in who-knows-how-long suddenly seems quite easy in comparison.
Throw in a charming but aimless drifter named Saint who a (long-dead) trickster finds far too easy to manipulate, and things get really interesting.
... Ayup. xD That's my story, as far as I can tell. I keep on feeling that I'm missing the point, which is a bit irritating. I already have 10k of this, incidentally, but seeing as I apparently keep on needing to start again and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite - Saint turning out to be the main character when he was just some extra that I threw in twenty thousand words in, for example, required quite drastic changes - that probably won't last very long in, so no worries.
*reads over* ... That's not an enticing teaser, it's an attempt at a plot summary! That probably indicates I don't really have a handle on what I'm doing. OH WELL. I can simplify it in a bit.
... Anyway, it's NaNo.
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Post by Rikku on Oct 17, 2011 16:31:05 GMT -5
Hm. So. This is ... interesting. It's weird, but I am, like, the least psyched for NaNo that I have ever been. xD; Maybe it's that the idea's not a new one, but I don't think it's that, I'm always psyched for NaNo regardless of what my idea happens to be. This time? I - I haven't even read anyone's threads. I haven't particularly wanted to. That's weird! Because that's one of my favourite parts, all the brilliant stories that everyone makes! (GUYS I AM SURE THEY ARE ALL BRILLIANT. D: AND YOU CAN DO IT BECAUSE YOU ARE AWESOME YES.) It's just. A wee bit odd. ... Hopefully I won't let my story down, here. xD; I realllly want this to be a good one. And so I don't make a post for nothin', let's have, hm ... want this rather lengthy stab I took a while ago at figuring out what a couple of mythological figures are doing now? 'course you do.
“I’m dying,” the captain gasped.
“You’re not dying,” said the stranger who knelt beside him, but he was. Tū could see that plainly, see that in every rattling breath and in the sweat on his face. It made him uncomfortable. Men dying in battle was one thing, a natural thing; but this lingering, this mix of injury and disease, this was wrong and foul. And right now, here in these strange muddy trenches, there was far too much of it.
“Don’t die, sir,” Tū said lightly, “I don’t know anyone else here.”
The captain gave a wheezing laugh that turned into a choke of pain. “Don’t think that’ll stop you, boy,” he said hoarsely. “They can just … point you at the enemy and … let you do your work. Where did you learn to fight like that?”
Tū stared at him blankly. “… My father,” he said eventually, because it seemed plausible.
“Suppose he fought in the land wars, did he? New Zealand had those, right? Bet he gave civilised men … one hell of a scare.” The captain laughed again, painfully. “You savages … always seem to. Glad you’re. On our side.”
Tū said, “Not a savage, sir,” patiently. It was stupid how these stupid white-faced men thought they were better than his people just because they lived a different way, stupid that they labelled them savage even when they were fighting besides each other – though in a companionable sort of way, at least, then. Though in his case, at least, it was true. Civilisation made him twitchy, made him itch to fight and kill and make things how they once had been, when wars were fought man to man, when your enemy died facing you, not face-down in the mud a hundred metres away with a bullet through his heart.
“Tell my family …” the captain started, and then he stopped and gasped his pain wordlessly up at the muddy grey sky.
“Your family?” prompted the stranger, gently. He wasn’t a soldier Tū had seen before, not someone in his unit, but that didn’t really seem to matter – when there was a comrade dying, you helped if you could, and if you couldn’t you kept them company until you no longer needed to. War forged fierce friendships between men, between strangers. There was no friendship like it. To Tū it was a thing of beauty, but then, to Tū war itself was a thing of beauty - normally. This war wasn’t. And the stranger certainly wasn’t - he was dressed in dark clothes, and had his cap pulled down over his face, but even in the dim light of the small spluttering fire Tū could see that there was something wrong about his shape and the way he moved. But it was war. Didn’t matter if the men beside you were crippled or ugly or broken or cruel, you fought beside them all the same, you held them while they died, you asked about their family.
