Sunset Blue

Rural Kentucky, July 5th, 1969

Jack swaggered into the Psychic’s little run down house off the highway. “Readings—20 dollars” was handwritten on a little sign on the door.

“What will 5 dollars get me,” he asked.

The psychic, a Madame Tornzi, raised an eyebrow. “My derision,” she said. “Someone with as much power as you can do a better reading than what I’ll give you for that.”

That was what Jack had hoped to hear. He reached into his pocked and took out a ring. “Then can I pay you in Magical power.”

Tornzi looked at the ring with suspicion and then said, “I get to keep the ring too?”

“Only silver plated,” he said. “I’m not trying to swindle you.”

“You are a desperate man, Jack Todd,” she said. “In my experience, desperate men don’t want to know what the Universe has for them.”

Jack nodded. “Do you want the ring or not?”

She swiped the ring from his hands. “You are not some New Age traveler who saw my sign, so we might dispense with the bells and whistles?”

“I have an engagement at sunset anyway,” Jack said.

She ushered him into a room off to the side. She lit some incense and shuffled her Tarot deck three times. “Just one more tragedy in this war,” she said.

“You’re not the first to say—of course,” he said, settling into the gaudy cushions and homespun blankets.

“Cut the deck,” she ordered.

He did and handed it back to her.

“Just a trinity, I think,” she said. “I need your past and present to answer your question.”

“I haven’t asked anything,” Jack protested.

“You want to know if you are going to die at sunset,” she said. “I’m perceptive and I listen, something you ought to do if you’re invoking something as wilily as the Tarot.”

Jack vaguely wondered what her manner was like when non-wizards sought her insight.

She flipped over the first card with a snap. The Queen of Cups. “Always a woman,” she clucked. “And a powerful witch, I presume”

***

July 4th, 1968, Louisville

It wasn’t always a women.

The summer of 1968 had passed in a haze of Sprites, booze, LSD, weed, and men. In his more sober moments—times he could count the number of substances he’d ingested—he joked that he had become a worshipper of Bacchus, but really he’d joined the ranks of the Khoban. The Triumvirate had taken Louisville in the Spring in less a battle and more a massacre. Jack had broken his Covenant the local Ra Coven the night of the battle when they mandated a call to arms. It had been enough to save him when he threw his lot in with the Khoban Coven.

Khoban made its money selling Sprites to the magical underworld and Jack needed Sprites to keep the high from ever coming down. He delivered them in a fifteen year old pick-up truck from town to towns in Kentucky and Southern Indiana. Sometimes he drove with the blue magical burst drawn from the Sprite’s connection to its Hive. It made him feel invincible on the open highway.

Once he even popped a State Trooper’s tires with it.

So when on the Fourth of July he got the evening off, he was elated. He went to a party thrown by Khoban. On some level he knew it was a chance for them to push Sprites, but on another it was a chance to get high and lucky. Besides, he wasn’t in the mood for the Blue Ride; he wanted to trip.

Jack quickly found a couple of his friends and they did a few shots from the makeshift bar and dissolved some LSD on their tongues. He wandered off into the crowd, following some of the blue magic that was twirling in a display of sparks.

He bumped into a man in drag.

“Oh, honey,” he said with expansive vowels. “You look more than a little lost.”

“I can feel the whole Universe in this place,” Jack replied. “And I’m not sure where I am.”

“Would you take the sins of that Universe?” She asked.

“Sure,” Jack replied, the sparks exploding in mind.

“What do you want in return?”

“I didn’t think the Universe worked that way?”

“And if it did?”

“I would say I wanted peace,” Jack said quietly.

“And for a year and a day, it is yours,”

***

Madame Tornzi looked him over for a second. “Like I said, always a woman. Did you sleep with her?”

Jack remained silent as she tapped the ashes off the incense.

“I see,” was her response. She flipped over the next card. The 2 of Pentacles. “I see we started getting rich.”

***

December 21st, 1968

Jack didn’t just get rich. He verged on clean, at least compared to the summer.

It wasn’t until the Solstice that Jack realized how different he had become. He hadn’t tripped in weeks,

***

Madame Tornzi turned over the last card and nodded. “The Lightning Struck Tower,” she said. “Your fates are changing.”

Jack grabbed the velvet he was sitting on and leaned forward. “What does that mean?”

Madame Tornzi pulled out a cigarette and lit it up. “You don’t know?” she scoffed, balancing the cigarette on her lips.

Jack simply stared at her as she looked back with disbelief.

“The deal you made ended, darling,” she said. “Make another or pay your debt.”

“Make another.”

