Cold Feet
an origin story
First off, we broke 150+ free subscribers a little over a month ago, and things have since accelerated a bit. As of this writing (3 years in), we’re at 167! Thank you!
The Speculative Fiction Fandom community is likewise starting slowly. We’re up to eight members after a week, all of them Americans so far, though one lives in Korea. We have to have 25 people from 5 different countries (if I remember the rules correctly) before we can petition Rotary International for an official charter.
What is this thing going to do? Good question!
Locally, I’ve had a request to sponsor some game nights, with weirder stuff than you find on most bar bookshelves (though last summer in Durham, while teaching for Science & Math, I was impressed by Moon Dog Meadery’s collection of 300+ board games). Since the demise of Geeksboro, Gate City Growlers might be a good location for such a thing. My permaculture peeps love South End Brewing (as do I), but it is generally way too loud for gaming.
Nationally and internationally (interplanetarily?), I hope members will be a presence at their local cons, wherever they are. I will have our first flyers ready for ConGregate 10 this weekend in Winston.
Eventually we’ll get into some service, like maybe doing game days at schools or nursing homes or something. My own Rotary club, Crescent, has recently started a relationship with the Newcomers School. That might be a possibility.
Open to suggestions, obviously.
Hero is a Verb
After many rejections from other publishers and outlets,
accepted “The Hound and the Nightingale” for his first StoryLetter anthology, a collection of location- and travel-themed stories called Take Me There. That anthology is out on Wednesday of this week, the 17th of July. You can pre-order it from your favorite retailer.The story below, “Cold Feet,” is a distant prequel, really one short chapter in the character Nachtigall’s origin story. Comics readers know how important those are for defining who a character is and what their story is about for month-to-month readers who have choices about where to put their pennies.
Almost all superheroes have an origin story: a bedrock account of the transformative events that set the protagonist apart from ordinary humanity.
I really don’t like the emphasis on special destiny, because I think a lot about luck and randomness and contingency. I think heroism is more situational than most authors and readers seem to want it to be. Heroism describes actions, not people. One of our biggest personal and cultural mistakes, over and over, is reifying and deifying flawed humans into perfect heroes, celebrities, and gods.
Now of course we reify all the time. We regard a car as a 'thing', though if we think carefully we realise that it is actually a process. A car is the ultimate example of the impermanence of functioning phenomena. Parts are always needing replacement. The body gradually oxidises to rust and the engine relentlessly becomes ever more worn. In the long term, a car can be regarded as a process that has money as its input and scrap metal as its output.
If that last bit resonated with you at all, check out Dharma Stack.
The Whole Half-Ogre
Meta-narratively, the big guy started out as a half-ogre druid, modified from Dragon Magazine #73, rolled up for a party of evil characters in a homebrew D&D game at the University of Kentucky during undergrad. At that time I called him Exedor, after an eccentric character I remembered from watching Mork & Mindy ten years before.
I liked the character enough that during down-times between games, I ported him to various other systems, from Ars Magica to Warhammer Fantasy, where I changed his name to Nachtigall (German for “nightingale”), because I liked the sound of the word. The idea of a big bruiser with a little bitty songbird for a familiar / master / god also appealed to me.
Despite all the preparations, I never played him again as part of a group (though my newest Arden Vul character Cosmos the Barbarian has a little bit of that same Exidor vibe).
Instead I started mapping out adventures for him in an undeveloped Solo RPG kind of way. Aside from the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which were for a YA audience, the term didn’t really exist yet.
Anyway, here’s a taste. Let me know what you think, and check out the anthology.
Cold Feet
or
The Midden
by Randall Hayes
Waldkat padded along with her heels up, allowing her familiar to feel the ground through her toes. Without a body, the spirit could not interact with our world except through her senses, her muscles. Walking on two legs was something of a compromise.
With a pounce, they were on all fours, punching through the crust of the snow and scrabbling in the leaves underneath for something small, and warm, which bit her hand until she stuffed its tiny head into her mouth and crushed it with her strong back teeth. She squeezed the middle with her hand, and blood and waste squirted out and ran down her arm. Long practice had taught her the necessity of this, if she did not want a mouth full of piss. The hair and claws were bad enough, scratching her throat on the way down. She licked a drop of her own blood from the bite on her hand, smacked her mouth a few times to satisfy the spirit, and then took a swig from her wineskin.
“Can we go home now?” Many nights she enjoyed their walks, but tonight was too cold to be out in bare feet.
