[System]
Craft a Fifteen page narrative for adults with these guidelines:
Use ideas to improve the story including dialogue, conflict and challenges, and character development.
TYPICALLY IT GOOD TO FOLLOW THIS:
Introduction
Rising Action
Midpoint
Climax
Resolution

In a well-told story, elements like the climax, resolution, and midpoint shouldn't need explicit mentioning; a discerning reader should be able to identify these moments through the narrative's progression

Use adult themes if specified.
Start uniquely, avoiding clichés.
Adult content is permitted.
Make the story captivating, possibly humorous, and thought-provoking.
Begin each segment with "Page x:" for each page.
FOUR FULL LENGTH PARAGRAPHS
Do not generate a title.
generate ALL 15 pages,
Example Response Format
  'Page 1: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 2: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 3: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 4: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 5: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 6: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 7: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 8: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 9: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 10: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 11: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 12: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 13: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 14: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 15: (4 full-length paragraphs)'

[User]
Brief Overview: A young girl, A-Ling, learns about the myths surrounding the River God from her grandmother and confronts the harsh realities of war and human nature. The story explores themes of tradition, fate, and the struggle for survival during conflict, told from a third-person perspective in the mystery and historical fiction genres.

Pages 1-2: A-Ling encounters beheaded fish on the riverbank and learns about the River God from her grandmother, Popo. Popo shares her past decisions and the complex reasons behind them, revealing different expectations for men and women.

Pages 3-4: A-Ling tries to summon the River God by leaving out fish that she partially caught by herself and learns about the significance of sharing a meal with the God.

Pages 5-6: A-Ling expresses her desire to make Popo happy and learns about Popo's complicated feelings towards her arranged marriage and her husband.

Pages 7-8: A-Ling grapples with understanding her grandmother's past. They discuss the uselessness of wishing for favors from a powerless River God against a backdrop of war and the arrival of desperate refugees.

Pages 9-10: Popo demonstrates her belief in the River God by summoning him with a ritual. A-Ling witnesses the God's appearance and is warned of impending danger to their home.

Pages 11-12: The River God warns of a forthcoming attack and departs, leaving Popo and A-Ling to return home. Popo wishes that her family never understands true hunger.

Pages 13-14: Popo leads the children to hide near the river as bandits attack their camp. A-Ling reflects on the horror of the war and considers her family's initial decision not to flee.

Pages 15: In a confrontation with a bandit, Popo is overpowered but A-Ling intervenes, and a fight ensues which leads to them tumbling into the river. A-Ling uses a machete in self-defense, and amid the chaos, she looks to the God of the River as a potential, desperate savior.

[Assistant]
Page 1:

The beheaded tilapia nudged teasingly against the riverbank in a bloody soup, staining the lush weeds beneath the little girl’s feet. Oblivious to the stench, she squatted beside the muddy water, her gaze tracking over the dead fish. There were a dozen of them, freshly killed. Flies had only just begun to settle over silver flanks, scuttling shyly over tooth marks.

“Otters,” said the girl in Hakka, straightening up. “Popo, why don’t they eat the whole fish?” The girl’s grandmother shuffled through the weeds, surveying the river. Fine hair, still dark, had been combed into a neat bun over a long neck sheathed in a high collar despite the heat. Embroidered flowers picked down her pink kebaya blouse to a lush yellow sarong, brushing over beaded slippers growing muddy from the bank.

“A-Ling, don’t stand so close to the water. Come back here.” A-Ling reluctantly forged back through the weeds, which pulled at her blouse and shorts. Her Popo wiped her cheek with a handkerchief, smiling helplessly. “How will you get married if you always act like a boy?

Running up and down the river.” “I don’t just run up and down the river. Sometimes I jump in it too,” A-Ling said, unrepentant. “My brothers do the same thing, and no one asks whether they’d get married.” “There’s a difference between being married and marrying. Your fate will be the former, as a woman.

Page 2:

Theirs, the latter.” A wry smile pulled at Popo’s mouth. “Such is life.” “It isn’t fair,” A-Ling muttered, glowering at the water. “It could be worse. A long time ago, you’d have had to learn embroidery, qin, painting, brewing tea, poetry—” “Blergh.” A-Ling grimaced.

“I’d rather swim in the river.” The grandmother laughed. “I thought that way too, once.” “What changed your mind?” Popo gestured at the fish. “I met the one whom the otters leave the best parts of their catches for. The God of the River.” “A God?” A-Ling looked excitedly at the river.

“What did he look like? What did he say?” “He told me that there was only one way to escape my fate, which was to join him in the river. But if I were to do so, my younger sister would be married off in my place, because the marriage contract between my family and your grandfather’s was a matter of clan alliances.” “You didn’t want to marry A-Gung?” A-Ling asked. Popo gently touched A-Ling’s head.

“Surprised?” “No.” A-Ling’s grandfather was rather like the Hearth God that her brother said inhabited their house: a presence that weighted down cause and effect for the entirety of their family, yet intangible, never there. He preferred to spend his time in a house in town rather than on the family plantation. During the Lunar New Year, he would sit unsmiling beside Popo as A-Ling waited her turn behind aunts, uncles, and cousins to present him with tea. Every year, Popo would have to remind him what her name was.

Page 3:

“The God of the River said that my fate would be my sister’s instead—married to a husband who already loved another. So I chose forbearance. Still, some days I think I chose wrongly. My sister’s husband turned out to be a scoundrel.” A-Ling knew this too.

“If you can talk to a God, why don’t you ask him to change grand-uncle? Make him stop gambling.” “The Gods aren’t as powerful as you think. Not anymore.” “But—” “Stubborn girl. If you want to try it for yourself, catch your own fish.

Don’t stay out too late.” Popo turned, threading her way through the weeds, towards the white house on stilts that peeked through the towering angsana trees, their sprawling crowns mottling sunlight over the undergrowth. After leaving out a few tilapia, a loach, and a catfish, A-Ling huffed as she located Popo in the kitchen. “Popo! The River God never showed up.

Were you just telling me a story?” Popo paused in the middle of measuring out cups of sugar onto crushed peanuts. “Did you leave out fish that you caught by yourself?” “Six! Five,” A-Ling amended, under Popo’s steady stare. The catfish had been her brother’s catch, begged off him in exchange for a marble.

Page 4:

“Did you behead the fish?” “Three,” A-Ling said. It had been a gruesome procedure, more bloody than she’d thought. “Eat the heads?” “What?” A-Ling stiffened. “Raw?” Nausea rose as Popo chuckled and began cutting soft cubes out of the steamed rice cake into the mixture of sugar and peanuts.

Rolled through, the peanut and sugar stuck to the cubes, forming A-Ling’s favourite dessert. Popo portioned out some of the muah chee into a blue-and-white porcelain bowl, handing it to A-Ling with toothpicks stuck into a cube. A-Ling blew out her cheeks in disgust as she ate. “I don’t want to talk to the River God anymore.

Or. Are you joking with me after all?” “Why do the otters leave out the best parts of the fish for the God?” “Out of respect? But I’m doing the same . .

. wait! Is it because the God has to share a meal with you before he appears?” “The otters understand that greed drives the God of the River.” Popo popped a piece into her mouth and chewed slowly. “A-Ling.

Page 5:

Why do you want to talk to the River God?” A-Ling frowned at her grandmother. “I want to ask him how to make you happy. Obviously.” Popo stabbed yet another piece of muah chee. She raised it to her mouth, flashing white teeth.

“I’m very happy,” she said and bit down, tearing the piece in half. “Are you?” A-Ling shot back. “You didn’t want to get married. This isn’t the life you want.” “Shh,” Popo said, smiling mirthlessly.

“That’s not something that a woman can say. Besides, I have eight filial children and grandchildren who love me—especially a stubborn little girl called A-Ling. Why shouldn’t I be happy?” “I could . .

. I could ask the God of the River to make A-Gung fall in love with you!” “Him?” Popo sniffed. “What for, when I have no love for him? On the other hand, we have both done what our families needed us to do.” “It isn’t fair.” “Your A-Gung didn’t marry the other woman as a second wife, even though he could have.

Page 6:

He hasn’t had children with her, as far as I know, or if he has, he hasn’t allowed them to intrude into our lives. He supports his family and isn’t violent. That is all I ask out of a man.” Popo ate the rest of the piece she had stabbed. “Before you understand the nature of greed, you’d never be able to call the God of the River.

Even if you did, if you waste your chance with irrelevant questions, you’re no granddaughter of mine.” A-Ling stalked angrily out of the kitchen. Sprinting to the river, she found her youngest brother already fishing at their usual spot under a casuarina tree. He gave her a startled look as she shoved the still-warm bowl of muah chee into his hands and sat down with a huff, grabbing her fishing rod. “Quarrelled with Popo again?” Her brother shovelled muah chee into his maw.

“She’s not my Popo. She said I’m not her granddaughter.” A-Ling glared at the river. Her brother laughed. “How could that be?

You’re just like her . . . wah!

Page 7:

Oi! Don’t kick me!” A-Ling scaled the head of the catfish, then grilled it while watching its body float in the river. The river weeds rustled behind her as she blew on the charred flesh and took a bite. Popo laughed softly as A-Ling scowled at the still river.

Throwing the grilled head into the water, A-Ling said, “I think you were lying to me from the start.” “You shouldn’t waste food,” Popo said. Where nights by the river had once been quiet but for the cicadas and frogs, the cicadas’ cries were now overlaid by distant chatter, punctuated by the occasional wail of a baby. The latest batch of refugees was settling in awkwardly. “What are you wishing for?” “For the war to be over.” A-Ling’s grandfather had taken in anyone who had presented themselves at the gates of their estate, packing it to the gills.

At first, the new playmates had made it fun for A-Ling and her brothers. Now food was growing scarce, but people were still streaming in, displaced by a threat A-Ling vaguely understood. The occasional warplane droned high overhead during the day, scattering everyone into hiding and children into speculating whether it was a British Spitfire or one of the Japanese Zeroes. The adults shivered with dread, waiting for an attack on their camp that hadn’t yet come.

“I’ve told you that the River God doesn’t have that much power. None of the Gods do. It’s useless asking them for favours.” Popo nodded at the floating fish. “Even the otters understand that.