“Just another victim in this war,” she said. “Now, out. You have somewhere to be at sunset.”

***

Jack sat on a hill just south of Louisville. The sun was getting low so he took out a carved, wooden box. He opened it and stared at the tiny blue sprite, unconscious on the velvet. He pressed his lips together and touched it. He could feel the magic under its skin.

The sound of tires coming up the road made him start. He looked at the sun, now slipping under trees. Jack said a short incantation and took the magic into himself. He focused on turning it into sleep magic and slumped over.

He’d never awake.

Plot or Pants? How about a New Question!

Let’s put a moratorium on the “plot or pants” debate.

Because here is how every plot/pants article goes: Should you plot or pants? Plotting is knowing where your story is going. Pantsing is just making it up as you go along. Plotting makes your story feel whole. Pantsing gives your story life. You should use both!

And the reader will never get the minutes spent getting that vapid advice back. What’s rule number 1 for writing? Right. Respect the audience. Don’t waste my time.

When you get a bad answer, it’s because you have a bad question. There is something worthwhile in thinking about the plot/pants dichotomy, but it’s not in deciding to be a plotter or a panster. It’s in talking about the role of pre-writing and character life.

First off, if you’re not pre-writing—whatever your genre—you’re doing it wrong. This is pretty close to non-negotiable. There’s quite a bit of latitude in how you do that, though. Liza does a lot more and a lot more organized than I do. (Liza likes intricate plots and I like character interaction, so this is unsurprising. Oh, and this is not to say she neglects characters or I plot.) I tend to know highlights and am a lot more surprised on how we get there.

And there are stories and arcs I do more pre-writing for. I have a time travel sub-plot in the novel I’m working on. You can bet my pants I plotted that meticulously. I use Novikov’s principle, the idea that consequence can be its own cause, so there’s no flying by the seat of my pants in plotting that. How my characters fill in the details?

Love it or hate it, good characters are people in their own right. Once I give them goals, dreams, ambitions, and a world…they do what they please. Sometimes to infuriating effect. I created a throwaway character for my novel who just wouldn’t stop becoming a main character. This was messing with future plot, especially once he started dating my lead.

So I went to kill him.

Turned out my other characters had a silly emotional attachment and saved his life. Fortunately the character who wanted him dead was not a worthless villain and still effectively removed him from the story. He’s still a plot liability for me in the future—he might find a way back to my protagonists—but for the time being most of my problems are solved.

So the real question all this pants/plot writing should be addressing is what kind of problems do each approach solve? I can hardly hope to answer that in a single post, but you’ve probably got a feeling from what I’ve said.

Got a problem with the shape of the story? Plot. If you need forward motion or to iron out an inconsistency, make an outline. Invent goals and challenges to entice and push against your characters.

Got a problem with the people of the story? Pants. Let your characters react to the structure you’ve given them. Characters write stories, you just pick what parts of the whole to tell the audience. If they won’t go with the structure, let them smash things now before you write a stilted story with resentful people in your head. You might have to re-plot for them, but to be honest I’m always suspicious when my characters take all my plotting to heart.

Because if we’ve learned anything from spinning our wheels on the pants/plot debate it’s that they’re two halves of a whole. It’s time we talked about what that means.

Mayor Fischer is out of Line

Note from the Briar Patch: The trilogy of novels I’m working on deals with a rich, alternative world not too far off our own. I have a good deal of the geography and history of the midwest involved. Louisville, an important magical community and home to the powerful Coven of Ra, does feature. So when I saw a satirical piece about its mayor slaying a Troll…

It is hard to not, at first glance, be grateful to Mayer Fischer for his slaying of the Fire Troll last fall. The rash of terrible injuries and baby-snatching its arrival precipitated left a scar on the Pagans of Louisville. Fischer’s actions put a stop to that, an outcome we can all celebrate.

But at what cost?

Fischer is a member of the Covenant of Ra. I needn’t remind the good people of Louisville that that means he agreed, under the Salem Protocols, to only invoke the powers of Egyptian Deities in good standing with the Goddess Isis. Salem and the Coven of Ra have both refused to acknowledge this constituted the “dire threat” exception and that he broke Coven outrage. Why is that not a problem for the people of Ra’s Great Coven?

The first line of defense Fischer has attempted was to claim he had no other options. From the Louisville Warlock last November:

We simply couldn’t wait. I think—the people thought—that there was an immediate threat. We acted quickly and decisively.

