steampunk for children

I was pleased to be asked to participate in the very cool Fairypunk Stories project. Here’s a teaser from the version of Sleeping Beauty that I just sent off.

(From “Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing”)

If a clock has ticked, it must tock, and thus time moves along. And in every tick and tock, there’s a story. Sometimes more than one.

Once upon a tick and tock, there was a great Lord and Lady, who were Patrons of the Arts and Sciences. They endowed libraries and laboratories, and commissioned portraits and poems and marvelous machines that could pay chess or spin a silk thread so fine you could barely see it or build their own, even tinier machines that could make tinier machines in turn, and so on and so on, until they produced the head of a pin inhabited by seven clockwork angels, all dancing.

The Lord and Lady loved the works they commissioned, but they yearned to produce something of their own. One day it came to pass that the Lady announced to her Lord that they had collaborated very well indeed, and that she would soon produce an heir.