Snippet Tag: The Library in the Stars (Part 1)

Part 1

The Snippet Tag @ Short & Snappy by Madeline J. Rose

I was tagged! By Madeline J. Rose @ Short & Snappy (an extremely fun blogger — seriously, her blog is like sunshine and makes me smile so much — do go check out her fantastic blog at once!!) for a new tag which she created, The Snippet Tag! Thanks so much, Madeline! ^_^

I’d been planning to share some snippets of my NaNoWriMo 2016 space-fantasy, time-travel novel The Library in the Stars anyway, and this was the perfect excuse for that, so there’s some perfect timing right there. 😉

Aaand I came up with quite a large wordcount with these snippets I picked, so I’m chopping the post in half and sharing five today and five in another post later this week. So here is part one!

On with the tag and the snippets!

The Snippet Tag (created by Madeline J. Rose)

Rules:

• Include the fancy-shmancy graphic I included somewhere in your post. (Or make your own, just so long as you include a link back to my blog.)
• Answer all the questions, however you want to. Creative interpretation is key here! You can use the book you’re currently working on to answer the questions, or other books you’ve started or have written.
• Tag 2-5 other bloggers.

Questions:

Part the First

1. Share your most gripping, fascinating, and hooking first line of a story.

[Note: I… already shared the opening (hooking or not) in my latest Beautiful Books post, so how about a snippet from the end of the first chapter? (More than a line, I’m afraid. ;))]

It seemed to Brendan that he had only been in his book for a mere few seconds (it may possibly have been a dozen chapters) when the doorbell rang again. For the third time that day. And right when the hero of the novel he was reading was in a particularly sticky predicament that even Brendan’s highly imaginative mind could not see a way out of… which was very bad timing, to be honest.

Jamming his bookmark in his place, he snapped the book shut, left it on the couch, and navigated the book stacks toward the door. He opened it and looked out, and shadow looked in at him.

A young man (perhaps eighteen, two years older than Brendan), dressed all in black, with black hair falling to his shoulders and seeming somehow rather wrapped in shadows, stood in the hallway. His piercing black eyes looked down into Brendan’s eyes, out of a face pale and drawn and somehow enigmatically displeased with something.

He was definitely strange, but all sorts of strange types could be met with in the inter-spacial Chronos University on Caligma, so it did not bother Brendan. He was only bothered with having to leave his book.

“Well?” Brendan said, more testily than usual.

The young man’s obsidian eyes stared at Brendan, unblinking, in the pause that was the following silence, while tendrils of shadow seeped past the threshold into the room.

“What do you want?” Brendan asked.

“What do I want?” the other repeated in a hoarse whisper, his voice low and seeming to come from the shadows that surrounded him and filled the doorway. “To make my own choices.” He spread his arms, the long black trailing sleeves morphing into darkness, and shadows wrapped around him and Brendan.

The next moment, the shadow took them both and they were gone.

2. Share a snippet that literally just crushes your heart into a million feelsy little pieces.

His ebony clothing and raven hair flowed into the shadows, becoming one with them, so that it was hard to tell where hair and shirt and pants and boots and flapping cloak—if it was a cloak—ended and where shadows began. In fact, the cloak itself could have been a shadow too—sweeping backward enigmatically. And all the shadows seemed alive, moving slightly as if they were being blown in a constant breeze, so that the cloak or shadow gathered behind him was flung back and flowing as if he stood on a hill with a strong wind before him. It was almost like wings, spread back behind him, though some swept around in front of him, cloaking him, his black eyes and glossy hair like raven feathers the only gleaming parts, the rest pure shadow, his pale drawn face staring out at them, his expression enigmatic and veiled, almost empty.

“Drayke…?” Veronica said to the space elf at her side.

His gaze was firmly fixed on the shadowy person in front of him, green eyes narrowed as he took him in. For a long moment there was complete silence as the two faced each other.

“What are you?” Drayke asked then.

The young man laughed, a hollow sound which seemed stolen by the light breeze, and sounded oddly devoid of enjoyment. “Isn’t that an excellent question.”

3. Share a snippet that makes you want to shout to the world that you’re SO. HAPPY.

“Of course it would rain today,” Briley said, stepping out to stand on the roof of the big clock tower, next to where her airship was perched. She glanced at the overcast sky and the other airships flying by overhead, and got some rain drops in her eye. “Oh well, what’s a climb down a clock tower without some rain to keep it interesting, right, Eon?”

Her only answer was silence.

“Speaking of keeping… Eon, get out here and keep me company. I want to talk to somebody.”

