I Need Cake (So Share It Maybe?)

I have an unholy craving for Halloween cake. Lookie!

CHARITY NEVER FAILETH (Summary)

Eimh Mac Leod knows better than to follow the sound of crying into the woods. Crying in the middle of the forest means nought but trouble, and the people of Fairview Township want none of it. But Eimh can't abandone the little water-kin bairn she finds abandoned in the woods. Changeling or not, it's still just a baby, and no Latter-Day Saint can leave a helpless baby to die in the forest. Her parents let her keep the baby, and he causes little enough trouble once Eimh gets the hang of things.

But the Kindly Ones aren't the only folk making trouble near Fairview. Contention brews between the Saints and the rest of the Missourians. Eimh's Da fears violence is inevitable, but Eimh prays it isn't so. Yet she can't help thinking her Da might be right when a riot breaks out in a nearby town and her brothers lose their jobs at the local mill and end up badly beatn for admitting they follow Joseph Smith's church. Eimh only feels safe in the presence of a very large, very special stray dog that attaches himself to her side when the trouble starts. But when a mob comes to Fairview, even a faerie hound may not be enough to save her family.

CHARITY NEVER FAILETH tells an alternate/fantasy history adaptation of the real-life Missouri Mormon War of 1838, when the state government sanctioned attacks against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Combining Old World superstition, real-world history, magical realism, LDS traditions, and lesser known bits of Scotch-Irish folklore, CHARITY NEVER FAILETH showcases one of the darkest times in LDS history as well as the far-reaching consequences of a single act of reckless kindness.

Someone Rewrote Danny Elfman's Song

I apologize in advance for the language (this post as a 16+ rating) but this is hilarious to me.

WWC WK10: Calling

Author's Note: this piece, inspired by the first half of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, won 2nd place in the HarperCollins/Inkpop Weekly Writer's Challenge #10: It's All Greek to Me. The girl who beat me did a steampunk adaptation about Circe called "All Men Are Pigs." It was actually pretty incredible. I loved it a lot, actually.

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Once there was a king in the Grecian city of Thrace, son of Calliope, goddess of music and poetry, and he they called Orpheus.

But the name Orpheus can never stand alone, for with that name, the story of Eurydice is forever entwined. Eurydice was everything to the king of Thrace—lover, wife, companion, and daughter.

Not his daughter in flesh, for that would be a grave evil. But it was Orpheus's song that called forth the nymph Eurydice from her tree, giving her true life.

That is how it happened to a king of the ancient days. And this is how it happens to a boy with a musician's heart...in our time...

§

Orpheus stared at his room, seeing the glossy rock gods on the walls. He drank in the vision of the people on his music posters.

He looked at his poster of Jimmy Hendrix, in skinny jeans and leather jacket; the Viking guitarist from Nightwish with his braided beard and the lion's mane of gold dreadlocks; the lead singer of Queen of Night in her ragged, green velvet dress and brown leather jacket, her leaf-green boots and fingerless gloves.

He wanted to be them. He hated being himself.

Somewhere outside his room, glass shattered. Orpheus jumped. Sighed. His mother. She'd either tripped and dropped her glass, or thrown it at Oeugrus.

Someone roared. His mother, Calliope, threw another glass at his father.

Orpheus got up and grabbed his guitar from where he'd left it, leaning against his bedside table, carrying it into the bathroom. He often sang in the bathtub – great acoustics, but no chance his parents would hear him. The walls were too thick.

The sixteen-year-old settled into the white marble tub and draped the guitar across his chest, cradled by his legs. He deliberately pulled his hair in front of his face. The boy wore it slicked back in public because his father wanted it that way, but he despised it. He wanted it in his face, hiding his expression from everyone who always stared at him because he was so pale and thin, practically albino with his white hair and colorless, washed-out eyes. He felt like a puddle, or an almost-empty glass of water.

The black slacks and white button-down shirt his father forced him to wear didn't lend themselves to the punk-rocker image, but that wasn't really what he wanted, and he could make do with what he had.

Damn it. His head was hurting again.

Plastic hit nylon. The strings twanged. Notes hit the walls, bounced around like happy children, tugging at his hands. Where had he been? Why had he stayed away so long? That's what the music wanted to know.

He ignored it, and played, just let his fingers wander along the strings. After awhile, he began to sing, toying with lyrics he'd been working on the night before.

“Like nothing burns in front of a cold sun,
Wanna go round and round, round and round.
Fighting through empty spaces and we're done.
Just wanna go round and round, round and round

Can't hear through tinkling chimes of glass breaking,
As we go around and round, always around.
Can't see past the masks everyone keeps faking,
As they go round and round, round and round...”

