ALL Chapters & Episodes of Worthness of Candle Fire by Purple Cashinx - Page 5

I came to in a warm bed. The last thing I remembered was planting my mouth on a unicorn wound and sucking out its blood. No, there was something after that, Fenn putting her weight on my chest and smiling, that was it. When I looked over, I saw her in bed beside me, curled up and looking content.We were back at Weik Handum; I recognized my room. I was out of my armor, which was piled on the floor beside me, along with the rest of my gear. I couldn’t help but notice that I was in just my boxers, and when I pulled back the covers, I saw that Fenn was topless, which set my heart beating faster. I looked at her, trying to work out what had happened in the gap between drinking the unicorn blood and ending up here, and then just looked at her without thinking too much in particular.When she began to stir, I averted my eyes. I could see through the light in the hallway that it was just barely sundown.“How are you doing?” she asked, slurring her wor

A Pleasant Interlude in Kansas

Worthness of Candle Fire/Purple Cashinx

Tiff had taken to driving me home after D&D. She didn’t live anywhere near me, but she’d said she lived so far out in the country that the extra few miles didn’t matter to her, and I naturally accepted the rides, because she was Tiff.“I have a question about the unicorns,” she said.“Unicorns in general?” I asked.“No, your unicorns, the creepy rape monsters,” she said.“They weren’t actually rapists,” I said. “Just, rape adjacent. And that was a long time ago, so I’m not sure that I’m going to remember anything.”“Well, you can make something up for me then,” she said. “The thing was, I kind of didn’t get the time powers.”“Oh,” I said, “So, the unicorn kind of merges alternate realities to put himself in a position --”“No, sorry, I mean I get how it physically works, or at

In Search of a Quest

Worthness of Candle Fire/Purple Cashinx

I didn’t manage to fall asleep until Fenn snaked a lazy hand under the covers and laid it across my chest. I don’t know if she did that by instinct, accident, elf luck, or because she’d woken up enough to see me staring at the ceiling and thinking, but either way, it was a comfort.When I woke up in the morning her side of the bed was empty, and my clothes and weapons were laid out for me, with my armor off to one side. The smell of breakfast came in through the open bedroom door, and I dressed in a hurry, electing to leave the armor off. I was feeling much better than I had felt the night before, with a clearer head.Fenn was cooking pancakes and bacon, and had already made a mess of the kitchen. When I came over to the dining table, which was in the same large room, Amaryllis slid me a cup of coffee in a thick mug, with a small, dark yellow square floating in it that I assumed must be butter. She raised an eyebrow my way, and on the assumption that

Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats

Worthness of Candle Fire/Purple Cashinx

The one thing we hadn’t gotten around to discussing was the issue of companions. Uther had seven of his Knights of the Square Table, and extrapolating from that, I was bound to have at least a few more. Both Amaryllis and Fenn I had stumbled across, while Grak had been someone we’d met after setting out some bait. I had an inkling that it might be worth it to find as many companions as possible, but then realized that logistics weren’t on our side, given the teleportation key only took five people at a time.(We hadn’t tested Fenn’s glove-past-the-limit theory yet, because it seemed too risky to me. Things that were in the glove stayed in the glove across teleportations, but I had this nightmare scenario of putting someone in the glove and trying to exceed the limit, only for the game to punish us by disconnecting the extradimensional bubble. Would the game kill a companion for that? I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t willing to test it, and

Keep Magic Weird

Worthness of Candle Fire/Purple Cashinx

I stared at the six-eyed doe as Amaryllis approached it. It was massive, for a deer, though showed no signs of giving a crap about the square-cube law. I mean, I also didn’t give a crap about the square-cube law, but it was one of those things that you needed to think about when designing creatures, because someone like Craig or Reimer would start questioning how a fly as large as a house was able to generate lift, and “it’s magic” only worked as an explanation a limited number of times before people started thinking that you didn’t know what you were talking about.I stayed back. I wasn’t actually clear on why Amaryllis was going toward the thing. There were definitely cultural assumptions and pieces of history that I was almost completely ignorant on, given that “magics that were previously considered dead” weren’t high up on my reading/research list (though when I phrased it like that, it seemed like

