the deep moans round with many voices

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Master List of Elizabeth Culmer's Fiction
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FANFICTION:

General Disclaimer: These stories are based on characters and situations created and owned by other people and corporations. I make no money from this borrowing of intellectual property, and intend no copyright or trademark infringement.

Organization: This list is organized primarily by fandom; within each fandom, it's arranged first by associated story cycles and then by writing date. Word counts and writing dates are approximations.

Content/Warning Policy: 1) I am not consistent about warnings! I use them when I remember, for a few relatively broad categories of potentially problematic content, but if something is off-page, non-explicit, or generally backgrounded, I probably won't think to note it in the metadata. Read at your own risk! 2) The things I try to warn for are explicit sex, rape, murder, torture, cannibalism, incest, depression/suicide, familial dysfunction, and occasionally also societal dysfunction (aka dystopia). Sometimes I just slap a general content warning on all my fic for a given fandom and don't label each individual fic. I also don't generally warn for violence, unless the violence in a fic is dramatically out-of-step with the violence in its source canon. 3) I don't use any content rating system unless I'm posting to a site or community that requires or encourages ratings, because I find movie-style ratings counter-intuitive when applied to written fiction, and not particularly useful for anything other than denoting the presence of explicit sex, which I already note in the metadata.

Quality Rating System: I've marked my favorite stories with asterisks, on a scale of 1 to 4. The more asterisks, the more I like the story. This doesn't necessarily mean that stories without asterisks are bad, just that I don't like them as much. Also, I am not claiming to be an arbiter of taste; you may love stories I dislike, and vice versa. I am just providing a heads-up about the ones that I think are best written and/or most interesting.

Where To Read: What I post on my journal tends to be the equivalent of a beta draft. If I have cross-posted a story literally anywhere else (except Tumblr; fic content there is just a mirror of fic content here), read the version that isn't on my journal. Versions on AO3 are definitive. If there is no AO3 version, read the ff.net version. If there is no ff.net version, read the FictionAlley version (only applicable for HP fic). Failing that, read the journal version, because that's the only one there is.

Harry Potter Fanfiction

Naruto Fanfiction

Angel Sanctuary Fanfiction

Chronicles of Narnia Fanfiction

Homestuck Fanfiction

MCU fanfic (assorted)

Minor Fandom Fanfiction
(currently includes BtVS/A:tS, The Dark Is Rising, the Darkangel trilogy, Enchanted Forest Chronicles, FF7: Mercverse AU, Inception, and Star Trek: AOS)

Miscellaneous Fanfiction
(Currently includes: American Gods, An Ash-Blonde Witch, Arthurian Mythology, Batman, the Bible, the Black Jewels series, the Bourne trilogy, Charlotte's Web, Code Geass, Death Note, Discworld, Doctor Who, Girl Genius, The Girl with the Silver Eyes, Glee, Gormenghast, Hamilton, Hexwood, The Homeward Bounders, Howl's Moving Castle, Labyrinth, Lord of the Rings, Lucifer (comics), Mad Max: Fury Road, Merlin, the Oz books, Ranma 1/2, Rise of the Guardians, Sailor Moon, Saiyuki, Seaward, Shakespeare, Star Wars, Tam Lin (Pamela Dean), Vorkosigan Saga, White Collar, Wolf Hall, X-Men, and Yu-Gi-Oh!)

Crossover Fanfiction
(I do not cross-list crossovers and fusions under their component fandoms; this is the only place to find them. Currently includes: the Anita Blake series, ASoIaF, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Black Jewels series, BtVS, Cardcaptor Sakura, Chronicles of Narnia, the Darkangel trilogy, The Dark Is Rising, Discworld, Doctor Who, Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Ender's Game, Gundam Wing, Harry Potter, Hikaru no Go, Homestuck, Inception, the Indiana Jones movies, Leverage, Lucifer (comics), MCU (various), Merlin, Naruto, the Oz books, Sandman, Stargate: SG-1, Star Trek: AOS, Vorkosigan Saga, Welcome to Night Vale, and a couple other things that only appear in memes rather than actual fic.)

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ORIGINAL FICTION:

These stories are all mine! *grin* I use the same warning policy and quality rating system as for my fanfiction.

All Original Fiction

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My various bingo cards: Cotton Candy Bingo, Round One (blackout!); Cotton Candy Bingo, Round Two (blackout!); Genprompt Bingo, Round 12 (blackout!); Genprompt Bingo, Round 15; Ladies Bingo; Daredevil Bingo; Domestic AU Prompt List

The 2023 Three Sentence Ficathon is live!!

This year, to spare poor rthstewart's inbox, Ruth has some co-mods and the ficathon now has its own dedicated Dreamwidth community: threesentenceficathon.

Here is the information post.