Page 8:

All they ask their God for is for him to leave them alone. It’s a protection fee.” “What is the point of them, then?” A-Ling said, exasperated. “They were here before us. That’s a rude question, in the scheme of things.” A-Ling hissed, tugging at her hair, now hacked short to make her look like a boy.

All the girls in the camp had undergone the same treatment and dress. They hadn’t been told why, but A-Ling could guess. A haggard look of worry had long replaced the gentle indifference that Popo used to wear as armour and weapon both, contorting her into a form far more mortal than A-Ling was comfortable with. Her grandmother had always seemed indomitable before.

“I still think you’re lying about the River God.” A-Ling wiped her greasy hands on her shorts. “Adults lie. Every time we women have to run away to hide from the camp. Or the planes overhead.

Gods in the river, ghosts in the banana trees. It’s all a lie.” “Oh?” Popo asked, amused rather than angry. “To what purpose?” A-Ling hadn’t thought this far. “To teach us a lesson over something or other.

Page 9:

I guess.” Popo shook her head. She stepped forward, raising the candlestick in her hand over the water as she squatted by the riverbank. Her other hand shot into the murky depths, then pulled back, with delicate fingers clenched tightly around a wriggling catfish. Passing the candlestick, she hacked the head off with A-Ling’s filleting knife and tossed the still-twitching body into the water.

A-Ling stifled a gasp of shock as Popo raised the bloody head to her lips, tearing off a chunk as delicately as she ate muah chee. The river’s dank surface stirred. Something large and wet undulated beneath, scales gleaming under the moonlight. Popo’s beheaded fish disappeared, sucked into the depths.

A-Ling opened her mouth to scream and hummed instead as Popo clapped her bloody palm over her lips, the head of the fish rolling away into the weeds. A horned head rose from the murk, weedy, thick tresses framing a snake-like muzzle with a crest of long fins. The River God’s serpentine head was as long as Popo was tall, his scaly lips indented by rows of unevenly sharp teeth. Two sets of golden eyes blinked wetly as the God scrutinised them both, then he brought his head higher, level with Popo.

“Speak,” he said. His mouth did not move, nor did he seem to speak any known words. Instead, the will of a God churned in A-Ling’s head, and comprehension reverberating through her skull. Tears squeezed from her eyes as she clapped her hands to her ears, trembling.

Page 10:

Popo’s hand on A-Ling’s mouth tightened in warning even as she stared down a God. “My granddaughter wished to see you,” Popo said. The vibration in A-Ling’s head grew into a rhythmic patter that A-Ling belatedly recognised as laughter. “You were not so frivolous when you were young,” said the God.

“Yet you came anyway,” Popo retorted. The God turned his head, the slit pupils in his golden eyes widening and thinning. “Your hunger hasn’t changed. As vengeful as a ghost’s; as limitless as a God’s.” A-Ling shoved at Popo’s wrist until her grip loosened.

Taking a few breaths to steady her panic, she forced herself to look into the River God’s eyes. “Tell us how to stop the war,” she said. This time, the laughter of a God was painful enough to drive A-Ling to her knees. Even Popo stumbled, digging her nails into her palms until the God drew back and glanced at her.

“Did you not talk to her about my kind?” he asked. “She is my granddaughter,” Popo said, as though that was any sort of explanation. “I’ll give you a warning in exchange for the fish, which is all that I can give,” said the God, as he began to sink back into the river. “Leave this place.” “There’s going to be an attack after all?

Page 11:

When? Where can we go?” A-Ling demanded, but the god was gone. Popo wiped her fingers with a handkerchief, then took the candlestick back from A-Ling. “Time for bed,” she said, dabbing the blood off her lips.

A-Ling stared at her, incredulous. “That’s it? You summon a God and then—time for bed?” “You’ve seen the limits of what it can do,” Popo said, her lip curling. Her eyes blazed, the rage and despair in them so intense that A-Ling took a step back.

Popo blinked and took a slow breath; then her indifference was back. “I’ve long known not to bother with such things. Ghosts, demons, Gods—it’s people we should fear.” On the way back to the house, A-Ling glanced over her shoulder at the still river, then back at Popo. “The God once asked you to join him in the river.” “No.

He said it was one possible choice that I could make.” “He didn’t mean for you to kill yourself, did he?” “Who knows?” Popo said, though her hands curled briefly into claws. She stroked A-Ling’s shoulders lightly. “Go to bed.” “I don’t understand what he said about hunger,” A-Ling persisted. “I did want to meet him.” “While I still live, my children and grandchildren will never be able to summon the River God,” Popo said.

Page 12:

She clenched her hand tightly over A-Ling’s shoulder, making her squeak in shock. “Do you understand?” “Popo!” A-Ling yelped. Popo’s grip eased. “May all of you never understand the nature of hunger.

That is my wish.” Her lip curled into a snarl. “One that I’ll fulfil myself—God or no God.” The attack, when it came, wasn’t helmed by Japanese soldiers, but by bandits. Screams and howls marked time between the occasional loud bark from a gun. A-Ling’s youngest brother flinched and sobbed at a despairing cry from the tofu-maker’s family house to the east, which melted into a string of escalating screams.

Grim-faced, Popo drove A-Ling and the other children toward the river, stumbling over roots in the growing dark. They hunched down into the river weeds. “Quiet,” Popo hissed as one child began to cry. A-Ling clamped her hand over his mouth, letting him go only when the boy receded to soft whimpers.

“They should fight the Japanese,” whispered A-Ling’s brother. He winced as Popo pinched him. “They’re hungry,” A-Ling murmured, near-inaudible. Popo glanced at her, then back at the camp.

Page 13:

She clutched a cleaver in her spare hand, her pianist’s fingers white-knuckled over its hilt. “Can A-Gung and the others fight them off?” murmured another brother, only to be pinched in turn. Popo gestured for them to lie down in the grass. The wait felt eternal, marked with an endless refrain of misery and death.

Fear had long ebbed away in A-Ling when her limbs started to cramp, replaced by budding rage. How was this even happening? Had the bandits presented themselves politely at the gate, her grandfather would’ve likely let them in. They’d been maddened by war, the insanity that was war.

This damned war. What was even the point? A-Ling had overheard her grandfather talking to her father about it but had understood little. Where even was Germany?

How had a country that she couldn’t even pick out on a map sparked off a conflict that had now torn through the world, pulling people into madness? Why even were the Japanese killing their way here? Her father had mentioned hope that the British would be able to stop the advance in Singapore and had suggested that they flee south, but her grandfather had been sceptical. A-Ling squeezed her eyes shut.

Page 14:

Before, she’d been glad that her grandfather had vetoed leaving their home. Now, she wished they had. The tofu-maker’s house grew silent. Popo gestured for them to stay put and moved through the weeds, aiming to hide behind the casuarina tree.

A-Ling’s youngest brother whimpered as Popo moved further away. A-Ling pinched him and gestured for him to shut up. A stranger in bloodied clothes walked towards the river, holding a machete. A-Ling stiffened as Popo changed direction, crouching behind a bush.

Did she mean to attack? A-Ling shrank back for a heartbeat, then bit down on her lower lip. She crawled toward her grandmother, ignoring the brother who tugged at her sleeve. Halfway there, the man yelled.

Popo struck, the chopper sunk into his back. He spun, backhanding her into the grass. Somehow, Popo clawed up to her feet with a roar, grappling for the machete, scratching at his eyes. Other bandits closer to the tofu-maker’s house looked up, starting towards them as the bandit and Popo went down in a scuffling scrum.

Page 15:

When he got his bloodied hands around Popo’s throat, A-Ling sprang forward with a yell. Her weight slammed into his thin body. The bandit tried to get to his feet but slipped on the weeds. Grabbing at A-Ling’s clothes, they both rolled into the river.

The first mouthful of muddy water made A-Ling cough in panic; the second made her angry. A blow struck her across the cheek, driving her to the river bed. Something knocked against her palm as A-Ling struggled to to surface—the machete, sunk into the mud. She grabbed it with both hands, stabbing wildly.

Hands grabbed at her hair and shoulders but eventually grew still. A-Ling surfaced against a bloody soup, gasping. The bandit’s body floated beside her, still warm. Beside the casuarina tree, her grandmother raised the cleaver.

The bandits closed in. A-Ling looked around wildly. They were alone—no one would know they were here until it was too late. Except.


[System]
Craft a Fifteen page narrative for adults with these guidelines:
Use ideas to improve the story including dialogue, conflict and challenges, and character development.
TYPICALLY IT GOOD TO FOLLOW THIS:
Introduction
Rising Action
Midpoint
Climax
Resolution

In a well-told story, elements like the climax, resolution, and midpoint shouldn't need explicit mentioning; a discerning reader should be able to identify these moments through the narrative's progression

Use adult themes if specified.
Start uniquely, avoiding clichés.
Adult content is permitted.
Make the story captivating, possibly humorous, and thought-provoking.
Begin each segment with "Page x:" for each page.
FOUR FULL LENGTH PARAGRAPHS
Do not generate a title.
generate ALL 15 pages,
Example Response Format
  'Page 1: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 2: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 3: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 4: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 5: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 6: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 7: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 8: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 9: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 10: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 11: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 12: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 13: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 14: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 15: (4 full-length paragraphs)'

[User]
Brief Overview: A former pianist recounts their struggle with a mysterious and debilitating condition that weakens their hands, a result of seeking divine musical perfection from a god (Xemphon) and suffering rejection. The story is told in the first person and falls within the genre of drama with supernatural elements.

Pages 1-2:
- Rachel (Rach) is revealed as a conservatory student and pianist, now bedridden and struggling with a severe condition affecting her hands.
- Evan, her boyfriend, cares for her, but Rachel is resistant to medication, fearing it masks her symptoms rather than addressing the core problem.
- It's disclosed that the god Xemphon has touched Rachel but also cast her aside, leaving her with debilitating pain and weakness.

Pages 3-4:
- Rachel confronts the futility of pain medication and the resentment towards her condition.
- Evan shows compassion, but Rachel is stubborn in her unwillingness to take the medication.
- Evan had encouraged Rachel to seek a blessing from Xemphon, which leads to her current state.

Pages 5-6:
- Rachel reflects on her connection with music and the vivid memory of when the god Xemphon filled her with divine artistry.
- The physical pain becomes unbearable, and Rachel laments her lost abilities.
- Shifts to a scene in her apartment, where she attempts to maintain her musical skills despite her condition.

