Ple, more please.
Here's the first unedited bit of "Needfire". Just began this about half an hour ago and I haven't looked at it (it's a Buffynight, guests coming), so apologies for typos. feedback, any variety, greatly appreciated. (just editing for typos as I reread, not for content)
Needfire
I honestly don't know why anyone would decide that I was supposed to be the Chosen One. It seemed a remarkably stupid idea at the time; in retrospect, it still does.
I was handed over to the tender mercies of Richard Giles, Associate Professor of Anthropology for Magdalen College, Oxford, at the age of eleven. The designation of "Associate" was not strictly accurate. "Visiting" might have summed it up better. Professor Giles, assigned to oversee my training (their instruction) and complete subjugation (the Professor's translation) by the Council of Watchers, owned a wonderful bookshop in Turl Street. Occasionally, he was invited to visit nicely panelled rooms and speak in learned, uninflected tones about the role of demons in the formation of medieval government, or the proper attribution of various bits of the Malleus annotations, Cotton Mather edition. If he was not the world's nicest human, nor its smartest, he was at least thorough.
When my mother brought me to the bookshop for the first time, I was aware of her relief. She tried to hide it, of course; my mother was not a cruel woman, merely an ordinary one. I suppose she loved me, from a sense of inborn duty if for no other reason. But I terrified her, and that upset the balance of normality in the mother-daughter relationship.
We had walked from the station, a long walk for a child; looking back, it's posible that my mother expected to me to pull a broomstick from my litle tapestry bag, and use that. The train had brought us down from Paddington, in London, where we lived. I noticed the city, through a child's eyes, smelling the history, wondering at the towers. It would be some time before I discovered Matthew Arnold, and learned to think of them as the dreaming spires. But I took the city in, a golden stone wall, a man crossing the road with his nose buried deep in a book narrowly missing being slammed into by a girl who looked very much like the model Twiggy except that she wore a short scholar's gown, the blare of horns and lorries rumbling down the hills into the Woodstock Road. It occurred to me that I lived here now, or would, if I decided to stay. That I might not have a choice never entered my head. My mother, after all, wasn't frightened of me without good reason.
We came to a black painted facade, with a lovely red door and a sign on a wrought iron frame hanging over it. I looked up, enchanted by the muddy picture on the sign: it was a blind man playing a standing harp. The word "Carolan" was lettered in a a faux-Celtic script. This was the sort of thing that abounded in London, with its pubs and rather muscularly self-conscious awareness of itself as a historical center. Surely, those pompous men in the featureless building in London hadn't sent me off to live in an Oxford pub....?
In the leaded window, I saw books, leather bound, old, arcane. Something moved in me, and my pulse awoke to a kind of inborn awareness. Where there were books like these, there was also power.
My mother rang the bell of Carolan. We waited on the doorstep, listening to the echoes shrilling behind the gaily painted red barrier. The door opened, and Richard Giles stood there.