“My daughter is … three,” the captain said, “or. Four. I don’t.” He started crying, half laughing as well.. “God, why don’t I remember? She was … she’s blond. I think. Yes. She’s blond.”
“Sounds like a charming girl,” said the stranger kindly, and glanced at Tū, who was sitting across the fire from them. Even without being able to see his face the message was plain: a kind of shared he-will-die, an acknowledgement that they both knew and that, strangers though they were, tonight they were partners in easing his way.
“She sounds beautiful,” Tū agreed. “And – your wife …?”
The captain flushed. “My sweetheart,” he mumbled, plainly embarrassed. As though any of that had any importance now. “We were … Her father doesn’t approve of me, but once I had a decent amount of money we were going to …” Another painful laugh. “Guess we never will now.”
“She must be very brave,” Tū said. “To manage that.”
“Oh yes. Not beautiful, not my Lucy, not to most men, anyhow, but - but oh is she brave. She … oh, God, I’ll never …”
Tū lifted the billy off the sad little fire. “Want some tea, sir?”
“Don’t think I can … drink.”
Tū glanced at the stranger, who nodded sadly. Tū sighed and then laughed. “I’d leave it by your head so you could smell it, sir,” he said, “because I know how you Pakeha love your tea, but I think they stopped giving us real tea several months ago. This is mud and spit and hope, I’d say.”
The captain struggled to lift his head in order to stare at Tū curiously. “Pakeha?”
“Englishmen, I meant.”
“Ah.” He was shaking from the effort of holding up his head. The stranger shifted his arm so the captain was more fully supported, then resumed smoothing the captain’s sweat-soaked hair back from his face with his hand, like he’d been doing for most of the conversation. Tū was glad the stranger was there to do that. It seemed to make the captain feel better, but it wouldn’t have occurred to Tū.
To be honest, Tū was mostly just good at fighting things.
The captain let his head loll back, and his eyes fluttered close. “Do you have family, boy?”
Tū blinked. “… Just brothers, sir.”
“Oh?”
Tū scowled into the fire just thinking of them. In his anger and the firelight his face almost seemed, for a moment, red. “Six of them.” Seven if you counted Ruaumoko, but he was still just a baby, and anyway he was sleeping under the earth.
The captain gave a startled laugh. “Ah. So this was running away, was it?”
Tū paused. It was, in a way. He doubted his brothers would ever leave New Zealand, and he could see why – he felt weak, here, even he, and war was a universal thing. He should’ve been able to be powerful here, but … it wasn’t his home. And no one worshipped him here, of course, but no one had worshipped him in his home land either, not for a long time now, so all there was to do was squabble with his brothers. Even this wretched war was better than that. “Yes.”
“Thought so. You seemed. Young.”
“Not as young as all that, sir.” Centuries older than you, sir.
“Are they fighting here?” By which he meant: Are they fighting here, or are they already dead? It was a polite way of asking, though.
“No.”
The captain frowned a little at that. Because that was strange, because everyone who could fight did fight right now. But he said, “Good. That’s good. They’ll be there waiting for you when you go home, eh?”
“God I hope not,” Tū said, and right then he meant it.
The captain laughed. “These things seem smaller when you’re dying, boy. Treasure your family. You only … get one.”
The stranger stroked back the captain’s hair and smiled. “Those’re wise words, I’d say,” he remarked.
“My family’s no business of yours,” snapped Tū, and then regretted it. Friends of the battlefield. And he could use friends right now, in all honesty, use the companionship of humans even if they were silly fragile things that were far, far too easy to kill. “… Sorry. We just … don’t get along. I mean, my oldest brother …” Tane. “He’s a prick. Thinks he’s better than everyone else just because he …” He paused. How to explain this in terms a human wouldn’t find strange? “Got the most land. And my other brothers aren’t any better. My little brother’s just a baby, it’s a pain, and – Rongo wants to work in a vineyard. What kind of job is that for a … for someone in my family?”
