Weekend Writing Warriors: 1/25

This 8 sentence blog hop is hosted by The Weekend Writing Warriors. (Click the link for the list of participants, or rules if you want to join!)

This is a snippet from my yet-to-be-completed NaNoWriMo story, Black Ink Plague, a fantasy about inkbloods, people who were left at the roots of a magic tree as babies, and can use charcoal from those trees to write and cast spells. The main character, the inkblood called Liar, is going to kill a gang leader called Cin.

 

Pulling a folded piece of paper from her purse, Liar lifted it to the light, the words dark strokes that swallowed the light, giving off oily highlights from their depths, as if they sank into the paper’s surface.

“Man of Cin, proud ruler of Dirt/ this is your last moment to breathe. /A red flower blooms over your heart/ the stem run through/ and your cruelty beats no longer. /Be still,” she spoke the words clearly and carefully.

The writing on the page flared, spilling dark light across the surface, and faded, leaving behind a page blank except for scorched splotches marring the surface, and some small burns perforating the paper.

Liar didn’t glance at the magic warping the spell in her hand, her dark eyes trained on the man below her. Cin faltered, stopping to lean against a wall, his face pale. He wiped sweat from his face, more beading from his skin, and then he jerked, falling back against the wall of the shop he’d been leaning against.

*    *    *

Black Ink Plague is set in a world similar to ours, with the addition of the Rakau tree, which has magical properties–charcoal or ink from the tree can be used to cast spells. However, only inkbloods, babies who were left overnight at a Rakau tree’s roots on their first full moon, can harvest and use the tree. The price they pay for their magic is that the ink infects them, staining their skin and eventually forming words from the spells they cast on their skin. These words change their lives in unexpected ways.