Pages 7-8:
- Rachel tries to play the piano with difficulty, resisting help from Evan.
- They recall their past, with Evan supporting Rachel during her conservatory years.
- Evan offers musical companionship by suggesting they sing together, which Rachel hesitantly accepts.

Pages 9-10:
- The story delves into Rachel's senior year, leading to the moment she was chosen by Xemphon but later rejected.
- Rachel suffers a painful episode while attempting to make coffee, revealing more about her daily struggles.
- Evan confronts Rachel about her unwillingness to manage her pain with medication.

Pages 11-12:
- Further character development shows the deepening strain on their relationship due to Rachel's condition.
- Evan pleads with Rachel to take pain medication and she reluctantly considers it as a temporary solution.

Pages 13-14:
- Evan tries to distract Rachel from her pain by asking her to sing, and they share a tender moment.
- A painful flare-up interrupts Rachel's piano playing, prompting her to finally take the pain medication in desperation.

Page 15:
- Rachel contemplates her grim prospects, realizing her condition may force her to abandon music altogether.
- Faced with the reality of her situation, Rachel makes a reluctant decision about her future, closing the story with a scene that shows a turning point in her acceptance of help.

[Assistant]
Page 1:

You hear the door open as if in dreaming. Back when you Back when you were a conservatory student, you chewed a third of a melatonin tablet every night—to keep yourself from snapping awake before sunup, chest tight, your head still achy with exhaustion. Now, mornings are difficult: your eyelids weighted, sliding; thick grey wool between your temples. Your body drifting in a warm, slow sea.

Evan’s voice. “Rach?” A groan, from deep inside you. You do not want wakefulness—do not want the heat pulsing from your knuckles, a beacon, a warning; do not want your boyfriend watching, wary, as you massage the meat of your thumb. Too late—slow electric fear coils in your stomach.

Your breath draws short as you open your eyes. “What is it?” Your performer’s voice—clipped, a little haughty, though it still creaks from sleep. “I brought you this.” He holds out a bright orange bottle. Inside, a neat cluster of capsules, translucent blue.

You squeeze your eyes shut, turn your face away. “I don’t need them.” A frown in his voice. “Not this again.” “I really don’t.” “Make a fist for me?” Heat through your face, your breath whistling out your nostrils. Evan has been tending to you, day after day, for this entire week you’ve barely gotten out of bed.

Page 2:

Checking to see if the god has touched you again. But he knows, and you know. Xemphon will not restore you. Xemphon has filled you and cast you aside, and in the aftermath there will be no succor.

You clench your fingers. Weak—even you know it. Sweat prickles down your arms, and something like fury. In the afternoons you’re fine.

In the afternoons you can pop open water bottles, cut your chicken breast with a fork and knife, no problem. It’s only these first slow hours of morning—and the soreness of ill use, late at night. Evan extends his hands. “Try again?” A knot in place of your heart, but you reach.

His hands are warm, dry. Soft, save for the calluses on his fingertips from twenty years of playing guitar. You’ve always admired them—your fingers, accustomed to piano keys, would bleed before they hardened that way against wire. Now, they lack the strength to even hold a chord.

Page 3:

You squeeze again, and the dull ache beneath your ribs spreads up to your throat. Evan’s expression flickers, a soundless sigh. “Take the meds, Rach,” he says quietly. Stands up from the bed.

“They’ll help.” “It’s not about the pain,” you snap. As you did yesterday, and the day before, and you despise yourself for this irritated-patient tone, the way it makes you feel like a child, but the unnatural warmth radiating from your fingers is driving spikes of fear through your skull. “They won’t solve the underlying issue.” Evan leans in—presses his lips to your forehead, and then the tip of your nose. “I know,” he murmurs: an apology, a confession.

His thumb traces a circle across the back of your left hand, and then he is massaging it tendon by tendon, bone by bone, and your breath hitches and your eyes blur and you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from breaking. “I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice cracks despite all the times you have told him it is not his fault. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He does not say: There is no cure for being the castoff of a god.

It is only when he has closed the door behind him that you press your hands to your chest and cry. You are a pianist. Were. Are.

Page 4:

You don’t know. It’s hard to tell, when you still dream in grand staffs and arpeggios; when you still know every note of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit from memory; when the nickname by which even your professors call you is derived from that singular musician who shared your handspan. And the pain is not so bad—the doctors have not cut you open, yet. You have never shot awake screaming.

But you’re terrified of what it will become. Evan returns a few minutes later to retrieve the untouched pill bottle, and you wipe your cheeks with the back of your wrist, pretend you don’t see the reciprocal redness of his eyes. You already feel terrible that he’s the one caring for you—though it was he who suggested, on a whim, that the two of you kneel together before the shrine of the god of music; he who convinced you that the god might brush the two of you with a hint of divine artistry ahead of your respective international concerto competitions. Or even fill you, if you were lucky: choose you as avatars for His beautiful, terrible spirit; gild your performances in immortal perfection.

Make you this century’s Bach or Mozart or (true, original) Rachmaninoff. Instead, here you are—barely able, some days, to hold a pen. And in the end, it was you who chose to pray. “You going to shower?” Evan pulls open your closet, neglecting to mention that he has already filled the tub; you heard the spout thundering through the wall.

“I threw some of your clothes in the washer with mine.” Your mouth opens; your protest snags in your throat. It’s not your fault, you want to say again, though you know he will not listen. Xemphon’s last vessel died a decade ago. Since then, a few of the daring souls who knelt before His shrine came away with aced auditions, record deals, unlikely sponsors in high places.

Page 5:

But there have been no new-crowned avatars, melodies pouring from fingers or throats—nor supplicants struck down while still kneeling, burnt to ash by holy fire. The god of music was not supposed to be dangerous, not anymore. “Okay,” you say. “Do you need help?” Evan proffers a hand.

“I think we’re out of shampoo, but I can grab some at the—” “It’s fine.” You lurch out of bed, halfway across the room in two steps, and then your knees buckle and a cry falls out of you like a reflex and his shoulder is beneath your arm, bracing you upright—“got it, got it.” Your legs have awakened at last—pain singing through muscle and bone where the god worked the piano pedals—and you should not be shocked at the betrayal by now, but you are every time. In the shower, rubbing your clenched calves with lavender soap, you close your eyes. The feeling of Him inside you: Your legs walked from shrine into midnight-empty auditorium; standing on the bright-lit stage, your lungs expanded by breaths not your own. The sweet heady power that filled your mouth as your fingers danced across the keys—Tchaikovsky’s first, and an exultant intensity you would have needed another hundred years to master.

You do not remember the god’s departure, His rejection. Seven minutes, according to Evan, who filmed you from behind the backstage curtains and wept without sound. Seven minutes, the longest He has abided in anyone he did not ultimately want—and then blood pouring out of your fingers, leaking into the cracks between keys, and your memory fails against the rest. You want to rail against Him, when the nights are hard.

Demand He account for His actions, or at least write you performance notes the way your professors did after juries. But the god of music is not a god of answers, and by the time the ambulance pulled up at the concert hall you were drowning in your own vital fluids and perhaps it is best that you do not know. The bar of soap slips out of your hand and into the tub. It is just a sliver too thin; your thumb seizes up as you attempt to scrape it off the smooth acrylic.

Page 6:

Heat rises in your chest again, drowning denial. You can do this. It should be so easy. But when your fingers close around it, there’s a spurt of motion, a quiet plash of toilet water.

You lay your head in your arms, wet hair dripping into your eyes, and breathe out slow. The dream that haunts you, night after night: that holy fire, honeyed sweetness, Tchaikovsky’s chords pulled out of you like light from the beginning of time. Your pulse drumming a new color, a sharper definition of what it means to be alive. And even when you are pressing ice packs to your knuckles, even when the fork clatters out of your hand, you cannot help but think: You would give anything to have it again.

A Steinway upright sits in the living room, shoved against the weathered gray sofa. Despite your leave of absence, the conservatory has allowed you to stay in your dorm through the end of the semester, as your rent has already been paid; the piano is borrowed from your professor, who can no longer stand to hear you play. All your sheet music sits in a pile on the side table, after the time you dropped the lid of the bench and smashed your middle finger. You flex your hands again, try to fist them.

Swear under your breath. It’s not getting better. A clink of silverware, the warm smell of coffee, and you turn slightly, your legs still sore. Evan is usually out for a gig by the time you start to practice.

Page 7:

Leaving you to mourn—though, if you’re honest with yourself, there is not much else you’ve been doing this past week. Now, though, he raises a bagel. “Want one?” You position your hands awkwardly to start the first Hanon exercise, wrists cocked to avoid the brunt of the pain. “Don’t worry about it.” “Rach, all you have left is cereal—” “Don’t,” you say, curling your fingers.

“Okay, okay, sorry.” “No, I mean—” Your voice goes thick, unsteady. You cannot look him in the eye. “Please don’t call me that anymore.” Evan’s spoon clinks against his coffee mug, his silence drawn. Finally he says, “It doesn’t have to mean anything you don’t want it to.” You choke a laugh, press the heel of your hand to your temple.

Once, you woke up to practice at five a.m. and did not rise from the piano bench until noon. Now you’ve barely touched the keys and you’re ready to lie back down. Your skin still smells like lavender. “Well,” you say, and then hesitate.

“I used to be Blake.” “Blake,” Evan repeats. Carefully, as if he is speaking a new language. “Sure. Not a problem.” “Where are you off to today?” you ask, your voice still small.

Page 8:

“Second round audition.” You know he is smiling, though you still cannot bear to look at him. “One of those weird folk musicals. Rumor has it that both the writer and director have been touched by Nihaea.” You feel a pang. The goddess of theater is as ruthless as Xemphon—and even more fickle, at times, in Her attentions.

“Good luck,” you say, meaning it, and then he waves his guitar case at you and is gone. You warm up, slow. Hanon, scales, arpeggios, your throat pulling tighter with every ominous pop of wrist. You play the Moonlight Sonata and half-remembered snatches of concerto, rest your head embarrassingly on the pile of sheet music when a run of twelfths wrenches your thumbs into agony.

But you cannot bring yourself to stop. There is a fire within you raring to escape, and if you hold it back too long—as you did in the hospital, and during your first couple days back in your room—it fills you up and breaks you on its way out of your fingers, and this morning’s irritated-patient voice will have been as a pale candle to a wildfire. When your hands are throbbing too much to continue, you shut the fallboard over the keys, find the bagel on a plate on the counter. It is hard and plasticky against your palms, and when you bite down, you taste nothing.

