Sneak Peek: Unnamed Fantasy Story

Greetings!  Well, after the exhausting chaos of the festive period and New Year, some form of normality reasserts itself.  I've been back to writing since the second (admitedly, only two days) but it's been a joy returning to the keyboard.

However, it's not Constant.  Don't worry! Constant hadn't been abandonned.  I'm still working on the outline for the next chapter (and beyond) and trying to tame and organise the many ideas and scenes I want to squeeze into the remaining chapters.

To be honest, there was a bit of fear at the idea of picking up the pen again.  Last year, everything just kind of fell apart.  There were reasons, but I was keen to avoid it happening again, and though the resting time was great, a certain amount of... anxiety? fear? laziness? accrues and it becomes difficult to start again.  I'm a terrible procrastinator, and it's always possible to find other things to do and defer writing - even though it's something I really enjoy doing!  But it's almost always an effort - more of an effort than, say, sinking into the sofa for an episode of... anything, really.

(Though not always; some scenes just seem to flow so easily and naturally, and a thousand or two words flows like water.  A lucky spot of inspiration? An intriguing scene? A good mood? Who knows why. But the scenes with Chad were generally easy to write, for example, as was Ivy.)

This year, however, as a palate cleanser, I've decided to try my hand at something a little different.  In this case, a... commissioned work?  Though that's a bit of a misnomer, as I decided to try out the Patreon level thing, and asked a few of the higher contributors if they had any ideas they'd like to see developed.  More of a collaboration, I suppose.

What I wanted was to try my hand at something shorter, to see if I could actually write to completion a single short story, a full narrative in around 5,000 to 10,000 words (or so).  Constant is... long, and I wanted some practice at restraint.

Please find below an extract from the work in progress.  It's in the Fantasy genre (something else I wanted to try my hand at), with a bit of GoT or Dune flavouring.  As always with a Sneak Peak, it's all in a very early stage, with names and such especially liable to change.

Let me know what you think!  

***

This Will Be The Title

(“Unnamed Fantasy Short Story”)

By Fakeminsk

(fakeminsk@gmail.com)

(patreon.com/fakeminsk)

Chapter One: The Old King’s Death

News of the old king’s death swiftly spread across the land.

In the gambling dens and weather-battered taverns of Fishtown, rough men cashed in bets on the monarch’s demise. In the halls of the Great Houses, powerful lords plotted and prepared for war. The so-called barbarian lords of the Northern Reaches summoned councillors to their wind-battered longhouses to determine if the death of this weak monarch was an opportunity to exploit, or whether his likely replacement a greater threat. And in the glimmering darkness of the candlelit Obsidian Halls, the veiled virgins of the Twilight Lady began the sonorous week-long dirge that would carry the dead king to the afterlife.

But it was to the halls of the capitol that the news spread fastest, where the fashionable ladies of the court stood, as still and sculpted as ornate columns, in the opulent chambers of power. Only a year ago—but no, not even a year, not so long as that—fashion had followed the example of Princess Elowen and her unbridled spirit: long hair fell freely and the most daring women even abandoned dresses and skirts in favour of clothes in the style of the princess’s riding breeches and masculine shirts. But with her tragic death—an inevitability, some whispered (though not so quietly as one might think) of the father’s failure to restrain his daughter—the liberated fashion died, as did the briefly deviant habit of women in trousers.

Her mother, the young Queen Kalia favoured dresses, in the style of her homeland across the Stardrop Seas, elegant and free-flowing styles that flattered her boyish figure, tight in the waist but fluttering and shimmering like butterfly wings as she flew and danced through the halls and chambers of Court. Briefly, following her daughter’s death, the parties became ever more lavish and vibrant and wild, the desperate reaching for life that follows death. But it was in her ever-more tightly braided hair and the ever-darkening clothes she wore that her grief expressed itself, the wasting grief that eventually consumed her a short six months later.

With both Princess and Queen gone, who to dictate the female fashions of Court? Strong-willed, striking yet distant, it was the Lady Teneira of House Malveil who dominated. During the funeral of the Queen, some doubt remained as to whose influence would reign supreme, as the ladies of the great houses vied, subtly yet fiercely, for dominance, through the cunning cut of a veil, the pretty turn of an ankle, the drop and colour and texture of a dress.

All doubts were firmly dispelled by the Festival of the Sisters the following week. Teneira’s main rival, the Lady Timora, had yet to show her face following her debasement that evening.

Gone, therefore, the dangerous liberation of the Princess’s masculine attire! Yet her preference in footwear endured, in the form of delicately heeled shoes and boots, no longer designed for locking into stirrups but rather for showcasing the skilful sway of the woman’s slow walk. (Or perhaps, some whispered, always men, for locking a woman’s thighs around her lovers’ torso, for the aristocratic sluts of the Court to grip behind their back as they knelt and serviced their men.)  The slight and slender heels were styled after the shoes and boots of the debauched Southern kingdoms. That the lucrative trading route to these land were under House Malveil’s exclusive control was immaterial, as was the fact that Lady Malveil had long ago mastered the fashions and feminine skills of those lands that she brought to the Court—a blessing brought on by her marriage several years ago to Quinos Jahan, her Southern King and husband.

