#Making a massive backlog now if I can I:

[storytellers-and-co]

Tansui's Adventures - #20, Devil Chocobo

Momodi suggested a new place - a change of scenery, an area where an adventurer was needed and where Tansui could just forget their worries for a good moment. Good ol’ adventure that involved helping people and making connections. 

And, she suggested that he should take a chocobo ride. 

Tansui, within the first minute or so, decided that this was the most horrible idea anyone had ever given to him. The mage could’ve sworn the feathered beast underneath him was secretly very aware and very sadistic, for it kept bouncing and jumping over things, not slowing down even for a second despite Tansui’s apparent fear.

[rorydrawsandwrites]

:O

[greyedian]

.

[meta-sequoia]

Rose genetics and the law of unintended consequences (or, ten rose bushes, reviewed)

I have a number of longposts in the backlog, including updates on a number of garden improvement projects I undertook over the winter, but I kept putting off posting them because there kept being Horrors. However, spring is here - in California anyway - and plants wait for no one.

Over the winter of 2025, as a coping mechanism for the aforementioned Horrors, I got really into roses. Because of who I am as a person, deciding what roses I wanted to buy also made me feel obliged to reconstruct the history of rose breeding, just to make sense of the teeming confusion of the tens of thousands of named rose varieties. Humans have been raising roses for food, medicine, and beauty for untold centuries, and so they've really grown up with us. The history of the development of roses, it turns out, is the history of the development of humanity in miniature.

This post has it all: history, some light phylogeny discussion, material analysis of English folk ballads, a conceptual framework for understanding how different kinds of roses vary and why, a #haul breakdown of what bare-root roses I got and what I thought of them, and some philosophical musings on what it means for an organism to be subjected to a long-term selective breeding process, to be remade wholly in the image of human desire. All that, and pictures of roses, under the cut.

My general region of California is considered to have a good climate for roses, much good may it do us. It never gets too hot or too cold, so they essentially never go out of season, and even though our winters are wet, the rest of the year is fairly dry. This is absolutely critical, because the main problem that makes garden roses hard to grow is fungal disease. Modern roses are incredibly susceptible to fungal diseases, which are caused, roughly, by Damp. This has typically been combated with toxic sprays (though there are now less-toxic options) and aggressive pruning regimens.

Needless to say, this is a ridiculous fucking problem for a plant to have. California natives, by comparison, hate irrigation - they have a natural life cycle involving being dry in summer and wet in winter, like California itself, so if you grow them in a climate resembling their natural range, without too much added water, they will be mostly OK. Roses, as far as I can tell, actually hate all water, including rain and humidity, which is much worse because gardeners do not control the weather. If it rains too often after, say, noon, the rose's leaves might get wet, fail to dry off, get a fungal disease, and die. If there is too much fog, or it is humid, as it is in most of the country in the summer, the rose's leaves might get wet &c. If you have a sprinkler system - you get the idea.

Fungal disease can also weaken roses and make them more prone to insect infestations. This is bad because modern garden roses are, without any help from The Weather, already incredibly prone to infestations from aphids, mites, beetles, and a mite-borne disease undescriptively called "rose rosette disease", which produces a habitus that I can only describe as "rose bush eldritch horror".

Now, this may all have you asking one question. Probably, that question is "why are you so obsessed with a plant that wants so badly to die?" I will not be answering this question today. Instead, I will be answering a different question, which is "Why do modern garden roses suck so bad?"

Now, if roses are subject to some manner of curse, then it isn't a family curse, phylogenically speaking. Roses - genus Rosa species extremely miscellaneous - are a member of the family Rosaceae, which contains a massive number of useful and delightful plants. It is possibly the most economically important family of plants next to the brassicas. The rose family brings us not just roses, but apples, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, plums, peaches, apricots, and almonds. And the wild rose, untouched by human efforts, is a lot like a raspberry, actually.

Its flowers have only five petals, in pink or white. It’s got thorny stems that form thickets, and oval (or, technically, lanceolate) leaves with lightly serrated edges. Its flowers are fragrant, which is an adaptation to their long and necessary coexistence with pollinators and other insects - fragrance serves as a chemical signal for insects to "come here" or "go away", depending. The wild rose is hardy, like all wild plants, tolerant of various environmental problems that would kill a garden rose: shade, salt, normal levels of ambient insect and fungal disease pressure, drought, being consistently rained on in the afternoon or evening. It may reproduce asexually from suckers - strong shoots from near the base of the plant - and this makes it able to withstand browsing pressure from e.g. deer. (Put a pin in that.) It also can reproduce in the normal way, by having its flowers pollinated and forming seeds, which are borne in prominent reddish-orange fruits called "hips".

This is not a rose I bought, but here’s Rosa gymnocarpa, a California native rose. It’s a wood rose, so it’s shade-tolerant, and it’s often found in redwood forests specifically, so it tolerates relatively dry soil and very acidic soil.

Honorable mention: Rosa gymnocarpa (wood rose)

Source: Calscape

A raspberry plant in flower, for comparison. Source

The wild rose has another trait, which may be surprising to those who have only ever seen garden roses: it blooms once, usually in the summer. This is typical of flowers, which almost always have a season, for the exact same reason fresh fruit has a season. Flowering plants are on a tight schedule: they need to finish up their blooming, so they can set fruit, so they can get their seeds out before winter, in case the frost kills them off. And mostly we’re used to that: tulips are for spring, so you don't expect a tulip to make a second showing in fall, or to flower continuously throughout the summer. But roses have been bred to do this, and have done it for centuries, for so long we barely remember what it was like when "roses blooming" was a time of year, an event.

It's possible that for most of human history, roses were all the more treasured for being fleeting, which simply isn't an aspect of how we moderns understand roses. I am constantly subjected to traditional ballads at home, both in English and German, so I am very aware that multiple Child ballads mention roses as a way of placing the events of the ballad at a particular time of year. In 'Lady Isobel and the Elf-Knight', a song traditionally associated with May Day, one version of the chorus references the events as occurring 'as the rose is blown'. And at the start of 'Tam Lin', the protagonist meets her fairy lover while plucking a double rose, is "laid down among... the roses red" by him, and finishes the ballad on Halloween night heavily pregnant with his child. The course of the ballad is inextricably intertwined with the course of the seasons, and the bloom of roses is synonymous with early summer. (There's so much symbolism in 'Tam Lin', but especially around roses. Can I interest you in tam-lin.org at this time?)

European religious literature even uses "a rose e'er blooming" as a purely figurative phrase, something impossible and magical enough to be a metonym for the Virgin Mary - but in the modern era, most garden roses are ever-blooming. The perpetual-blooming rose is not the natural state of the rose plant, but a kind of technology that had to be developed. And I don't know, I just think that's neat.

So what have we learned? The wild rose is: once-blooming, tough, possibly shade-tolerant depending on species, very thorny, bearing simple pink or white five-petaled flowers, that are fragrant, pollinator-friendly, and produce fruit readily enough. In short, a practical, normal sort of plant.

The garden rose is…not that. There’s no other way to put this: the modern garden rose is the wild rose, but bimboified.

Now, in case today is your first day on the Internet - well, first of all, welcome, it’s bad here - but secondly, bimboification is a niche fetish where someone is transformed into a hypersexualized version of themselves that is also very stupid. Plant domestication is obviously analogous. I didn’t originate this joke; in fact, I reblogged a joke like this just last week.

Roses are like this but even more so. Like, wheat is clearly bimboified. Its sexual parts (seeds) have been remade, swollen to ludicrous proportions, and wheat is probably worse at being a plant than wild grasses. But we created modern wheat from wild grass because it was more useful that way, and wheat could in theory survive and spread without human cultivation. Roses are Like That purely because we wanted to make them a more perfect decorative object. Centuries of intensive selection pressure for appearance have rendered roses useless as an independent plant: they are so disease-prone they need extensive intervention to even survive, and they are often physically incapable of propagating themselves - one of the basic features of plants! - without human aid. That’s plant bimboification.

Source: Heirloom Roses. This one is called 'Oranges 'n' Lemons. Hardly seems like the same plant!

Here are just a few examples, of what we've done to roses. Humans love rose petals - eating them, distilling them into perfume, smelling them, just looking at them - so the garden rose has massive flowers that are so stuffed with petals that pollinators cannot get at their centers, rendering the rose incapable of reproducing except possibly with the help of a human equipped with a paintbrush. Humans love bright colors, so modern roses come in every color their natural pigments allow. Garden roses are often - though not always - less thorny than their wild cousins, because thorns are inconvenient to humans, and so have been somewhat bred out.

And what’s just as important is what was bred out of wild roses in the process of becoming modern roses - by accident. As mentioned above, modern roses are often useless to pollinators, and, not unrelatedly, can’t reproduce without human help. They often lose their fragrance, if not specifically bred for it. They are very susceptible to disease, because gardeners can keep alive, through sheer stubbornness, plants that natural selection would have culled. Likewise, they need full sun where many wild roses can get by even in the shade of big evergreens, and they can't tolerate nearly as much cold, heat, or salt exposure as their wild relatives.