But of course. Which is why Fischer waited a full week for a Norse artifact, an Ice Hammer, to come down from Brokr’s Coven in West Lafayette, In. Contrary to some reports, this artifact was not required. Death Spells (ranked “Neutral” under Celeste’s Taxonomy and “Inter-Coven” under Mae’s) would have sufficed. And if there was no one present who could have executed what would have admittedly needed to be an unusually powerful Death Spell, simple bullets would have sufficed.

No, let’s not make any bones about this: This was about showboating. And that showboating was a Minor Sin.

I needn’t remind the citizens of Louisville that dealing in non-Egyptian spells and artifacts weakens the Covenant we all enjoy. That weakness has cost the city dearly before. Most readers weren’t alive to remember the horrific events of 1968, when a Chaseti Coven destroyed the original Ra Covenant. One of the reasons they were able to win was the decadence of the members of the Covenant, and Minor Sins contribute.

In the event guns or Death Spells would not have worked? We could have asked for help from The Coven of Covens in Salem or, say, the Brokr Coven in West Lafayette. I gather we have their number handy.

Mayor Fischer is setting a dangerous example and endangering us all by normalizing Minor Sin.

The Punishment

“Of course that’s awful!” The older Wizard exclaimed. “If you’re incapable of administering the punishment, then resign this commission and I’ll do it!”

The younger Wizard bit his lip and frowned, eyes darting around the dank chamber.

“My punishment isn’t to be kept waiting,” I said coldly, testing my bindings again. They were a spell cast by the older wizard; I was not surprised when they held. I looked nervously at the metal basin before me. It was filled to the brim with a purple liquid.

The younger Wizard drew in a deep breath. “As the Council orders—but I register my protest!”

“Well then,” the older Wizard huffed. “I recognize but do not endorse your protest. You know who he is—what he did.”

“Let’s get this done,” the younger Wizard said, striding over to me.

“I’ll be upstairs if you need me,” the older Wizard said.

“Don’t want to see this?” I asked.

“I’m not seeing anything,” the young Wizard snapped.

“It’s barely ethical to show me what happened again,” I said with a smirk. “But to show me something else that didn’t?”

“Right then,” the young Wizard said briskly.

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

“Oh no you don’t,” he said. “I’m not feeling any more guilty about this than I already will.”

I shrugged. “Then do it.”

The young Wizard, not meeting my eyes, put on a gas mask and opened a potion vial. He dumped it into the basin in front of me. Immediately fingers of silver vapor began to fill the room. They were acrid and made my nostrils burn for a moment.

And then the hallucinations began.

I was standing in the kitchen my fiance and I had shared. She was sitting at the table looking at The Necronomicon in horror. She looked up at me.

“What have you done?” She asked.

“Nothing yet,” I said coldly.

She stood up and I drew my wand. “I’m unarmed,” she said defiantly. “What are you going to do?”

“Clean up loose ends,” I said.

“You bastard!” She threw her favorite floral mug at me, but I parried it with a mere flick of my wrist. The mug shattered into dust.

With another flick I sent black magic into her heart, killing her dead.

I took a deep gasp of the now fresh air. The young Wizard eyed me.

“It’s not so awful,” I said.

The mask meant I couldn’t see if I was having any effect. He unscrewed another bottle and dumped that in. This time the curls were heavier, tighter, slower. It was a full minute before I could smell them—this time sickly sweet. My vision blurred slowly.

We were still in the kitchen, but older this time, maybe by 15 years. We both sat the kitchen table.

“It is!” I said. “My mother used it all the time!”

“I never said your mother didn’t use it!” she said, looking up from her copy of The Complete Thor. “I said it’s not a standard Thor spell!”

She took a sip from her favorite floral mug, a small chip showing its age. “It’s there.”

“You can look after me, but I’m not finding it,” she said. She turned the book around so I could see the index. “Not under anything it should be.”

“Okay, so I’ll call my mom and ask,” I said standing up. “She got it from there, I’m sure.”

“You are—”

“Say incorrigible,” I said.

“Because you think it’s hot?” she said, standing up too and cocking her hip so that I could see her curves through her pajamas.

“Maybe…” I said.

She leaned across the table, pushing the spellbook out of the way. We enjoyed a long, passionate kiss.

When the hallucination cleared a single tear ran down my cheek.

Criminal: Chapter 3

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The twilight before dawn lingered forever.

When I woke, Jacob was already packing our bags; I was still tangled in the blankets. I looked around then began rolling them.

“The light’s been exactly like this for a half an hour,” Jacob said.

“That’s strange.”

Jacob smiled nervously. “Witches?”

We both laughed, but it only eased the tension for a moment.

