Sound of White

Ugh. So, I have all sorts of fragments that I need to write, at some point. But I can't quite seem to manage actually writing them. So instead, I shall write about them!

For Toggle, there's a Silverlock/Blaine scene I've wanted to write since last year. It would be the Festival of Joshel, which is an enormous, week long celebration that takes over the city- it's sort of like Mardi Gras, only it lasts for a week. Even people who don't worship Joshel get to celebrate, because Joshel is such a huge deity. There are parades and dances and masks, and the Church of Joshel sponsors the whole thing- and all the slaves in the city get the week off, or at the very least, the last day off. Silverlock does that thing where he drags Blaine out of the infirmary- and Blaine's reaction is WTF, have you looked outside, they're practically rioting out there, we're gonna get trampled. Silverlock gets a couple of the Shrive to jaunt them outside the city, up the coast a few miles, where a small-ish congregation of Joshelites are having their celebration for the last day of the festival. There's a bonfire on the beach, and everyone is dancing and singing and drumming and drinking and having sex. Blaine gets a little bit wigged out by the crowd and the very palpable presence of a god that isn't his, so he wanders down the beach to stare at the waves and lets Silverlock reconnect his soul for a bit so at least one of them can have a properly good time. (He can feel a few other leechmages in the throng, none of them strong enough or close enough to be more than a faint, uncomfortable buzzing in the corners of his soul. He can feel Silverlock, too, and the temptation to reach out is almost too strong to resist. Almost. He knows better than to try and touch what he can never really have.)

Blaine ends up meditating until the tide comes in, while Silverlock dances and basks in the joy of the people around him. Eventually he wanders off to find Blaine and wake him up before he drowns- and finds a very poisonous sea snake wrapped around him. After that it's mostly just dialogue and the two of them being cute at each other.
("I'm fairly certain that's got rather deadly poison."

"Mm. Watch where you're stepping- her nest is buried in the sand by those rocks." He opened his eyes and looked up at Silverlock. "Did you have a good time?"

"Of course. And you?" His hair, unbound for once, spilled past his shoulders when he leaned forward, brushing Blaine's face.

"Making new friends." He held up his hand, where the snake's head lay. It curled around to the underside of his arm. "She's a bit shy around strangers.")

And of course Silverlock's thoughts inevitably end up thinking about Blaine naked, wearing nothing but a giant snake. I'm thinking this image ends up in the "Potentially very hot or very weird" category. Possibly the "Very Late '80s Music Video" category, even.
--

I need to write more of the Zanadreths- I have a scene in the works where Aya has her first and third companies out on endurance training, and she's taking a bath in a stream, because the mud is pretty fierce on the road north from Shaivhen. And Liall shows up, and it looks vaguely like the set up for some bad lesbian porn. Porn does not happen, of course- Aya is more Ishkhahareni at heart than Liall is in that respect. The whole scene is mostly just an excuse for me to play with Templar's story. So the whole scene is Liall telling Aya the tale of the Templar, and Aya beginning to confront Liall about the murders.

It's possible Aya and Liall have better chemistry than Aya and Nick, so that's something I need to work on.

The other Zanadreths scene I want to write is the one where Aya introduces them both to Silverlock- who, at that point, is nearing the end of his mage apprenticeship. The meet up in a bar somewhere, and as soon as Aya and Liall get up to fetch more drinks, Silverlock gives Nick the "break her heart and I'll crush your soul and violate your body in a thousand heinous ways" speech. Nick's upbringing shows itself in rather nasty ways here- Rothcar is rather blase about same sex couples, but Akvaria tends to view them in a rather negative light. Akvaria has some strong anti-non-human sentiment, and they're not overly fond of same sex couples. Mostly, though, Nick is violently opposed to sex outside of marriage, and that's the source of his dislike of Silverlock.

This burns Aya a bit, since she wants the people she cares about to get along, but there's nothing to be done about it, really.
--

I want to write the scene where Jarrek DeLavrey walks into Theron's office and demands to know what happened to his children. Of course, the only people in at the time are Bren and Stella, and once Bren figures out who he's talking to, he goes into starstruck fanboy mode. It's kind of cute. And Stella gets to be sane, which doesn't happen nearly as often as it ought.