And here is the first ficathon post. The ficathon started yesterday, on January 13, and will remain open for new prompts through February 12.

Anyway, here's my first set of fills:

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( 1. ) For wearing_tearing, in response to the prompt: any, any, tarot, written 1/13/23

Cards on the Table (385 words)

Fandom = Greenwing & Dart (Victoria Goddard)

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"Fascinating," I said, shuffling the Tarot cards one final time before returning the deck to the Ystharian ambassador's niece, a young woman of indeterminate ancestry with scandalously short hair and an ingenious set of spectacles that Hope assured me could not possibly be made from glass. "The symbolism is rich despite the repetitive nature of the suits, and the Major Arcana add additional layers of possibility -- what games do you play with them?"

"Hardly any these days," Miss Soledad Aguilar said as she tucked the cards into the canvas satchel slung over her shoulder. "We use a simplified version of the minor arcana for thousands of games, but the full deck is mostly used for divination, which means many people think playing games with the Major Arcana is disrespectful or dangerous -- though most card-based divination is of dubious strength or accuracy."

I thought of the layers of Poacher, the ways that prosaic gameplay and the more arcane aspects intertwined to build upon each other until the great masters could nearly read a man's soul from his discards, and slipped my own deck from my pocket. "I think we took the opposite road on Alinor," I said as I fanned out the deck, displaying various Fish and Happenstance cards to Miss Aguilar's evident interest, "to the point where some people will deny Poacher has any power beyond that of parting fools from their money, but I assure you from personal experience that the cards can speak messages from the gods themselves."

"Fascinating," Miss Aguilar echoed, pausing for my nod before she slipped a pair of cards (the Salmon of Wisdom and Friend with Errand) from my hands to examine. "Mr. Greenwing, I believe there's an empty table under the pergola. Would you mind teaching me the basic rules of Poacher in return for instruction in some simple Tarot spreads? With, perhaps, the Lady Violet to help both of us demonstrate -- I know one of my uncle's predecessors taught her some Tarot, which is why I brought my deck in the first place -- and I assume she knows at least the rudiments of Poacher."

"Miss Aguilar, it would be my pleasure," I returned, and clicked my heels and offered her my most elaborate bow before I began pushing through the crowded afternoon fete in search of Violet.

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( 2. ) For betony, in response to the prompt: Queen’s Thief, Gen/Attolia, apotheosis, written 1/13/23

Prayer Like a Knife (170 words)

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Eugenides is named for a god and touched by a god; sometimes, in some lights, he may even embody that god; and these days he carries the painful brightness of that attention, visible only from the corner of one's eye: a flaring ember of divine fire and glory that reflects from his eyes and teeth like the breath of dew rising from grass at the touch of morning sun.

Attolia bows to the altar in the temple she has erected to honor her husband's gods and says, so quietly that no air moves to carry her words to mortal ears, "If you steal him, or burn him up in your plans, I will find a way to lay siege to your heavens myself until you repay the fullness of my loss."

As she steps back into the light of day, she ignores the way her shadow seems fainter and less sharp-edged than those of her handmaidens, as if some impossible light has lingered in her hair and beneath her skin.

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( 3. ) For wingedflight, in response to the prompt: Duck Hunt (discord game), Strong Duck, shake it off, written 1/13/23

Horatius at the Bridge (90 words)

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If you can hold them off long enough -- just one more bullet, one jammed gun, one pause to reload or change out a magazine -- your sister will have time to set off the explosion.

The hunters think it's murder-suicide, but in truth it's only cover fire to let the younger, sillier members of the flock escape.

A third bullet smashes through your wing and you stumble at the searing pain of shattered flight feathers, but you're not dead yet, and you will sell your life as dearly as you can.

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( 4. ) For wingedflight, in response to the prompt: any, any, this is the darkest timeline, written 1/13/23

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines (340 words)

Fandom = Nine Worlds (Victoria Goddard)

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"This is, without a doubt, the darkest timeline that has ever, will ever, and could ever exist," Fitzroy announced as he burst out of the tent (much larger on the inside, courtesy of some highly experimental magic) where the rest of the Red Company were taking their ease after a filling lunch.

Jullanar counted to ten, then uncricked her neck and glanced up from the ethnographic and cartographic study of southern Colhélhé that she had bargained fiercely for in a small market stall just that morning. Fitzroy looked slightly put-out at her delay in giving him her full attention, but neither calm enough nor wild enough for this to truly be serious, and so she merely raised one eyebrow and said, leadingly, "Oh?"

"Yes, because Pali ate the last of your gingersnaps and laughed at me for being too slow to claim it," Fitzroy said, and flung himself down on the grass to rest his head in Jullanar's lap like an oversized cat -- or perhaps like a younger brother asking for comfort without yet knowing how to vocalize his needs.

