#ziskwrites

Sometime last week @broodwoof tagged me to share a WIP snippet and I’ve actually been getting writing done so…!

This is from another one-shot set in the Enduring Friendships verse, but taking place when Emmrich and Johanna are kids.

Ft. a snippet from their first meeting!

The girl’s eyes narrow as she continues. “I thought you’d be more impressive.”

Now that the terror in his ears is ringing a little less loudly, he realises just how strange her accent is, too. The rhythm is wrong. The shape of the vowels. Orlesian, maybe. Or Nevarran, once removed.

The girl takes another step towards him.

He fights the urge to shrink against the wall, fails and finds himself apologising instead. “I’m sorry,” he says, knowing full well he can’t even fault her for the observation because he understands just how she’s developed the misconception.

And, well, truth be told, he wishes he was more impressive, too.

“Why?” she asks, leaning in like there’s an answer to give.

The problem is he’s now learned that there’s two different types of sorries: the type you give when something is your fault (like hiding a cat bite from your mother for hours), and the type people give when overwhelmed, like at funerals.

Right now, he’s still not sure which type of sorry he is. Maybe both.

But he still can’t run—still can’t force himself to simply walk away—so instead he takes the only other path available to him.

He doubles down.

“That I’m not more impressive.”

He’s not expecting her to burst into laughter but she does, the sound echoing off the flagstones before she claps a hand to her mouth as though someone’s reminded her to keep quiet, to behave herself.

It doesn’t work very well.

Or at all.

But mostly he’s just glad she’s no longer looking at him like half-preserved organs in a specimen jar.

Tagged by @serbarris, thank you! Tagging: @carnalapples, @queenaeducan, @gallows-into-oblivion and anybody else who might like to do this one! Scene from the still tentatively titled follow-up to Brilliant Things.

If Johanna were the type of woman to believe in the Maker, perhaps her current circumstances could be excused as divine retribution. In the absence of faith, however, a more mundane explanation must suffice.

Fortunately, she knows exactly where to pin the blame: any wrong she has ever faced can always be traced back to Emmrich Volkarin.

Volkarin has not been subtle about his involvement when it comes to all matters involving Johanna’s imprisonment. It is obvious in everything from the basic details of her physical location in his office to the structure of the wards he’d placed upon her skull: of course he would use a personal variation to the special formulation they had developed together in simpler and happier times. He had always enjoyed such petty flourishes, and Johanna had always indulged him.

And then there is the fact of her continued existence.

In her degraded state, the lich lords of the Grand Necropolis could have easily destroyed her soul in its entirety. And yet, through whatever contrivances Volkarin must have mustered in conversations with his fellow Watchers, Johanna had been granted this so-called mercy instead of the oblivion she had expected.

Given his intimate knowledge of her feelings toward contrition, it had been Volkarin’s most masterful ploy yet. Honestly, she would have been impressed—perhaps even proud—had she not been the target of his malevolent intentions.

Nonetheless, the events of the last few days as well as a newfound purpose in light of Rook’s disappearance had started Johanna along the path of considering accepting the excoriating indignity of her reduced circumstances.

Tagged on main by @poetikat and @mxanigel, thank you!

Not sure who has or hasn't been tagged lately, so tagging some of the usual suspects: @zirrah-writes, @serbarris, @nerdanel01.

But if anybody else wants to share, please take this as your excuse to do so and tag me, because I'd love to see! Here's a sneak peak of the next chapter of Extra Ordinary, my Emmrich & Johanna childhood friendship fic, hence popping this onto the sideblog!

--

There’s still something about Johanna that fascinates him. Maybe it’s how neither of them truly fit in here at the Necropolis. The older, more experienced Watchers might have welcomed Emmrich to the fold with warmth, but there’s still enough of them scrutinising him as though he’s some sort of experiment they expect to go horribly wrong one day to keep him wary.

And when it comes to the other apprentices, the initiates… well, they’re mostly older and don’t like the way he straddles the line of both from such a young age. Joining the Watch’s ranks is supposed to be a great honour: it's rare for anyone to be selected this long before their Harrowing.

Anyway, the truth of the matter is simple: Johanna’s really the only other person here around his own age. Maybe it needn't be more complicated than that. Not that he’d ever tell her directly. He already knows she’d hate the pity. She’d act just like those cats who had skulked behind his father’s shop and wouldn’t eat the scraps they'd been given until you pretended you were no longer watching.

Seized by a surge of curiosity, he acts before he can recall how to be afraid. Striding towards her, he doesn't bother to disguise the heaviness of his footsteps for once, his bucket swinging noisily back-and-forth from his wrist. If she bolts, she bolts, but this way, he hopes she'll escape before he reaches striking range.

His words, too, slip out before he can rehearse them. But they change midsentence as she turns to look at him.

