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Sometimes Nika has dreams that she's falling straight through the middle of the earth. She doesn't talk about them though, she doesn't really talk about anything she thinks or feels or dreams. What she does do is block out all the chattering in her head with the loudest music possible, ride her bike as fast as she can with her eyes closed, and sometimes she wonders where her father is.


Arch is a wall. He is solid and strong, and never lets anything in.


When she was a girl they told her she was special. Different. They were lying of course, it's just the same old drivel a parent tells her child, and Avery knew it. She knew she was ordinary, nothing special. And that's why she has to work so hard to make it look easy.


She doesn't have a name. If she ever did, it's since passed to the bottom of the sea, covered in barnacles and rusty as an ancient anchor. Her voice is something full of salt and breath, and her hands are the oldest part of her. She isn't Muireann, and she isn't the Dockwitch, but sometimes it's easier to define yourself by what you are not, or by what one day you might hope to become.


The Bach Violin Partita #2 in D Minor is an empty, sad piece of music. It's her favorite thing to play. There are no acrobatics, no fingers flowing over the fingerboard, no pizzicato or detache, only simple, flowing notes. One after the other, the bow going up and down, and she can feel the notes in her breath. This is the time that she feels closest to God, and this is the only time she thinks He might be listening.


The window is diamond-clear, the sky is perfect. Her hands are smeared with the Crayola red of fresh blood, and her eyes are squinted against the big yellow sun. Nobody said this life would be easy, and it's not; but that's the way it has to be. Boo shrugs her shoulders, wipes her hands on a hankie, and holsters her sidearm. As she steps out the door and into the cold perfect air, she wonders if they still have any tea left.


When they look at me they see only weakness. They don't even see their mother, as far as they know their mother is their nurse, their governess. Eliza doesn't see that she has my eyes, my chin. Anne doesn't stop crying when I hold her. John's hands are rough, and his face is worse. Every time I look at him I see only how I've failed as a wife, as a woman. They don't see how my hands tremble or how my jaw clenches, because they do not understand. They don't know that to leave with such weakness takes terrible strength.


Knowledge is power. If that is the case, Roy should be far more powerful than he is. Instead, he is only a shadow of what he once was. He knows everything, or so he says, but none of that is meaningful. What good is knowledge to someone too terrified to use it?


The only difference between a whore and a noblewoman is that the former is honest about what she does. It's a good thing too, because Liz doesn't feel like she's ever been honest about anything else.


Lily Clarke holds in her hand a forget-me-not. It was meant to be a gift, but she's thinking about keeping it. Every day she feels a piece of herself slip away, every day she wonders how long it's going to be before she's gone. She knows what it is to be adored, but she wishes that she knew what it meant to be loved. Just as she sighs, the wind rises, and that flower she is holding trembles. Will anyone remember me after I've gone?


Verity is complicated and subversive, in that she appears to wear her thoughts and emotions on her sleeve; it is this illusion that makes her dangerous.


Fear drives us to do courageous things. Somewhere in England, a man called Richard Welles is terrified. He's been instrumental in the country's cryptology, and if the war that's brewing never starts, that might be part his doing. But he doesn't care about that. He can feel a different storm gathering, and it's only his cowardice that drives him to take everything apart.
So a couple of weeks ago or something, :iconshoepixie: and I were playing this game with the characters in our rp's. They aren't all our characters...but anyway...

The game was that one of us would give the other a name, and then we had to write a short blurb and try to capture each characters essence in a couple of sentences. Sometimes just one sentence.

Anyway, she kindly organized hers by game. I did not. They're all mashed together. There are characters from The Victorious, The Baroque, The Fractured, and Steampulp....all together in a veritable orgy of metaphor.

Please to enjoy this, written for your pleasure!
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zampano1983's avatar
Wow! :O

Big stories & characters in few words, every one of them leaving me with a vivid impression. I love what you've done here, especially the last one.

Makes me think I should write up all my own characters in this format before I put them in stories