“Working the land’s respectable,” the captain murmured. He’d gone vague. “Better than feeding it, anyway. We spill our blood in it and our bones and all it gives us is mud … so much … tired. I’m. There’s. It hurts … Lucy it hurts, I …”
The stranger tilted his head, an odd motion. “Hush now,” he said gently, curling his hand comfortingly around the captain’s shoulder, stroking his neck. Also not something that would’ve occurred to Tū.
The captain started to cough, harsh ragged coughs; the blood splattered the too-pale skin around his mouth with red. Then he died. Tū looked away, and busied himself lighting a cigarette.
The captain had been right, in a way - Tū was young. In a way he was every young man who’d been fooled into thinking war was glorious. He was every young man who’d felt the fierce battle rage rise up inside of him, the rage to protect or control, to fight; he was every young man who’d fought and died or seen friends die, and he was fine with that. He’d been fine with that. Because there was a glory and an honesty and a braveness to it.
But there was no role for him here. And this wasn’t his home. Things had changed, and he hadn’t changed with them, and for the first time he wasn’t just the young men that fought and killed and laughed with battle-glee, he was the scared ones, he was the ones that wanted so desperately to live, he was the ones that cowered and cried or managed not to cry, he was the ones that missed their families, that wanted nothing except to be home. For the first time he knew fear, felt the thick muddy taste of it on his tongue, felt the panic clenching his hands into fists and his heart into a fast juddery lump of terror.
He hated it. When he hated things he killed them, but this was too big to kill.
He didn’t like being here, here in the mud where the noise never stopped and the killing never stopped and the dying. Never. Stopped. There had been rules, before, ways of going about it, but the rules had started to change as soon as the white men came with their guns; he’d fought with his people, and it was a thing of beauty, so many tribes working against one enemy. That hadn’t happened on such a scale before. But his people had stopped fighting, had started to die, slowly but surely, practically eradicating themselves, Māori people marrying pakeha people so their children would be less Māori, and he hated that, hated that they were losing, so he came here, came to where the war was.
But he didn’t want to be here, not anymore, here in the mud and the noise, here in the roar of the guns.
He didn’t want to die here, weakened and alone in a country he didn’t belong to.
He pulled on his cigarette, and exhaled, and stared into the fire. The stranger said, “Those’ll kill you, Tū.”
Tū started and stared at him. What – how had – “How the hell do you know my name?” he snarled, dropping the cigarette into the mud, reaching for the knife at his side. Knives he understood. You cut people with them. It was simple, and Tū liked simple.
“I’m serious,” the stranger said, in an amused sarcastic drawl that sounded quite different from the voice he’d had before. “They really do, you know! The lovely thing is that no one’s figured it out yet. It’s a disease, really, a disease they love and crave and go back to even as it chokes their lungs with smoke and tar.” He stretched a little and sighed contentedly, and the dead thing that had been the captain slipped partly off him and into the mud. He didn’t seem to notice. “Oh, it’s lovely.”
A disease, really. Tū knew only one person who spoke of diseases in the fond way that normal people – mortal people – spoke about kittens or springtime or loved ones. “Whiro,” he said.
Whiro said, lazily, “The one and only,” then laughed to himself.
Tū thought of long fingers stroking pale skin. “… You killed him. The captain.”
Whiro gave a patient sigh. “Mud killed the captain, dear foolish brother,” he said, “mud and all the bullet holes in him, of course. And too much cold, and too little food.” He smiled, and it was Whiro’s smile, right enough – Whiro could look like whatever he wanted, whoever he wanted, but he never smiled like real people did, never even showed teeth, just twisted his lips into something mocking and laughing and cruel. “I helped it along a little, that’s all.”
Tū stared into the fire. “… I quite liked him. He made jokes.”
“Well,” said Whiro. “As humans would say, he’s gone to a better place.” He looked around. “Which generally I’d laugh at, but, well. Wouldn’t be hard for anywhere to be better than here.” He patted the ground, fondly. “Ever so much death. It’s horrible, really.”
