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lmao i fell asleep before actually posting last night. Prompts: Get off my magical lawn by Pham Nuwen, Clothes Make The Man by Kharmakazy Ward 1000 words It’d been a long, harrowing night for Lumineus and Solinar. The Thaumatic Symposium’s fortress was expansive and well-warded against outside attack. The wards didn’t differentiate between attackers from beyond and escapees from within, however, which presented a sizable challenge for certain old wizards trying to aid the escape of their young, subversive proteges. They stood within the penultimate layer of wards, just inside of the high, moss-covered north wall. Behind them, the Symposium was little more than a hump of darkness, a dearth of starlight. “You’re on your own from here, boy,” Lumineus said. “Once you pass through the final ward, run. Run and don’t look back, or the hunting dogs will be gnawing on your fundament come morning.” Solinar put a hand on his mentor’s bony shoulder. “I’ll miss your way with words.” His smile didn’t touch his eyes. “I swear I’ll do right by the people,” he said. “The gates of magic have been barred to ordinary folk for far too long.” Lumineus scowled. “Get yourself gone, boy! Or I’ll use a binding cant and leave you trussed up for the Primarch to find.” Solinar opened his mouth as if in retort, then thought better of it and used his breath to issue the beginnings of the piercing cant, a complex spell that would let him slip through the outer wards as a needle slipped into flesh. As soon as his magical intonations touched the invisible membrane of the ward, there was a flash--not visible light, but a turbulent outward pulsation of magic that knocked the two wizards onto the ground and thrust them into darkness. Lumineus was jolted into wakefulness by the voice of Primarch Halodar, roaring commands, demanding answers. And there, there was Solinar’s voice, clear and youthful as ever, but babbling nonsense. “Naught twixt the stars,” he said. “Naught twixt the stars. The raven lurks between pages.” “Aphasia,” spat the primarch. “The sure mark of a fool tampering with wards beyond his ken.” Lumineus opened his eyes. Why hadn’t the Primarch slapped him back into consciousness? He was obviously culpable in Solinar’s attempt to slip away. He sat up, found Solinar staring at him intently. “Alarum! Naught twixt the stars. The raven in the book!” Solinar babbled, never taking his eyes off of Lumineus. “Primarch Halodar, this boy was acting under my direction. I appealed to his ego, filled his head with notions of doing medicine for common folk, advising kings...” The primarch didn’t reply, didn’t so much as glance at Lumineus. Instead, he glowered down at Solinar and said, “Cursed as you are, you’re still too much of a liability to let out into the world. The kitchen can always use another set of hands, no matter how addled the mind or mouth.” And then Solinar was gone, dragged back into the depths of the Thaumatic Symposium. Lumineus was quite invisible. He could lay a hand against a wall, window, or mug of mead and feel the solidity of them, but that was the end of his interaction with the physical world. No one could see him save Solinar, who was busy navigating the rigors of the massive kitchen. Even so, Lumineus took to lurking in the kitchen, because guilt-filled glances from Solinar were better than living as a ghost. No one else was much perturbed by Lumineus’s disappearance; they wrote him off as a traitor, assume he’d died during Solinar’s unsanctioned departure. Solinar babbled in his strange new language whenever the head cook was distracted: “Bookbound raven. Bisect heirloom crevasses. Naught twixt the stars. A body. A challice.” Lumineus was no fool. The boy was trying to tell him something, but there was no guessing what. He’d inspected the damaged portion of the outer ward, found it pristine, exactly as it had been before Solinar’s escape attempt. A body. A challice. Lumineus rolled the disjointed phrases around inside his head for days, until a mad impulse seized him in the early hours of the morning. He found himself following the Primarch noiselessly up a series of forbidden stairways, slipping quickly through hastily closed doors. Soon he found himself in the Primarch’s private suites, watching the piggish man fall asleep amidst a mountainscape of pillows. He strode over to the great feather bed, looked down at the slumbering form of the Symposium’s highest authority. “You’ll drive them all away,” he whispered. He knew his voice wouldn’t carry into the physical world, but perhaps it would haunt the primarch’s dreams. “Every talented young witch and wizard. They don’t want to confine their powers to your agenda. Solinar will not be the last.” Primarch Halodar murmured in his sleep, the unmistakable lilt of a ward-cant. Transparent domes of white-blue light sprung up around him in concentric layers, mimicking the complex configuration of wards that protected the compound. Now Lumineus understood why the defenses had been so difficult to breach; they drew from the magical strength and reflexes of the primarch himself. He reached out one noncorporeal finger toward the miniature wards, felt something he’d been deprived of in his days of invisibility: heat. The magic existed on whatever non-plane he did. Lumineus was an old wizard who’d seen many things. Even if there were a way to restore his physicality, his colleagues had already branded him a dead traitor. He was never going to lecture or conduct experiments again. His hand lingered in the air just centimeters from the magic. Solinar had somehow guessed the wards were tied to the primarch. Now, all the older wizard could do was confirm that theory. With one last windless breath, he plunged his hand into the layers of magic. He felt his essence fragment, spiral upward, and-- Solinar was hauling scraps to the hunting dogs when a vast column of light erupted from the Symposium’s highest tower. The wards rippled and shimmered, temporarily visible to the naked eye as the magic shifted to compensate for the disturbance at its source. “Interlope the sky, book raven,” he said softly.
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Nov 27, 2017 19:43
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 10:17 |
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lmao the judges have to read 60 terrible stories, it's like wizard week 1 only 2/3 of the stories are providing a lovely origin story for this week's lovely stories
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Nov 28, 2017 21:42
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Jay you are a credit to your species (spiders)
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Dec 1, 2017 06:29
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Exmond posted:It is I, Exmond, he who brings Crits! these are neat
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Dec 5, 2017 08:07
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 IMPORTANT REMINDER This thread will be locked at the end of the year. Once Thunderdome is locked and goldmined (which every TD to date has been), it is impossible to remove stories from the thread. This is important for anyone who plans on pulling stories for further editing and submission. If you wish, you can replace the story with the relevant archive page link. The archive requires a password to view. That said, if you are pretty sure you're not going to work on a story anymore, consider leaving it up for posterity!
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Dec 6, 2017 23:24
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Dec 14, 2017 02:15
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Exmond posted:
those examples aren't kayfabe kayfabe is showmanship. It's a way to add dimension and a touch of theatrical flourish to what is inherently a competitive community. All of my good TD friends are people who have bested me while cackling maniacally (or their version of cackling maniacally), or who I have bested while similarly crowing like a supervillain. I think we are pretty nice, considering our motif comes from a movie about a literal post apocalyptic murder dome
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Dec 27, 2017 20:22
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oh yeah stuff i like about td: it is what it is stuff i don't like: n/a, td is td
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Dec 27, 2017 20:26
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My thoughts on what to pull: oddly enough, TD has lurkers and people who go back and read goldmined threads. Those people won't have archive accounts, so I think when deleting stories, it's worth considering how much content you feel comfortable leaving for posterity. Obviously you should pull anything you're reasonably sure you're going to edit, but I suspect that's not the case for many stories.
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Dec 28, 2017 20:13
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Morning Bell posted:.  fyi, the podcast still happens, we're just terribly behind because of the holidays. I should have a new episode up tonight or tomorrow, though we're a few weeks behind.
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Dec 29, 2017 01:07
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hey trex, grats, make sure to put the new prompt in the new thread when it goes up That's a wrap for the 2017 thread. Feel free to shitpost, sincerepost, or not post here as your heart desires. You have until midnight PST on Friday, January 5th to edit out any stories you may wish to remove from this thread.
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Jan 3, 2018 04:20
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