I was tagged by @woundedsoul12!
Yes people it's back. If you have never played before, take a recently published work and break it down for me scene by scene
I'm doing Shattered, my teeny-tiny little Valdemar fic about a character who was the victim of (we infer) torture and sexual assault in Magic's Pawn. She only got a few sentences in the book and has stuck with me for about 30 years.
I'm tagging anyone who wants to do this!
When I was younger, but not smaller, my aunt told me that my scars were given to me by an evil wizard.
Given. She truly did use that word.
Two things. The adult character likely gets sort of rewound mentally by a healer in the book, so that's what I was trying to get across with, "younger, but not smaller."
I also wanted to do something with given. I think the idea of the use of the word given was the core of the idea of the fic, and it's from it that everything else sort of spun off.
As if they were a gift, as if they were laid on me like a wreath or veil, like a shawl hung around my shoulders, or a necklace around my neck, or smudges of violet powder on my eyelids, or a fine woven belt gently tied around my waist. I would imagine him laying the scars on me like a mother might dress her daughter on the morning of a marriage, and when I’d trace a scar up my arm and smile, my aunt would go pale.
Me playing with the idea of gift. I liked the idea of a long list sentence because it felt like something she might spit out in anger when she was fed up.
The next bit served a couple of purposes. It painted a picture of her childlike state, and it gave an idea of the horror she'd gone through. I didn't have to outline what the mage did if I gave her a very idyllic view that made her aunt react - the reader would understand by the contrast drawn.
It’s hard to blame my aunt or the others for my early confusion. What the wizard had done to me was shattering, and after he’d been killed, the Hawkbrothers had put only as much of me back together as they thought was safe — my foundation had been compromised and was no longer capable of bearing the full weight of me. It left me like a child, and in a state where I would fondly trace a shallow pink trench of scar tissue on my thigh and think: Auntie said this was given to me. It is a gift.
This is the one paragraph I'm still a little unsure of. It gives a rundown of what happened, but the back end of that foundation sentence feels a little precious - like I sacrificed the flow of the paragraph for something the "full weight of me" phrase. But I went back to the scar tracing after that, and that bit is fine.
This paragraph was where I decided I had told circled around the subject enough and had to lay out the main points of what had happened.
It took me years to understand what she hadn't the courage to say. I’d had to trace the scars myself and wonder how they would have been made. This one was a burn. That one would have been a cut from a blade.
It also took years to understand that the way I moved in my world was also a scar. How I kept to the shadows to stay unseen or the way I couldn’t breath if someone raised their voice. The way I screamed when Jorrie kissed me.
Now I understand. It is only my body that remembers, and I can’t see what he did in my mind. But I can reconstruct it as well as the Hawkbrothers reconstructed me by tracing the scars or feeling how my breathing quickens at times.
I wanted to make clear that there was a separation between what her mind remembered and what her body remembered, and that the gulf there helped her realize what had been done once she had matured again.
Now that I'm rereading it it's sort of like how I wrote a gulf between what she thought had happened and what her aunt knew - a space between the thing and the understanding of that thing. I think that's a theme of this?
The problem is, as it has always been, that I can also reconstruct what he did by the looks of others. My aunt’s pale face started it, and now I can see it in everyone. I understand why Nemmy fusses over me when I visit and why her husband can’t meet my stare. I understand why Jorrie was punished, even though I told them I had asked him for the kiss. I understand why Moondance visits, and why he looks at me as though he’s trying to see to the bottom of a muddy pond.
Again, another way she understand what happened - by how others treat her. The Moondance bit was important to me. The character felt so devalued in the book - not even a name - so I wanted he to be important to Moondance (a powerful Healer and mage) and to be a bit of a mystery to him. She wasn't just healed and transformed, she made into something that didn't fit any more. There's stuff in Moondance's backstory that mirrors her a little bit so if I keep writing this, that will come up.
Of course she does. If she had no problem with it, I wouldn't have a story.
I was saved. I was healed. It was an imperfect healing, but I am more or less whole again after being shattered. Yet everyone still sees just the pieces of me on the ground and always, always, treads carefully around me, as if they might step on some fragment and crush it. Their eyes are down, keeping track of what I was, not looking up at who I am. Sometimes I wish so much that they might misstep, like Jorrie, so that I can exorcise a little of what they think is precious. Because if they keep to their dance, clutching their skirts and walking on tiptoes, I will break. The mage broke me once, but this, given enough time and enough pitying stares, will break me again.
This is where she lays out that the people around her have got her wrong. She doesn't have their special knowledge, so she can't see herself how they do, and what they think of as protecting her is exactly what is going to hurt her. There's a ton more I thought about with this paragraph, but I didn't write it in because the story didn't need it. Maybe if I do a follw up...
So tomorrow, I will leave. I have hidden some things just beyond the trees at the edge of the village, and tomorrow I will tell my aunt that I am going to pick fiddleheads. I will tell her that I don’t plan to be back before the afternoon, and I will pack a bit of food, and I will walk out the door. I will retrieve my things from their hiding place, and I will walk until every person who remembers what I don’t is far behind me.
I’m not sure where I will end up, but when my aunt told me where the man who killed the wizard was from, she said Valdemar, and she always pointed east.
And there's her resolve and resolution. There's no way she can fix how she's being treated, and there's no way she can be this new self in her community, so she's leaving. I tried to change the pace a bit because it's a shift in energy from reflection to actually doing something.
I don't have a clue what she's going to do next, but I do know she has no interest in tracking down Vanyel, the mage who killed the wizard. She is just heading towards to the place that's away. A lot of my stories are about people who don't fit in where they're from, and this is yet another one.
Her name I've given her is Niome, btw. Now I DO have to write more so she can have the name!.
