Changeling fiction (short)

I'm currently in a NWoD Changeling game, which I am, in a word, loving. I've been playing with the GM and two of the players for a few years, now, and they are among my favorite people -- the excellent sort of gamers who are funny and horrifying and make me insanely jealous with their creativity on a regular basis. Added to this are two players (a couple) who are new to the group and seem to be fitting right in on all counts.

In any case, this is the sort of group that inspires vignettes and daydreams and plotting-when-I-should-be-working. It is the sort of group I wish on every gamer at least once in their lives.

For a peek at Black Annie, my Darkling/Gristlegrinder (mixed Kith/Seeming! the horror!), follow the breadcrumbs. All characters, settings, etc., belong to their respective creators, of course.



The window had been given a token cleaning, but no quick ammonia rubdown could hide the signs of age -- the panes were slightly warped by time and gravity, pooling downward at a glacier crawl, as old glass does. Annie absently traced the lines of a random flow, and stared out from her darkened room, first at the overgrown field, then further back, to the rough shape of the moon-silhouetted treeline beyond. The unseen presence of the creek pricked at her nerves; she shivered at the sudden flash of black water closing over her, and drew her hand back from the cool pane.

Stubbornly, she resisted the urge to turn away and instead set her eyes in the direction of the work shed, and the firepit marking Mr. Charlotte's grave. She hadn't really known the man, but he had helped them escape that place, and had arranged a place for them here. His purpose in that remained unclear, and yet ... his reward had been violence and a rough, efficient burial under the bottom half of an old oil drum.

It bothered her a little that she felt no sorrow, no guilt for being unable to save him, though a small voice at the back of her mind said she should. If she were human.

Annie wrapped her thin arms around herself at the chill that crept down her spine, and finally tore her gaze from the window. Quietly, she padded barefoot back to the lumpy mattress on the floor in the corner of the room, and stepped carefully into the center, where she folded herself down, cross-legged, and wrapped herself in the familiar warmth of her ragged hedge shawl.

Were they human anymore? Did it even matter? The question felt academic rather than the crisis of identity it ought to be. Or maybe she was just too used to being the outsider, that the implications had to swim a greater gulf to affect her.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and thought back, trying to conjure memories of Arcadia. Like a nightmare, her memory of that place had begun to fray at the edges, leaving her confused and skittish at times. She found that vexing, too -- a double-edged sword of respite, and the great, gaping unknown that would inevitably come back to haunt her.

After a few moments, she retrieved her sketchbook from its slot between the mattress and the wall, and patiently coaxed the mechanical pencil from the book's wire spine. The light here was dim at best, little more than diffused remnants of moonlight from the window, but more than enough for her sensitive eyes. She opened the sketchbook and turned slowly through the first few pages -- rough sketches of faces, both hideous and fair, that she no longer recognized, and names (she thought, or maybe places?) whose meanings had crumbled away.

Eventually, she came to a drawing of two knights fighting amongst what looked like scattering sheets of paper. Below the sketch was a carefully printed label: "Dretchen and Alabaster." The drawing itself was somewhat rough and stylized; she recognized the resemblance to Evan in the first figure. Well ... the new Evan, anyway. As for the second figure, the white knight, there was a fury in his visage that reminded her of ... someone. The impressions invoked by this sketch had lingered longer and more intensely than the others, though even they had begun to dull. Judging by the state of the page, this scene had obviously been important to her. As important as the scraps in her pocket, maybe -- she had filled the margins with strange scribbles and descriptives: glass, steel, screams, blood, pages, hope, fury, falling (this with an arrow copied over and over, stretching to the bottom of the page, that even now somehow managed to make her stomach lurch), ashes and ashes and blood and drowning [again].

