Writer's Block

[annarti.livejournal.com]

AUTHOR Annarti
DISCLAIMER All mine
NOTES In an attempt to write more about Yamin, this appeared. Poor Yamin.

~ ~ ~

Two brothers of the sky above,
Two sons of hate, could never love.
Each breathed the same upon the sands,
The light of day held in their hands.

The feathered end of Yamin’s quill traced idly over the parchment in front of her, blank save the single verse she had inscribed onto the uneven surface at least an hour ago. She flicked absently at a fly that had inconsiderately decided to land in the quill’s path. The fly obediently buzzed away from the greyish-blue feather, only to land again on the ink-spotted pine of the desk.

Writer’s block was not something Yamin was accustomed to. Each and every story was in her head already, and had been for at least a decade. Her mother had recited them all to her in her soft, desert-accented voice when Yamin was but a child. She knew the stories by heard, and now it was simply a matter of laying them on paper, only for some reason the words would not come.

Yamin’s eyes narrowed vaguely at the fly, flicking more insistently at it. The small grey insect finally took the hint that the workspace was not perhaps the best place to retire. Apparently, the young scribe’s face was far more appropriate.

Her eyes still on the parchment, Yamin blew up at the persistent bug with the trained expertise exercised by all the people who lived in the desert. It eventually gave up and commenced its ponderous circuit of the ceiling, crashing into the walls at various intervals and causing jerks in its otherwise droning flight path.

It took a lot to set even the slightest annoyed frown on the young healer’s brow. Unless, of course, she was already frustrated by something else. Writer’s block, she felt, was the perfect excuse to lose her temper.

She didn’t move from her chair, only flicked her eyes up to the erratic flight path of the insect. The yrae stone at her wrist glittered faintly as she caught hold of the fly with her mind, dragging it down to her desk and taking up a fly swat. Fly swats were as common in a Raykinian bedroom as the bed itself, perhaps even more so.

Yamin held the fly firmly on the table and brought the fly swat down hard. The fly’s buzzing rose a few octaves as it spun around on its fixed spot on the polished pine desk. Yamin put it out of its misery with another thwack of the fly swat, nodded briefly and flicked it nonchalantly off the desk.

Now that at least one frustration had been taken care of, she sighed and read over the verse on her desk for the hundredth time. Idly she tidied up a few of the characters on the parchment with more ink. Completed circles, made some of the swirling lines longer and more elegant, darkened some spots that hadn’t come out right.

She knew this story just as well as any others that had flowed so easily from her geya quill that she couldn’t dip the nib in ink fast enough. Why was this one story being so Aeia-damned difficult?

She bit her lip, apologising fervently for her silent curse of the death-goddess, then groaned slightly in frustration, pushing herself away from the stifling desk to stare out the window.

The sun would be setting in little more than two hours, and she had already been sitting at the desk since lunch. The healer shook her head and rested her arms on the windowsill, absently drumming her fingers on the ringing silver of her bracelet.

Her bracelet.

Yamin froze momentarily; glanced at the yrae stone, at her parchment, then back at the stone. A coy expression set on her face as she tapped the glittering sapphire-coloured stone set into the silver. She already used the stone to heal people, to move objects without touching them… Nimay occasionally used it to hone her skills with various weapons… Perhaps there was a way to use it to counteract writer’s block?

Hope surged in Yamin’s veins as she took up her seat once more, tentatively dipping her geya quill in the dark ink. She tapped it once on the rim of the inkpot and allowed it to hover over the parchment for a few moments.

‘Lin, guide me,’ she thought, then touched quill to parchment.

There was no gap, no loss of time from when the ink was first laid on the parchment and when it was lifted off. But four lines of Yamin’s flowing script lay on the paper, proving to her that the yrae stone had indeed inspired some form of a story to flow onto the page.

She blinked a few times at the lines of text, freeing herself from the odd daze she had fallen into while the stone had taken over.

Silent feet tread solid earth, matching callused hands.

Woodpecker song echoes through wavering air.

Pride’s strength, cub’s innocence.

Solid earth, solid growth, solid steel.

Yamin rested her head in her hands, heels of her hands supporting her temples as she stared in profound befuddlement at the words on the page. She had intended to write the desert people’s story of how an endless day of two suns had been separated by night, not some nonsensical drivel that even a philosopher would have trouble deciphering.

Her eyes ran over the lines a few times more, but her frown only deepened. Evidently her plan had not worked. The yrae stone had inspired her to write something, but it would hardly be useful.

Angrily, she screwed up the piece of parchment that had been the bane of her afternoon and shoved it off the desk into a corner.

One unfortunate servant chose that time to knock on her door.

Yamin swung it open with forced patience. Evidently the frustration was still plain on her face, since the girl’s eyes widened briefly before she thrust the food tray towards the healer.

“Your dinner, ma’am,” the serving girl mumbled.

Yamin smiled weakly and pressed her hands together in thanks before taking the tray and kicking the door closed behind her with one foot.

She barely tasted the spicy, sun-dried tomato as she scooped the mixture out of her bowl with a piece of flat bread. Instead, she glared at the scrunched ball of parchment. There was something about the ridiculous excuse for a piece of writing that made Yamin uncomfortable. She couldn’t think what it was exactly, there was just something profoundly wrong with it. Maybe it was because it hadn’t been written by a conscious mind, but instead by a stone.

Eventually, she sighed and set her tray aside, then blew out the candles by her bed and slid under the covers, her back deliberately turned on the parchment.

When dawn’s light woke her the next morning, the words of the yrae stone were washed from her mind. She didn’t even notice the crumpled parchment that had caused her so much irritation the previous afternoon. Instead, she pulled her pale green healer’s robe over her head and walked to the mirror over her desk.

After dragging a brush through her shimmering white hair, she flipped her fringe back and dabbed her thumb in the pot of green mixture before imprinting the healer’s green thumbprint on her forehead. She didn’t know why exactly she bothered with the thumbprint—the fine, white strands of her fringe covered it anyway.

She shrugged and slung the light, dusty red cloak she wore whenever she was in the public eye. Even though Nimay would be asleep now, and would be for a number of hours yet, Yamin still preferred to keep a low profile. The less people knew about her, the less they would talk and drop hints to Nimay. The cloak, the same colour as the clothes of the palace staff, kept enough attention away from her.

Satisfied that the cloak now sat right, Yamin closed the heavy oak door behind her, the strange words all but forgotten.