Tū stood up and lunged at him, leapt across the fire; it was surprising enough, apparently, that it took Whiro off-guard, and Tū took advantage of that to punch him hard in the face, and then in the stomach, and then to slam him against the ground, hoping the back of his head would crack on the cold earth, though it was a vain hope. The sons of earth and sky could hurt each other, they were about the only things that could hurt each other, nothing else could wound them, really; and maybe they could even kill each other, but it would be hard, very hard.
Whiro’s surprise only lasted for a moment, and then he wriggled like the reptile he was, wriggled free; was on top of Tū somehow, suddenly, was winning somehow. He’d always been like that. Tū was the best of them in a fair fight, but Whiro was a wriggler, Whiro was a slow killer. He delighted in the game of it.
“You’re not welcome here,” Tū hissed. “This is my place and I won’t have you here. Get out. Go home.”
“It’s not yours,” Whiro said, strangling him a little – it wouldn’t kill him, certainly, so maybe it was to try and shut him up. “Don’t be a selfish prat, it’s not anyone’s!”
Tū choked out, “Then why are you here—” and, before Whiro could answer, kneed him, hard, hard enough for Tū to shove him off and get another punch in. “What the hell are you doing here!” he said, standing.
“For your information, I like it here,” Whiro said, almost sulkily, getting into a kneeling position. He didn’t stand up, though. Maybe he felt dignified enough even kneeling in the dirt. Whiro was … difficult to unsettle, and all but impossible to embarrass. “There’s dirt and mud and anger. I’m death, in case you’d forgotten, brother dear, and I’m disease, and war and disease go together hand in hand like happy young children.” He gave Tū a considering look. “You might have forgotten, I suppose, might’ve forgotten all the times our paths have crossed over the years. Has pretending to be human made you as stupid as they are?”
“No,” said Tū. “I’m not stupid, so you won’t fool me that easy.” He kicked Whiro, hard, and then again, enjoying the simplicity of it, the clear goals. This? Causing pain? This he was good at. This was easy. “Our paths have crossed but mostly by accident. You followed me here. Why?”
“None of your beeswax,” Whiro sing-songed, smiling his thin smile. Whiro had, apparently, taken to all the irritating little idioms and quirks and mannerisms of English like a bird to flying. Of course he had.
“It’s your business if I gut you,” said Tū, conversationally. “It’d be hard, but I’m up for trying. Will it be your business when I’ve split your belly open and your life is oozing out into the mud?” He kicked him again. “Tell me, brother, will it be your business then?”
“You’ve gotten cruel,” Whiro said. “Crueller.”
“Everyone has. It’s that kind of place. Tell me! Tell me or—”
“I was worried,” said Whiro testily, standing up, making a show of brushing mud off his clothes – not that it helped. “You idiot. And I’m thinking better of it already, believe you me. If this is the sort of thanks I get … Well. And here was me thinking you remembered politeness.”
“War’s not polite. What do you mean, worried?” Tū couldn’t keep the suspicion from his tone, so he didn’t even try. But mostly he was just confused. Because this was confusing, even more so than all the strange new ways of war-making, the guns and fires and machines and the choking green gas that killed so foully. Those had obvious motivations: to kill things, to hurt. Whiro normally had obvious motivations like that. This was … really bloody disconcerting. “What would I do to worry you?”
“Haring off on your own like that!” said Whiro, crossing his arms and glaring. “Like a prize idiot. This isn’t our country, Tū, you’re not safe here.”
Tū drew himself up. “No one is.”
Whiro laughed his sarcastic, mocking little laugh. “Oh, I see,” he said, clapping his hands together. “You think you’re one of them! You think that by struggling in the dirt like a worm, writhing in all the fear and the pain – you think it makes it better for them, somehow, because you’re all suffering together. Newsflash: they don’t notice you. They don’t know you, they don’t know what you are, if they did they wouldn’t give a darn. This is no place to be alone!”
Tū snorted. “I’m war,” he said, haughty. “I am Tū. I am Tū-ka-nguha the fierce fighter. I am Tū-kai-taua who destroys armies. I think I can manage.”