The Market of Blood and Bone

Worthness of Candle Fire/Purple Cashinx

Solace went around to us one by one, tapping her bird-skull wooden staff upon our heads. The tap produced dense mist, which fell down like a sheet to cover the body, and when it cleared, there was a bird standing there instead. I watched that happen to Grak and then Amaryllis, as Solace moved around the circle. Their bird forms looked almost identical, with her being a bit more sprightly and him a bit thicker. The color of the feathers was a dark black, with white on the belly and the lower half of the head.“What kind of bird is that, if you know, or if that question isn’t indelicate to your, um, profession?” I asked, as Fenn was tapped on the head and shrouded in mist (or possibly, odorless smoke, if it had physical substance at all).Solace gave a little laugh. “We’re not so fragile that we can’t withstand a little scrutiny,” she said. “They’re swallows.”Yeah, thought so. African or European? “With an airspeed velocity of roughly twenty-five miles an hour?” It was a random fact st

At Arm's Length

Worthness of Candle Fire/Purple Cashinx

Things were a little bit awkward between us after that. I kept wanting her to crack a joke, but she was being very serious as she took payment for the meat, and as we carted the bones over to a cleaner. It was roughly eight thousand pounds of animal, which was spread across no less than four different large refrigerators.“So you planned this out when you knew that we were going to be going after the unicorn?” I asked.“I have my own life beyond our little group,” she said.“Right, but we haven’t actually divided up the money, except for Grak’s share,” I said. “So I have at least a little interest in the schemes that you’re pursuing, if there’s an investment involved.”Fenn raised an eyebrow. “How dare you accuse me of having actually paid for things,” she said.I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it. “I think you were perhaps the worst person that glove could possibly have gone to.”“Or I’m the best, because I think ahead to what our needs would be,” said Fenn. “I don’t particu

The Market of Blood and Bone

Worthness of Candle Fire/Purple Cashinx

Solace went around to us one by one, tapping her bird-skull wooden staff upon our heads. The tap produced dense mist, which fell down like a sheet to cover the body, and when it cleared, there was a bird standing there instead. I watched that happen to Grak and then Amaryllis, as Solace moved around the circle. Their bird forms looked almost identical, with her being a bit more sprightly and him a bit thicker. The color of the feathers was a dark black, with white on the belly and the lower half of the head.“What kind of bird is that, if you know, or if that question isn’t indelicate to your, um, profession?” I asked, as Fenn was tapped on the head and shrouded in mist (or possibly, odorless smoke, if it had physical substance at all).Solace gave a little laugh. “We’re not so fragile that we can’t withstand a little scrutiny,” she said. “They’re swallows.”Yeah, thought so. African or European?&nb

Doe or Doe Not, There is no Try

Worthness of Candle Fire/Purple Cashinx

I woke up gasping for air and looking around wildly. My brain must have been working off some really old subsystems, because my first thought was, this isn’t my room, before I remembered that I didn’t have a room anymore. I was on Aerb, not Earth, and on Aerb I was an itinerant wanderer without a home to call my own.I looked down at my shoulder, fearing the worst, but saw that it was intact, connecting my arm to my torso like it had been doing for more than seventeen years, until very recently. There was a deep red seam there, but it was only on the level of the skin, not in the flesh itself, and my mobility as I gingerly moved it was only slightly limited.I wasn’t in the hotel; I was in the house built into a tree, inside the bottle, which was presumably inside Solace’s cloak. It was dark, but the remains of a small fire smoldered away in a little blackened recess of the tree. I got up out of the pile of furs that had been

Math.random()

Worthness of Candle Fire/Purple Cashinx

“He made a deal with fucking Doris Finch,” said Amaryllis, as soon as I was out of the bottle.I stared at her; her hair was different, cut short, almost to the scalp, and no longer the red it had been, but brown instead. She was in her full armor, minus the helmet, and it gave her a look that was boyish (but like an extremely attractive boy, enough that it started to awaken confusing feelings in me).“The shirt says ‘Incognito’,” said Fenn. “But you can’t see it, because someone is a spoilsport.”“I’m staying armored until he’s dead,” said Amaryllis. She didn’t seem to be in the mood for humor. “We all are,” she nodded to Fenn.Fenn was wearing her own leather armor, I noticed, and she held out her hand to me. I caught the things she threw to me one by one, first a plain white shirt, then the tights I wore to keep my armor from chafing, then the armor itself.