One For Sorrow
Another longer excerpt from my WIP. Yay! And this chapter has a theme of sorts. And some other notes: in the previous draft, Tenley rescues a squirrel at this point in the story. It was just to show that she isn’t psychopathic and she can feel sympathy and empathy sometimes even if she has a hard time admitting it. But as you might have seen in some of the renders I made, Tenley is accompanied by a magpie as it was always intended she have one as a sort of famliar/pet. So I decided why not just introduce the magpie here? Also the scene is much extended as there was a later that just wasn’t working for me, so I moved some of that bits from that to here and now that later chapter is going to be something completely different to what it was. Phew! And now this:
One For Sorrow
By afternoon last night’s clouds had all disappeared. At
least the ones in the sky. Tenley felt the sun’s warm touch, was refreshed by
the gentle breeze, yet her mind was filled by a heavy, suffocating mist. From a
perch she peeped through the branches and across a field where other children
were playing. Laughing, holding hands, falling down, laughing again. It was
like they didn’t understand that their lives could be devastated in an instant
and none of them were prepared for that or all the pain that followed. She
supposed no-one ever could be.Tenley winced, her head throbbing again. It was probably
just that she hadn’t gotten any sleep. She hadn’t got much at all since that
night, as every time she closed her eyes she saw mother, her once fearsome
visage suddenly very quiet and still. Peaceful, she supposed, which mother
never was. That was what had gotten her killed. And Tenley saw the faces of all
those murderers too. They were worse than murderers – they were thieves too.
They’d taken her music-box and without it she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t see
through any of this mess. More throbbing. More wincing. She wondered if the man
in the alley had understood why any of that had happened to him. Probably more
than she did.
Also, when I wrote this, I’d forgotten what noise a magpie makes when it’s in distress. Fortunately I found a video on youtube and the description here is pretty accurate – it’s almost like a laugh, but you can feel it’s panicking. Maybe the tone is just a bit off what a human laugh would be.
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