This 'use it or lose it' thing, by the way, is a general principle of selective processes like plant breeding, or like evolution. If you have two independent traits, A and B, and you select hard for A, then B is likely to gradually drop out of the population, simply because the subset of A carriers that also have B is likely to be small. It's pure statistics. (It essentially is a human-created population bottleneck.) The more intense and ruthless the selection pressure, the stronger the effect. Evolution cares a lot about seed production and hardly at all about color, so wild roses are plain but make enormous rose hips; humans like beautiful roses the color of sunsets, and are indifferent to seed production, so modern roses don’t make hips at all. The failure to select for eventually becomes an implicit selection pressure against.

(Highly-bred organisms are thus less, I guess, well-rounded genetically even before you get to issues of inbreeding, and if you assume there is no biological link between your selected-for traits and other ridealong traits, e.g. domestication syndrome. Genetics is complicated!)

One adapted wild-type trait that - I speculate - was not bred out, due to its direct usefulness to humans, was the ability of roses to grow back vigorously from having leaves or branches removed. This is, it seems to me, an adaptation to herbivore browsing - if you are a rose with minimal regrowth ability, and a deer chews on half your canes, it’s curtains for you. But humans also fully remove half of the canes of their garden roses every winter - it’s critical to controlling the fungal disease that so plagues them. Specifically, pruning improves airflow through the plant, which evaporates the water that keeps falling on the leaves from the sky. (You know. The rain, that roses both hate and need to live.) In some sense, we are acting as caretakers here, shaping the plant in inscrutable ways for its own good. But to the plant, we are basically deer: just another in a long line of animals that want to steal its leaves. Unbelievable! It needs those! Fuck you too, buddy: here’s a faceful of thorns.

Truly, a tale as old as time.

This brings me to my first actual rose review, a kind of bridge between wild roses and the world of cultivated roses.

#1: Rosa rugosa, probably "Hansa"

Source: the author's yard.

This is a sucker - a vigorous young ground-level shoot - from an unnamed rosebush from my mother's house. I say "probably 'Hansa'" because we have no idea what this actually is, only that it is a rugosa hybrid, purchased from an unknown nursery in the Midwest sometime during the Bush administration.

'Hybrid rugosas' are crosses between garden-type roses and a wild rose species called Rosa rugosa, which is native to much of Asia. This particular rose bush has many traits carried over from its wild parent: it's violently fragrant, a glorious sweet-spicy combo that smells to me like childhood and home; it has wrinkly leaves (characteristic of Rosa rugosa in particular); its stems are practically coated in prickles; and it's quite tolerant of shade, drought, and salt (Rosa rugosa is a beach rose).

The main virtue evinced by this rose, derived from its wild parent, is the same reason that it is still here in my garden: it is extremely difficult to kill. My mother, after hearing me say I wanted this specific rose bush at my house the same way it had been at my childhood home, dug up a sucker from her instance, put it in a bag with some wet dirt, carried it by hand on a multi-hour cross-country plane flight, and handed it off to me. Once I received it, I stuck it in a pot, because I was ripping up my lawn and had nowhere to plant it, and mostly forgot about it, because I was busy ripping up my entire lawn. It lost its leaves suspiciously early in the fall. ("That's not good," my mother said, over FaceTime, brow furrowed. "Are the rest of your roses doing that?")

But as the saying doesn't go, "where there's green cambium, there's hope", and I continued to take care of it throughout the winter. I eventually even remembered to put it in the ground. It is now March, and in defiance of the mockery of certain judgemental housemates, who said things like "why do you have a stick in a pot?" and "it's giving 'dead', my guy", this "stick" has now decided to become a rosebush, and has a grand total of (approximately) twenty-five leaves.

Like I said: extremely difficult to kill. It is currently planted 10-ish feet from the base of a redwood tree, a tough environment where some hardy garden-style roses have nonetheless been known to thrive. Given that its resurrection has occurred entirely while it was planted under the redwood, it doesn't seem too mad about its environment.

Review: holy shit, it’s alive???

#2: Zéphirine Drouhin, the "old garden rose"

Source: Heirloom Roses

Rosarians have conceived of many groupings of garden roses, based on known ancestry, phenotype, genetic studies, and Vibes, but one major breakpoint is those bred before 1867, the "old garden roses", and after 1867, the "modern garden roses".

The old garden roses were derived mostly from ancient European and Middle Eastern stock, which had themselves been created from wild roses centuries prior. For example, this is Rosa x alba, an ancient European rose strain; it was used as the heraldic badge of the medieval House of York during the English conflict known as the War of the Roses.

Source: not mine

Some of these roses are perpetual-blooming, a trait introduced as late as the eighteenth century, and which is entirely due to trade contact with China: as far as I can tell, the genes for strong reblooming only come from the Chinese rose-breeding tradition, which was itself centuries old by that point. So the modern Western concept of perpetual-blooming roses as the default kind of rose - like so many other aspects of modernity - is a direct result of Europeans cribbing from everybody else.

Interestingly, France was a major center for rose development during the early modern period. You can see it in the way old garden roses are named: overwhelmingly after some eminent madame or monsieur. This is probably connected to the fact that Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte’s empress, was a rose fiend: she had two hundred and fifty new varieties of rose to be brought to her gardens at Château de Malmaison, which was probably pretty much all the named varieties of rose that existed then, and many of which were new to European cultivation at that time. Again, this represented a massive inflow of rose genes that were previously restricted to other countries or continents entirely. Inextricably, these gardens also represent the proceeds of early modern global trade, and of empire: Napoleon, on campaign abroad, himself sent her hundreds of specimens of flowering plants, and the French navy confiscated plants and seeds from ships captured and sea and sent them to her.

Anyway, Zéphirine Drouhin, created at the end of the "old garden rose" period and named for some now-forgotten madame or mademoiselle, is highly fragrant - one of the few roses said to really perfume the air - with a vibrant but old-fashioned color palette. (Apricot and yellow roses were also characteristic of the Chinese rose gene pool, and so were significantly less common in old garden roses.) Zéphirine Drouhin is also thornless, a rare trait that we nonetheless see in some old-fashioned garden roses, and a few modern garden roses as well.

Old garden roses have a variable but generally good level of disease resistance. Zéphirine Drouhin in particular, gets something of a bad rap for poor disease resistance; English rose breeder David Austin Roses says, tactfully, that it "prefers warmer climates" (versus, one must assume, rainy England) and that "controlling disease can be a problem". By this you should understand them to mean that it is a whiny little pissbaby that constantly gets blackspot, a diva that will defoliate at the drop of a hat (or the drop of, uh, water).

However, unlike certain other newer roses I will mention later, I have found Zéphirine Drouhin to be pretty healthy so far. I received this rose, like many in this post, "bare root", basically a stick, dormant in a bag of wood shavings. Upon being planted in a part-sun area, it has leafed out with only a scattering of aphids to show in terms of disease.

Review: So far, so good. Looking forward to the fragrance.

#3 and 4: 'Mister Lincoln' and 'Fragrant Cloud', the hybrid tea brothers

Remember how I mentioned that 1868 is the breakpoint between "old garden roses" and "modern garden roses"? That year marked the invention of a new type of rose, the 'hybrid tea', that is in some sense THE rose, the ARCHETYPE of a rose. If you ask someone who knows nothing about roses to draw 'a rose' - if you look up clipart of a rose - a hybrid tea rose is what you'll get.

Source: Star Nursery

This is Mister Lincoln, and although it was developed as late as the 1960s, it has the classic hybrid tea rose form. Hybrid teas have a very distinctive shape, described as "high-pointed", with a spiral of unfurling petals that curl at the edges, and they're borne singly on long stems, making them great for cutting and putting into vases and bouquets. They are not always strongly fragrant, and they are not generally very disease-resistant. They come in a very wide variety of colors, intense and subtle. They are reblooming.

Hybrid teas were developed by another East-meets-West cross, when the Chinese tea roses, freshly imported from Guangzhou in the early 19th century, were bred with the old garden roses. Tea roses have the same iconic form as the hybrid teas; they have those unique, pastel shades that were previously quite absent from European rose stocks; they smell like a fresh cup of tea. All these traits they impart to hybrid teas. Hybrid teas have been very popular ever since, and have been subject to a great deal of selective breeding for color and form.

Hybrid teas don't generally spark joy, to me. I find the 'cartoon rose' shape kind of twee, honestly. And the reputation for lack of disease tolerance puts me off. But I heard Mister Lincoln was incredibly fragrant, and that drew me in. Likewise Fragrant Cloud (1967), which also has the charming feature of being a violent neon coral that is allegedly very difficult to photograph.

Source: Heirloom Roses

“It'll be fine," I thought. "How much fungal disease can it get? It's not like it's humid here."

Never again. My trust is destroyed; fuck hybrid teas.

please, my son, he is very sick

This is my poor Mister Lincoln, planted from bare-root in mid-December. It has three different fungal diseases, and also an aphid infestation I can't seem to get it to shake. It looks like one of those diagrams of a liver in a medical textbook that has fatty liver and cirrhosis and liver cancer all at once, just so you can see what all the diseases look like. This is a rose that has every problem! No other rose in this flower bed comes close to having every problem! 'Munstead Wood' is also a modern garden rose (though from a very different lineage - see my review below) and it has no fungal diseases and not a single aphid!