Rules: You will be given a word. Then you share one sentence/excerpt from your WIP(s) that starts with each letter of your word! Tagged by @gallows-into-oblivion with the word 'fire'.

F from the Olivier Ingellvar story "My Favourite Mistake":

Frowning, Olivier scampered to his feet with surprising agility for a man his age. “Klara?” he asked. “What’s wrong?” Klara. Of course. That had been her name. He should have remembered— Emmrich’s self-flagellation was interrupted by the commotion in his peripheral vision. From what he could tell, Rook had just shoved her father. “How dare you show your face after all this time,” she hissed.

I from a pre-canon fic that explores the circumstances leading up to Johanna's expulsion from the Mourn Watch:

It’s all Emmrich can do to keep from fainting.  Maybe Johanna is paying attention after all, because her gloved hands grip his forearms, fingers finding the gaps between the bracelets of his grave dowry. “And if such power were harnessed correctly, it could destroy the entire world.” “Please,” Emmrich begs. “I don’t want to destroy the world.” The silence lingers for an overlong moment, the look on Johanna’s face inscrutable. He braces himself reflexively, having seen the same look upon her features when making complex calculations immediately before delivering a crushing blow on her opponents in the board games she so favours. 

R from a very post-canon Johanna & Emmrich fic:

Realisation hits her like a thunderclap. In the absence of guidance from his beloved Rook, Emmrich had once again turned to Johanna. Oh, how easily he could convince anybody else in the entire Necropolis that his bequeathment would be entirely benevolent—should he suddenly be of a mind to confess to the practice of illegal necromancy, which she suspected he wasn’t—but he can’t deceive her.    What else is a coward to do when staring down the inevitability of his own mortality other than to hedge his bets? “It might not work,” she warns him, as though he doesn’t already know, as though they hadn’t worked on the original calculations together, all those years ago. Of course, everything had been different back then, Johanna still flesh and bone and Emmrich a man in his prime. Emmrich’s grave gold rattles as he wheezes weakly. “Scared?”

E from the Meredith/Emmrich fic:

Emmrich studied the other occupants of the room closely, not daring to take a seat unless invited. It would have been a gross understatement to simply say he was a long way from home, and while he had read—voraciously—about Marcher customs over the years, he was staring to suspect there was no text in the world that could have prepared him for the reality of surviving Kirkwall. And that was based upon his impression of what the city must have been like prior to the undead incursion. With two extremely powerful mages with nothing left to lose intent on breaking down the city’s remaining defences? He could only hope the city’s last major remaining stronghold was as strong as the knight-commander purported it to be. The fact that the Gallows was an ancient Tevinter fortress at least afforded him some small measure of hope; perhaps in happier times, despite Kirkwall’s bloody history, he would have been able to enjoy a short visit, the chance to take in sights previously unseen.    But still. The Gallows. What a terrible name for a Circle of Magi, an executioner’s platform where young bright minds should be scaffolded instead!

Tagged by @hazelestelle

Rules: post the first line of your wip, the first line you worked on today, or any other “first line!”

Didn’t get much writing done today; snuck some scenes down on my phone as time permitted. Anyway.

“Johanna,” Emmrich starts with a tired sigh, “you know as well as I do that lichdom was never truly my dream.”

Write 3 sentences of your current WIP and post them (in a new post). Tag people to make them work on their WIPs too. Thank you for the tag, @hazelestelle 💖

@mxkelsifer, @mxanigel, @druckkugelschreiber and @anneapocalypse have tagged me in various 'share snippets' memes over the last few days, and I... actually wrote something today! (Post Absolution, taking place in the continuity as my other Orsino Lives works.)

The cottage wasn’t the sort of place Cullen had envisioned Orsino taking as a residence. It was of simple means, with wooden walls and a thatched roof. If anything, it reminded Cullen of the houses of his youth. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, considering he was in the Hinterlands, but despite being back on Fereldan soil, Cullen had never felt so far from home.

Cullen raised his hand to the door to knock, but it was already ajar. It felt dangerous, perverse, for the former First Enchanter to be so unguarded like this. It hadn’t been this way back in the Circle.

But so many things had changed since then. Everything had changed. Except for the most important thing.

He sighed loudly. He wished it hadn’t come to this, that he didn’t have to be the one to tell Orsino the bad news. But who else was there? Who else knew Orsino’s whereabouts, who knew he was even still alive? The popularity of the dwarf’s book seemed to have overwritten reality even for those who were present. “Cullen,” Orsino’s voice called from inside, “do you intend to brood in my doorway all day? Come in.”

Cullen flushed, pushing his way into the house with heavy footsteps. “How did you know it was me?”

Smiling, Orsino looked up from the teapot in his hands. “I’d recognise that sigh anywhere.”