LINKDING

<blockquote>Told to “go up there and start some trouble,” Crowley bypasses humanity and goes straight for an angel: The Guardian of the Eastern Gate. An AU. (Book canon, but TV canon references are there)</blockquote> ➤ oh my gosh???

<blockquote>Of how much Helen knows, and all the bad decisions that follow.</blockquote> ➤ Ooh I love this!

<blockquote>When Vivian and her daughter witness the family matriarch die without leaving a corpse, Vivian can no longer ignore the family “gift” or the choice that lies before her.</blockquote>

<blockquote>He is not a remarkable student, Neconnu. Some among more senior Masters—those not required to take on teaching duties—did not even recognize his name when they found it entered into the lists for examination. But this is not as unusual as one might think; magi are not known for their humility. Already this year three candidates have overreached themselves, and been sent away. Odds are high that Neconnu will be the fourth. But he must have his chance. The Obsidian Master asks the question that pulses behind every serene expression. “What act will you perform, to prove your right to the degree of vīs faciendī?” Harrik Neconnu says, “I am going to return the dead to life.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Il était une fois—there was a time when Ti-Jean was very old. His fiddle was long out of tune, and his brothers Cordon-Bleu and Cordon-Vert had moved away. He’d spent the gold the Devil put in his tuque, and the bones of the seven-headed dragon he’d killed were crumbled to dust. One day, he was sitting by the fire when • • • • “Wait,” Raccoon says. “Ti-Jean had brothers? There was a seven-headed dragon?” “Those are Ti-Jean’s other adventures,” I say. “Don’t you know any heritage?”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Where Genly Ai went, after Winter. [Written for Yuletide 2010.]</blockquote> ➤ oh, wow. Very effective at grounding in setting such that it evokes a strong consistent feeling throughout. Plus excellent alien anthropology

<blockquote>Anakin has always had an easy time getting what he wants. (He never means to do it.)</blockquote>

<blockquote>Val had lost hope. Routine carried her where hope had stopped: up the stairs to tend the lamp. Into the forest for wood, apples, berries, more rarely a deer or a grouse. Her stores of magic and wild rice came from the same place, though not from the same method: the smaller, murky inland lake, the one too small to need a lighthouse, only the canoes and the flat-bottom boats of the rice harvest.</blockquote> ➤ I enjoy how the story never tells you directly what horrible thing it was that happened in the past, you just get to see the results of it. ➤ (Author says it's set on the north shore of Lake Superior, which is absolutely correct.)

<blockquote>"Lady Therese Vorkalloner," Esterhazy announces. He ushers her in and then makes a discreet retreat. Aral pushes himself up higher in the chair and looks at his ex-wife. He can't recall when he had last seen her. Their circles haven't crossed very much since her remarriage and, when they have, she's made it clear that they've already said all they've needed to each other. But she's not the first one of Aral's old enemies to come see him on his sick bed.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“No, listen, listen,” one of the mountain women said. “Strange things may happen on your farms and in your towns, but it’s nothing to what you may see in the forests, in the depth of winter, far from light and hope. They say the ghost of Zayred the Splendid—” “Pigshit on your ghosts,” the mule driver interrupted. “Zayred the Splendid isn’t even dead.” The silent, unsmiling figure in the corner leaned forward, suddenly intent. “Killed by Cladists in the month of rains, I heard,” said the farmhand from Little Bhirrit. “They said there was a battle out in the Salt Country and she tried to hold a bridge by herself against a whole Cladist army, and she sang for six hours and held them all spellbound, while she waited for reinforcements from Devport to come, only they never did, and eventually her voice gave out and the spell broke and they killed her.” The listener in the corner twitched, but the expression that crossed her face was gone so quickly that no-one would have marked it. “And now her ghost roams the forests,” the mountain woman insisted. “Why would she haunt the forests if she was killed in the Salt Country?” the mule driver asked</blockquote> ➤ Would be stronger for being tightened and shortened some, but still worth reading