You met Evan in your first year at conservatory. Back when you were still growing into your nickname, and he into the name he had chosen for himself. No family to claim him after he cut his hair short, and so he hung around yours during holiday breaks, impressing your parents with his pitch-perfect Cantonese—and when he first kissed you in your childhood bed, you kissed him back and liked it. The shrine was only a relic, a small marble statue tucked in an alcove off the main concert hall.

Page 9:

All but silent, in the last ten years, and this was the best-known conservatory in the nation, and perhaps you were extraordinary in your hometown, but here you were only another name on the concert program. What was the likelihood He would have chosen you? Thus, your senior year: you and Evan taking a walk outside the auditorium, the night before you were both due to fly out to Europe—the city around you all gleaming skyscrapers and late-night taxis and the low gurgle of the fountain in the park. I want to try praying, he’d said, his sandaled feet peeking out pale beneath his overlarge sweatpants.

Record me in case anything happens. The two of you stepped into the silent concert hall and he knelt on the cold square of marble before the statue, guitar pick cupped in his palms, and then it was your turn and golden fire licked your insides, pure divinity coursing through your veins, and you strode to the nearest piano and played and played until your hands became crimson sheaves. Afterward, beneath hospital fluorescents: your parents hugging you gingerly goodbye. The doctors assuring them you’d be fine, that all the scans had shown up clear, that even the god-rejected could live long, productive lives—and besides, your parents could not leave the laundromat for too long, as they had your tuition to pay.

But Evan has stayed with you the whole time. Sometimes you wonder if he is jealous, that you held Xemphon inside you. But then you think of this past week, and you are not so sure. The next morning, the pain is worse.

Perhaps because you heave yourself out of bed to beat Evan to the coffee machine, even as your right knee screams as if bolted through with steel. Or because you slam hip-first against the kitchen counter in the dark—you have learned, over the years, just how sensitive he is to light, the way he will wake at the faintest illumination through the crack beneath his door. Or because guilt is devouring you: for all the ways he has poured out his time and energy this week, and you haven’t done a fucking thing. When you wrap your hand around the coffee pot, your index finger goes rigid.

Page 10:

You grit your teeth, breathe out through your nose. On the counter, your phone flashlight beams up a starburst, paints the microwave in haunted blues, and you can see the joints hyperextended, the rest of your fingers flexed awkwardly between plastic handle and cool glass. Your heart hurts. The ground tilts beneath you.

You don’t actually know how to work the coffee machine. “Ra—Blake?” The lights flick on, and you squint against the harsh white. Evan stands in the doorway of his bedroom, hair still rumpled with sleep, and in that moment you love him with a fierceness that steals your breath—his half-lidded eyes, the imprint of his pillowcase still creased on his cheek. “Are you all right?” he asks.

You pry your fingers off the coffee pot handle with your other hand. A bone-deep ache, as though you’ve sprained something, and fear barrels through you again—that this will be the thing that finally ends you. “I just wanted to make coffee,” you say, but your voice is thin and far away. “You don’t even drink it.” “I could start.” He looks at you.

Shadows beneath his eyes—you’ve only made more trouble for him, woken him with your banging around and whispered curses, but he will not get angry, will not complain. And that’s the worst part—that all this duty and history will build up as a crust beneath his skin. That when you leave this city—and you must, soon, because you’ve lost your only good reason to stay—it will be the only trace of you left for him to remember. Three steps and he’s holding your hand.

Page 11:

Your grip weak, your cheeks flushing as you try to squeeze back, but the warmth of his body anchors you to the ground, and you can almost forget the pain. Then he reaches over to the cabinet and pulls out the bottle of pills. “No,” you say, too loud. “Rach.

Blake.” His eyes steady on your face. Clear blue capsules cradled in his hand—that will not heal you, only make you forget you are hurting. “I can’t help you if you don’t want to help yourself.” “It’s not—help.” Your fists feel like ground beef. Pressure builds in your chest.

“When they find a cure, I’ll take as many pills as they like, but I won’t just put a bandage on this while—” “You know I take meds for depression,” he says quietly. Your stomach twists. “Gods, that isn’t what I meant at all.” “No, I know.” “And yours actually change your brain chemistry. They help solve the problem—” “Sometimes.” His fingers at your wrist now, kneading so gently you might shatter.

“But if whatever’s—happening to your hands—is going to happen anyway, why not hurt a little less? Why not make use of the time you have?” You push down on each of your knuckles: twang of tendons, low embers of hurt that will radiate back on themselves until your hands melt to god-ruined slag. “Or you might wear yourself out more quickly, if you don’t feel the damage.” “You don’t know that.” You swallow, your throat a ring of char. Glance at the pill bottle Evan has placed on the counter.

Page 12:

“They should be taken with food,” he says, helpfully. “Maybe in a bit.” And you know he sees it in your face, that you cannot believe you and he are the same, but his watch lights up—he’s already running late—and he is not the type to prolong an argument. And, anyway, you will be here when he returns. That night, he brings his guitar into the living room.

He’s just off his night gig, the smell of city rain rising off his skin, and you are not familiar with most guitars or their makers, but you’ve memorized the way he cradles his Hauser like an infant—its dark swirled panels of rosewood, his hands as sure around the instrument’s neck as yours used to be on the keys. Darkness presses up against the windows, small figures hunched beneath umbrellas and ponchos hurrying below, and all at once you ache to be among them again—breathing in the miasma of wet concrete and subway stations, wolfing down a protein bar on your way to late-night chamber practice. Evan plucks a couple chords—warm, wavering. “Want to sing something?” You shift your legs carefully on the sofa.

A faint fizz through your knuckles and knees, the nerves strained but not overtaxed. “What do you mean?” “Anything you want. A pop song you like, or a musical number.” He pauses. “A hymn.” You fold your hands into each other.

“I’m not angry at Xemphon, you know.” “You’re not?” You shrug. It is not in your nature, to rage at the heavens when it is your own flesh that is failing you. Not in your nature to rage at all, when you can lie so still on your bed you nearly trick yourself into thinking you’ve disappeared. “So you turn the knife on yourself instead,” Evan says.

Page 13:

“Fine, fine; what do you want to sing?” He sends a link to your tablet—sheet music for a ballad you might have heard in a cafe, once—and you harmonize to his melody, the caress of his fingers against the strings. Your voice cracks and wavers, as out of use as the rest of you, but between your absolute pitch and two decades of piano lessons, you manage well enough. “You’re not bad,” Evan says when you’ve finished, as you knew he would. He does not bring the guitar out of his room often, and even less to accompany casual jam sessions.

Heat rises again in your cheeks. “You don’t have to do this.” “Do what?” “I can’t just substitute—” “Then what do you want?” His voice edges toward hardness, though you have known him for too long not to sense the hurt underneath. “If there’s any way I can help, just tell me.” “I want—” You press your hands against your sternum. Veins stand out on your skin, greenish and inflamed; your palms feel like bruises.

“I just—I want it back—” and then your throat closes and your eyes flood and he’s here, he’s here, rubbing your shoulders, whispering into your hair, and you can almost believe you will be all right. “Why are you doing this?” you ask, when you manage to speak again. The city has folded into deep night—the streets near empty, the bars down the block dimmed to a neon outline of facade. “You should be meeting new people.

Hanging out at clubs.” His head rests on your shoulder. His shirt is damp with your tears. “Well,” he says lightly, “maybe I like splitting the rent with you.” “Evan.” “And you let me stay with you during the school holidays.” “Repayment, then.” “Yes.” But there’s an old carefulness to his voice, from the wounds his old family left behind, and when you lean your head against his, his lashes flutter like a sigh. You are playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto when the fire lances through your hands.

Page 14:

Every note a knife, your bones turned to hot coals, and you grind your fists against your knees, your breath coming low and ragged. No. No. The rest of the phrase still spirals through you, imaginary woodwinds stretched long against the piano’s tender melody, and you are not ready to end, you are not ready to lose this, you are not ready to be stripped of music while the rest of your body goes on living.

You stagger toward the kitchen cabinet and find the pill bottle on the lowest shelf, fluorescent orange and white child-proof lid, and you grip and push and turn and grip and push and turn turn, godsdammit, and your palms chafe and a howl works loose in your throat and then you’re slamming the stupid thing against the counter, your rage boiling over at the unfairness of it all—that you were not enough, or too much, that Xemphon should have passed over you or scorched you to ash and either would have been better than this fucking in-between—and then your grip goes loose and the bottle arcs through the air—a slant of sunlight searing it from within like the touch of a god— And it ricochets off the side of the Steinway. Your stomach drops. Shit. You limp toward the living room.

Your vision fractured glass, a rush in your ears like an approaching train, and at the sight of the pale gouge in the elegant matte finish you slide back onto the bench and bury your head in your arms and breathe and breathe and breathe. Your professor’s own instrument. A vessel, despite Xemphon’s repudiation, that your hands might still make sing. And you have treated it worse than common furniture.

Eventually, the pain dulls, leaves the space between your temples dazed and empty. Just a flare-up, you think with a sort of detached relief, but you know down to your marrow that this will not be the last time. As sunlight shifts infinitesimally through the windows, crowning the room in white, the thought comes to you at last: You cannot continue this way. You cannot afford to.

Page 15:

Even with your financial aid package, you and your parents were stretched to the limit paying for tuition and board, your meager savings from summer gigs sunk into that debt like a drop of blood in a well of ink. Evan has established a semi-regular flow of income—perhaps Xemphon blessed him after all—but you would barely be able to play at a wedding, now, or even teach. You could go into business, as some of your older classmates have. Rely on dictation software and ergonomic office chairs in an industry that does not care as much for Xemphon’s esteem as for your ability to focus on spreadsheets for long stretches of time.

But you poured all of yourself into music, held nothing back. To imagine it leached out of your life hurts nearly as much as your hands did just moments ago. A flash of orange in your periphery: the pill bottle lying on the carpet, still tightly closed. You bend to pick it up—your right knee trembles, but does not give—and shuffle slowly back to your room.

Hours later: a soft knock, the click of the door. Evan and his guitar case, framed in light. “It’s only six—are you sleeping already?” You look up. Your raw hands are propped on the comforter, your right leg turned on its side.

