2014 Edit: of the original project, only the thumbnails, and one image, remain. The rest are gone, sorry. But I want to include the post -- it's a neat story. So I'll fill in the blanks with something at least interesting after the text... I don't think I have anything much that's "in the spirit of," but if I think of something in due course, I'll come back and adjust this post.
"Do you feel that, Iorik?" she asks, turning her face to the wind.
"Feel what, madam?" he asks, wondering why the concubine is on the heath at twilight, when the air smells strangely of the sea.
"There's a storm coming," she says. "Do you not smell it, taste it? It makes me think of my youth, of home, before."
"I feel the wind," he says. "I'm just my lady's guard, not..."
"Not what, Iorik? Say it," she challenges.
But he dare not say it, for the stories about her say she brought with her the magic of the steppes when she was sold into the household of the master. They call her the Stormseer, and Iorik can believe it as he watches her fall to her knees and petition the gods of the sky.
"Hear me," she whispers, "hear my prayer."
"What prayer, madam?" he asks, creeping closer.
But she no longer hears him. She hears only the sky -- the wind and the storm that will surely break across the heath before midnight.
She has always been able to hear, taste, smell the oncoming storm. But can she also summon the storm? Iorik does not know, but he wonders, watching her now, if she can bring the wild storm down on the household into which she was sold -- if she can wreak devastation, and through it win her own liberty, and his.
**************
Just a story fragment -- the rest of the story is out there somewhere, I'm sure. This one comes as a contrast to the weather we're having here, which has been brutal in the last few days. HOT. One of the riverland towns, east of here, recorded 51 degrees Celsius yesterday! That's 124 in the old Fahrenheit scale, and we measure share temperatures, so you can add 35 degrees to that to get the sun temperature. Ouch! Well, we didn't get that hot, but it was 43 for a couple of consecutive days, which is hot enough.
So I couldn't resist doing something with a big storm, chill winds -- "chance of an evening shower or two around the coastal hills," as the forecast sometimes says down here.
The model is Victoria 4, wearing the Yaana skin map and the Rock Star hair. The costume is the Night Lily coat -- there's supposed to be a dress under it, but, well, let's just replace it with a bikini, and set the textures of everything to something emerald green. The sky is an enlargement of a small piece of sky from a digital shot of a weather front arriving a couple of years ago, and the ground is a bit of terrain made in Bryce and exported as an .OBJ, and imported into DAZ here to serve as the ground. Nice.
Jade, 2 February
