Status: Prompting Closed
This round is now closed to further prompts but remain open for fills and remixes (forever!).
About
"Enter any body of water and you give yourself up to be swallowed. Even the stones know that."
"beauty is terror"
"Would you fall in love with me again, if you knew all I've done? The things I can't undo. "
Calling all lovers of poetry and prose, rhyme and reason, screen and stage. Welcome to the Quotes Round, where every prompt must cradle a quotation (or two, or three). Mix the media and let the synergy birth a new order, or keep it short and let the subtext speak its secrets to the right writer.
🛑 HOLD UP
If this is your first time on 17hols please check out our About Page which has helpful information about dreamwidth and HTML. We are a prompting fest where all the action happens in the comment section.
Rules
- Sign up is not required.
- Fills have a minimum of 400 words for prose, haiku-length for poetry (3 lines), and 400px by 400px for art (memes are also art). Other mediums are fine too!
- There is no maximum cap.
- Tag and provide content warnings at your discretion, but a good guide are the Ao3 four (Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage) and this list of common CWs (cr: SportsFest).
- NSFW/Explicit content should be tagged
- NSFW art should not be visible, please provide a link and a warning. You may crop the artwork and embed a SFW preview.
How it works
Prompting
- Click on [Post a New Comment] at the bottom of this post;
- Change the subject;
- Copy+Paste the following HTML into your comment and edit the sections. Feel free to add as much detail as you want!
Need ideas? Check out our 2021 and 2022 Quote rounds.
Filling
- Reply to the original prompt;
- You must change the subject to [FILL] - this is to help the mods track. Feel free to add a title
- Copy+Paste the following HTML into your comment, edit the sections, and add your text.
You may also upload your fill to the AO3 Collection.
Remixing
- Post as a reply to the fill you are remixing, using the same HTML as above;
- Change the subject to [REMIX].
Art/media
- Upload your work to any platform (twitter, imgur, youtube, soundcloud, google maps, etc.)
- Using the same HTML code as above, copy the link into your fill or remix. That's it!
- Optionally, you can embed a picture into your comment. Please use the following code instead.
(To explain, the HTML resizes your picture to 400x400px so that it fits on most screens. Users can view the full size if they click on it. You can also add a link to your work on twitter so that others can share it, or to any other website you want)
On dreamwidth, you can't edit a comment once someone has replied to it.
|
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
the only way out is through
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: love(?) despite doom, no-win scenarios, consider horror/dystopia/sci-fi
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
omens in the skies
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: Andor/Star Wars AU, implies canon-typical violence, one allusion to a real-world event
Permission to remix: Yes
***
In the morning Minghao wakes to a rain-covered sky, the fifth since he arrived. He tries not to think of omens, his mother weaving blessed thread into his clothes before she passed on, his father trying to see the future before he was arrested with the rest of the elders. It doesn't matter, really. The days plod forward, omens or none.
The hut keeps out the rain but not the damp. All around him are fields and strange animals he's never seen on any planet before. The animals trouble him more than the sky. They aren't quite corporeal, sliding around the edges of his vision. He wonders if they trouble the Imperial troops that march through the town square at dawn and dusk, or if it is beneath the Empire to survey the local fauna. He supposes the latter; the Empire has little use for something so fundamental as pastoral life in the business of conquest.
The curtain hung as a door over the entrance to the hut moves and Hansol enters, his head wrapped in a scarf like the locals. "I saw the ship," he says.
"Me too."
"Two days."
Hansol hands him a piece of folded up cloth before he begins rummaging in his bag for their meager breakfast. For a moment, Minghao is more interested in breakfast than the cloth, his stomach clenching in a terribly human way. He never expected it would be like this, starving on a planet he'd never heard of, sharing a hut with a stranger, watching for omens in the sky.
He unfolds the cloth. On it is drawn a map of the local Imperial base and surrounding town. He studies the thin scrawl of ink.
"We need to burn that," Hansol says.
"I know." Minghao studies it a little while longer. The Imperial architects are geniuses. The symmetry of the compound's design mocks Minghao the longer he stares at it, an omen written in ink.