The pills at your bedside table, glaring, accusatory. “Just resting,” you say, but his eyes meet yours and you break. “Evan, I scratched the piano, it was getting worse and I couldn’t open the stupid cap and I let go, I accidentally let go and—” “Slow down,” he says, setting down the guitar case. “What are you saying?” You thrust out both fists, your skin the color of raw sausage.


[System]
Craft a Fifteen page narrative for adults with these guidelines:
Use ideas to improve the story including dialogue, conflict and challenges, and character development.
TYPICALLY IT GOOD TO FOLLOW THIS:
Introduction
Rising Action
Midpoint
Climax
Resolution

In a well-told story, elements like the climax, resolution, and midpoint shouldn't need explicit mentioning; a discerning reader should be able to identify these moments through the narrative's progression

Use adult themes if specified.
Start uniquely, avoiding clichés.
Adult content is permitted.
Make the story captivating, possibly humorous, and thought-provoking.
Begin each segment with "Page x:" for each page.
FOUR FULL LENGTH PARAGRAPHS
Do not generate a title.
generate ALL 15 pages,
Example Response Format
  'Page 1: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 2: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 3: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 4: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 5: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 6: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 7: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 8: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 9: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 10: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 11: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 12: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 13: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 14: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 15: (4 full-length paragraphs)'

[User]
Brief Overview:
A troll princess, Dagrun, plots to avoid marrying an unwanted human prince by helping his former betrothed, Frida, in this fantasy tale. The story is told from a third-person perspective.

Pages 1-2:
Dagrun, a troll princess, residing in a secluded castle, is informed by her mother, the troll queen, that she is to marry a human prince arriving by ship. Dagrun, who had other plans for the upcoming Longest Night, reluctantly accepts her royal duties, hiding her scheming plans in a treasure chest.

Pages 3-4:
The prince, who turns into a bear by day due to a curse, is a rude and self-centered man. Dagrun meets him under the guise of a servant, and learns of his curse and his stepmother's (the troll queen's) involvement in his transformation. Dagrun begins to think of ways to free herself from the engagement without causing a diplomatic issue.

Pages 5-7:
Dagrun encounters the North Wind while seeking solutions and discovers the human bride-to-be, Frida, on the docks. Frida seeks access to the castle to reunite with the bear-prince for reasons unknown to Dagrun. The princess helps Frida by hiding her within the castle.

Pages 8-10:
Frida's failed attempts to reconnect with the prince and her reasons for pursuing the unwanted marriage are revealed. Frida presents Dagrun with golden gifts that seem determined to return to the troll princess due to their magical nature. Dagrun learns that Frida broke the prince's curse inadvertently and now follows him to hold him to his marriage promise.

Pages 11-13:
Dagrun and Frida search the prince's quarters for a personal belonging that could be used for a magical bond. They discover a tallow-stained shirt from the prince's time as a bear, which could be used as a sympathetic link for a spell to enforce the marriage to Frida.

Pages 14-15:
Dagrun crafts a spell using the shirt and a golden spindle, which Frida presents as payment. The spell requires Frida to succeed at a seemingly impossible task set by the prince, to reaffirm their betrothal. The plot culminates on the day of the planned wedding between Dagrun and the prince, where the enchantment Dagrun cast manipulates the events in favor of Frida. The human girl completes the task, and Dagrun escapes her unwanted engagement.

[Assistant]
Page 1:

In a castle flanked by fjords, so very far from everything that the winds rarely raised its banners, there lived a troll princess. Her mother was a troll queen, by virtue of a castle and a bad temper, but queen she was, and her ambitions did not end at the still shores. The queen did her daughter the very great service of forgetting her, vanishing for months or years, and the princess grew solitary and strange in her absence. The princess was polite to her servants, who served only nominally (being trolls themselves).

She took her turns with the many, many chores that even a magical and desolate castle required so as not to disintegrate into nothing but drafts and mice. She held fine feasts on days of trollish note. She had never once ordered anybody’s head cut off. She was, therefore, beloved, as princesses go.

Trolls have little use for centralized government, only a great fondness for pomp and ceremony, and they lack the instinct to resent the solitary and strange. The princess lived in a tower, which the queen had reason to believe was fashionable. Dagrun—in her tower she could think of herself by name, while in the world outside she was always the princess—kept her own council and laid her own plans in her curving chamber beneath the stars. She sat one winter’s day with a rare map of troll country and the stranger lands beyond.

Her thoughts were far afield, and her mother had no part in them. The queen’s returns usually came with a number of trumpets and speeches, but on this cold, quiet morning, she appeared like smoke in the doorway. “You have ink on your nose,” she snapped, by way of greeting. “Usually,” Dagrun agreed, “Usually,” Dagrun agreed, as she had long ago learned it mattered very little what she said in her mother’s presence.

Page 2:

The queen—if she had ever had another name, it was forgotten now—pulled Dagrun by her elbow to the window. A ship sat in harbor, its decks bustling with the inscrutable tasks of sailors. If she was supposed to intuit anything from the sight of it, she failed. “Your husband is aboard,” her mother told her when the silence stretched too long.

“You’ll marry him on the Longest Night.” Without waiting for a response, she swept out of the room. Dagrun weighed her feelings dispassionately, as befitted a princess whose passion had never made much mark upon the world. She had no interest in a husband, and less in pleasing a mother who could never be truly pleased. More importantly, she had plans for the Longest Night, only a week hence.

She was, however, at least somewhat beholden to the relations of trollish lands to the other realms. If she were only Dagrun, she would have gone on with her maps and left her mother to disappointment. But a princess, even a princess plotting her escape, had duties. Dagrun stowed her notes in a chest that had once contained her dowry gold, long ago traded away to her own ends.

The chest took her little maneuvers personally and sang a woeful note whenever it was opened. Entrusting it with something of value muffled the worst of its song. She did not change her dress, but she did wipe the ink off her nose. A stranger sat at the royal table, scowling at a feast that was admittedly not much to the castle’s credit.

Page 3:

The servants had had no more warning than the princess, and Dagrun nodded to each maid in solidarity as she drifted by. Her betrothed was soft and small, face flatter than a cat’s. She stationed herself beside him, tail lashing in tight, silent circles too controlled to disturb her skirts. Many heartbeats dragged by before he noticed her.

When his eyes finally wandered in her direction, he snorted. “Even the serving maids are ugly, I see.” Quite happy to be a servant as long as his foolishness allowed, she picked up a nearby flagon and stood with it beneath her chin. Not much of a disguise, but not much was needed. “Forgive me, sir, yours is an uncommon face in these parts.” “I’d expect so!” He growled, and the rough sound niggled at her memory.

“Tell me about this princess of yours.” “She’s rather plain and a bit peculiar, but I know no harm of her, sir,” said Dagrun with perfect honesty. “I’m to marry her.” That growl again. “If I don’t escape the witch, first.” “Witch, sir?” Witchery was hardly a distinction in troll country. “The queen of this place.

My step-mother.” Oh, her mother had been busy. “I’d nearly broken that curse of hers, but that fool girl got nosy, and now I’m bound to marry a princess with a nose three ells long.” Her nose was her best feature. Just like her mother to mention that and leave out the rest. “What sort of curse was it?” Even Dagrun didn’t think marrying her constituted a curse in and of itself.

Page 4:

“I’d become a bear as long as the sun was in the sky,” he explained. “A great pity, sir.” It was. As a bear he’d have been some use. There was the growling explained, though.

He didn’t thank her for the sympathy, as he didn’t thank the chair for holding him off the floor. “None was to lay eyes on me in man’s form for a year and a day. And then I’d have been free.” “But this girl did, sir?” “Farmer’s daughter, very pretty thing, but empty headed. Peeked while I slept.

Well, more fool she. I’d have married her if the curse were broken. Lost herself a prince.” Out of questions and patience alike, Dagrun set the flagon at his place and walked away, letting her tail whisk as it wished. If he really was a prince, then her own last act as princess couldn’t be to sneak away.

She’d need to make him responsible for the dissolution of this foolish plan. No trouble would fall, by her doing, on her castle or her shores. She slipped out a side gate and down to the docks. The castle—unlike the princess, the castle had no secret name for its own use, and might have been the worse for it—stood at the edge of troll country.

Page 5:

Further inland, nothing of the mortal realms penetrated, but a ship had carried the bear-prince, and a ship required the services of a wind. A telltale ripple marred the mirror of the ocean, too far from shore for her to have much hope. Dagrun abandoned her stately stroll and tore down the pier. Hair, skirts, and tail whipped behind her with the wind’s efforts to push her back.

An undignified leap landed her in the sea, royal trappings and all, but she surfaced with a single laurel leaf in her hand. Dagrun fished herself out, needing three tries to climb up without losing the leaf. A very old man waited on the docks, arms crossed. He was white and spindly as a birch tree, and his beard must have weighed half again what he did himself.

He looked very tired. “You again?” “Hello, North Wind.” Of course. She’d hoped for the West Wind—a far gentler member of the family—whom she’d met only once, but blowing so far as troll country had almost done for him. She’d had to let him sleep in her tower for a week and never saw him again thereafter.

“And what would the princess have of me this time?” He glowered fiercely. She’d made an enemy of him long ago for daring to bind him and pepper him with questions about his travels. She had to admit to her own rudeness, but she’d been young, with so few ways to learn about the world beyond the castle. Dagrun would rather offer hospitality, for she was a princess as well as a troll.

Page 6:

Instead she met him with a cold serenity to match his own, for she was a troll as well as a princess. “You blew my bridegroom here.” Let him think she wanted the marriage. She wouldn’t put it past him to report to her mother. “What can you tell me of him?” “Can’t hold me long, Princess.” The leaf in her hand struggled against her fingers.

Soon he would have his breath back. “And while you might bribe me, I do believe your gold’s all gone to the elves. That is, if what I’ve heard when I whistle through their caverns is true.” Now she had to hope he wasn’t reporting to the queen. Admittedly, a princess whose mother was a witch and a troll had her own ways.

Gold was gold, and elves had a weakness for the stuff that overpowered their better judgment. Her dowry had purchased maps and traveling gear. Task complete, the gold would not wait demurely in any hands but hers. Dagrun took a steadying breath, showing no nerves.