Well, maybe the other hybrid tea I bought is doing better... well, nope, it rained last week and Fragrant Cloud has powdery mildew.

Review: Come on, man.

#5 Unidentified ‘sunset’ rose

I didn’t buy these roses; they came with my house. As a consequence, I have no idea what they are, but I am now intimately familiar with their traits, and I think they are very indicative of both the high and low points of modern garden roses.

On the surface level, the fact that these rose bushes are still with us is an impressive proof of their persistence under adversity. When I bought the house, these roses were being choked to death. Lily-of-the-nile had been planted way too close to them, and then permitted to grow unchecked and undivided for many years; their roots were completely infiltrated and surrounded with lily roots. The lily roots had also damaged the irrigation lines, which were dribbling uncontrolled amounts of water into the shared root zone. So when I excavated these roses, the whole area smelled strongly of rot, with visible mold throughout; the roots were fully wet even in the heat of August. The roses were also infested with blackspot, not surprisingly. I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was too little, too late.

But when they finally got some drainage, some direct sunlight, and some relief from the brutal root competition, they did start growing back, and even blooming. Come winter, I pruned hard, defoliated, and applied neem oil consistently. And they’ve made a comeback!

Source: these blooms are actually my roses.

They bloom, and they’re beautiful. They do this ombre thing, where the buds are bright yellow and as they open they go from yellow, to orange, and finally to red.

The growth is fairly vigorous, with no powdery mildew no matter how rainy it gets. But their foliage definitely suffers from blackspot, and occasional rose rust; the spores are probably ambiently present in the soil now, and they can’t quite seem to defend themselves, even with ample help from organic fungicides like neem oil.

They also have no fragrance. They smell like nothing. And that’s the standard modern garden rose in a nutshell, I think: beautiful color and form, shaky disease resistance, little fragrance. It’s a little sad, honestly.

Review: Okay, this one is really pretty, actually.

Interlude: Pesticides and the law of unintended consequences

So, yeah, you can sort of see how roses got a reputation for being picky divas. I can only imagine how bad this sort of thing must get in places that get (gasp!) rain or humidity in the summer.

Now, having created plants that are too disease-ridden to live, rose-lovers came up with practical and effective solutions to the disease problem they created. For the past century or so, the go-to fix for our increasingly disease-prone rose population has been chemicals: regular applications of synthetic insecticide and fungicide sprays, as well as plenty of fertilizer and herbicide to feed the roses and kill any competing weeds.

However, recall the theme of this post: the law of unintended consequences. In agriculture, the development of modern pesticides and fertilizers has been genuinely miraculous; the Green Revolution is estimated to have saved a billion people from starvation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Saving a billion people! Can you even begin to conceive of what it would be like to save a billion people, even grapple with the moral weight of that act? I know I can't; the number is simply too large for our moral intuitions to handle, I think. So I'm hesitant to bad-mouth pesticides and fertilizers too much.

But they do have massive downsides. Chemical fertilizers leach into the groundwater and cause algal blooms that make entire bodies of water go anoxic, rendering them uninhabitable to fish and the rest of the aquatic food chain. Insecticides are probably responsible for colony collapse, which endangers the pollinators that we rely on for our food supply.

And, well, even if you don't give a shit about the natural world - you are a part of the natural world. You are an animal, with all the frailty that implies. Our bodies use many of the same ancient metabolic pathways as insects and plants; the majority of your DNA is shared with a banana. And because you are an animal, it is very difficult indeed to create an insecticide that will poison other animals without poisoning you too, at least a little. Herbicides are somehow still worse, despite the more distant biological relationship between humans and dandelions: Roundup, for instance, is linked to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has led to Monsanto paying out massive legal settlements to cancer patients who used their products.

So if we can't grow roses without coating them in poison, maybe we should just… not do that? Go back to growing super-hardy nearly-wild roses like rugosas, forgoing forever the elegance and sublime color of a modern rose?

Give up this? ‘Glowing Peace’, Heirloom Roses

Not so fast! Maybe this technological problem has a technological solution. If we bred roses so that they sucked, maybe we should just not do that! Make different roses! Make roses that don't suck!

#6-#8, ‘Ebb Tide', 'Eden', and 'Lavender Crush': roses that don't suck

Over the last fifty years, people have become increasingly aware of the impacts of modern lifestyles upon our health and the health of the planet and its ecosystems. So maybe this has made the public less willing to buy roses that need to be treated constantly with toxic sprays. Or maybe it's just that growing disease-prone roses is an enormous pain in the ass. Spray, prune, spray, defoliate, fertilize, spray, fertilize, spray, water - but not too much! Oops, powdery mildew. Defoliate and spray some more.

So the genetic health of the newer varieties of garden roses is greatly improved. The two hybrid teas I struggled with above were bred in the 1960s. All the named rose varieties in this section were bred since the 1990s or later: Eden in 1997, Ebb Tide in 2004, and Lavender Crush, the baby of the group, was introduced in 2016. All of them are vibrantly healthy and quite vigorous; Ebb Tide and Eden are shade-tolerant too, and Lavender Crush is allegedly very winter-hardy. After a scant two months in the ground, they've started to put out flower buds. And they keep some of the glorious color and form of older roses. Look at them!

Source: Heirloom Roses.

I don't mean to say all 20th century roses are bad and disease-ridden. I also have purchased 'New Dawn' (introduced 1930), due to it being the fifteen-dollarest rose at the Home Depot. (My toxic trait is that I am an absolute sucker for a good deal. I don't go into TJ Maxx anymore; it's too dangerous.) 'New Dawn' has all the ancestral, throwback traits I laud here: shade-tolerance, fragrance, disease resistance. It even brings in the pollinators! But it seems to me there's been a noticeable uptick in the quality of newer rose introductions, particularly when it comes to disease resistance. I'm not wired into the professional rose world to know what that is; I'm Literally Just Some Guy. But it's a good trend.

Review: I am so excited for the buds to open, you have no idea.

#9: 'Double Knockout': the 'landscape' rose

Wait, no, I take that back. These roses have too much ease of care. Put some back.

The Knockout rose has one virtue: you cannot kill it with an axe. Literally.

This rose was planted right at the foot of a redwood tree in my garden, because the previous owner of my house was an idiot. This is a terrifically bad setup for roses and redwoods: redwoods acidify the soil, and suck up water and nutrients aggressively, leaving little for surrounding plants, and of course they provide dense shade. Roses hate the acid, the dry and low-nutrient soil, and the shade; this plant never bloomed all last summer. For their part, the redwoods hate having anything planted in their inner root zone - their roots are relatively shallow for such a large tree. This is not a good situation for anyone, so I hacked this rose back to the ground, dug out as much of the root ball as I dared, and in my naivete thought that would be the end of it. Well, it has grown back. Now I am faced with the dilemma of whether to risk root injury to my redwood tree, or just let the rose be, bloomless as it is. Probably the latter is better for the redwood tree, on the whole. Maybe it’ll get choked out if I don’t water it? Anyone’s guess, really.

The category of landscape roses is a 2000s invention. The first Knockout rose was introduced in 2000 after years of intensive selective breeding for being easy-care, free-flowering, and disease-resistant; the similar Drift line was the product of an amateur rose breeder in 2006 to much the same ends. Landscape roses are so named because instead of being demanding prima donnas suited only to those who love roses enough to take on the Rose Tasks, they’re just another pretty shrub in the landscape.

And I will say this for them: in that bad, fungal spore–inundated flower bed I mentioned, my landscape roses (plus Munstead Wood, see below) are notably free of fungal disease.

Also, I think that's leaf tissue proliferating at the center of the bottom left bloom?? A rare but harmless growth disorder of flowering plants.

This comes at a cost, of course, at least if you’re a snob like me. I don’t think landscape roses are very interesting-looking - though of course they come in a wide variety of colors, the better to coordinate with the color scheme of your house! - and they are generally, tragically, without fragrance. While I can’t complain about anything that gets US gardeners to use less pesticides, they are barely roses to me. They are, in fact, the closest roses come to being an inanimate object, a decorative thing you can just plonk down in your garden wherever, like a tacky concrete statue. They’re a commodity; the enchantment is gone. I wouldn’t rip them out where they’re well-sited, but I sure wouldn’t plant more.

Now, this is incredibly mean to people who love landscape roses, but here goes. I’m reminded of a thread from r/Ceanothus, the California native gardening subreddit, that is now burned into my brain. OP asks for a native shrub recommendation, but not just any native shrub. OP wants a native shrub that will grow very tall, but also stay very narrow - 1’ wide in places. OP needs a native shrub that will grow thick and vigorous, to block out their view of the neighbors. OP needs this thing to be evergreen; OP presumably wants low water inputs. And OP needs all this, in a shrub that will grow in full shade.