Evan. Randall. Charlotte. ---> Wayward <--- These four, circled in thick, insistent strokes pressed hard channels into the paper. Other, less intelligible words and phrases she couldn't quite make out filled in the gaps here and there, surrounding the names in confused spirals where she had continued to scribble until she'd passed out from exhaustion. Annie traced the tracks of pencil indentations with the thin pad of her forefinger and automatically reached to ease the page out of the sketchbook, to fold and tuck away into one of her many pockets, or knot into the weave of her shawl. As the sound of tearing paper registered, she realized what she was doing and stopped herself. Agitated at having torn the precious page, she smoothed it again and again with thin fingers, careful to hold up thick black nails just so, so they wouldn't catch the paper. Then gently, deliberately, she turned the page. On the next sheet, she had carefully taped one of the precious remaining squares of paper from the scrap of cloth in her deep, patched pockets; a small black and white photo of Evan and Randall, torn from the battered old yearbook -- stained, faded, crumpled and worn until soft to the touch. There were others, but she kept those hidden away, afraid even now to lose the surviving scraps. Annie brushed the photo tentatively with her fingertips, and felt tension ease from her spine at the familiar texture. She wondered how many times she had touched these pieces for reassurance, and wondered, too, what Evan must have thought of her keeping the sad little scraps ... what he would say if he knew she still had them. She felt her pale cheeks burn, and reflexively pulled the shawl up to veil her face. She didn't care so much if he knew about the crush she'd had on him in high school. The crush she still had, even though her blood went cold and still whenever the dragon flared. The real truth was more embarrassing, if that were possible; in Arcadia, there hadn't been enough Annie to hold on to. She'd needed something real, something important, to give herself a grounding point: find Evan and Randall, and escape. They were far more solid than she was, it was as simple as that. The times she'd lost sight of that goal ...

Annie cut herself off from that line of thought. She wasn't quite ready to believe it was over, that she wouldn't be dragged back to the Endless Dark. And ... with Evan here, in this place, and no guarantee she'd even end up in the same world as Randall, she'd have no anchor, this time.

And no Mr. Charlotte to come find her.

And that thought terrified her.

Silent, she forced herself to study the picture, to focus on something real, as she must have done hundreds of times before. Randall ... yes, she could see him reflected, now, in the other figure on the previous page. It was odd -- the resemblance was mostly in the eyes; something angry and crystalline that remained unchanged. Evan, though ... the smiling, relaxed teenager in the photo bore only a surface resemblance to the dragon who had returned with her from Arcadia. Here, she finally felt the slow creep of failure that had eluded her earlier. If I had been quicker, or more clever ... If I had found them sooner ... If I had confronted them separately instead of together ...

If only. But I wasn't. I didn't. No way to know, now, in any case.

What was done was done; no sense in making poisoned wishes, no matter how much she hated what was.

A long, thin hand slid out from the shawl and carefully turned the page again.

A blank sheet. She had woken early this morning, before the sun, and had tried to draw one of her new companions -- the cute one, the ogre-girl who called herself Toy. For some reason, she had known even before she'd started that the pencil wouldn't move the way she wanted it to. She wasn't sure whether the hesitation came of some sort of superstition, or a geas, or simply from her own fear of committing the image to paper. Of making it real.

Annie stared at the blank page, motionless and silent, until she lost the moonlight and only the feeble glow of ambient night filtered in through the window. And still, that was more than enough.

Finally, a face came to her, and she set her pencil to paper. She was rusty, yes, and the sketch was rougher than it ought to have been, but in the end, she looked into the exhausted eyes of Mr. Charlotte and nodded, satisfied. If nothing else, he deserved to be real.

Tired, now, she closed the sketchpad and worked the plastic pencil into the spine, then re-set the book in its place between the mattress and the wall. She eased herself backward, set her back against the corner of the room, and shifted from crossed legs to knees tucked tightly against her chest. She drew her bare feet into the protection of the shawl.

And then Black Annie -- Gentile Annie, the children would whisper in their prayers, when they didn't want to offend the darkness -- pulled the black shawl over and around to cover her face, and slept.

Follow the breadcrumbs...