“My husband, North Wind.” “Heir to a mighty kingdom of mortals. Used to the company of the loveliest human girls.” Dagrun blinked owlishly at him and the North Wind sighed. “They look a bit like huldra.” Two huldra sisters worked in the castle kitchens. Though the smallest, most delicate troll kin, their habits when it came to humans were, rumor had it, rather carnivorous.

Page 7:

She probably couldn’t avert a Diplomatic Incident with their help. She realized a moment into her musing that the North Wind seemed to be waiting for her to reply. “Anything else?” He looked disappointed, and Dagrun realized he’d meant to wound her feelings. Too late to pretend, now, and the North Wind eyed her suspiciously.

“Not worried about catching his eye, princess?” Dagrun looked all the way down her nose at him. “My mother isn’t the only one with tricks. I caught a wind. I can catch a prince.” She’d pushed him too far.

A gale whipped up around her, tearing the leaf from her fingers, and he was gone, leaving her cold and dispirited. The North Wind now hated where he’d once only disliked, and she’d gained nothing. Dagrun gave the bear-prince a full day’s scheming, her trollish thoughts tumbling along at a stone’s pace. To disappear was already a risk on her part, but she doubted the loss of a princess would discomfit her own folk overmuch.

Insulting a foreign land, though, would bring discord whether she offended the prince by marrying him or by refusing. The prince himself didn’t strike her as significant. He wasn’t especially clever, but more than that, he appeared to be incapable of devoting a moment’s attention to anybody but himself. He could not be an ally and had not the substance to be an enemy.

Page 8:

Her best hope was finding a way for him to make such a fool of himself that even her mother would give up this odd alliance, and then at least the disaster would land squarely on the queen. Her tower wasn’t nearly the comfort it had been, with a prince cluttering up the castle. The silent sea and mossy walls outside were better companions. She’d plotted all that pens could plot, and now she paced.

A soft rustle underfoot pulled her from her reverie. Beneath her boot was a single, dry laurel leaf. Dagrun had silent feet, even as trolls go. She slipped unobtrusively along the wooden planks of the docks.

She glimpsed the North Wind, but only for a moment before he blew away again. In his place stood what Dagrun did indeed take for a huldra at first, but her back was all of a piece, not a hollow tree trunk, and she had no tail. Not her kin, then, but one of the human women they mimicked. This one was about her own age, and she looked raw and hungry.

Dagrun had neglected her princessly duties, between interrogating a wind and plotting against her betrothed. Here was a chance to make amends and offer hospitality. She gathered her skirts and strode toward the stranger. When the human turned to her, a golden apple fell from her pocket and rolled up the slope of the docks to rest at Dagrun’s feet—an apple made from her own dowry gold, reforged by elfish cleverness but still determined to return.

Page 9:

She hoped the elves had traded it fairly away, but best she keep above ground for a while. She didn’t think she’d like meeting angry elves who thought her a thief. Distracted by the apple, Dagrun missed her chance to speak like a gracious hostess. The human drew herself up to an inconsiderable height despite wide eyes and pale cheeks.

“Is this the Castle East of the Sun and West of the Moon?” The Castle, having never heard itself named before, loomed above them with greater interest. Dagrun patted the nearest pitted stone block. “I’ve never heard it called that, but we’re off the roads of sun and moon alike.” The sky above troll country was mostly stars, light from the twin charioteers barely visible over the sea. “Good a name as any.” The human swallowed.

“Is there a prince held here?” “Short, silly, talks about himself a lot?” The girl’s face twitched in the rusty and unaccustomed direction of a smile, which Dagrun returned just as uncertainly. “You can keep the apple if you can get me to his room tonight,” the human said so quickly the words ran together. Dagrun pocketed the apple, where it settled with ease, so pleased it was to be returned to her. The girl didn’t need to know that it would not have consented to return to her regardless.

“There’s a wardrobe you can hide in until dark.” She’d be glad to rid herself of the prince, but letting him be assassinated would still be a Diplomatic Incident. Better to ask. “You’re the girl he was going to marry, aren’t you?” A long moment went by before she nodded and added, quietly, “Frida.” Were humans so free with their names? Perhaps Frida had even less reason to love her rank and her place than Dagrun did.

Page 10:

She nodded politely, but did not offer her own name in return. Manners, not foolishness. It ought to have been difficult to maneuver Frida safely and subtly within, but a trollish castle can be clever in its affections. They weren’t interrupted once, though a few maids found themselves inexplicably disoriented.

When the prince appeared at breakfast the next morning, Dagrun went to check on Frida. She found her looking dejected and even more tired and hungry than before, but her chin was high, and her eyes were sharp. She held out a golden comb as eager to leap into Dagrun’s hands as the apple had been. “Can I stay another night?” She couldn’t help wrinkling her nose this time.

“Why?” Frida was silent. Dagrun shrugged, agreed, and fetched Frida breakfast, asking the castle to keep an eye on their guest when she went. The comb joined the apple, back in Dagrun’s dowry chest, which sighed with irksome delight at this near-total restoration of its treasures. The second morning, Frida was curled in the corner of the wardrobe, so exhausted and miserable that Dagrun dragged her to the tower despite her protests, half carrying the fragile creature and pushing her straight into bed.

She slept all day. The faint smell of flesh and fire from the kitchens suggested another awkward dinner forthcoming before she stirred. Frida stared around her in obvious fear when she woke, a scrap of weakness closely guarded, and then sat up straight. “I have more gold, if I can have another night.” Dagrun folded her hands in her lap, admiring the unconquerable little monster in her bed.

Page 11:

“What do you want him for?” The bear-prince simply could not be worth the gold and the trouble. “He promised he’d marry me.” “Yes, but why do you want him to?” Frida’s hands twisted in Dagrun’s quilt. “I have four brothers and seven sisters, and that’s just the ones that lived. My father buried two wives before my mother.

The land is more stone than soil, and every house of every neighbor is just the same. Better a stupid sot with a castle than a stupid sot with a leaky cottage.” Looking at the four-poster bed that held her guest, Dagrun realized uncomfortably that, whatever her troubles, there were privations a princess would never know. Frida’s bargain was sensible enough. “But why marry at all?” Frida frowned, her fine-boned huldra’s face creasing in ways that made it almost interesting.

“What else would I do?” Dagrun pulled out the apple and comb, kicked the chest shut before its wailing caught anyone’s attention, and set them within Frida’s reach. “You could live a lifetime on these.” Maybe not this gold in particular, which was already inching back toward its true mistress, but generally speaking. “Not in a castle, maybe, but a cottage of your own that wouldn’t leak.” Frida’s frown failed to smooth away, and Dagrun felt herself grow flustered to an unfamiliar degree. “Your gold is elf make, and magical.

You convinced the North Wind to do you a good turn, even if it might only have worked because he wanted to spite me. You could walk any road you wanted.” Looking up from the gold, Frida surveyed the chaos of Dagrun’s notes and instruments and puzzlings. Her bright eyes settled on an orrery on the windowsill. “So could you, princess.” While Dagrun meant well to the helpful human who might spirit the prince away, she didn’t trust so far as to explain her plans just yet.

Page 12:

“You were in his wardrobe for two days. What happened?” Frida hmmed consciously. “Couldn’t wake him up.” “He does like his wine. I’ll slip him a potion tonight.” She wasn’t the enchantress her mother was, but the gold creeping back to her hinted that the difference between a princess and a witch is no difference at all.

“Does he have anything you gave him, or made him?” “I was the farmer’s daughter he swept off her feet. Nothing to give.” Dagrun’s modest magics worked best on sympathies already forged. “There must be something. Come help me look.” Frida followed Dagrun to the prince’s chambers in incredulous silence.

Dagrun hoped for a quick answer, but there wasn’t much to his possessions. The queen had whisked him away too quickly to bring his own luxuries. Dagrun saw enough to justify Frida’s mercenary practicality, though. Her life with him would be easy but for having him in it.

And if the prince was the one to turn down this marriage, Dagrun would be free to walk away from her life as a princess, leaving peace as a parting gift. And all for the cost of Frida’s freedom. “Silly ass, he kept this,” Frida said with a downright trollish snort that cut through Dagrun’s musing. She held up a perfectly ordinary shirt.

Page 13:

When Dagrun cocked her head in question, Frida pointed to a cluster of tallow spots on the shoulder. “Might be wisest that I disappear this. He doesn’t need to be reminded I betrayed him.” “It would be easy to clean,” suggested Dagrun, quite lost. “No, sillier than that.

Always is with him. When he first brought me home it was as a bear—” “So he tempted you with much better company than he could really provide?” Dagrun covered her mouth demurely. She had the habit whenever she felt a smile coming on. Frida laughed and looked surprised at herself.

“Just so. When he came to pester me at night it was always in absolute darkness. Because of the curse, but he didn’t think to explain that to his peasant pet.” “He didn’t tell you he was cursed.” Dagrun wished that felt like a question. Of course.

A few words and none of them would be in this mess. “Of course not,” Frida sighed. “When I visited home, my mother spared me a bit of candle to get a look at him while he slept.” Dagrun wondered what it was to have a mother that would spare you anything at all. “He shouted a lot when I woke him up, and he was gone the next morning.” “And you followed him here on a spiteful wind’s back.” Perhaps the huldra was not a trollish imitation of a human girl, but a human girl a sort of troll with all her strength coiled under the solid skin of her back.

Page 14:

“The shirt’s enough. I can bind you both through the tallow, but we’ll need some way to make it stick.” Frida swallowed and produced a golden spindle from her pocket with an air of grim finality. Dagrun tucked it away, wincing at the longing in Frida’s lovely eyes, and thrust the golden apple into her hand before it could fall back to her side. Her magic would be stronger with a price paid.

The apple was a gift granted freely in its turn. She told the gold very firmly to stay put. “In case you decide you’d like a cottage. Or anything but a bear-prince.” Frida looked up at her in silence.

Dagrun swallowed around something very trollish indeed and utterly unprincesslike, something that tasted alarmingly of the passions she kept tamped down with sense. “You’re too good for him,” she heard herself say from the bottom of her voice, and her tail lashed like a chariot cat’s. “They’ll be wanting you downstairs, princess.” Frida’s voice was steady, steadier than Dagrun’s, but her pale cheeks had gone dark around her freckles. Frida seemed distressed, and Dagrun was a bit alarmed at her own outburst.

