another story time

So since it's been a while since I last did it, decided to try the story exercise again with new week's deck, the Sheridan-Douglas...

There was a girl once, a girl with a strong mind and many ideas. They floated around her sometimes, twisted and curled, giggled and spoke. There were so many possibilities and dreams, too many for a girl of her youth to know what to do with. But the girl lived in a place, a land, a house surrounding by cups, and in those cups there were nectars, juices and wines. They tasted sweet, and they made her head spin. They made her body light, and they made her laugh at almost anything. It was easy to smile, to be satisfied with simply sitting there, drinking from those cups as one day melted into the next and nothing was changed and nothing was done, but what did it matter, when there was always another cup nearby to empty?

And so the days went by, and nights. Slowly the girl grew tired of the sickly sweet taste that always surrounded her. She grew tired of the meaningless laughter, of only-half feeling her body, of so much time passed with nothing to show, with ideas always ideas that merely floated, slowly, away from her. One night she realized she'd had enough, that she would never be able to stop so long as she stayed here, in the land of the cups; she realized that as long as she stayed she would never make anything more of herself. On that night she packed up her things, the few she couldn't do without, and she walked away. She walked over the bridge that separated this land from the outside world, walked without looking back, without pausing, without giving herself the chance to change her mind, to succumb to the temptation of one more sip.

The new lands she entered were strange, quite unlike the one she had grown to know so well. They were harsher and colder, more difficult to climb through. There were challenges that she could never have imagined. But now all her funny ideas, the ones that used to tickle and curl and float away as she drank and laughed...now she could reach out to them, grasp them, harness them to her will, to her plans: and these plans worked. Slowly she succeeded, grew more powerful, earned allies, earned friends, until finally the girl, now a woman, sat on her own throne, the ruler of her own domain. Now her ideas went forth like little flames, illuminating the land for her subjects, feeding the common good. Now, when she smiled, it was the smile of accomplishment, and smile of looking down at all the good she had achieved.