Weekend Writing Warriors: 4/12

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 offers her mother some of the money to repay part of her school debts, which her mother accepts in a dismissive fashion then leaves.

Even though her parents valued her very little, a maid who’d been frightened by Liar’s appearance when she’d come home for holiday, descending into hysterics, had been dismissed immediately. At the time, Liar had embraced dressing as dark as the night, with drapes of funeral lace, and smudges of charcoal around her eyes to emphasize their contrast to her skin.

Looking back on it, she was aware she’d been both ridiculous, and undoubtedly alarming, looming out of a shadowed hallway into the lamp light. No wonder the poor woman had been so frightened, but all her arguments hadn’t earned the maid even a reference letter. Every time Liar entered her parent’s world, she fit in as poorly as a crow among sparrows, clumsy and dangerous without even meaning to be.

She was glad to leave the streets of her childhood behind, crossing into the part of town where she lived and worked most often. Yes, it was dotted with a few cesspools of vice, but mostly made up of poor working families trying to make ends meet, people who sometimes worked in the nice houses, but didn’t fit in there any more than Liar did.

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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.