<blockquote>It feels like ghost stories should mean something, but it’s not at all clear what. I managed to get about a hundred pages out of the question, “What do these mean, anyway?” when I wrote my doctoral dissertation to get my PhD in Folklore, all without reaching an actual conclusion. My mother helpfully pointed that out when she read the manuscript. “If I give them a real answer, they’ll just complain about it,” I said. “So just tell me, Leah,” she said. “What do you think ghost stories mean?” “I think they’re the manifestation of people’s desire for answers about death and eternity,” I said. “But I could be totally wrong, especially since there’s a whole category of ghost stories that don’t seem to have anything to do with identifiable dead people.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Nyalu squeezes my hand, burying a blunt talon into my flesh as if to wake me up from sleep. It’s time to wear our wedding rings—the gifts sent to the island two moons ago, for our husband to mark us as his. Nyalu slips one pearl-white ring over my wrist, then traces the chain to find the other one; I push it down gently over his hand. His fingers shake—it’s not the boat’s rocking. The pairs of brides around us are already restless, already standing on their feet inside the boats, wings flapping anxiously underneath their veils. The hairless, featherless arms of men are tying our boats to the pier, unloading the stacks of lacquered boxes. A gloved hand reaches out. Nyalu is behind me and almost loses his balance as he hops from wood over water and onto the earth. Beneath our feet we find flat, concrete rock. We careen through the silent faces of husbands, through a swarm of veils, feathers, hands, and feet covered in bridal tattoos. No words of welcome, no music or dance to celebrate the group wedding. No mothers-in-law to host us. This is a nation of men.</blockquote>

<blockquote>So, flies, flying, and flew were still official Herald-Tribune usage. But it was obviously different. He didn’t have the speed, a tenth the speed, that he used to. Or for some reason, he wasn’t using it. It was hard to know. In the paper, we used euphemisms like deliberate and stately. Worse, he seemed stuck at one altitude, drifting along around the level of a sixth-story window. He never got any higher. Even stranger, once you thought about it, was that he never got any lower. You’d never see him at streetlight level. You’d never see him land. He could fly about six stories above the ground, and as far as anybody could tell, that was it. He would gradually drift sideways above the traffic, so that he started flying above one sidewalk, and seven or eight blocks later, he’d wind up over the other. People would see him zigzagging toward Brooklyn across the river or looping erratically over the park. After a while, you got used to it. There he was, you know? It didn’t seem so bad. You’d see him over the Sheep Meadows on a summer night, when you could barely make him out against the sky, over Riverside Drive on a clear autumn afternoon with the leaves riveting against the blue. And you wouldn’t think about how things used to be.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Breq is a traitor, a rebel, and a captain a thousand years out of date. Mercy of Seivarden is drifting without a crew.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A Staryk girl with a Jewish name</blockquote> ➤ YESSSSSSSS this is so good

<blockquote>Katherine Climpson explores the documentation of an unusual example of medieval matrimony.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The night she left to follow the King, it wasn't raining or anything like that.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Rita Hanson is also experiencing a time loop on February 2nd, 2017 in Punxsutawney. But it's not quite the same.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Stavros had this metaphoric image of her: Jean Goravec, buried alive in the airless dark, smothered by tonnes of earth—finally set free. Jean Goravec coming up for air. Another image, of himself this time: Stavros Mikalaides, liberator. The man who made it possible for her to experience, however briefly, a world where the virtual air was sweet and the bonds nonexistent. Certainly there’d been others in on the miracle—a dozen tech-heads, twice as many lawyers—but they’d all vanished over time, their interest fading with proof-of-principal or the signing of the last waiver. The damage was under control, the project was in a holding pattern; there was no need to waste more than a single Terracon employee on mere cruise control. So only Stavros remained—and to Stavros, Jeannie had never been a “project.” She was his as much as the Goravecs’. Maybe more. But even Stavros still didn’t know what it was really like for her. He wondered if it was physically possible for anyone to know. When Jean Goravec slipped the leash of her fleshly existence, she awoke into a reality where the very laws of physics had expired.</blockquote>

<blockquote>An isolated farmer finds a badly wounded man in a ruined farm. Six hundred years later, a historian researching King Elessar comes across a sealed letter. What links these two events is a story long forgotten.</blockquote> ➤ Love the frame story, love the outside pov, love the assumptions on why it's unreasonable to believe that the letter is actually Aragorn's because of assumptions about kingliness!