He takes orders from a man he's never spoken to. He visits planets he's never heard of. He meets others like transient ghosts on a road to unknown lands.
Another man joins them in the evening. He has delicate features, a gentle voice. Shua, he calls himself, and Minghao wonders if that's his real name. The only signal of his true purpose is the long-range blaster he unpacks after sunset, frowning at each piece of it with a steadiness that speaks to some kind of training, though Minghao doesn't ask what.
He steps outside. On this undeveloped planet, the only artificial light comes from the Imperial compound in the distance, barely a pinprick in his sight, like a small star. The stars overhead gleam much brighter, much older, witnesses to a life Minghao has never known.
A sound draws his attention. He looks behind him to see Hansol exit the hut, his placid face familiar now after the past week. In another life, they might have been friends.
They stand in silence for a long time. Those strange animals float like iridescent leaves rustling across the grasses. Minghao thinks of his mother, teaching him to play his grandfather's harp. He thinks of his father, and wonders if he is still alive.
Hansol startles him when he speaks. "When I was in prison," he says without preamble, "I used to look up at the stars every night and try to spot the constellations I remembered. I was on this planet not very far from the one I'd grown up on, so I could, but, well. After a while, I forgot to look up."
Minghao doesn't say anything. This is more than they're supposed to reveal to each other, all personal information considered unbelievably dangerous. The only secret is one not told. But he listens, hoping against his better judgment to hear more.
"I guess that's what they want," Hansol says. "For us to forget. Forget what we were, who we come from. Our own stories."
Minghao clears his throat before he answers. "I guess so."
When his father was arrested and taken away, Minghao's neighbors avoided his eyes. Got on with their lives. Knelt before the Emperor's statue and treated it like one of their own gods. He could not bear it.
"One time I was in the Outer Rim," Minghao says. "And I saw this Imperial ship patrolling out there, I guess the planet had something they wanted. And there was this little ship, obviously a cargo ship, flying toward a planet where I was headed. The Imperial ship blasted it to nothing and just flew away."
He lets out a shaky sigh, looking over at Hansol. In the dim light, the furrow in Hansol's brow is the only outward sign of his reaction. Of the heavy weight hanging over them like the mists clinging to the fields.
"I've thought of that ship often," Minghao says. "I wonder who was on it. Nobody knows how they died. Nobody but me ever saw it."
In the sprawl of the universe his insignificance chafes him raw. What justice could anyone provide to the unknown travelers who died in silence on that small cargo ship? The universe swallows them up. The Empire expands like a cloud covering the moons.
Hansol doesn't say anything. Overhead the stars gleam with a terrible brightness. Perhaps this is the omen, instead.
Hansol looks over at him, starlight reflected in his eyes.
"We have to remember," he says firmly. "This is why we're here. This is why we must be here."
His confidence betrays his fear. Minghao knows it too.
In the early morning Minghao and Hansol and Shua take a transport toward the town square. They meet a man there who calls himself Jun. He tells them where to find his ship when it's done, then disappears into the crowd.
Minghao looks up. Rain clouds.
He finds the roof he and Hansol scoped out a week prior, and the weapon he'd concealed within the wall.
Between the three of them, one of them will succeed. They must.
Between the three of them, one of them will reach Jun's ship. They must.
Between the three of them, one of them will live to remember what happened here.
In the distance the Imperial procession winds through the streets like a dark cloud passing over the sky. Minghao begins to count.
Re: omens in the skies
Re: omens in the skies
Re: omens in the skies
This entire sequence really seals the doomed vibes so, so well... you really put such artful gaps in the story for the imagination to grow, e.g. what's the grand narrative they're supposed to follow? What's the actual mission? The focus on how Minghao and Hansol sees the world before they march on reminds me of how real life soldiers just want the war to end quickly so they can come home. And here, too, there's the uncertainty of whether Minghao and Hansol and whatever they're fighting for would survive. With so much mess going on in the world right now, this piece bottles the essence of inevitability so concisely. So, so good!
Re: omens in the skies
Re: omens in the skies
Re: omens in the skies
Re: omens in the skies