Eben Mishkin

His twin brother once told Veloldion that insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Sometimes, like this, when he was hiding under some human child’s bed with an iron cross wrapped to safety with rubber bands in one hand and an antique lady’s garter pistol in the other, he thought his brother might have a point. To be fair to himself, Veloldion did try to improvise and change for every one of his cons. To be even fairer he couldn’t exactly change. He had been born a double-crossing son of a bitch. It was in his nature. Like a scorpion. Scorpions had to sting. Veloldion had to live.

And really, people who thought otherwise just had themselves to blame. It wasn’t like it was personal. He actually liked Shrimscraw, he was pretty decent as troll-giant half-breed tough guys went. Deep believer in the rule of puff, puff, pass so he shared well and had a good loopy sense of humor.

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Alright, my first post for Elfebruary. A bit longer than I intended it to be but so it goes. Bindlesticks has been living in my head a couple of years now, so there will probably be more of her.

Lights and Fires


The advantage and disadvantage of being a mutt was that all manner of magics that were only supposed to effect one specific kith or the other still thought that Bindlesticks counted. As she wandered through a valley between a world where nothing had ever lived at all and a world where the dominant form of life were spiders the size of oversized SUVs – neither of which particularly seemed promising to Bindlesticks – a billow of what looked liked fireflies washed down the valley side and over her. The tiny twinkling lights surrounded her in a halo and there they paused as much as tiny twinkling dancing lights ever do, the halo spinning around her like she was the galactic center of their thousand-thousand stars.

Bindlesticks reached out to feel the dancing swarm and they brushed like an electric buzz over her fingers and through the twining ochre-brown branches of her arm. She resisted the urge to shake free of them and the buzz settled into a tickle that drew out her slow laugh. She stretched out her other arm, letting them swirl around and through her. She decided she liked it. She could be the tree at the center of their universe feeling the tickle of them. So she wiggled her rooty toes into the earth, settling in to be the galactic core for a while.

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