Weekend Writing Warriors: 3/22

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, an inkblood called Liar, cast a spell to kill the gang leader called Cin, accepted payment from the gang’s second in command, then traveled to a nicer part of town, where she offers her mother some of the money, and her mother asks how Liar earned it.

 

“Nothing I wasn’t taught at school,” Liar shrugged.

Unlike many parents of inkbloods, who left their child at the roots of a Rakau tree with desperate hopes for a better future, her parents simply hadn’t known what to do with her. They’d had a son, a pampered only child for thirteen long years, and then a surprise daughter. With no interest in the effort it took to find a husband for their child, they’d placed her under a tree on the first full moon after her birth, and then handed her into the care of nannies until she was old enough to go to school.

When she was nine years old, he’d fallen ill, and died a few months later, leaving her parents  with only the child they hadn’t wanted. Their grief excluded their daughter, for all that she’d lost a brother when they lost a son.

“Would you prefer not to be repaid for the debts you incurred on my behalf?” Liar asked, though she already knew the answer.

*    *    *

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.