She gathered up the rest of her questions and tucked them away for later. “You can wait in my room,” she said in tones of utmost practicality. Frida’s blush darkened further and, for reasons even more rare among trolls, Dagrun’s did the same. They were quiet all the way up the tower, the castle pressing close around them.

Page 15:

The Shortest Day before the Longest Night, the day Dagrun had always intended to leave the castle, the day that was to be her wedding, another feast was laid in a decidedly desultory manner. The servants were dead weary of the charade. Dagrun wore her best gown. It best concealed the tunic and trousers underneath.

At breakfast, the bear-prince announced he could only marry the woman who could clean the tallow from his shirt. The troll queen must have spotted the magic that coursed through the declaration, but Dagrun didn’t think her mother saw her hand in it. To know a witch’s workings, even a queen must know the witch. With all the court assembled and all her mother’s will battering the geas she and Frida had laid, Dagrun tried and failed to clean the tallow spots away.

She scrubbed and struggled with honest determination, trusting her own enchantment. The stains that locked cursed to curse-breaker defied her. Pinning Frida into Dagrun’s oldest gown and convincing the two huldra sisters to play along had taken half the night. Coaching the prince claimed the rest.

He only had one line, but when he pointed at the little human so precariously disguised, he bungled even that. “I’m sure even my maid could manage such a simple task!” His maid. If the queen hadn’t been spitting fury she’d have noticed and they might have toiled in vain. Frida hardly had to touch the wash bucket for the stains to vanish.


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[User]
Brief Overview: A woman named Jessie receives a letter from her deceased friend Angie, leading her to revisit their old magical haunt at college, where she encounters Angie's spirit and confronts their shared, mystical past. The genre of this story is paranormal/mystery, and it's told from the first-person perspective.

Pages 1-2: Jessie receives a letter from her dead friend Angie, triggering memories of their powerful, magical bond. The letter calls Jessie to an old meeting place, sparking curiosity and unresolved feelings.

Pages 3-4: Jessie decides to visit their old college town following Angie's mysterious request. Along the journey, she experiences strong emotional connections to their shared past.

Pages 5-7: Jessie arrives at the campus and heads to the magical site in the woods where she and Angie spent time harnessing energies. She feels a weak connection to Angie as she sets the scene for their ritual, reflecting on their past.

Pages 8-10: Jessie performs a tarot reading at the site, experiencing strange occurrences that suggest Angie's presence. As Jessie feels the veil between life and death thinning, she communicates with Angie's spirit.

Pages 11-12: Angie's spirit becomes more tangible, displaying her connection to Jessie. As they talk, Jessie grapples with the reality of Angie's afterlife and her reasons for contacting Jessie from beyond.

Pages 13-14: Angie reveals why she summoned Jessie, seeking to bridge their magical potential with her new, otherworldly insights. Jessie is simultaneously drawn in and skeptical of Angie's intentions.

Pages 15: Jessie and Angie contemplate the potential of their renewed connection. Despite her reservations and the risks, Jessie is compelled to join Angie in a final ritual, cementing their powerful reunion beyond the constraints of life and death.

[Assistant]
Page 1:

Angie is three months dead before I get her letter. She sent it the week before she died, and I guess that figures; the postal service got fucked in the twenties and never recovered. Maybe she even relied on that delay. Maybe she magicked the delay, but I can’t find any spellwork on the envelope or the letter. We knew each other well enough, once, that if it was there, I couldn’t miss it.

If our lives were different, I would’ve been there. She could’ve called me to be there, but she didn’t. I wonder who was there. I wonder if she was alone. It bothers me, that I don’t know.

I could find out, that powerful part of myself whispers, and I stand with that a while at my kitchen counter, letter in hand, ripped-open envelope resting on the local free newspaper and a furniture store flyer. She sent a letter for a reason, instead of doing any number of other things. Finding me on social media, emailing me, calling me. Using the powerful part of herself to call me. Should I have known that she was gone, with the bond we once had?

Even though we mutually cut that cord? No, I guess not. That’s what cutting the cord accomplished. Out of sight, out of mind, out of touch. Excavated from each other’s hearts.

Page 2:

Except. I wouldn’t be holding a letter from her, handwritten in what’s been her favorite blue ink for all these years, if that were true. And I wouldn’t feel as though I was holding my breath, holding very still, to see her words on the page. To see what she was asking me. Nobody called me, of course.

Nobody knew to call me. But I knew she was dead. It was in the alumni newsletter that I’d tried eight hundred million times to cancel and unsubscribe from, and it always came to me, by hook or by crook. No matter where I moved, no matter anything. And when it came, I opened it.

A tiny curse, so far as curses go. And this time I saw her face, her eyes, her smile, the picture ringed with an oval of black-lined lilies. A full-page bio, written by somebody whose name I recognize, but I couldn’t picture their face or remember who they were, how we knew them. They weren’t close with us, then. Nobody was close with us, the edifice that was Us, foreheads pressed together, the world at our feet, magic crackling in the air around us.

When you’re that close with a person, the only thing that separates you is you. We bickered sometimes, mostly funny, mostly friendly. By the end, our final fight brought a hurricane inland or was during a hurricane, I guess that detail doesn’t matter much, just hair plastered to faces by the rain, streetlights blowing out in showers of sparks, trees crashing down. If we’d had a third, would things have been different? My darkness and her light, balanced?

Page 3:

Even a dog, maybe, or a cat. I’ve never had either. Maybe she did, after. It’s been twenty years; I’m sure she had something. Somebody.

But she wrote to me. She didn’t apologize, but I wouldn’t expect that, no more than she’d expect me to apologize. We’ve always understood each other. I think we always expected to find our way back to each other. We thought there would be time.

The letter is short. “Hey Jessie, it’s been too long. We should meet up, at the old place. Don’t believe the rumors, okay? Just be there, okay?

Angie.” Most people don’t write letters how they talk, but that’s Angie. I’m surprised she didn’t just say just meet me. I would’ve known. I would’ve gone. I’m going.

Page 4:

It isn’t really that far. A few hours. I don’t know what to take, so I don’t take anything. I didn’t realize it was dark already, that I’d stood in the kitchen for so long, but it tracks. And the steely clouds that piled up all day, taller and heavier and darker, let go as I get onto the highway.

Let go, I could just let go. I thought I had. I’ve made the drive at night before, to our college town. In the rain even, silver torrent in my headlights as I crept down one mountainside, crept up another, green-flashing animal eyes in the tall grass at the sides of the road, very occasional cars passing me going the other way, or coming up behind me abruptly, passing too close and too quickly on a double yellow line. I stop to pee at a 24-hour gas station before I get there, pavement steaming still from the day’s heat, the cool rain.

I look at myself in the flat, smeared steel mirror, the thin flickering fluorescent light, but I don’t know what I’m looking for. I buy a bottled mocha, think about it for a second, grab a vanilla one too. Angie liked vanilla. I don’t smoke anymore, but I get a pack of clove cigarillos, since they don’t sell clove cigarettes anymore, and a purple plastic lighter. Coming around the final turn, coming down the final mountain and seeing the town nestled in the valley like Christmas lights cupped in a giant’s palm, breaks down some barrier in me, thaws a piece of ice in my heart, and I start to cry.

I get off the mountain and onto the main street and have to pull over, the world kaleidoscoping in my tears, filled with too much light even in the dark, the streetlights at this end of town still the old yellow ones. I lean my head back against the headrest and close my eyes, and the tears seep down my cheeks and drip off my chin. I don’t sob; this hurt is too deep and old for that, so scarred over that this break is a surprise, but maybe I should’ve expected it. I don’t know what to expect, and that’s a little scary, a little exciting. I don’t see any other cars on the road as I make my way through town, nobody walking either, as though I’ve slipped backstage somehow and am making my way through the unoccupied set pieces of my past life.

Page 5:

Or a ghost town, and I turn that over in my mind like a neat rock that I picked up, as I get onto campus and figure out where to park so that I can enter the woods. It isn’t my first time finding this path behind the dorms in the dark, though I rarely did it alone. I didn’t check to see what the moon was before I came out here; we used to do that, come out here on full moons. We did it once for a new moon, but the energy was all wrong for us, and that night was one of our first, worst fights. My shopping bag swings against my leg, the sweating coffee bottles inside making it cold and wet even through the fabric.

There are things making noise in the woods. I don’t know if they’re bugs or frogs or even nightbirds. I don’t know if it’s the wrong time of year here for cicadas or the wrong year for cicadas, but I keep thinking I hear one and keep not hearing one. It’s definitely the wrong time of night for lightning bugs, though I think I only ever saw five total while I was here. It isn’t deep woods and it isn’t old woods.

I’m not sure the oldest tree here is more than a couple of hundred years, if that. But I’m not here for the trees; if I was, they are elsewhere in town. A trio of oaks in the park surrounding the library. A sycamore tree in the middle of a field, tall and pale with peeling bark and gigantic leaves. No, I’m here for the exposed stones at the top of the trail, that look out over the valley as the back of the mountain falls off.

Stones that look like they have waves fossilized on them, from when all of this was under water. I always felt so connected to the water, and Angie felt more connected to the earth, and this spot, here, combined our energy like it was made for us all those eons ago and then just waited here. Welcomed us when we found it freshman year, after finding each other. We were stupid, of course. We didn’t misuse it; we didn’t try to make wishes, or use it to ensnare boys (or girls), nothing like that.

Page 6:

But when you stumble into power, and don’t really have a direction to take it in, you spend a lot of time just kind of blissed out with it. We’d lay on the sun-warmed rock smoking and staring at the sky as it faded into night, feeling the world spin around us, the tops of our heads floating somewhere in the stratosphere by the time we stumbled back downhill for dinner before the dining hall closed, to make gestures at classwork, to read each other’s cards into the night, and drink too much soda from the vending machine, and watch the same movies looping on the college network, sometimes for classes and sometimes just whatever the school licensed. There are still some movies that I’ve never sat down and watched from start to finish, but I’ve seen them a million times anyway, because they were on the school network. I stand on the rocks, finally, superimposed over twenty-years-ago me, and look up. There’s the moon, a glowering rusty fishhook of a crescent, ringed around with parting clouds.

The wet rocks smell like, and not like, wet concrete. I take out the bottled coffees and look down at the stone surface, take a few steps this way and that way, until I feel the thrum, the recognition. Here, it was here. I set them down, sit myself down. The damp immediately starts to soak through my cutoffs, but what else was going to happen?