In fairness, OP was polite about it, and this is a common problem for urban gardeners. The dark, untended canyon between buildings is a very common phenomenon in Californian cities. I too have a narrow, shaded side yard containing a tiny strip of crappy, gravelly dirt, that I’d love to grow something in: how do you think I found this post? Dear reader, I am very much at that devil's sacrament.

And the ceanothusheads of r/Ceanothus tried gamely. But one commenter replied with something that fully changed how I think about gardening:

Source: Reddit

Sometimes, what you need is not a living organism, with its own needs, that will change over time in ways you may not endorse, that interacts with the world around it. Sometimes what you really want is a man-made object. Sometimes what you want to grow in your tall, narrow, lightless, bone-dry side yard, for your privacy requirements, is a fence. And that’s what I think about landscape roses. In Mediterranean and desert climates, as long as there's enough sun, you can always fall back on planting a succulent. But not every location can grow succulents outdoors year-round. In temperate climates, landscape roses could probably be successfully replaced with a particularly attractive boulder. Or, if what you want is a smart-looking, easy-care hedge: consider a fence.

Review: I’d maybe rather plant a fence a succulent.

#10: 'Munstead Wood': the old English rose, reloaded

‘Munstead Wood’, my final acquisition, is a credit to another major modern rose breeding program, this time out of England: David Austin Roses. The main idea of the David Austin rose-breeding project seems to be combining the particular charms of traditional English old garden roses - their fragrance, their romantic, sophisticated forms - with the virtues of modern roses - continuous blooming, a wide range of highly Instagrammable colors - plus disease-tolerance that twenty-first century gardeners now expect. And judging by their singular impact on the contemporary rose market, they seem to have been very successful at that goal. The Reddit reviews are glowing, the forums are abuzz for their hottest new releases (Dannahue restock wen?), their most popular roses are often sold out, and other rose sellers have catalog filters for 'English shrub roses' that allegedly share the looks and fragrance of David Austin's best.

From the author's camera roll. 'I can't believe it's not Dave [sic] Austin!'

Their marketing is also very slick. Their website is very informative, with separate filters for various kinds of roses you might want to buy ('Best for fragrance', 'For a shady spot', 'Thornless or nearly so'), all the rose varieties have literary or historical names or else are named after charming British locations, and are all beautifully photographed in their idyllic show garden, and the prose is carefully engineered to incite lust in the winter-weary gardener. They even do periodic drops of new roses, like a sneaker company.

So last November, I allowed myself to buy one David Austin rose, 'Munstead Wood'.

Source: David Austin Roses

'Munstead Wood' is really gorgeous, I think, blooming in a deep burgundy color. The website claims the fragrance is "Old Rose, with fruity notes of blackberry, blueberry and damson".

An interesting fact about 'Munstead Wood' is that it is actually region-locked. David Austin Roses sells roses in both the US and UK (and maybe other places; sorry I am so American), but the climate of the UK has been changing, with more extreme weather events and even more rain. And you know how it is with roses and the rain. 'Munstead Wood' was no longer able to thrive, and has packed up its little rucksack and gone out to explore the world as a lone vagabond - specifically, America.

So how is it doing here? Great, actually. It may have been rained on every day for the past week, but at least it's not in England, I guess.

'Munstead Wood' has no fungal disease. It looks like it's never even heard of fungal disease. I'm pretty impressed! I can't actually tell you whether the roses are good, but this is a pretty good plant, which is a good start.

Review: I'm holding myself back from buying more David Austin roses right now. God help me, I have two more open full- to part-sun spots in my garden right now.

David Austin, "Lady of Shalott". Call me the Lady of Shalott the way I'm languishing in my tower, gazing only at the mere reflections of the real world (stuck inside, looking at my phone, because of the rain) and am about to throw myself in the river with longing (to be out in the garden)

[covenha]

Synopsis: perv!roommate!yeosang can't stop thinking ungodly things about his best friend. Pairings: Perv!bff!yeosang x fem reader Genre: smut, mdni Warnings: smut (duh), yeosang in grey sweatpants bc that should be a warning WC: 746 a/n: this is filth that has been backlogged into my brain the minute that yeosang posted *that* black and white photo on ig so you know what's up. this is purely fiction so the this does not portray his character irl in any way shape or form. this is my first time writing smut so if it's poorly written or sounds like it came from those weird alpha tiktok shorts i am so sorry. its yet another self-indulgent fic so lmk how it is. as always, feedback and reblogs are always appreciated and my inbox is open for any requests!

just imagine pervy bff!Yeosang, you guys have been roommates for a few months now as the both of you just started college together and thought that living in an apartment together was better than living in some dingy university dorm room with strangers. he thought the idea was fine then, but he didn’t realize just how hard it was living with someone he had a massive crush on. 

you guys have always been comfortable with each other. you guys wore your more… questionable loungewear around each other. but you not wearing bras around him was a new thing. when you asked if it was cool to not wear bras around the apartment since they were uncomfortable to wear all day, yeosang agreed immediately stating that he didn’t want you to be uncomfortable in your living space. but he couldn’t help but get turned on. 

the bustling city’s humid weather was a hellscape compared to the cooler temperatures you both were accustomed to back in your seaside town. this meant that when the sun was at its highest, the apartment you guys shared was like a microwave. and this also meant that you would wear lighter clothing. those thinner tank tops that showcased your chest so well, those crop tops that showed off your midriff, and those fucking pajama shorts that did nothing to cover your legs. sometimes he manages to get a glimpse of your cotton panties peeking through. All of these things adding up would damn near drive yeosang to insanity. 

the sight of you wearing clothes that left nearly nothing to the imagination sent blood rushing straight to his dick. he’s lost count of how many times he’s had to rub one out quickly in his room to the thought of you. it was starting to get out of hand if he was being honest, he might start shooting blanks and get an electrolyte imbalance.

and the dreams were the worst part. he really thought that phase was over. the awkward wet dreams he’d have at night with some unknown female living out his sexual fantasies. but he was wrong. and they’ve come back stronger and more vivid than ever. and what’s worse is, you are always the star of these dreams. 

on some nights he’d have you face down, ass up, your hands held behind your back as he fucked you to oblivion on your bed with your plushies facing the wall. on other nights you’re riding his dick whining about how deep he is inside you that you can feel him in your stomach. and other times he has you splayed on the kitchen counter as he eats you out for so long you start shaking violently and squirting on his pretty face. 

on this particular night he has you on his bed, your neck marred with red splotches of his love bites. you whine about it being too much, and i mean who could blame you? he had been going at it for 3 rounds already and he didn’t show any signs of stopping. with your thighs on his shoulders, he was practically folding you in half and the aches of his passionate love making were starting to seep into your poor body. but yeosang persisted, mumbling something about how he was almost there. and it truly felt like he was. 

your spongy spot had been abused beyond belief and your whines of his name were the only things coming out of your mouth at this point.

“Sangi….”

“Sangi….”

“Yeosang!” 

and he comes so hard in one of the most intense orgasms he’s ever had in his life. 

“Dude, get up!” 

he’s groggy as he hears your voice. he’s laying on his front, face plopped down on his pillow. he groans as he wakes up from your shaking. 

“We’re gonna be late for the bus, Sang. You have like 20 minutes to get ready.” you shake him some more to snap him out of his sleepy state. 

he just hums in a sound of agreement before he breathes a sigh of relief as you walk out of his room and close the door. he can feel the spurts of come in his sweatpants sticking uncomfortably around his now soft dick. his grey sweatpants were stained a dark grey in the groin area. he came so much that he felt it dripping down his leg when he stood up. man, how was he supposed to survive 4 more years of this torture? 

[max1461]

My brain is completely and wholly smashed to bits by an unknown problem. I can't really "think". I am very good semantic recall and I the ability to remember new semantic information but very little ability to like, compute, visualize, do anything like that. I can't work right now but when I get better I need to get a job and on the basis of my background that job will almost certainly involve some amount of coding and unfortunately I am not the world's greatest coder. If my brain was working I could practice and improve but it isn't so that's been a no-go. But I do think I could learn git I think I need to know how to use git and github, I've asked about this on here before but then I bookmarked the answers for later and well now's (a) later and I can't understand them.

So.

Is there a thing online that assume you're a smart guy with a basic knowledge of you know what code is what fucking directories are and shit, doesn't assume you were frozen in ice in 1950 and will have your mind blow at the concept of a file, but also kinda tbh just spoon feeds you the commands you need to do different shit? Uh. I can't THINK. Have I explained that on here? I'm like operating fully on the retrieval part of my brain. I can still make good posts because I thought about a lot of stuff before so there's a massive backlog of thoughts.