Something wet touched Orpheus's hand, but he ignored it. Another wet thing splashed his wrist, wetting the skin over his pulse. It was transparent as glass, and hotter than blood. His head was pounding. He wished it would rain, so he could go outside and walk in it, instead of the sun beating down like it did in the summer, baking the sand and pavement until your sneakers melted to everything.

But wishes weren't horses, and beggars didn't ride. So the boy ignored the weather. Instead, he kept mumbling half-lyrics, adjusting here, tweaking there, listening to his heart hurting in his chest.

His fingers danced, and he tried to ignore the sound of breaking dishes, his father roaring, his mother shrieking. Orpheus wished he were older, just by a few months. Wished that it was later in the year, closer to August. Then he'd just leave for real, back to school, instead of only leaving in his mind.

Leave for real... he'd get to that point, one day very, very soon.

§

In fact, he reached it the next day. As soon as he heard Calliope spew a rapid stream of obscenities, he picked up his guitar, stuffed his shoes on his feet, and left.

Through the dust of the desert, he walked until his house was lost amidst a tiny suburban sea at the base of the mountain. Higher and higher he climbed. Cholla and paddle cactus thorns snagged his jeans. Scorpions and tarantulas scurried out of the way, terrified of being crushed under the thick soles of his boots.

And when he reached the top of the hill at the base of the Catalina Mountains, he sat on one of the near-searing red stones, under a Joshua tree. Orpheus set his guitar on his lap, and played.

He lost himself in the hum of nylon strings, the melancholy song that seemed to pour out of him. He played the sun beating down on his skin, burning him raw. He plucked out the rapid-fire chitter of cicadas, the leaping song of coyotes as the sun begins to sink, the chirping of cactus wrens and the rustling of pack rats in their tumbleweed nests.

Orpheus played it all: the music of the desert, the soul of the world.

Then the girl sneezed. His fingers stilled. Whirling around, he saw her standing behind him, eyes wide in her dusty face.

Fairy, his mind whispered.

It was her eyes; eyes so bright, they held the late autumn sun. That's what Orpheus saw at first, because somehow he hadn't noticed the girl until she was right on him. Her hair, sun-streaked brown and tipped green, streamed down her back and out like a banner, catching and playing with the light. Blue jeans with rips in the knees, a thin green sweater so worn it was almost gray and had thready holes in the elbows showed off her spiky bones. She wore brown Vans with green and no socks. Her ankles were just as spiky as the rest of her.

Now Orpheus understood why he'd first thought fairy. She was as close to one as humanly possible, this green-eyed girl.

He slowly rose to his feet, never taking his eyes off her face.

"W-w-what's...what's your name?" He whispered. Shyness suddenly surged up through him, and he ducked his head, hiding behind his silvery hair. His face burned.

"Dice," she murmured. Her voice was the tawny wind after a dust storm through the branches of green mesquite, warm as baking creosote in spring. "My name...Dice."

"Where did you come from?" He asked, because he had no idea. Somehow she had simply appeared, a desert mirage.

Her sunshine eyes flickered to the Joshua tree, then back to him. She bit her lip and gestured almost helplessly to his guitar. "You call me," she said, "from...from Joshua tree. You...you need me. Orpheus. You...Orpheus. You need me." Confusion clouded her features. "Why? Why do you need me?"

Something sharp and hot lanced his chest when her eyes finally found his. His mouth went dry. He did, he realized dazedly, eyes stinging. He didn’t even know this girl, and he needed her. Orpheus could see an answering need in her eyes, eyes as green as sahauro, in the expression on her slender face.

And not only did he need her, but somehow, without understanding how, without ever having met her before, he knew her.

As soon as he understood the fierce yearning for this too-familiar girl, he ran. Oh, how he ran.

Heart thundering, his ribs spasmed; lungs burned and legs ached. Still, he ran, on and on and on, skidding down the hillside, oblivious to thorns and stones and rattler holes. The thin, whippy branches of mesquite trees cut his face, tried to drag him back, force him to return to that girl watching his dust and calling his name.

Eyes streaming with tears, every step rattling his bones, the sobs burst from him. All around him, the desert yipped and chattered and howled, calling to him, Coward. Coward. Coward.

Orpheus would've clapped his hands to his ears, but if he did, he would pitch forward and fall. But he didn't want to hear. He couldn't let himself hear the voices of the mesquite and the Joshua trees. They accused him. They rebuked him.

He kept running. Overhead, the sky split open on the heels of a crack of thunder and the first drops of monsoon rain began plunging towards the earth.

Orpheus ran away from that girl, ran from her familiar, hungry eyes like the sun on the green blood of the sahauro, putting the sheeting rain between them. He hadn't meant to look into her eyes and see the sunshine behind her face. As soon as their eyes locked, his chest had begun to burn with an overwhelming sadness.