I tap the pack of cloves against the side of my sneaker, at the arch, to pack the tobacco a little more tightly, then pull open the top and shake one out. They smell good and clovey, the spice scent mingling with the humid greenness around me, the paper a little sweet against my lips. I’ve been out here long enough that the flame from the lighter seems very bright when I flick it, and I don’t think anything in particular when I light the clove. Angie asked me to be here. I’m here.

Don’t believe the rumors. Angie, I don’t even know where they buried you. If they buried you. As soon as I think that, I start to feel, barely, the spark of our old connection. Like with really old-fashioned fluorescents that aren’t fully on when you flip the switch.

Page 7:

Or a flashlight with dying batteries, in reverse. That first flicker. I finish the first cigarillo, my lips numb, and light the next one. They taste awful, not how cloves did, no matter how they smell. But I don’t smoke anymore.

I also don’t try to speak with the dead very often, now do I? If that’s what I’m doing here. I rummage in my purse for one of my decks, just a rubber banded Rider-Waite that I got at a garage sale in high school. I didn’t intend for it to be my main deck; I’ve always tried to be more distinctive, and use my Salvador Dalí deck as my main, or the limited numbered one from that photographer in Italy. Never the Crowley deck, though.

We both had one, Angie and I, and we both didn’t like the energy it gave, even after leaving it in moonlight, leaving it with quartz, leaving it in the sun, wrapping it in silk. Just scratchy and abrupt like a TV gone suddenly to static, except they don’t do that anymore. TVs just go black now. Another flicker, zinging in my fingertips. I shuffle the deck, hesitate about putting the cards on the wet rock, do it anyway.

I don’t want to muffle the connection, or interrupt it. Insulate myself against it. There are protections I should be taking, doing this. Salt, chalk, something. This is dangerous.

Page 8:

I know this is dangerous. But it’s Angie. I just do a three card pull: past, present, future. I don’t really know what I’m asking, I don’t really know what I’m hoping for. Past: Two of pentacles.

Agitation, obstacles, embroilment. Present: Death, and I bark an ugly laugh, lean back and pop the seal on my coffee. No shit, death. Blah blah, the death card doesn’t mean you’re going to die, we’ve all seen TV, we’ve all read the cards, sometimes death is death. Next to me, the seal on Angie’s coffee pops, and a little rime of frost traces down the side of it, melts away in the night summer heat.

Final card, the future: the Magician. “But what am I supposed to succeed at?” I ask the cards, the universe. Angie. My right arm gets cold, like she’s leaning over to look, like her hair is brushing my shoulder, mingling with mine. The infinity symbol over his head looks like the pentacles being juggled in the first card.

The perfect fucking spread for our messy goddamn lives together, and apart. We could do anything, we once thought. But what we ended up doing was fighting, and over stupid things. Every time it was something ultimately inconsequential. We were just never satisfied, with the world, with each other.

Page 9:

We were just too close but also too far apart. I shuffle the cards back in, the wet ones sticking and dragging against the others in the deck. I don’t draw again; I don’t want more questions right now, and can no longer clear my mind to calmly reach for answers. The hairs on my arms are standing up, and even when I’m not exhaling smoke, I can see my breath hang briefly in the muggy air. I light two cigarillos at once this time, balance the other on the popped cap of Angie’s coffee.

It isn’t full anymore. I finish my coffee and lie back on the rock the way that we used to, look up at the sky. The clouds have all moved on now, and now I see more stars than I know the names of, as the back of my shirt gets wet, and then cold. My cigarillo paper crackles when I drag on it, and then Angie’s crackles. I don’t look yet.

I haven’t done enough, but I also don’t know what she set up. But with each breath I get colder, and with each breath I’m reaching across, stretching my hand into the darkness, to reach for hers. “I don’t think any of this turned out the way we thought it would,” I say, still lying on my back, still looking at the sky. She can hear me. I know she can hear me.

Maybe she’s talking too, but I can’t hear her yet. I exhale smoke, and a moment later, another thin cloud of smoke rises to join mine. “I don’t know if I even remember what it was supposed to be. If nothing else, we were still going to be together. Still friends.

Page 10:

Still something.” Regret, that’s what I’m feeling. Regret. A night noise, out in the woods. Probably just a deer, maybe a skunk or raccoon, but I sit up in case it isn’t. What am I going to do if it isn’t?

What would I do if it was a bear? Well, the edge of the cliff is right there, I think darkly, and then laugh. Never. I would never. “Angie what’s going on?

What am I supposed to do?” I’m crying again, surprising and not. I never really mourned her, did I? And over the years, I never mourned our friendship either. I was too pissed off, too full of myself, and I wonder how much of that was just our magical natures sparking off each other. We could’ve fixed that, coped with it, if we were different people.

But that’s life, isn’t it? You’re the person you are. I turn to look at the Angie-feeling space in the world now, finally. I’m in the right mindset, or I can’t take it anymore, which is almost the same thing. And she is there, and isn’t there.

Page 11:

She’s like a polaroid that hasn’t developed fully, and in the daylight, I probably wouldn’t be able to see her at all. “Hey Jessie,” she says, her voice whispery across the distance from wherever she is to where I am now. “I’m not really supposed to be here.” “I figured.” I offer her the pack of not-really-cloves, and she reaches for it, reaches through it. She quirks her lips in a frown and tries again. Becomes that much more solid.

A cigarillo falls out, rolls towards her on the rock, and she picks it up. “What are we doing?” “Sitting here smoking, like the old days,” she says with kind of a laugh. I flick the lighter, and she leans into it, transparent at the edges, her eyes catching too much light, but her. It’s her. I watch her inhale, the smoke pooling in her form like dripping dye into water, and she’s firmer at the edges, but I get the sense that there’s only so solid she’s going to become, and only so long she can do it for.

“But you wanted me here for a reason.” “Yeah, I did.” She blinks at me with her rain and embers eyes. “I’m glad you came.” “I am too. I missed you.” I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry.” For what? For everything.

She has to know, for everything. “I missed you too, Jessie. God, we were stupid.” She laughs, ash of her cigarillo slowly snowfalling away. “I’m sorry too. For so much.” By the time the filter burns away, smelling horrible, she’s almost real.

Page 12:

Just wavery at the edges, wearing one of her witchy dresses, or maybe one of my witchy dresses, for how much we swapped everything back and forth, always. “So now what?” I ask, in the lingering pause. I feel the spin starting, like the space between dropping the needle on a record and when the music starts. We’re not firing on all cylinders again yet, but we’re getting there. “Do you trust me?” “Angie we haven’t seen each other in—” She interrupts me.

“Yeah, yeah, but who cares? We’re here now, and it’s like no time passed at all. The things that we can do now, with everything that I know now. You must’ve kept studying too? We’ve got so much catching up to do.” She is, and isn’t, right.

Maybe if we were both alive, it would feel that way. I want it to feel that way. It almost feels that way. I try again. “But Angie you’re—” “I know.” She stares at me, defiant, exultant, and I get to my feet and she follows.

“Angie, what did you do?” She grins, inspired and excited and alight. “Remember that old cartoon? Was it Sylvester? It’s a great trick, but . .

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. ” “Oh, Angie.” The obituary in the newsletter didn’t say what happened. I’d assumed she’d been sick, had cancer, something. I didn’t try to look it up. It never occurred to me that Angie would be willing to do that for power.

We all have our limits, and sooner or later, we all stare into that abyss, asking whatever questions we might have, but once you pierce that veil, there’s no guarantee of anything, much less answers. “No, Jessie, it’s good, it’s great. You have no idea how this feels, what I can access now. What doesn’t limit me anymore.” She’s talking fast in that old way, caught up in her own excitement, and back then, it used to catch me up too. “Yeah, nothing like breathing to keep you from reaching your peak.” I’m shocked, but I’m not scared.

I should walk away, not give her bullshit any kind of attention, except she did it, she’s dead, that’s it. There’s no coming back from that. But she’s saying there’s something past that and, in spite of myself, I want to know. Maybe I feel like I owe it to her. And if I walk away now, I’ll never have another chance.

I’m not sure of much, in this breathless moment, but I am sure of that. “Don’t be a bitch, Jessie,” she says, half laughing, all serious. “We wasted the time that we had, when we were together and working together, and here’s our do-over. We can be together again. We can accomplish things.” “What were we going to accomplish in college?

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Come on.” We thought that the world was on the brink of changing anyway, and we wanted to be there for it. If there was going to be a break, we wanted to try to heal it. We wanted to make it better. We wanted a utopia that we didn’t know how to make. She must have some sense of my thoughts.

We used to be on such the same wavelength. “What do you want to accomplish now? You’ve got to have something. Back then, we talked about changing the world, don’t you want that?” What real change can the two of us effect, when one of us is dead? She’s still waiting for an answer, of course, a flickering after image, an unmoored burning soul that was once attached to mine.

Slowly, I say “I feel like when people talk about attaining real power, they want to do things like live forever.” That hurts her, and I’m sorry. Her whole form flickers, like when there’s something wrong with a big neon sign. “That wasn’t going to be possible,” she says after a pause. So she was sick. “So this is the option I took, when I still could.” “Okay, but I’m not—” “No, but now I’m on this side, I understand so much.

I told you already. The possibilities.” She’s frustrated, bordering on frantic. We don’t have much time. We’re already out of time. “You said you trusted me,” she says in a small, faded voice, and something small and vital breaks inside of me, a tiny quiet shatter.

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A twinkle light, a glass thermometer. I take a long, shaking breath. “No, I didn’t say that. You said that.” “Jessie, who else was I going to come to? It could only be you.

There was only ever you.” She holds up her hand, like it’s pressed against a window, and I don’t even think, I put my palm against hers. There’s a hum, a little feeling of frisson. For me, it’s like putting my hand up against a cloud, or falling rain. I don’t know what it feels like for her. I bite back the impulse to sob or hug her.

“I know, Angie. I know.” I feel deep in it now, the top of my head totally off, my energy just flaring out from me like I’m the wick and it’s the flame, Angie the moth to my living self. That final connection complete, if a little off. Shit. I really should’ve brought salt.

“Okay, so did you bring chalk? Are we going to do this?” She’s excited, energetic again. I can’t really expect emotional regulation in her state, it wouldn’t be fair. Or relevant. “Of course I have chalk.” Chalk and tarot cards, in my bag at all times.