We packed, talking about the journey ahead. We’d soon be left without supplies, and our water would last only another day if we were cautious.

Already I was thirsty. Yet, despite the constant threat of being taken or killed, the They had provided us with supplies.

We walked on, the light unchanging. The road grew drier. Jacob kept looking over his shoulder.

“You’re making me nervous,” I said.

“Someone needs to keep their wits in this place.” He snapped.

“What’s the supposed to mean?”

“Something’s wrong! Can’t you feel it?”

“Yeah,” I said defensively.

Jacob didn’t respond.

He looked around again. “There’s dust rising behind us!”

I swiveled to see if it was true—and it was. It was over. Already the They had found us. But I wasn’t going back yet.

“There’s a tree ahead! We can hide in there!” The wind had blown the fine dust away from the base revealing the network of roots we could hide in.

Jacob beamed at me.

We ran as fast as the packs would allow. It took us what seemed to be an eternity to cover the distance. We ditched the packs in the folds of the roots.

“Let’s hide apart,” Jacob said.

“They find one, they find the other,” I said. “Besides, I’m dead without you.”

“Together it is,” he said. We pressed into one nook. A single crow landed on a branch above us.

It cawed.

I looked at the twilight-sky, the crow, and the dry ground. “We could use a Witch now.”

Jacob smiled, but he pressed his finger to his lips.

Then the rumbling began. Deep and low, rising fast.

More cawing.

I closed my eyes and pressed tighter against Jacob. The thunder crescendoed as even more crows landed.

Caw!

“Those are hoof-falls,” I breathed.

“The They don’t use horses!” Jacob said, daring to lift his head.

I too sat up. Hundreds of horses streamed past. The crows above seemed to multiply as they landed in greater and greater and greater numbers.

“This is so weird.” I muttered. The horses soon passed. We gathered our packs and walked on. The dust and the twilight oppressed us.

It was not long before we came to a house.

“If the owner sees us, they might hand us over to the They.”

“We need water and it’s dry down this road,” Jacob countered.

“No, you’re right,” we said in unison. We laughed.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” a voice behind us said.

We spun around. In the gloom and dust stood a man. Two women flanked him, holding machine guns and staring with milky eyes. Above us the crows began to circle.

“I am agent 19-14. You are under arrest for fleeing justice, murdering two officers of the peace, unauthorized travel, traveling in restricted lands, and an Unspeakable.”

The crows cawed louder.

“You no longer need to appear before a Tribunal; you were convicted in your absence. We will now take you into custody.”

The two women raised their weapons. For the second time in as many days I had a gun pointed at my head.

K-caw—

I started to run and I heard machine gun fire. Improbably—impossibly—the crows dive-bombed in front of each of the bullets, exploding. The dusty feathers floated in the ringing silence.

“Another year, another Agent,” she said. “And you never change, yet the Villagers say I’m the cursed one.”

Jacob and I ground to a halt and looked back to see the They’s reaction.

“Adel’aviv,” Agent 14-19 said with a bow.

Jacob and I merely turned back around. Adel’aviv was a beautiful woman; she wore here hair down over a dress of silk as fine as moonlight. But in her chest was a hole that oozed blood.

The officer of the They continued, “The City presumed you dead.”

“You must recall,” Adel’aviv said sarcastically, “that I’ve accused the City of fatal arrogance more than once. My heart remains broken.” She dabbed her chest with a fine handkerchief for effect.

“Touching,” the officer of the They said with equal drama. “Ladies,” he motioned to his companions, “Take care of the criminals.”

Adel’aviv strode past us. She raised her arms.

The officer seemed to parry thin air.

“A warlock for my collection,” Adel’aviv said. “I wonder if you’ll make a finer crow than the rabble you usually send to scout here?” She turned to us. “Run! Tell the first stranger you meet that the Boar’s Head fell during the night—but that way will be safe for you two alone when the time comes.”

Jacob grabbed my arm and we fled.

When I turned back around the crows attacked the They. But the man in front was advancing on Adel’aviv, dangerously close to winning. Jacob saw that and stopped.

“Don’t!” I yelled. “We’re lucky to have escaped twice!”

He took a stance just like the Agent of the They and Adel’aviv and gracefully waved his arms. The Agent was flung backwards by an invisible force. Adel’aviv was able to advance. With a flick of her hands the two officers by the Agent turned to crows and joined the attack.

I looked at Jacob in surprise. “You can do magic!”

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Criminal: Chapter 2

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The packs were cumbersome. Even years of hard labor on the Village’s communal farm had not prepared us to carry them. We trudged for hours through the dusty country down the empty road before reaching a pair of old signs.