Whiro gave a longsuffering, brotherly sort of sigh, and went back to sit by the fire, muttering, “Oh, perfect,” when he saw it had gone out. He started trying to stir it back to life. Tū, almost automatically, started to help. That was what you did in war. You all worked together.
The fire sparked. Whiro sat back looking self-satisfied, and said, conversationally, “You are death itself with a mere in your hand, brother, I’ll not deny that. Even with your bare hands you could take down an army, I imagine, if you felt so inclined. But Tū, dear silly Tū, you fail to grasp …” He sighed. “Mm. How to put this?”
“You could just shut up, instead,” Tū suggested.
“No, no. That won’t do. How to … Hm. You see, dearest and most of all angriest of brothers, it doesn’t matter how skilled you are at dancing war dances that can strike terror into the heart of your foe. If they drop a bomb on you they’ll never even need to see you, and wonderfully useful your dances are then.”
Tū couldn’t help the way he tensed at that. He stared at the fire, frowning. It was red, the fire, red like war and blood and Tū himself. It was, though he hated it, one of the things they shared, too – Whiro was not all that far from whero, and whero meant red.
“… A bomb,” he said, and he managed, with an effort, to sound, if not friendly, then at least not like he wanted to jump over the fire and rip Whiro’s throat out. “Do you think that’d kill one of us?”
Whiro tapped his hand against his thigh thoughtfully. “… I really haven’t the faintest,” he admitted, laughing. “I ought to. But – regardless. I’d rather you didn’t find that out all alone, far from home, among strangers.” He pursed his lips. “It’d set a bad sort of precedent.”
Tū laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “like it’d be better to die with a brother you hate.”
Whiro smiled. “That’s the way of war, is it not?” He thumped his chest. “It unites us. For the common cause. Anyhow,” he added, leaning back and lying down, his head pillowed on the captain’s corpse, “it’ll be interesting to see if you can die, don’t you think? From a scientific sort of standpoint. And now I’ll be here to remind you that, if you do happen to die horribly, it’ll add to my already staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of death. I’m sure that’s a great comfort.”
“Wonderful.”
“And there are so many fascinating diseases here. Really, it would’ve pained me to keep away. And this way I don’t have to try and live with the fact that a brother of mine is being an idiot in some far-away country, alone, and miserable, and,” he shot Tū a thin-lipped smile, “without me there to annoy him. So.” He yawned. “Do be a dear and wake me when the killing happens, won’t you?”
Tū said, “I will,” and took out another cigarette. He had a feeling they’d be here for a while.
They’d survive, at least. That was more than could be said for most of the men here. For most men at all.
I love Whiro faaaar too much. xD And these - these two are not terribly at all like how they ought to be, I imagine, but I'm doing The Best I Can, which is something.
And that's Tū, red-faced god of war. <3 All his siblings rather hate him 'cos he was an angry jerk to them at the beginning of the world - he set the patterns for mankind to follow, like, by eating the children of Rongo and Haumia (also by eating them, by doing that; they hid from Tawhiri-of-the-wind's fury by burrowing into the ground, turning into kumara and taro and fernroot and such, and then he, yeah) and hunting Tangaroa's children and cutting down Tane's children to use for things and whatnot. Tū needs some work, obviously, before his viewpoint's distinctive enough for me to like it, but even if he doesn't get there I imagine he'll be quite important - suggesting war, perhaps, between the iwi atua and those silly little humans, because yay, conflict. Suggesting it to Tawhiri, perhaps, who I really do need to work on. >.> Seeing as Wellington's the bloody wind city and all.
No idea where Whiro is or what he's doing during this here book, but I love him all the same. xD;
I played with the idea of Tū being a member of a gang in the modern-day, but then it occurred to me that he ought to play rugby, instead. Um. Not sure what I'll do with that, but it amuses me. |
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Gah, this is just your summary and it sounds like a story of it's own, all haunting and mysterious and magical and--