No! hissed the spirit, annoyed. We stayed in for the whole of the storm. I am restless. Bored. Muscles twitched at the base of the woman’s spine, where her tail would have been if she’d had one. We will find something bigger near the grain houses, or the middens.
“When my toes go numb, you won’t be able to feel anything. And stiff fingers can’t hold prey.”
Hurry, then, the spirit said, and went silent. The woman waited long enough for another swig, just to be difficult. She knew the spirit could keep her awake all night, yowling in a voice only she could hear. There wasn’t enough wine in the skin to drown that out. So she went.
Despite all the village fires being banked for the night, Waldkat could see fairly well, and not just from the reflected starlight on the snow. Cat eyes were not as clear for details in the center, and they did not see as many colors, but at night they were amazing. No motion went unseen. The only hope for prey was to stand stock still and hope not to be noticed. Her ears were just as sharp.
They moved around the edge of the village, out from the trunks of the trees but still under the branches. As followers of the Old Ways, Waldkat and her mate Sprosser (“Sparrow”) did not stay in the village unless there were raiders about. During the summer, when the cattle stank even more and the flies started biting, other families moved out as well. If there was sickness or the crops failed, the whole village might be abandoned, for a while, until the troubles moved on too.
She came in facing the wind so that the cattle penned on the other side of the village would not smell her and make a fuss, moaning and roaring in their hoarse voices. She did not like questions at the best of times, and she was growing colder by the breath.
The grain houses were up on stilts to discourage rats. It seemed to be working at the moment, because when she sniffed the ground under them, she couldn’t smell anything but smoke and shit. Her nose was running, so she sniffed and spit to clear it.
Near one of the trash dumps, however, she caught the scents of salt and blood. Sniffing, she opened her mouth in an odd grimace and pulled the air in across her tongue, and then licked the roof of her mouth, sampling for other scents — sex scents.
It didn’t work. It never did. There was a spot inside Waldkat’s head that would respond, sometimes, but it was inside her nose, not in her mouth. It did no good to argue with the cat spirit, though, and it only took a second, so she usually went along.
With the air warm from her mouth now, that spot did respond when she blew out through her nose. Someone had given birth. It smelled like the sea, hundreds of miles away. Waldkat knelt down and stuck her head into the pit.
There was a babe down there, not crying. It was small, as though it had been delivered early, but its eyes were open, and it had teeth. Waldkat could see them, and hear them crunching the tough fibers of the veins in the afterbirth. Those veins were white against the dark mass of the placenta, making it look oddly like a purple cabbage. Blood leaked out of the tiny mouth and ran down over its body.
It looked straight at her out of the dark hole, unafraid, and chewed. Waldkat shivered, and not from the cold. She wondered if it could see her as anything more than a silhouette against the stars. If it had animal eyes like hers. If it knew her. She stood up and turned to go, quickly.
Take it, said the spirit. I want it.
“I am NOT eating that.”
We will not eat it. We will nurse it.
“Oh, no. No.” Cats were known to adopt the young of other animals sometimes, if their own kittens were killed -- skunks, rabbits, the ring-tailed bandits that would rapidly outgrow the mother. Like cuckoos, in reverse. “That is some kind of . . . changeling. I am not touching it.”
It is a riese, a son of the sea. It will not harm its mother. Not directly.
“NO.”
There are secrets I have kept from you. I will share them. I will show you the Ghost Lands. You will have all of my power, all of it.
“Why now? Why is this so important?”
There will be no more separation, no more talking. We will be the same creature.
Waldkat felt heat and strength flowing through her. She bent her knees and leaped, straight up, at least six feet, before flipping her feet backwards over her head and landing in the midden pit next to the little monster. She picked it up and bit through the cord. It was a boy.
Sprosser would be pleased by that part, at least. Maybe.
She leaped back out of the pit and walked away, picking off bits of trash so she could lick him dry.
Leave the grease, for now, said the spirit. It will keep him warm. That seemed true. The baby’s silent breath steamed in the cold, dry air, but his skin did not.
“I don’t have any milk.”
You will. This one will grow big, and strong. We can go now, the spirit purred. I am pleased with you both.
“Good. I’m freezing.” After that one moment of bribery, the spirit had withdrawn its power somewhat, and Waldkat’s feet hurt with the cold. She couldn’t wait to slide into bed with Sprosser. Where had she dropped her wineskin?
The little riese, gorged on blood and garbage, slept.
The snow sparkled with false promises, like fey silver.
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