A muffled voice came from her pocket. “Of course you would want to talk to somebody right now when there’s only me. And I’m not coming out.”

Briley shook her now wet short blue hair out of her eyes, and put on an old-fashioned cap, with goggles on top, on her head. She pulled the goggles down over her eyes, tugged at a rope—connected to the side of the ship at one end and a harness brace Briley wore at the other—to test it, then snapped her fingers once and pulled a gold and brass pocket watch out of her pocket.

“Too bad,” she said cheerfully, “because I’m making you come out.”

The metal, gears, and glass of the small timepiece took on a fluid-looking form for a moment, morphing into another shape, solidifying into a gold and brass metal figurine shaped like a small clockwork fox.

It stretched in the palm of her hand—much more flexibly and real-looking than an ordinary figurine of metal should have been able to do—and then tried to dodge the raindrops falling and pinging quietly against the metal of its back.

“Ow! Have a care, then!” the little clockwork fox that was Eon said in the clipped tones of his singular accent. He shifted into the shape of a frowning little owl, hunching one wing and holding the other wing over his head, drops of rain running off his bronze feathers onto Briley’s hand. “You said it was raining; leave a chap alone, will you?”

“As if rain bothers you,” Briley said.

“I’m made of metal—of course it bloody bothers me, and if you—” He broke off in mid-speech with a slight yelp, for Briley had put owl-Eon on her shoulder, took a firm grip on the rope and a running leap backward a couple steps, and she purposefully fell right off the edge of the roof a few feet—laughing as the wind flew around her and through her blue hair—until the rope caught her and pulled her up short. She then commenced rappelling down the side of the clock tower.

Eon had instantly shifted into a lion shape, digging all of his many claws into the fabric of her shirt so that he wouldn’t fall off.

“This is what I’m talking about, love,” he griped into her ear. “Whoever thought it was a good idea to give a fifteen year old girl the job of clock tower maintenance—well, they should just have their brain examined is all I’m saying.”

4. Share a snippet that gives a bit of insight into one of your most favorite characters ever.

“I fail to see how being kidnapped by the minion of some crazy space elf lady is supposed to be protection.”

Damian winced. Veronica almost felt bad for saying minion, but not quite. Not enough to take it back, anyway.

“I never wanted to be a minion,” Damian said softly. “And I was supposed to find Brendan and bring him—”

“Don’t say that,” Veronica interrupted.

“Say what?”

“His name.”

Damian paused. “I was supposed to bring him to her,” he went on. “She needs him for… well, I don’t know exactly why. She always said there was something special about him, some reason she needed him in particular, out of all the Time Wisps she’s been collecting—”

“Collecting?” Veronica repeated in disgust. “You do realize how awful that sounds, don’t you?”

Damian nodded. “I never said I was a fan of this person. I mean, she did after all curse me for all eternity to live in shadows and eventually become one myself,” he said a little testily.

5. Share a snippet that literally melts you into a puddle of adorable, squishy, OTP mush.

(Note: [Translation of OTP for those who don’t speak fangirl-ese: One True Pairing, i.e. favorite couple.] There… wasn’t actually very much time for me to devote to my characters’ romantic-or-not relationships. Hence, I’m just going to go with a random section of Veronica and Damian. Since they’re adorable even though they don’t know it/haven’t had time to be yet. >.>)

Damian turned entirely into a shadow and went through the table in the blink of an eye, re-solidifying on the other side just in front of Veronica and flinging his arms and their accompanying shadows around her, at the same second that the force field on the door snapped open and the two shadow men surged through into the space craft. But just a split second before they reached them, Damian, with Veronica clasped in his arms, teleported out of the space craft and reappeared somewhere else.

For Veronica, it was terribly disorienting. She was suddenly engulfed in shadow, feeling Damian’s arms solid and yet somehow shadowy around her, and the next second she stood somewhere else—not entirely sure where else, but only sure that the space craft’s interior around her a second before was no longer there, and that her head was suddenly disoriented and scrambled and aching. She tilted dizzily, and as Damian released her, she started falling toward the ground. Her orientation and ability to hold herself up just stopped working. Damian caught her again before she could fall the whole way.

“Oh. Yeah. I forgot about that.”

“About what?” Veronica managed to croak through the haze of mind-numbing, head-pounding dizziness.

“The teleporting-with-someone-else thing,” Damian’s voice said from somewhere in the shadows above her head. “Not doing that again, then.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

Part 2 coming later this week…

…

So, what do you think of this little look at The Library in the Stars? I want to know all your thoughts! Spill ’em! 🙂 (And if you read this far, you get cookies; thank you, kind soul.)

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