www.CaptainTemerity.com

Spade, the Evergnome, sat with his back against the cave wall. The doorway he’d run through was solid enough for the likes of him, a spill of loose rocks and a couple boulders that he’d rigged to fall onto his pursuer if one should ever catch him in the act of cutpurse.

But he’d never expected that something so shiny would be the property of a troll.

The troll beat mightily at the doorway, its heavy club bashing at the stones. It had been nimble enough to avoid their collapse, but not smart enough to leave with its head still intact.

“Trixty!” it cursed at Spade, the grunts getting louder to his ears, the air getting fouler as the troll and he shared breathing space.

As moonlight broke in, enough for the troll to see by, easily, Spade jumped up, in plain view, and dove for a smaller hole in the back of the cave. The troll made a lame grab at him, still getting its bearings in, what was for it, a cramped space. It slid on the damp stone floor, and shoved an elongated arm into the crevice, scraping at the furthest back edges of the hidey-hole for its prize.

Spade squatted quietly at the back, too scared to breathe. He held out hope that he was still out of the beast’s reach.

Then suddenly, the troll caught the edge of Spade’s cloak. It felt a desperate tugging at the end of the cloth, so it pulled harder, crushing the form as it finally got him within its grasp. Spade lay limp in its hand, but as soon as it got him out of the small hole, it pounded his small body, within its fist, against the largest rock nearby, and then, happy that he wouldn’t wriggle on the way down, tossed Spade into his mouth.

“Treat,” it mumbled to itself as it munched on the lifeless form. As it chewed, the troll felt not meat and bone crunching between its rotted teeth, but cloth and hay. The creature tasted no sweet gnome blood, but only something akin to dwarvish silverale, heavy and pungent of distilled alcohol. The troll’s chewing slowed, its mouth agape as it began to spit the gnome out.

Spade shot out of the hole in front of it, a small rod in his hand. The tip glowed a fiery red on his mental command, and he pressed it up directly to the beast’s tongue. Immediately, the combination of the wand’s enchantment, the concentrated alcohol, and dried hay ignited in the troll’s gullet, and its entire giant head went ablaze.

The troll dropped dead instantly in front of Spade, the Evergnome.

“Trick,” is all he offered to the smoldering corpse.

It makes sense to start off this blog with this story, not because it’s my oldest piece, or even that it’s particularly good.  But because it ties in several things about my writing and the people that I write for.

This came as a challenge from my bestest of besties, Anne.  Now, Anne is an impeccable writer, and has been as long as I’ve known her.  But we met in a group that was basically fanfiction before it knew it was called that, and we always treated writing as play.  We’d do these wonderous stories with our characters interacting with one another, and it’s some of my favorite stuff to read, but, because it takes place in someone else’s universe, it’s not something we could ever try to publish.  And it’s so full of in-jokes and private moments, no one else would really get it anyway.  The definition of “You had to be there.”

But Anne still likes to play sometimes, so back in October of 2008, she challenged me to something she called a “drabble” (the word was new to me).  Write a story, so many words, and the theme, based off the calendar, was “Trick or Treat.”

Now, this takes me back to the days we met, on the Prodigy BBSes, where I would just have an idea, throw it up in our forums, writing it without planning or thinking, and let it go.  Sometimes the stories would be near masterworks, sometimes they would be horrific failures.  Often, though, they just struck our little group as funny.  I’ve learned that trying to write as a Writer should, I fail near every time.  When I go into it just to make a joke or avoid doing real work and responsibilities, that’s when I do my best.

And, again, I’m not saying this is my best (not that my Best is much better).  But it came from my biggest muse.  And then it went into the hands of one of my other ones.  I don’t know why I sent this to Levi, other than it was something short and it seemed like he might get a kick out of it.  Whatever I was expecting, what I didn’t intend on was him drawing me a wonderful little picture to go with it.  Painting the picture to my words, only much more expertly.  My story got Levi art, and that is about the best thing I could ever hope or want to accomplish.

Spade was just a name for someone I needed to name in the moment.  But this was not the last time I’d see Spade the Evergnome wind up on my page.

But that’s another story…