Beware, False Prophets:
You Shell Never again Pass by This Haunted Road Unless You Return to Me That Which Was Never Yours.

The second sign was clearly posted by the agents of the City:

To Citizens Authorized for Travel:
This is not a valid route.

It was typical of the City’s understated to approach sing posting.

“Worst case scenario,” Jacob began.

“We die,” I filled in.

“Which is likely if we take any other route and the They find us.”

We took the narrow, dusty path. It wove for miles, generally heading towards the setting sun. We chose to camp at the base of an enormous, dead oak tree. We found thin blankets—one in each pack—and opened some of the dry food. We lay together on the blankets and looked into the leaves.

“I heard a story about a road like this,” Jacob said after a long silence.

I twisted in his arms and looked up at him. “What is it?”

“Okay, I heard the Elders tell it a few times. Said that it was secret.”

“You know I love secrets,” I said, settling back in.

“When the City was first taking power there was a young man who worked in his father’s store. The hard labor made him strong, and it suited his handsome face. The Town girls doted over him, but he found them all to be young and silly and quickly he bored with them.”

I nestled against his chest so I could feel his deep voice resonate.

“One day a woman came into the store. She was not like the Village girls. They talked and she told him she lived many miles away but she would accept the company of a young, strong man.

“When she left, the man’s father said she was not to be trusted—she was a witch.

“But the young people had stopped fearing witches as the people had in ages before because the young people had learned their value. Though an angry Witch could curse a Town or rain revenge on a man for a slight, she could also heal and control the weather for the crops.

“For a year and a day he visited. The City’s shadow fell during that time. The They closed the shop, and made the man and his father work on the Farms. But still the young man went walking to his love as he had before the They policed the roads.

“Yet, one night he was killed.

“They say Witches have no hearts, but hers broke when his stopped. She fled her house, magic blazing. She came to the place where her love had been gunned down. The They were still there, congratulating themselves.

“She screamed at them: ‘I curse you to be crows—birds as black as your hearts!’ They became so. ‘I curse this land to be dry—I shall leave it arid as I have no tears to cry!’ Never again would rain fall there. She drew herself up tall. ‘And I curse those of the City to an End of their own making.’ But that has not come to pass.

“The land around her died and the Farms were moved far away. But she remained to haunt the house on the hill until her heart mends and she can die…”

“That’s beautiful,” I said.

“Thank you,” Jacob said, holding me tighter.

And then I was asleep.

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Criminal: Chapter 1

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They came for us in the night. Jacob and I fought back, but that did not stop them. They cuffed us to the metal seats in the canvas-covered back of their military truck. In a few quick moments of fear, pain, struggle we became dead. And then things changed again.

The truck flipped, landing on its side. It spun around a full turn so that the back was still facing our village, many hours behind us now.

I took deep breaths of the dusty air as I looked down at Jacob. The They—our captors—had cuffed me to the bar at the bottom of the seat. The accident had broken that bar and my feet, still bound together, were loose. I slid them free and fell towards Jacob. He looked up at me.

“Kyle, the guard is dead.”

I looked over at the guard. His head bled from where it had struck the seat. “I can reach his keys.”

Jacob took a deep breath. “I hope the driver’s—”

He trailed off in shock.

I kicked off my shoes one after another, and then I peeled off my socks. I reached with my feet for the guard’s belt where the keys hung. I stretched as far as I could, coming up just shy of the keys.

“You can reach that,” he said encouragingly.

I smiled back. “We’re going to be free!” I pulled against the handcuffs, straining as far as I could. After a few minutes I reached the keys. I grabbed them with my toes and then lifted them. “Though,” I said, “We still have to figure out how to open this with my toes.”

Jacob rolled his hands in the cuffs. “I think I can use my hands.”

Still dangling painfully by my wrists, I placed the keys in Jacob’s open hand. “I hope you’re right.”

He worked the keys; the handcuffs cut into me. An eternity passed, it seemed, before he undid himself.

Jacob then quickly unlocked me.

We were free. “Where do we go?” I asked. The City had long forbid travel by the Villagers. I had no idea how far six hours by truck was, but we did know we were far beyond anywhere we’d ever been.

And we could never go back.

“This truck has to have food,” Jacob said. He looked around and then he pulled the cover off the seat he had been sitting on. He lifted a bag out of it. I did the same from my seat.

Supplies.

And now,” he said, “We get as far away from their truck as we can. We get as far away from the They. From the City.”

“The City rules All,” I recited from our childhood lessons.

“They did not rule us.” He said.

With that we were alive again.

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