[averycutesalamander]

i have extremely neutral opinions about SMAUs (social media AUs) but i just thought about what Boothill's role would be in one and im kind of losing my mind about it.

his account handle is @.silvergunshura and he literally only posts clumsy nature photos and occasional pics of his gun. a handful of videos that are just the sound of the wilds. never puts any captions or tags on his posts. extremely long unacknowledged absences with no schedule. double-digit amount of followers at an absolute maximum. absolutely no interaction with his audience. or anyone else on the platform actually. quite frankly he doesn't pay any attention to his following in the slightest. bro simply cannot be bothered. for all he cares he is sending these photos to the void and there are no other users on the platform.

and then he posts one (1) video of him at the shooting range nailing bullseyes left and right like it's nothing. barely half of his body is in frame and most of his face is covered by his hair. someone with a decent following shares it and his entire fucking profile EXPLODES because people will NOT stop talking about how hot he is and it kinda snowballs from there. people go through his entire backlog only to find ZERO other posts with his face or body in them. the best they get is little snippets of his arms. people are frothing at the fucking mouth trying to figure out who he is and nobody knows because he literally hasn't said a single word in his entire posting history. people make theory posts, which obviously gets more people invested in this new mystery. his comments are filled with people speculating about who he is and what the fuck he's doing. someone posts a massive spreadsheet detailing all of the identifiable locations in his posts, and they're literally all over the galaxy. immediately afterwards they're cancelled for some vague allegations about them being a shady intelligentsia guild member guilty of multiple human rights violations and everybody completely forgets about the spreadsheet.

Boothill posts a single blurry photo of his hand feeding a chipmunk and people lose their goddamn minds. he follows this up an hour later with a photo of the same chipmunk sitting on his shoulder that is somehow even blurrier than the last and it briefly trends on the front page. a week later he uploads a video of him playing a harmonica by a campfire, once again barely in frame, lit only by the flickering fire. people brighten the video in a desperate attempt to get a better look at his face, but there's nothing identifiable. someone posts a slightly unhinged video examining the tiniest pixels in every screencap of him that they can find, claiming that he's definitely a halovian because of some extremely blurry details, and you technically can't deny it as a possibility because there are no clear shots of where his halo or wings would be. naturally this severely divides fans, and several other theories about his species pop up over the course of a few days. many people are called morons from all sides.

the REAL drama comes when he posts a picture where he's holding what looks suspiciously like an extremely precious meteorite-formed gem that was stolen during a private IPC auction two weeks ago. this post is also notable because it's the first time he's used a caption and it's literally just "lol". naturally people quickly connects the dots and realize that he's BOOTHILL, that crazy motherfucker with the vendetta against the IPC, and why the fuck is he posting nature photos and videos of him feeding birds and shit. silvergunshura fans are instantly divided by discourse about whether or not it's ethical to be a fan. "silvergun fans dni" and "silvergun antis dni" become staples in the bios of people invested in the drama. a bunch of fans start using his substitute swears, and whether or not this is ironic is extremely debatable. the business of cyborg modifications has a moderate boom. anti-IPC sentiments have a notable increase, but now the people doing serious exposés and earnest discussion about the humanitarian crimes of the IPC that are concealed from the public are constantly called simps. there's a brief stint with a handful of Boothill copycat crimes that are all solved within the week.

people unsuccessfully try to hunt down any other potential socials to no avail, but this does spawn a massive wave of fake accounts on a million different platforms, which obviously successfully baits a ton of people. the drama gets even spicier when the moderators shut down his account. one of the mods gets doxxed by an outraged fan. even more fake accounts pop up. Boothill comes back less than a week later as @.silvercowboy244 like nothing happened. his returning post is a crooked picture of a sorta weird looking tree, and he's pointing toward the top left of the frame. the caption is just "bird?" and nobody can figure out what the FUCK that's supposed to mean, because there's no bird visible in the picture, nor is there a bird nest in the tree. conspiracy theories and decoders are immediately chomping at the bit trying to figure out if it has some kind of secret meaning.

tons of people try to use his posts to pinpoint his location for clout or the bounty money or to find him in person and beg him to let them give him head, but he never posts them exactly when they're taken, and nobody can figure out what the fuck logic he's using to pick his next destination. there's an IPC investigation. his accounts keep getting banned but he keeps coming back like a cockroach. dedicated fan archives are made to preserve all of his shitty photos. he never acknowledges any of the drama.

if you're fortunate enough to know Boothill personally and you ask him about all of that weird shit with his socials, he just shrugs and says, "yep, i keep gettin' locked out. can't remember passwords for shirt." if you ask him what he thinks of all the drama surrounding his online presence, he gives you the most bewildered expression you've ever seen on his face. "what the fork are you yappin' about?? what do you mean i got "band" ?? disk horse??? docksing???? i think you've got a few screws loose buddy" and he promptly forgets about the entire ordeal and goes back to posting blurry nature pictures like literally nothing happened.

edit: here's part two-ish lol

[sapnapstummy]

short little dsmp thought from my drafts (tw for referenced torture)

c!sam left the server at some point early on. he'd seen alyssa and callahan leave and after continuing to get his stuff stolen and dragged into drama, he leaves too. but he leaves behind his latest robot, one nearly indistinguishable from himself. he makes sure it's moral and always does what's right. and it reports back to him every week.

the server operates in the back of his mind now, something about another war, betrayals and secret alliances. he doesn't pay much attention, working on his own side projects. then the robot asks him permission for something... "should i let harm come to the monster"

it's not super coherent, and upon further notice the backlog of reports is looking sparse. sam figures it needs some maintenance and is malfunctioning. he assumes the question was about mobs and the morality of killing them. so he sends back a "protect the people around you. if that means harm to monsters, then that's okay." the robot goes quiet after that, no real reports. just: "all is right." every so often.

the robot has slipped his mind when he runs into quackity on the mcc server months later. he's greeted with an overly familiar smile that sets off alarm bells.

"didn't expect you to be taking a day off, warden." quackitys eye twitches.

sam shrugs, "can only work on the same project for so long before it gets boring."

quackity bristles, "i'm making more progress than you did. i have dream begging and pleading with me, all you did was let him sit around. when i get the revive book it'll be off my work."

sam has no idea what any of that means. so he asks about the only thing he does recognize. "how is dream?"

quackity scoffs, "stubborn and annoying as ever." normally sam would laugh and agree, but the way quackity says it sets his mind on edge. "i'm sure you saw him how i left him today. i wonder how long it took him to finally die and respawn."

"what did you do?" sam asks, trying to push down the horrifying sense that quackity isn't playing around.

"hacked through his leg with an old pair of shears. quackity grins, snapping his suspenders with a satisfied look in his eyes.

sam holds back bike, quickly he pulls up the logs. the robot doesn't mention anything about quackity or dream. the last thing he got was the odd question. the growing dread burst into full terror. "i have to go." he tells quackity, running off to the server portal without hearing his goodbye.

the first thing he notices when he gets back on the server is that the air stinks. it's stagnant and thick with the smell of gunpowder. urgently he pulls up the robots tracker, rushing toward it quickly. he's so focused on his compass, he doesn't notice the building until he's nearly on top of it.

a massive rectangular box of obsidian blocks the horizon. the tracker says the robot's inside and he has to push down dread as he enters. his robot greets him immediately, "the prisoner is not taking visitors at the moment."

"what have you been doing?" sam asks, walking around the desk.

"i've been doing what is right and necessary." the robot answers methodically.

sam's fists clench at his side, "override any commands you have and take me to the prisoner."

the robot hesitates for a moment, but follows his orders obediently. it leads him through tight twisting tunnels deeper and deeper into the obsidian. sam waits with baited breath as the wall of lava drops slowly. the sight that meets him has him doubling over spitting up bile.

red-brown covers the walls and floor. and the air is so thick and hot and rot-scented he can hardly catch his breath. dream is almost unrecognizable, a bony bleeding body trembling in the corner. his mask is missing and his golden curls lay in thick dark mats over his face.

"dream," he whispers horrified.

a raspy whisper barely makes it to his ears, "please sam. please don't let him come back, i'll do anything. please."

sam reaches for him, recoiling as dream flinches away. "i'm getting you out of here."

dream shakes his head weakly. his body weights almost nothing as sam pulls him into his arms. dreams breathing goes ragged and panicked, clawing at sam's chest. "i've got you," sam promises, "we're getting away from here."

"i'll never give you the book," dream sneers.

sam shakes his head and holds dream closer.

[candyswirls]

Is it Heresy to Fall in Love With a Warp Entity?

Finally! I posted a teaser a while back, and I've just been yapping about this story in the Primarch Kids discord (despite it not being primarch kids), and I now have the first chapter ready! I'm excited to present to you these two and their romance.

Is it Heresy to fall in love with a warp entity?

Am I really to be censured and struck out from my chapter as penance? What traitorous action have I done to merit this?

I have taken no steps towards chaos, and every decision was made in favor of my legion and the Emperor. I have merely done my duty and followed through the natural direction my hearts have taken me.

Is it because of the warp entity? The nature of how we met? Or is this type of feeling not granted to one of His angels?

Just as I have been loyal, she has born no ill will to anyone but the ruinous powers themselves.

Is it heresy to fall in love with a warp entity? One who showed me great kindness and understanding. Who fought alongside me and my battle-brothers? Who, when possessing them, not of her own volition, took the utmost care of them?

Is it heresy to fall in love with a warp entity?

Is it Heresy to love the unlovable?

***

He refused to look. Perhaps he needed a higher dose. Yes, the stress of the recent war was just getting to him. Just like it was his brother... and those other brothers.