Jullanar wondered if he would ever tell them the truth about his childhood, and what he had been doing before he fell out of the sky and into that rowboat between her and Damian. She was fairly sure it couldn't have been anything pleasant, not with the way he sometimes treated normal human interaction like a vast, intricate puzzle constructed by intelligences as foreign as, say, termites.

She was equally certain that mentioning her concerns wouldn't help anything.

"I'll bake some more gingersnaps after I finish my chapter," she said, "if, and only if, you hold very still and let me use you as a bookrest. I think that's a reasonable bargain."

"Deal," Fitzroy said instantly, and closed his eyes. Soon thereafter he drifted off to sleep, and Jullanar allowed herself the small pleasure of combing her fingers gently through the wild curls and squiggles of his hair.

She read three chapters rather than disturb him before he woke on his own.

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( 5. ) For scytale, in response to the prompt: any, any, sheep, written 1/13/23

A Good Shepherd (180 words)

Fandom = The Dark Is Rising

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"The thing about sheep, see, is that they make sense," Bran said as he and Will wedged their hands under nearly twelve stone of panicky flesh and sodden fleece, then heaved the fallen sheep off her back and onto her side; the sheep hastily scrambled to her feet and staggered off on wobbly legs toward the rest of her flock.

"They may not be the brightest, or the most sensibly designed," Bran continued, wiping his muddy, oily hands on his equally muddy trousers, "but sheep want to have enough food and water, to be around other sheep, to make little baby sheep at the right time of year, to not get too hot or cold, and to not get eaten by wolves or minks or terrifying sheepdogs -- simple and sensible, and easy enough for a farmer to arrange -- and they don't bother with things like taxes or religion or the costs and benefits of the devolution of parliamentary authority."

"I know where you're going with this," Will said preemptively, "and no, I won't replace the British government with sheep."

"Shame."

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( 6. ) For wingedflight, in response to the prompt: Sandman, Dream, Rose, and Jed, family dinners, written 1/13/23

First Steps (230 words)

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"Is family dinner going to be a regular thing?" Rose asked as Jed excitedly handed his dinner request to the chef; "Because if this is going to be a regular thing, you need to tell me so I can rearrange my schedule and fall asleep normally instead of you showing up out of nowhere to blow sand in my face and only explain after the fact."

(There were no gilded and leather-bound menus to match the fancy silverware and china plates of the private dining room Dream had conjured up to the left of the great hall, just two blank sheets of heavy paper that the fanged chef assured the Walker siblings would record the foods they wanted most, even if they didn't consciously know what those foods were; Rose admitted it was a neat trick, and mentally awarded Dream a half point on her tally sheet -- at this rate, he might break out of the negative before Jed was old enough to vote.)

Dream looked even more stiff and awkward than normal, which should have been anatomically impossible, but he somehow managed; "You have my apologies for the short notice, and my word that, if you and Jed find yourselves willing to attempt another meal after this, I would be willing to visit the waking world so that you may choose a time and location more convenient for you."

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More to follow!

Summary: Jane plans to study archaeology. She'll explain about the 'underwater' part some other day. (200 words exactly)

Note: This ficlet was written for rosaxx50 as part of a three-sentence meme, in response to the prompt: TDIR, Jane Drew. I failed the structural restriction yet again, though I did wrangle it down to four sentences which is at least movement in the right direction. It's also another double drabble, just because. [Tumblr crosspost]

[ETA: The AO3 crosspost is now up!]

( I Have a Secret )

I think oceanography would be an equally sensible response under the circumstances, but I went with archeology because of the Drews' connection to Merriman, and also because Britain's deep history is a running theme in canon.

Timeline note: Jane and Bran seem to be Will's age, give or take a few months. So far as I can tell, Will is twelve and a half (maybe thirteen and a half, but certainly no older) during Silver on the Tree, which takes place in 1977 at the absolute earliest. Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1981. Barney's joke is historically possible. (Yes, I did actually take five minutes to verify that. *headdesk*)

Remix reveal day! I wrote two stories this year: They Have To Take You In (A Sheepish Story) for Gramarye and Follow the Story (One Queen, Bearing Gifts) for rthstewart. I'm going to talk about each in a separate post.

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They Have To Take You In (A Sheepish Story): 1,700 words, June 2015. After the events of The Dark Is Rising, the Black Rider calls the White Rider for help. This is only amusing for one of them.

Remixed from Strategic Sheep Purposes, by Gramarye.

Toward the end of the remix signup period, I took a look at the signup summary page to see if there were any requested fandoms (aka, fandoms in which people had already written stuff) that could use more offers to ease the matching process. Most of the unloved fandoms were things I either don't know at all, know only vaguely through internet osmosis, and/or have no interest in writing, but there was one request for Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising sequence. Which is not a fandom I have ever felt impelled to write in of my own accord, but is certainly one I love and know fairly well, and for which I'm more than willing to write responses to other people's Yuletide or Three Sentence Ficathon prompts.