And I want to write the scene where Edrana Coralin drags Theron out of the city and takes him roadtripping around to all of her old stomping grounds. She's his older sister in spirit; her army of zombies actually managed to sack Shaivhen, while his just made it to the borders of Murundcar.

She feels even less guilt than he does for killing thousands of people (Theron's death count is higher, but only because there were more people in his era), even though she's more at fault than he was. Theron went crazy fairly early on; Eddy was sane the whole time. And Theron at least feels bad for screwing over Bren- Edrana killed Siegfried's entire family and ate their brains in front of him, but she never so much as apologizes.

("Woman-"

"If I touch you again you'll rip of my limbs and feed them to stray cats?" Bluish black outlines of butterflies swarmed over her arms; they seemed to shift and crawl when she moved.

He stopped short. "How did you know I was going to say that?"

She walked past him. "I said the exact same thing to Joradi when I was your age. Come on, I want to show you the place where I reanimated a dragon's corpse and made it kill its nest mates." She pointed to a place high up the cliffs.

Theron scrambled to catch up with her.)
--

I really want to write (though I'd never post them here) the first time Blaine and Silverlock have sex, and the first time Orrin and Silverlock have sex. The former has a few really beautiful moments, and the latter a few hilarious moments. And both showcase how very different Silverlock's relationships with the two of them are. Not better, not worse, just different. (Okay, Orrin may be a little better. He's happy as so few of my characters are; he leads a charmed life and knows it, and is profoundly grateful for it. He lacks the ridiculous emotional baggage Blaine had.)

It's also interesting to see how Silverlock relates to the people he cares about on a physical level...and, hey, porn. I think it's hot, but they're my characters, so I suppose I ought to.

(This is not part of either of those scenes; this is just Silverlock and Orrin being dumb.)
("So, now what?" Orrin had him pinned to the bed, with an obscenely smug look on his face.

"Well," he shifted his hips and watched Orrin's eyes briefly roll back in his head, "I was thinking you could fuck me. And then," he glanced at the clock, whose blinking numbers told him he wouldn't be getting any sleep tonight anyway, and he might as well give in to the inevitable. "I'm going to make pancakes."

"Pancakes?" Orrin seemed dubious.

"I'm hungry. And if I'm hungry now, I'll be hungry later, too." He spoke as though to a particularly slow-witted small child. He rolled his hips again, eliciting another blinded-by-lust expression from Orrin. "I'm also horny. And I will still be horny later if you don't get on with it.")

I'm a little bit in love with Orrin. He's very much who Tyrin could have become, had he survived past 16. And I love Faraz, because I needed a six and a half foot tall druid in my head. (She's so hardcore her internal organs are made of titanium.)

I want to write the scene where Orrin introduces Silverlock to the other four. Faraz adores him from the start, of course, as does Lindra. Ravi is a bit protective of Orrin and doesn't entirely approve, and Lorreth spends the evening very quietly hyperventilating, because he majored in arcane history and wrote his senior thesis on leechmagick in the Fourth Era Riftwar.

("I quoted you. In my master's dissertation. Does Orrin know you were an assassin? And that you helped acquit Theron Shanretha in the Radrezarian Genocide trials? Or that you've been sleeping with Anna DeLavrey? He's clueless sometimes, but if you hurt him I'll kill you. I'll mine your brain for research on my AD project and throw your body in the river."

Silverlock smirked and reached out with his senses; Eleth's soul was slippery and elusive, but if he could get a good look at it-

The sudden irony of Eleth defending Orrin was almost enough to make him sick. "I would sooner tear out my own eyes," he said gravely, all good humor gone. "Now if you'll excuse me, Mister Hjordiss, I need to get myself very drunk very quickly."

The others were whole and healthy, if surrounded by a faint aura of permanent bemusement- but Aya, alien and bright and beautiful, hadn't made the transition intact. The wounded shreds of her soul hung about Eleth like a shroud.)

The last scene I want to write is the one where Orrin and Faraz bust some skulls and rescue Tim from a bunch of drunken frat boys. Poor Tim- he was a baby when the tower opened, so no one realized he was one of the Soulless, until Silverlock meets him, and LOLs his head off.