"Just because you ignore me doesn't mean it's not happening," his brother's voice piped up.

But it wasn't his brother. It was his voice. But not in his regular tone or manner of speaking. He even was sitting like a degenerate. This... this - no. Do not name or acknowledge it. This isn't happening.

He flipped through his backlog of doses and times he took his medication. Meetings with his chaplain and captain. With other apothecaries. The magos shrinks. It spanned the last forty years. Other records that had been archived went back to when he was first diagnosed.

He frowned. He hadn't missed a single day, a single dose, or a single meeting. Not once or for any reason. A perfect and immaculate record.

He rubbed his face, keeping his breathing level.

He turned, and his brother was right next to him. He nearly slammed him to the table, but they caught his hand with-with... with in-astartes speed.

"Let's relax and not be so jumpy," he said. "You're obviously on edge."

"Hush!" He hissed. "If the chaplain finds out- urgh! Why am I even entertaining this?! No, this isn't happening. It's not."

It went silent for a moment.

"I'm still here," they said in a whisper.

"Emperor, give me strength," he muttered.

"Who?"

He looked at his battlebrother, bewildered.

"Please tell me you're joking," he demanded. "The Emperor? Master of All Mankind. The God-Emperor."

"Oh, you mean him," scoffed his brother. "Big guy. Massive psykic aura. Likes gold. Comically bad at reading Tarot of all things."

He stared, "What madness are you speaking of?"

"What madness are you speaking of?" They demanded, placing his hands upon his hips.

"You!" He gritted as he pointed a finger at him. "You are... agh!"

"I'm what? A dude? I can see that."

Hallo muttered, "This makes no sense. Absolutely no sense."

His brother threw up his arms, "I agree. Let's sit down and talk about it so we can come to a conclusion."

Hallo looked into their eyes. It was slight, but he could see some type of light hiding behind the pupils.

"I am Apothecary Hallo Iche," he said. "I want to protect my brothers, but I demand to know why a warp daemon has been and is able to possess them."

"Entity," the corrected.

Hallo wrinkled his nose, "Excuse me?"

"Warp entity," they clarified. "I am no daemon."

***

He walked down the hallway to the apothecarium, and fellow marines refused to step out of the way. Others did it solely out of finding him annoying and unbearable.

His mentor had not dealt with such disrespect. He was held in high reguard. But even as the old marines apprentice, that had not rubbed off on himself.

He had yet to learn of his nickname. The Inquisition's Lackey Boy. He trusted them completely. Much to the chagrin of his fellow astartes.

He cared not for his brothers' opinion of him, though. At least that is the lie he told himself.

He was a proud Son of Dorn. His father had locked away his librarians after Nikea despite his grief. He would show the same discipline.

He had gained a name for himself even before arriving with the fifth company. He wished it was a name associated with honor and positivity. Not one scorned by the chapter master himself.

Not the name of a failed apprentice chaplain. He'd get his mentor to speak to him again.

He had received a cold greeting upon arrival and immediately began attending to his duties. Only a few months after arriving and his battle-brothers hated him. Believing him not to understand the meaning of loyalty or the joy of relying upon the brotherhood of the chapter.

Or what he saw.

The life of a chaplain was a lonely one. He'd wear it gladly for his Father and the Emperor, beloved by all. He just needed to prove he could still be one. It had been his dream. For throne sakes, his own mother had given him the middle name of Chaplain in anticipation!

The apothecarium slid open, and he marched in towards the astartes on the table.

Apothecary Vierro intercepted him before he could get to the other.

"Brother Hallo Iche," He greeted. "What brings you here?"

He explained, "Yonathan Bairen, one of the scouts recently promoted to battle-brother. He was down on Redma battling the orks and fell into a Suscoma due to injuries near the old chaos temple they commandeered. He awoke yesterday and seemed perfectly fine. But as of this morning, he woke with no memory, no knowledge of the imperium or astartes. You are unsure of this due to his wounds or if it has anything to do with the temple."

The other apothecary, Balto Fage, muttered, "Who in the warp told you - no need to worry Iche. A lot of details you have are wrong, but we are handling it. Thank you for your concern. You may go, Brother Iche."

Vierro glanced back for a moment and then gave a smile to Hallo, "What can I help you with?"

Iche stood there a moment before sighing and handing forth the prescription note.

Vierro took it and raised a brow.

"They're placing you on them now," he mumbled, already counting out the amounts on his hand. "You should sleep well with these. Then, ones for itching... sores around carapce ports... yes... yes..."

Iche did not reply and just folded his arms across his armor, trying to ignore the itching and feeling of something crawling across his skin. As Vierro went to fill the prescription, Iche glanced at the sick battle-brother. He was sitting up and staring at the wall.

Balto went to a supply room.

It grew eerily silent, and Yonathon slowly turned unblinking eyes upon the apprentice chaplain. His shadow upon the wall grew long and writhed outwards.

Yonathon's irises flashed a yellow glow, and he collapsed back onto the table, the shadow disappearing.

"Apothecary!" Iche called as he drew his bolter.

Balto rushed in, "What happened? What are you doing?!"

"Possession!" He hissed. "I saw it! Strap him down!"

Yonathon didn't move, but cackling came from him.

Vierro dashed back in and moved towards Iche, "Hallo Iche, calm yourself! Put the bolter down and tell me what you saw."

"Silence daemon!" Iche snapped. Just stop, please stop the laughing! He'd had enough of it in his dreams!

Yonathon's eyes went wide, "Daemon? No, Iche. I am no daemon. I am a loyal battle brother! I've only fought front lines in battle! I would never betray the emperor or imperium! Apothecary, help me!"

"Hallo Chaplain Iche," Vierro spoke again. "Perhaps we can follow the ways of the codex and report this to a chaplain as we sh -"

He whipped the bolter to Vierro, "I am a chaplain! You- you... you..."

That was not Apothecary Vierro. It was his mentor and master, Kagrus. Blood dripped down his eyeless face, and half of his skull was exposed.

"Hallo?" He inquired. "Why didn't you save me? Why did you betray me? You lost your faith in the God emperor. Heretic. You have become a heretic."

Hallo's hands shook, "I'm not a heretic. I'm not a heretic. I am not a heretic!"

"Hallo!"

His bolter went off. Yonathon yelped as a bullet grazed his thigh. Kagrus had leaped forward in an attempt to get the bolter away.

He dashed out of the apothecarium, breath hitching in his throat as he raced to the elevators. Blood was seeping up from the floor.

There was foul play going on here. The dark forces wished to enter in? They would be met by him and the emperor's light.

As he entered the lift, another marine staggered out from their quarters. Sergeant Hoskins. He had just gone through the rubicon primaris not even a week ago and was still in his robes. He blinked and looked around. They caught sight of the him and lit up. The lift began to move, but the marine easily leaped in.

He looked shocked at himself.

"I've never been able to do that before!" He excalimed. "That was so cool! This body is amazing!"

His tattoos moved across his skin, hopping back and forth between scars.

Iche froze, "Yes... the benefits of the rubicon primaris surgery."

Hoskins was looking at his arms, "The Rubicon is named after a famous River on Terra."

Iche slowly reached for his bolter.

"You read this in the archive, imposter?" He asked cautiously.

"Hmm?" The other marine questioned as he looked up. "Why are you reaching near your hip?"

Iche drew the bolter, pointing it at the Sergeant's chest. Ink like tears spilled from his eyes, nose, and mouth.

"Withdraw from the Sergeant immediately!" He ordered. The next floor would be coming up soon.

The Sergeant put up his arms.

"Let's just all calm down and take -"

He bashed the bolter over their head, and they collapsed on the ground.

"Chaplain!" Barked a lieutenant.

They had arrived at the next floor, the brothers there only seeing Hoskins back and Iche knocking him out.

"He's possessed!" He yelled. "By a daemon! restrain him! We are infiltrated! I must get to the reclusiam!"

He sprinted past, not allowing anyone to stop him. His name was called, but it began echoing, following him long after it should have stopped.

He rounded the corner to the reclusiam and froze. Black webbing and pustules covered the walls, ceiling, and floor. A writhing mass was within the Reclusiam.

He hid in an alcove and tried to catch his breath. Why was this happening? Was this happening? No! He'd only dealt with such things before becoming an Astartes! Hadn't he been suppressing his psykic powers enough?

He took in a deep breath. He had to warn everyone.

He was alone in the hallway when another battle brother came out. He didn't know his name. Just saw him and his eerie demeanor. This marine had such a sickening grin plastered on their face.

"Let's head to the Reclusiam, Hallo," he said in a distended voice.

Hallo whipped out his bolter again, but the marine smacked it out of his hand. It flew over the railing and down far below. It would eventually reach the bottom and shatter. It was so far down he wouldn't be able to hear it.

The marine spoke again, mouth unmoving. "Let's go to the Reclusiam. I don't want to hurt you."

He tried to punch the primaris, but they caught his arms and held them down to his sides. Their grip was beyond what it should be. Strength far exceeding his own.

He kicked and used every bit of combat doctrine he knew. But he was still a novice and struggled to break free.