<blockquote>“It’s wastoures! They came through Newton and Blackhill and killed everything, and then they split into two big groups and one turned north, and the other’s coming here. I stay ahead of them and earn pennies by warning people.” Wastoures. Perhaps you have not heard of them, you people born a thousand years after Ada and Blanche and this runner—whose name is Hardourt, though his part in this story is nearly over: his name will not matter to you, though it matters to him. In your time they are gone, but in the twelfth century, every child knew of them, and adults as well. Wastoures: scarce larger than chickens but unfeathered and wingless, snake-necked and sharp-beaked and bright-clawed, with little arms ending in daggery talons. For long years there would be no wastoures (except in memory and dread), and then a population bloom, like duckweed choking an August pond, or locusts after a dry spring, or cicadas rising from the ground each seventeenth year. For reasons unknowable, they emerged in their scores of thousands from some unknown cave or forgotten Roman mine, and seethed like floodwater or plague across the land.</blockquote> ➤ I'm fascinated by the way the narrative continues to draw your attention to what might happen to the other characters Ada encounters throughout the story, and the structure of Story.

<blockquote>Enabran Tain has retired, and Garak has been second-in-command of the Obsidian Order for over three years. His next assignment is the interrogation of Cardassia’s newest detainee, a Federation doctor charged with espionage. AU in which Garak was never exiled. Set during early season 3.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Dis (tance that shatters to splinters of near) In (coming moments divided by fear) Ter (ribble burning of ablative shields) Gra (y as the stormclouds of flickering fields) Tion (ting the power we need to survive)</blockquote> ➤ Author's note: <blockquote>This is a crude translation of an alien form of poetry/song that I made up. The idea is that the first syllable would be sung suspended under the rest of the line by one voice, while another sings the rest. Each stanza consists of one word made up of the first syllables in each line -- I've gone with the spelling of the main word, which is a little odd when it means "shimmering" starts with "ti" but there you go. This poem describes crashlanding a ship made for space on a planet with an atmosphere.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Funny you should say that,” I said. “I’m interested in paint.” “Painting.” “Paint,” I said. “I dabble a bit in alchemy, and I reckon it might be possible to make synthetic blue. Instead of having to grind up ruinously expensive lapis lazulae in a pestle and mortar.” She didn’t say anything, so I went on: “There’s definitely a demand for it. A genuine deep royal blue at a fraction of the price. A man could make a nice little bit of money that way.” “I’ve never used blue.” “Too expensive?” She nodded. “That’s why I started doing portraits, you don’t have to have any sky.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Wherefore art thou, Romeo? New York Magazine March 13, 2045 Let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, in Broadway’s latest iteration of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is an alien. And no, that doesn’t necessarily make it worth the ticket price.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Don’t get too comfortable,” Haakon said to me in a low tone. “What do you mean?” I said. Everyone exchanged a look. It was Namja who finally explained. “The third cargo capsule from the homeworld is going to land at Newton’s Eye in about 650 hours.” “But . . . ” I stopped when I saw they didn’t need me to tell them the problem. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Umbernight was just around the corner. Much as we needed that cargo, getting to it would be a gamble with death. I remember how my mother explained Umbernight to me as a child. “There’s a bad star in the sky, Michiko. We didn’t know it was there at first because there’s a shroud covering it. But sometimes, in winter, the shroud pulls back and we can see its light. Then we have to go inside, or we would die.”</blockquote> ➤ Good worldbuilding, evocative writing

<blockquote>No one will sleep until the Princess learns the Stranger’s name. Liù the slave girl, who has loved the Stranger since before his exile, when he was a Prince, when he smiled at her—Liù alone knows who he really is. So it is Liù who is dragged to the Princess’s garden by night, bound, ankles twisting as she stumbles through the peonies.</blockquote> ➤ Not sure I quite follow the ending but it works anyway

<blockquote>A young food taster to the Traitor King must make a difficult choice in this story of pastries, magic, and revenge.</blockquote>

<blockquote>There's a guy lives down the road, swears he's Gregor Vorbarra. Notes: This started life a long time ago because of a tumblr ask from cosmictuesdays and then I spent a while trying to make Gregor Raised By Esterhazy actually work, to no real avail. The summary is based on the song title 'There's A Guy Works Down the Chip Shop, Swears He's Elvis' by Kirsty MacColl, which, in remembering that was a thing that existed, was the key to actually getting this into a thing that contained words.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A good Gallows Girl knows how to steady a man when he twitches at the end of the rope. She’ll take his hands and hold them tight, or grab him by the forearms if she needs to. The firm touch of a good Gallows Girl is usually enough: he’ll go slack, stop kicking, and let the noose dig. The death is just as ugly, but the passing is eased. A good Gallows Girl will open herself a tiny bit, let him scrape off some of her innocence to carry with him as he goes. My sister told me that it hurts a lot. But it’s supposed to be a good hurt, and it’s the only way to know that you did your job.</blockquote>