So I said hey, why not... and of course that's where I was matched. *wry*

It was also where I was pretty much stuck writing, because all of Gramarye's other fandoms fall into my "don't know" and/or "don't care" categories. Which is how it goes, sometimes! The world would be a very boring place if we all loved exactly the same things.

Anyway, I read through Gramarye's DIR works, rapidly concluded that I had no business trying to write about Welsh politics in the 1980s and 1990s, and decided to elaborate on one of the many drabbles instead. Then the trick was choosing which drabble. I copypasted several of them to a brainstorming file and spent the next three and a half weeks looking at them occasionally and sort of vaguely weighing options in the back of my mind.

Strategic Sheep Purposes is, oddly enough, the first drabble that really caught my imagination and the one I tentatively settled on as my target when I first read through Gramarye's archive. My usual fic exchange pattern calls for my first idea to get unceremoniously trampled by a later, more insistent plot bunny, but while I do still have half a notion to poke at the Jane-centric plot bunnies inspired by two of Gramarye's other drabbles, in the event I could not resist the sheep jokes, nor the chance to explain to my own satisfaction a question that began to bother me when I reread all five books in rapid succession: namely, what did the White Rider think of the Black Rider's dramatics in the first two books of the sequence, given that she apparently stayed well out of those disasters? (And in fact may have persuaded him to do likewise for a while thereafter, given the low level of the antagonist in Greenwitch.)

Also, the idea of two ageless personifications of darkness and evil acting as bickering siblings tickles the hell out of me. This may be a flaw in my character. *grin*

I feel that this was probably an obvious story to anyone who's read my other DIR work, considering my established interest in the White Rider and the way she balances her two lives/selves, but we love what we love and there's not much use pretending otherwise.

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And now I'm just going to blather about the DIR sequence in general, because I have been sitting on these random observations for over a week now!

When I decided to refresh my familiarity with the series, it turned out to be cheaper to buy a complete box set than to simply fill in the missing books in my collection. This is weird and silly! Also, in theory I should only have needed to buy TWO missing books, but my copy of The Dark Is Rising was eaten by book gremlins lo these dozen years ago and I kept forgetting to replace it, so in practice I had three titles to purchase. I never actually owned Over Sea, Under Stone or Greenwitch until now. The first omission never bothered me, but I do dearly love Greenwitch and am glad to have had an excuse to fill that hole in my personal library.

On another side note, reading all five books in fairly rapid succession makes their time discrepancies screamingly obvious. In-universe, the sequence plays out over a period of not quite two years: the Drews find the grail in late summer of Year One, Will joins the Signs over the Christmas season that links Year One and Year Two, Jane gets the translation key from the Greenwitch around Easter of Year Two, Will and Bran claim and use the harp around Halloween of Year Two, and the final battle happens shortly after summer solstice in Year Three. Which is all well and good.

EXCEPT!

In the first book, copyright 1965, the Drews use pre-decimal currency, meaning the book must be set pre-1971. By the second book, copyright 1973, there's a specific mention of a Mrs. Horniman "coolly disregarding changes in the currency" and handing out silver sixpences to the caroling Stanton children, which sets it firmly post-decimalization. And then by the fifth book, copyright 1977, Bran casually refers to Snowdonia as the "only place that didn't die of the drought, back in nineteen seventy-six," which means they are in 1977 at the very earliest, and quite possibly a few years further on given the phrasing. We've somehow stretched two years of events over at least seven years of real time. Even for the Old Ones, that's flatly impossible.

So when do the events of the sequence take place? I think the best way to rationalize them is to handwave the pre-decimal currency in book one as an artefact of Early Installment Weirdness -- after all, that book was written as a standalone, and has some other oddities like Mr. Hastings (aka the Black Rider, one of the greatest Lords of the Dark) not being able to use a spell to breathe underwater, though Will can pull that trick easily in book three and he's far from the most powerful of the Old Ones -- and work backwards from book five, on the assumption that it's set somewhere between 1977 and 1980. But not much later than that, or you'd start running into Margaret Thatcher's fights with the unions, and I think that would've altered Mr. Stanton's dialogue in the opening section of book five.

...

Okay, I'm done babbling now. *wry*

More Three Sentence Ficathon fills. :-)

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( but where do your ideas come from? - The Dark Is Rising )

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( once is happenstance - Rise of the Guardians )

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( nothing gold can stay - Chronicles of Narnia )

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( last and least (and loved) - The Dark Is Rising )

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I have one more fill after these, but it's long enough that I want to post it separately. (Also, on a random note, I think I have now written enough ficlets to qualify for Remix Redux in The Dark Is Rising. A strange feeling!)