Gone, too, the loose and flowing dresses of the Queen, so well suited to wild dances and rapid walks along gardens and courtyards and gleeful chases through sun-dappled meadows.  Instead, it was the memory of her grief that endured. The tight weave of her hair and the dark, heavy fabrics she wore at the end, inspired the fierce constriction of the fashions that followed. Under Lady Teneira’s knowing smirk and baleful eyes, crushingly restrictive dresses once again seized the women in their silken hold, restricting them to the most mincing gaits as they hobbled in their towering shoes. Weighed down by jewellery, the heavy dangling earrings and gilt chain belts, decorated most meticulously with cosmetics, breathless in the tight grip of corsetry, the ladies of the Court became like finely sculpted figurines, poised, positioned and painted, shaped into the exquisite form that the Lady Teneira presented so naturally.

And so when the news of the old King’s death reach Lady Aubriella, it was not shock and horror alone that left her breathless.

“My lady?” Her handmaiden, the always attentive Maya, held Aubriella by the elbow. Her eyes sparkled with mirth. As a servant, she was dressed far less severely, and moved with enviable freedom.

Together, they withdrew to one of the secluded alcoves of the Whispering Gallery. The curved walls were carved with reliefs of the great figures of the past: Talgart Atrebar, the Brave, who drove off the heathen barbarians who once skulked along the shores of the Aelgis River that now ran beneath the capitol; Aelasandra Lannorin, the Pure, whose divine visions brought the Sisters; Alaric McAlasdair, the Ravenshield who seized the North.

In passing the great relief of the kingdom’s founding, Lady Abriella’s hand, as always, reached out to touch the figure of the Ravenshield. Her slender fingers lingered over the bearded, fierce figure of Alaric. She felt the carved detail of the hero’s strong features, the wide jaw and clenched muscles. He held his massive axe, Kral, raised in defiance as he held the line, alone, against the massed enemy hordes of the North.

Aubriella sighed, and then grimaced, her full, painted lips forming a worried pout. The Whispering Gallery was named for the way sound travelled along the curved walls, and people at opposite ends of the expansive chamber could hear each other’s voice. The sound of her complain was undignified; good girls didn’t sigh, unless with pleasure, or complain, unless with desire; it wouldn’t do for other courtiers to hear.

Fortunately, the main vaulting chamber was largely empty, though certainly the alcoves were not. The Whispering Gallery was also named after courtiers’ tendency to use its many private nooks—from which sound most certainly did not travel—to whisper and plot in private. More nobles fell to whispered plans formed in the alcoves of the Gallery in a single year, it was said, than in a century of open combat.

With her handmaiden holding her elbow, she retreated towards the nearest alcove. Aubriella glided rather than walked, her many months of training and punishment smoothing—reshaping—her stride into one that was slow and sinuous; though the tightness of her dress, coiled in shimmering swaths of fabric down to her calves without vent or slit, allowed only the daintiest of steps. Every move appeared affected and deliberate, somehow both coquettish and demure. A lady, at least under current fashion, never rushed, even if she wanted to.

Fortunately, the nearest alcove was empty, quiet and dark, one of many quiet recesses that lined the central gallery. Each was dedicated to a different Sister; or to the Twilight Lady in one of her three incarnations; or to one of the Old Gods, or the New. It was by chance that Aubriella took refuge under the auspices of the Sister of Submission, Untera.

Yet even there, despite the quiet and seclusion, she knew better than to give in to the grief and anger and fear that threatened to overwhelm. As a lady she must always present her best self; as a woman it was a duty—an honour, even—to beautify the halls of the Court; as a girl she should know her place and obey; and as the youngest and last unmarried child of House Malveil she carried the reputation of her adopted family on her pretty shoulders.

Such unworthy shoulders, she was so often reminded; a shame to the family; a clumsy, inelegant fool, a stupid girl, weak and silly, and so very stubborn and slow in learning the finer skills of feminine aristocracy.

“My lady?”

And there was Maya, of course.  Without her handmaiden, Aubriella knew she would be lost. Maya, so quick to spot any infractions; Maya, so eager to report her failings to House Mistress Castigen. Maya, who delighted in dressing her Lady, in pulling corset lacing savagely tight and then slowly and sensuously sliding stockings up her slender legs before attaching them tautly to the dangling tabs. But also Maya who deftly deflected the most inappropriate insinuations (or outright lewdness, or aggressive advances) of the men and young courtiers, who guided her unfailingly through the labyrinthian back halls of the great old palace, and who helped the inexperienced Aubriella manoeuvre the intrigues of court.

“I need—” To breathe, Aubriella thought, but bound tightly in her corset this was impossible. To sit, to relieve the agony of burning calves and instep, but though the alcove was generously lined with padded seats, this too was impossible. A lady—especially one under Castigen’s tutelage—did not sit. Rather the opposite: it was an indicator of dignity and class, of aristocratic demeanour, to bear the difficulties of feminine fashions to their most extreme. The greatest ladies of the Court were those who wore their corset the tightest, who walked with confidence in the most precarious of shoes. They did not sit, unless at the bequest of a man or in the privacy of their own chambers.

Aubriella’s hands fluttered at her side for a moment. She instinctively reached for the litany of submission, the one first taught to her only a short six months ago. It was easy to recall: the words were inscribed in gilt letting in gracefully curving letters in the heavy bronze that framed the mirror mounted on the wall of the alcove. Untera, Sister of Submission, in her incarnation of meekness; this was her alcove, and she invited its occupants to gaze upon themselves and find her spirit within.

And in the mirror, Aubriella saw....