Tears poured like rain as he booked it down the path through the raging monsoon rains. The trail back to Houghton Road was only a river of mud now. Orpheus slipped in it, fell, soaking his jeans. He tasted grit in his mouth. Lunging to his feet, the running went on.

When he got home, drenched and mud-streaked, crying tears that tasted of acid, he realized he'd left his guitar on the hill.

§

She picked up the guitar, clutched it to her chest as she huddled under the spiky branches of her tree. The rain pelted down, soaking her to the skin. Dice didn’t mind.

She understood why Orpheus had run. She knew about freedom, about chains, about needing and depending on something so violent and furious as what had arced between them when their eyes met. She wasn’t angry.

Leaning against the rigid skin of the Joshua tree, she drew in a breath that carried the scent of wet earth and green life. Then she faded into the tree.

Dice could wait.

§

That night, he dreamed of her, dreamed of cool water and hot desert sand, the shimmer of blistering summer air and a heart that beat in time with his. He woke in a sweat, the sheets so hot they stuck to his skin like melted wax. Her name was heat and raindrops on his lips.

"Dice...."

He got up, threw on a pair of worn jeans and his thick hiking boots. In the hallway, he glanced towards the door of his parents' bedroom. His father's snores nearly rattled the windows. Smiling a little, Orpheus walked out of his house and into the moonlit night without looking back.

He made it to the hill at the foot of the Santa Rita Mountains, where the lone Joshua tree stood by the flat, red stone where he'd sat earlier that day. Leaning against the skin of the tree, gleaming in the light of the full, white moon, was his guitar.

Orpheus lifted it, strummed the strings experimentally to make sure it was in tune. With the monsoon, you just never knew. Sometimes the humidity soaked into the strings and the wood, fattening them up until they could only screech. But each of his string thrummed beautifully, and the wood wasn't even damp. So he bent his head, mentally crossed his fingers, and began to play.

Everything he'd ever dreamed or thought or hoped for or needed flowed into his song.

Dragons and roses, ocean waves, ships and stars, stories told by the hum of nylon string over varnished wood: princesses in towers, boys with wings who fell and boys with wings who flew, fairies dancing, a girl riding on the back of a reindeer, two children in a cradle like a little boat, a woman with snakes for hair in the arms of a lion-faced man.

Girls who rode on fish, boys in towers made of ice, cities melting into oceans and skyscrapers turning into mountains, skeletons and dresses like cakes: he played everything, calling to her, calling to Dice, calling to the girl in the Joshua tree. He played until his fingers bled, and then a cool hand was pulling his from the strings.

"Orpheus," she said, softly, her head tilted to the side. She looked so modern, in her jeans and sweater, her spiked hair and her electric green makeup. She hadn’t been wearing makeup before, but she looked beautiful either way.

"Dice. You... you're a—"

"Nymph."

"A nymph. They're Greek, right? Aren't you supposed to...I dunno...be in a toga or something?" He asked, feeling foolish. Her rich laugh made him smile.

"Toga?" She whispered, and blinked once. The sweater and hip huggers melted into a shimmering drape of silk the color of clouded jade and dark honey. She shook her head and the short, spiked hair suddenly tumbled down around her shoulders like a cascade of thick, viridian curls. "Like this?"

His brain shut down when she tilted her head and the moonlight touched on the shadow of her body beneath the silk. He drew in a breath, choked on his own saliva. Coughing, clearing his throat, he fought his blush. Could a guy trip over his own feet when he wasn't moving? He almost managed it.

"You like?" Her voice was the night wind.

"Um...um...yes. No! Maybe...yes! Yes? Definitely..."

She tilted her head the other way, curiosity dancing across her face in the moonlight. Pale silver light brushed against the column of her throat, the slope of her skin where it touched bronze silk.

"Jeans are fine," he practically yelped, trying to focus on her eyes, on the safe warmth flowing from her gaze, and not stare at the skin washed silver. He swallowed hard. "I like jeans."

She laughed, but her voice was cool as spring water and soothed the burning in his face. He closed his eyes, counted to five, peeked. Dice was once again in holey sweater and jeans.

"Better?" She asked. He nodded, blushing hot.

"Are you... are you a goddess or something?"

"No," she said. "I am nymph... but not common nymph." Her words were slow as time and halting, but he could have listened to her voice forever. "Not epimeliad, or hamadryad, or meliae or leuce—"

"Well, good,” he said, trying to smooth away the distress in her eyes. “'Cause I don't know what any of those things are. It's all Greek to me, dude."

She laughed again, put her hand on his arm. Smiling with her autumn sunshine eyes, she leaned in and whispered, "Orpheus." Her breath was the heat of high summer on red stone and desert sand, but sweet as the cool breezes of monsoon.

And then she kissed him, and it was like the music of the desert.