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Title: Earth
’Verse/characters: Wild Roses, Ulysse Manannan Sabaey
Prompt: 050 "Spade"
Word Count: 482
Rating: . . erm. Dead body. No blood left. PG-13?
Notes: this will be continued. Fairly major plot point of the Bastards' War, however--please do not read if you're spoiler shy.
Ulysse did not like the land--he had not, for a very long time, now. Land was too still, too likely to betray one in ways water and the sea would not.
The sea was a bitch, too, but a known bitch, and he knew the ways she'd try to betray him. Not so land.
His callouses were shaped wrong for this task, the spade in his hands an unfamiliar, uncomfortable thing. But then, this was an unfamiliar, uncomfortable task, a quiet desecration of something not yet remembered.
The next double-handful of dirt tossed out of the hole revealed a ringed hand, and he dropped the spade at the edge of the hole, knelt down on one begrimed knee to poke at the hand.
Much as he might like to wish it otherwise, he knew that hand, those rings. Even beginning to decompose, skin gray and clammy, the back of the hand still showed the scars of a fight with a man-killer wyvern, centuries before, teeth scoring across a sword barely raised in time to protect face. A thumb-ring of deep-engraved gold, the cuts now with dirt worn in, instead of faintly scented tallow, and a plain wedding band that had never been taken off since the death of the last Queen. Even with two other marriages between Brighid and--
Ulysses sighed, dug a little deeper in hated earth to reveal the King his father's face, gray and cold as his sword hand.
"Well, father," he said softly, "What desecration would you prefer? For your children to parade before your unmarked grave, to step into this hole and see your face? Or for me to steal your lasting rings and whatever else your killer left you, and so to show you dead?"
He would be lighting candles tonight, anyway. For his father, for his king, for the evil he himself had done by digging up a dead man's body after its burial.
So after a long moment, waiting to see if his father's ghost lingered, he reached down and pulled the rings away, briefly thankful that death had thinned the fingers enough that cutting them off wasn't necessary. Further digging revealed that the killer had not even bothered to take the king's sword-belt and neck-torc, so Ulysse finished the task, bundling the regalia in his own discarded coat.
He reburied his father much faster than he'd dug the man up, the loosened earth rising in small puffs of dust as he shoved it back.
Standing, he shoved the spade in blade-deep at the head of the unmarked grave--there would be a tree, later, and he would give his father's rings back there--and turned away, pulling on the threads of his grandfather’s Trick.
"In the absence of the King," he called calmly, as the Court drew away from the filthy man appearing in its midst, "I call the royal family home."
’Verse/characters: Wild Roses, Ulysse Manannan Sabaey
Prompt: 050 "Spade"
Word Count: 482
Rating: . . erm. Dead body. No blood left. PG-13?
Notes: this will be continued. Fairly major plot point of the Bastards' War, however--please do not read if you're spoiler shy.
Ulysse did not like the land--he had not, for a very long time, now. Land was too still, too likely to betray one in ways water and the sea would not.
The sea was a bitch, too, but a known bitch, and he knew the ways she'd try to betray him. Not so land.
His callouses were shaped wrong for this task, the spade in his hands an unfamiliar, uncomfortable thing. But then, this was an unfamiliar, uncomfortable task, a quiet desecration of something not yet remembered.
The next double-handful of dirt tossed out of the hole revealed a ringed hand, and he dropped the spade at the edge of the hole, knelt down on one begrimed knee to poke at the hand.
Much as he might like to wish it otherwise, he knew that hand, those rings. Even beginning to decompose, skin gray and clammy, the back of the hand still showed the scars of a fight with a man-killer wyvern, centuries before, teeth scoring across a sword barely raised in time to protect face. A thumb-ring of deep-engraved gold, the cuts now with dirt worn in, instead of faintly scented tallow, and a plain wedding band that had never been taken off since the death of the last Queen. Even with two other marriages between Brighid and--
Ulysses sighed, dug a little deeper in hated earth to reveal the King his father's face, gray and cold as his sword hand.
"Well, father," he said softly, "What desecration would you prefer? For your children to parade before your unmarked grave, to step into this hole and see your face? Or for me to steal your lasting rings and whatever else your killer left you, and so to show you dead?"
He would be lighting candles tonight, anyway. For his father, for his king, for the evil he himself had done by digging up a dead man's body after its burial.
So after a long moment, waiting to see if his father's ghost lingered, he reached down and pulled the rings away, briefly thankful that death had thinned the fingers enough that cutting them off wasn't necessary. Further digging revealed that the killer had not even bothered to take the king's sword-belt and neck-torc, so Ulysse finished the task, bundling the regalia in his own discarded coat.
He reburied his father much faster than he'd dug the man up, the loosened earth rising in small puffs of dust as he shoved it back.
Standing, he shoved the spade in blade-deep at the head of the unmarked grave--there would be a tree, later, and he would give his father's rings back there--and turned away, pulling on the threads of his grandfather’s Trick.
"In the absence of the King," he called calmly, as the Court drew away from the filthy man appearing in its midst, "I call the royal family home."
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 06:11 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 06:13 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 06:40 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 10:53 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 05:34 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 05:57 am (UTC)From:I said it was fey and sidewise and I quite liked it.
I didn't think I'd have to mention to underlucius how inventive and varied the characters are, along with the way the pieces show the characters using words. Not many writers have so wide a grasp of what I think of as varied *voices*.
Nice, nice stuff.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 03:41 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 05:43 pm (UTC)From:...and yet you wonder why this owns my brain, even incrementally?
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Date: 2005-11-11 06:09 pm (UTC)From:Well, yes.