Iche yelled. "Daemon! Help!"

He heard the voices grow as black bugs crawled out of the other marines armor and into Hallo's.

He shrieked and knocked his head back into the possessed marine.

He managed to break free, dart away, but he misjudged the force behind his movement. He broke through the guard railing. He fell down towards his death, breaking any and all cherubim cages he hit on his way down.

He was going to die while daemons were rampant through the ship. He had failed yet again.

***

He came to, staring up at the light from the void of each level. For a moment, he had thought it to be the light of the afterlife.

Pain echoed in his body. He knew many bones were broken and could taste blood.

He could hear the hum of a dreadnought engine approach. One leaned over him and spoke.

"You are incredibly lucky," He said.

Iche sighed, "Thank you, revered brother."

Iche side eyed the dreadnought.

The silence was defeaning. A shadowy figure broke open from the dreadnought and began crawling towards him.

Iche flung himself to the side and seethed at the pain.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Hallo," the creature assured.

"GET AWAY FROM ME!!" He screamed.

The ground was suddenly gone, and he fell again.

***

He gasped awake, hearing voices, seeing mortals climbing towards him, and the image of the dreadnought looking down the hole at him. They were far away. A woman, chained in silver and glowing, was floating down towards him, grabbing him by the chest and shoving him backward. He melted into the metal till there was nothing left.

He lost consciousness.

***

Awakening in the apothecarium felt shameful in a way. Especially as Captain Antaros stood at his bedside, looking disappointed.

"Sir," he croaked, trying to sit up, but realizing he was strapped down.

The captain sighed. "You have caused massive panic throughout the ranks. Raving about daemons, attacking a wounded brother, striking down a sergeant, falling several floors, then sending yourself down even more.

"I didn't!" He insisted. "There were daemons -"

"Tyren Dantus and several mechanicus saw it after you tried punching a brother who had just exited his room," the captain said.. "There are witnesses. Then our dear ancient one managed to wake up to try and save you, and you crawled away from him screaming and failing to notice an open maintenance hatch. It took hours to get you out of there, and most of the work was done by servitors and serfs. "

"Daemons are haunting the ship and possessing each person you speak of!" Iche burst. "It's haunting me! Constantly hounding and obsessing over me! It followed me and now appears in my dreams! Captain, this is a seriously terrible and horrible matter! Bugs came out of the Sergeant, and I can still feel them crawling on me! I could feel them before! They're in my carapace ports!"

Captain Anteros just sighed and stood.

He turned to Apothecary Balto, "Send a message to the home base apothecaries. Hallo Chaplain Iche will need intense psychiatric care."

Iche gaped, "My lord?"

"You were sent here because of what happened with your mentor and former squad. You've endangered countless marines, refused to listen to orders, are extremely paranoid, and now your hallucinations are so severe you're seeing daemons and attacking your own brothers? This company is full of loyal sons of dorn who despise chaos. You are obviously not well from Minon. You experience such intense horrors and PTSD that you fully believe that all the brothers here hate you."

"It is my duty as chaplain -"

"You're not the chaplain!" Anteros retorted. "You're an apprentice! Were an apprentice. You still won't acknowledge the fact that your mentor, Kagrus, died in front of you! You are not fit to be an astartes. Not mentally, at least not right now."

Iche could feel his hearts break.

"No," He whispered. "Please."

"You are being sent away to receive help," the captain informed him. "It pains me to see you like this. Jist hbainh freshly graduated from being a scout. You can't even see the state you're in. Your weapons and armor have been confiscated. You are not allowed to pick up any weapons and, in turn, are not allowed in the training cages. Apothecary Vierro will be over seeing you, and you will require an escort anytime you exit your room."

Tears streamed down his cheeks at hearing this.

"Your life has worth, Hallo," Antaros said. "It has been one too many times that you've tried to end it as of late. You can't even remember them. I hope you become well enough to return to the ranks, but if it ends up that you are forced to retire and work with the neophytes, then so be it."

"My duty is to the emperor," Iche choked. "It doesn't end till I perish in battle!"

"Not when you endanger the lives of your brothers," the captain said coldly. "Not when your mind is ill and you can not make proper choices. If this continues, you will die but not in the emperor's way. The decision has been made. Pick-up will be here within the week."

"Please!" He begged through sobs. "Captain, please!"

He pulled against the restraints to no avail. He thrashed for a while but eventually gave up.

Once he calmed down, Vierro came over. He still had his soft smile.

"Vierro," he cried. "I'm not a heretic."

"No one said you were," Vierro assured him.

Iche shook his head and laid back, "I... what am I to do?"

"Take one day at a time," he said as he shined a light in Hallo's eyes. "You've given us all a massive scare."

Hallo squirmed. He could feel the bugs crawling, but... they weren't there??

"What is happening? He sniffed. "Am I cursed?"

"I sent for your medical file for both during and before the astartes process," Vierro stated. "I suspect you are experiencing psychosis and are in the middle of its peak. Back as a boy, my father developed it. The medicines take time, but he never had an episode again."

The apprentice went quiet.

"You've been told this before, haven't you," Vierro deduced.

Hallo nodded, "It never was confirmed... but doctors had suspicions. I never had it evaluated... it ran in my family."

Vierro nodded as he took blood samples, "It's extremely common for Astartes to develop it due to war and warp travel. Usually easily treatable and caught quickly. Sounds like yours developed beforehand and has grown worse. You require better amenities and help than what we have here."

The apothecary dabbed away tears from Hallo's face.

"I never should have become a chaplain," he mumbled.

"You could become a librarian," Vierro offered. "You are quietly skilled with your psykic might."

Hallo just shook his head. He'd failed his mother.

***

He stared at this... warp entity...

"You can call me Circa," they smiled.

Master Post - Next

[hivemuthur]

The speed at which u write is so inspiring hive how do you do this

Hi babes! Thank you for the ask <3

Uh, I low-key feared this question :') Okay, so um, somewhere around mid-December my family (me, my bf and our bff - we all live together) came to a hard decision that it's time to say goodbyes to our kitty Zozo (she was 18, sick and was clearly at her 9th life). We basically lost a battle to cancer. She passed away on Jan 3rd. She was with me for 15 years (I am all good now).

And to ease that blow I started writing fiction. I'm not new-new to writing, I've been writing my entire life, but mostly music/film reviews, academic papers for my uni and booklets/supplements for RPG games, so I'm familiar with coming up with plot points and making characters seem real. The last fiction I wrote before this was when I was 15 I think.

When I started posting here I had a massive backlog of works I've managed to produce in a span of a month. And it was possible because I was off work and just completely drowning in grief. Being here allowed me to connect with like-minded people and other writers that I talk to daily, so it just fuels that idea monster in my head.

And the real-real answer is I basically just write, read and have music in the background. Since Dec 18th there has not been a day I wasn't writing. You can take a wild guess that I don't sleep very much and don't socialize very much in real world and you would be right. I meet my closest friends occasionally and spend time with my bf, other than that I work remotely and do as much as I can remotely (like, I even order groceries). I still have a backlog of works I haven't published yet.

As for ideas, eh, they come and go. I thought that if I knock the first thing out of me nothing else will come, but the more I write, the more things come to plague my head. I find that I write best when I'm sleep-deprived and things kind of get shaped from scraps. Like, I have an imaginary conversation in my head, write it down in the middle of the night and then write a whole thing around it. I try to make my works distinct and not seem like they drop from some soulless conveyor belt. I sometimes write with other people and that also helps to get a fresh perspective.

I get very obsessive when I like something. I have massive binge-sessions in gaming, lore digging and studying things that interest me on my account. I also have two very supportive people with me that hype me up daily in real life and some super cool people here who comment and chat to me and just make me feel seen, you know? So, I'm gonna say it here, chat to your authors and leave them comments because there is nothing better than presenting your open chest to everyone and people peeking in and being like 'That's a very nice heart you have in here boo.'

I know this is not a super satisfying answer to anyone who struggles to write, because I kind of come off as 'well, I just write, duh,' but I just want to say that I really do see and appreciate my privilege of having time and resources to do it and I hope I use it well.

That got very long, sorry :v

[alphynix]

Spectember 2023 #01: Kiwi Alvarezsaur

It's #Spectember time again!

I'm still trying to work through that big pile of speculative evolution concepts from a few years ago, so I'm hoping to make this month sort of a "lightning round" to finally clear out the backlog.

(I'm not going to set a definite posting schedule this year because things are pretty chaotic right now. But I'll try to fit in as many as I can!)

So let's start off with a concept from an anonymous submitter, who requested a "kiwi/sengi niche alverezsaur":

Khamartaia dolabella is similar in size and build to Shuvuuia, about 1m in length (3'3"), with slender legs and stumpy arms with massive thumb claws. Unlike its close relatives, however, it has small eyes and fairly poor vision, relying more on its other senses to forage around during the darkness of night.

It has an acute sense of smell, and its long narrow snout is full of highly touch-sensitive nerves, allowing it to probe around for invertebrate prey in soil, undergrowth, and cracks and crevices. Its chunky thumb claws are used to dig up burrows and to tear through bark to access deeper insect nests.

