Post by Zylaa on Oct 1, 2014 21:35:47 GMT -5
I'm cheating a bit this year--I have almost 800 words of this story written. But I won't count those in the 50,000-word total.
So begins the story of an as-yet-unnamed protagonist, out for revenge on the clan who murdered her family. This is going to be much more limited in scope than my last few NaNos--no world-spanning, epic conflict, just some nice personal vengeance. There will be a cursed city, and lots of songs and myths, and magical creatures, and a central moraillegiance.
Once I have actual names for my two main characters, I'll post a plot summary and character descriptions. It will kind of lose the effect if I call them "Protagonist one" and "Protagonist two."
I hate winter almost as much as I hate the Brangeos.
They have a lot of similarities—constant threat to my life when in proximity of, indifferent to the sufferings of others, heartless.
(That last one is a metaphor. The Brangeos must have hearts, because otherwise, the powdered Ash Maiden leaf would not have worked on Elgar Brangeos when I put it in his soup. Ash Maiden affects the heart. But until I watched him turn purple, convulse, and die, I did harbor some doubts about whether or not the Brangeos have hearts. I had certainly seen no other evidence for it.)
I have to go south during winter, as south as I can without hitting the cities that line the southern border of Nortak. In cities, people must buy food, and people must have money to buy food, and nobody with good intentions and a good heart will pay an unclanned.
Deer do not care if I am unclanned. My hounds do not care if I am unclanned.
My hounds don’t mind the winter. They grow a winter coat of fur over their scaly-skinned faces, so they have no skin to worry about. Their two horns, front-facing, slightly longer than a handspan, do get awfully cold, but I don’t think they can feel it.
I know how to cover my skin, of course, and how to set up a shelter that keeps in body heat, and all the basics that each child of the northern clans must learn as she learns to dress. But it is one thing to go out in the winter knowing that at the end of the day, you can strip off your furs and boots and gloves around the fires of the Great Hall, and another thing entirely to know that at the end of the day, you will have only as big a fire as you personally care to tend, and at night, only a huddle of hounds for warmth.
The hounds try, bless them. They bring me sticks for the fire, although they insist we play fetch or tug-of-war with them first. During the first few months out here, when I would still sometimes give in to the hurt and lie down, wishing I could just cry my cut soul out of my body and be done, Loosefoot and Snowdrop would catch live squirrels and rabbits for me. They’d look at me so hopefully, eyes round, tongues lolling out of fanged mouths, that I always got up and chased the stunned little creatures. I even caught a few.
I think the hounds miss the old tribe too, and the feasts, and the parties. But I’m not sure. Even with Lenokai’s gift, there are some things about each other we can’t understand. Despite what some of the stories say, we gifted don’t know what it’s like to have the hearing of a hound, or the smell of a hound, and definitely not the mind of a hound. Oh, I can rattle off the facts, like how a hound can smell the difference between a weak elk and a sick elk two days after the elk have passed. But I’ll never experience it. It’s probably the same for the hounds. “Our human keeps string of beads carefully wrapped in fur in her pouch. Every time she looks at those beads, she is sad. Our human needs many rabbits to cheer up after this.”
They have a lot of similarities—constant threat to my life when in proximity of, indifferent to the sufferings of others, heartless.
(That last one is a metaphor. The Brangeos must have hearts, because otherwise, the powdered Ash Maiden leaf would not have worked on Elgar Brangeos when I put it in his soup. Ash Maiden affects the heart. But until I watched him turn purple, convulse, and die, I did harbor some doubts about whether or not the Brangeos have hearts. I had certainly seen no other evidence for it.)
I have to go south during winter, as south as I can without hitting the cities that line the southern border of Nortak. In cities, people must buy food, and people must have money to buy food, and nobody with good intentions and a good heart will pay an unclanned.
Deer do not care if I am unclanned. My hounds do not care if I am unclanned.
My hounds don’t mind the winter. They grow a winter coat of fur over their scaly-skinned faces, so they have no skin to worry about. Their two horns, front-facing, slightly longer than a handspan, do get awfully cold, but I don’t think they can feel it.
I know how to cover my skin, of course, and how to set up a shelter that keeps in body heat, and all the basics that each child of the northern clans must learn as she learns to dress. But it is one thing to go out in the winter knowing that at the end of the day, you can strip off your furs and boots and gloves around the fires of the Great Hall, and another thing entirely to know that at the end of the day, you will have only as big a fire as you personally care to tend, and at night, only a huddle of hounds for warmth.
The hounds try, bless them. They bring me sticks for the fire, although they insist we play fetch or tug-of-war with them first. During the first few months out here, when I would still sometimes give in to the hurt and lie down, wishing I could just cry my cut soul out of my body and be done, Loosefoot and Snowdrop would catch live squirrels and rabbits for me. They’d look at me so hopefully, eyes round, tongues lolling out of fanged mouths, that I always got up and chased the stunned little creatures. I even caught a few.
I think the hounds miss the old tribe too, and the feasts, and the parties. But I’m not sure. Even with Lenokai’s gift, there are some things about each other we can’t understand. Despite what some of the stories say, we gifted don’t know what it’s like to have the hearing of a hound, or the smell of a hound, and definitely not the mind of a hound. Oh, I can rattle off the facts, like how a hound can smell the difference between a weak elk and a sick elk two days after the elk have passed. But I’ll never experience it. It’s probably the same for the hounds. “Our human keeps string of beads carefully wrapped in fur in her pouch. Every time she looks at those beads, she is sad. Our human needs many rabbits to cheer up after this.”
So begins the story of an as-yet-unnamed protagonist, out for revenge on the clan who murdered her family. This is going to be much more limited in scope than my last few NaNos--no world-spanning, epic conflict, just some nice personal vengeance. There will be a cursed city, and lots of songs and myths, and magical creatures, and a central moraillegiance.
Once I have actual names for my two main characters, I'll post a plot summary and character descriptions. It will kind of lose the effect if I call them "Protagonist one" and "Protagonist two."