It mainly relies on its long legs to sprint away from threats, although with its poor eyesight these escapes are often rather ungainly.

[xmascritter]

Id be less offended about watcher making a subscription service if:

1. Some of the shows theyre putting behind the payeall weren't tailor made for youtube. One of the series titles they showed was survival mode, which is literally just a lets play series. You know. The genre made on and for youtube. It makes no sense to keep that behind a paywall.

2. I thought they were in a proper place in their career to do it. I just dont think watcher has a big enough fanbase to do what collegehumor/dropout did, and dropout has the advantage at this point of offering a massive backlog of content that one can work through, while currently it doesnt look like watcher's streaming service has much besides some bts from previous series and a karaoke edit for a bunch of the puppet history songs. For something that was supposedly in the works for a while, I expected them to at least have some new enticing content that would at least demonstrate what they hoped to do now that they dont need advertisers

3. If they sold physical copies of their media that i could purchase. I swear to god, shane madej, if you dont let me buy a box set of the puppet history seasons, Im just gonna make it myself

[geekeryisafoot]

I am endlessly fascinated by how different metrics of popularity do not always correlate with each other and tell different pieces of the big picture. Take, for example, Birds of Empire

Look at those subscriber and listen numbers on Castbox, then look at the number of reviews on Spotify. On tumblr, this podcast has a grand total of 13 posts in its tag. 13. You can scroll to the end of its tag in 30 seconds.

Now let's calibrate our scale by looking at those same numbers on the same platforms for other podcasts

The Magnus Archives, one of the juggernauts of audio drama, has a fraction of the subscriptions, a differences in play counts that makes sense given the number of episodes in it's feed backlog, and a RIDICULOUSly dwarfing number of reviews. I don't need to describe the scale of fandom to any soul on tumblr.

Compared with Old Gods of Appalachia, a giant name for those into podcasts but that didn't break containment to the extent that TMA did. If you ask for podcasts recs on this webbed site, this will be one of the first ones literally anyone mentions. Once upon a time (like 4 years ago) when patroen numbers were public, I also remembered them having MASSIVE numbers, even more than I'd expected at the time

Compared to The Silt Verses, which imo rounded out a triumvirate of wildly popular horror podcasts for quite a while...

Until Malevolent showed up on the scene and made it a quartet

And just to round out this scale, let's include Not Quite Dead. To me, this podcast feels mildly popular with a dedicated if relatively small fandom. Like, the tag moves consistently if not quickly

I'm just so endlessly fascinated by these different numbers compared to how active each fandom is. Like, what the hell could possibly explain Birds of Empire DWARFING these other super popular podcasts when literally no one talks about it? Has it simply not caught on on tumblr but has on other social media or social circles? Is it normies who are listening and not talking about it where I can hear/see? And why do the numbers indicate high listener counts specifically on Castbox but not the most common podcatcher that is Spotify? Who other than me is actually using Castbox?????

[centrally-unplanned]

I actually never finished my "2024 in Review" posts because some life stuff got in the way - too late for any media review stuff to be that relevant, but for myself I wanted to review my own projects from the period. I post a lot of random stuff obviously but I do have that "I try to be a real writer & more" instinct going on, and I wanted to reflect on how those all turned out. Let's see what I accomplished last year - warning for a very "me" post up ahead:

2024 Stuff I Liked Post - My Own Stuff!

FLCLick Noise Book Translation: Finished February of 2024! Obviously a ton of that work happened in 2023, definitely seems like another time, but it counts. For a project that I knew would be way too niche to ever have much reception, I was very happy with the few-but-notable people who read it and clearly used it to expand their FLCL knowledge for their own projects (seeing "my" words in a YouTube video was kinda cool!). I still resonate with my write-up above - in so many ways this was an incredibly inefficient acquisition of knowledge, I could have just summarized the book in one post for people. But by hyper-analyzing every line as needed for translation, I dove far deeper into the material than any other method would allow, and all the little facts and asides - each useless trivia in isolation - built up into enough force to break through the wall and see the work in a whole new way. FLCL is forever imprinted on me; not just as a show, but as a process of understanding.

My reflection here is also somber though in that I do feel like I dropped the ball halfway. All projects have this feeling, to be clear - the idea that it could be "more", a stepping stone to something greater, is a siren call that your own abilities and available time can never really heed. Still, for FLCL I definitely had the idea of something bigger - a sort of complete "documentary archive" for the work. I had all these other sources that I half-collected over time; I posted the translation of the FLCL Proposal & Early Drafts, I posted a scan of the GAINAX Interviews Tsurumaki Section, and ofc scattered throughout my blog is a dozen other FLCL stuff. But I never actually read & wrote a summary of that latter interview, and I posted about importing this other 2010's interview but I never scanned it or read it! I just ran out of steam, as people do. Now I am far enough removed from it that pivoting back to it involves digging up emotional energy that has settled down. There are a bunch of random things I have found and imported that I never got to really discuss, so clearing that backlog is on my agenda this year and that will include some of the above. But the bigger project...I will have to think on that.

Fortunately the book stands alone, and I can take pride in that as a true-blue archival work of anime history. Which, you know, is pretty sad to take pride in - but whatever, welcome to Tumblr.

Welcome to The Bronze: This one was just a lot of fun to write. You can't plan kismet like this; sometimes you just stumble upon a documentary by a bunch of buffy nerds waging the culture war of its time and setting you up to discover a really damn interesting chapter of the history of the early internet! I liked this work because it stretched me a bit - I hadn't blended that "documentary history of the internet" angle with a media review quite so aggressively as this, and the concept fits my whole vibe really well. I think I did a good job crystalizing the fights & obsessions of an era now lost, which is one of things I like doing the most in my "work".

And I hadn't really tackled something this deeply in the western fandom space! I will ofc still do anime stuff but I do want to broaden myself a bit more - you gotta find the spark but they are out there for sure. And not gonna lie, not having a massive language barrier made things a ton easier lol. One of my top goals for 2025 is building on this a bit and making sure I tackle projects in new spaces beyond my niches.

On reviewing it I think I could have been nicer to the documentary? I am a quipping asshole after all, I like that stylistically. But I do think how much I like these people comes through, so I don't think it is a huge problem.

The director of this movie lives in the DC area by the way. I have, many times over the past months, thought about emailing her and asking if she would do an interview. Or just shoot the shit over coffee about something from 20 years I am sure she has no interest in remembering lol. Maybe I will run into her someday...

The Dai Nippon Controversy: This is the "weeb" version of The Bronze post, a shoulders-deep wade through a pool of completely arcane fandom drama lost to time, that just so happened to circle some immensely important people in the history of anime "before they were cool". I love this essay - it was pure luck to stumble on the source material, the people of the era positively vibrate with the sense that what they are doing is ~Important~ in a way you can never really muster today, and I was able to connect that to my wider themes of shifts in the otaku subculture. It both stands alone and is data from that mythical "history of otakudom" I am always building in my mind.

It was also just a real stretch to research, combining going through Yahoo auction listings for preview photos of relevant articles and combining them with archived Dutch Sci Fi magazines, and through that source diversity I got a better look at this time than I think I could have otherwise. Sometimes it all comes together!

California Crisis: A small one to wrap this up, I liked this piece because at this point I really don't do "straight" media analysis any more? It doesn't really excite me, not the way some of my older posts do. But I can still enjoy it with the right framing, and the way I blended archival work, the "narrative" around the piece in western culture, and a true-blue "what are the themes of this work" explanation made me like doing it again. Like so many of my essays, I liked California Crisis beforehand as a silly little OVA, but now I love it because I spent the time with it. It is nice to go back to those days sometimes. This was an "attack of opportunity" essay for sure, you can't force it, but when it works it works.

---

Anyway, those are my good works - a bunch of this is repetitional from previous posts, but that is the point of a year-end wrap-up! Though there is something I wanted to note - what isn't on the list. Namely, any of my writings on politics, economics, or history. In certain sense this isn't fair - The Swing Won't Save You is a perfectly good essay for example, I think it came out well. But it was "easy" to write, I did not put my nose to the grindstone to make it, or grow in the telling. I remember it because it has a snazzy title if we are being honest! And so on for many other posts that did have effort put into them. Maybe I am missing some I should single out, I didn't do an every-post dive into my archive (I should do that honestly!) or anything.

But I think I just failed to prioritize real-deal essays in the space this year and that was a mistake. Inspiration, the distraction of the election, comparative advantage (I am a middling political commentator, but "within the space" I think I add some real value on the anime & media history stuff), all that contributed to that failure. And no harm in that, I post for fun and none of this matters. I still want to "do better" this year though - one of my big goals is to really tackle some deeper political-historical works. I have some ideas in that space, so it is time to put this into practice.

[thetomorrowshow]

just when i was getting to know you

TRUST AU

yeah yeah i'm posting a lot of trust au. i have a backlog ok

~

Joel wouldn’t say he was the closest person to Scott. Sure, they know each other. They’re friends. They've been in House Blossom councils together for the past ten years, and Scott's been joining in on family night, and the elf's engaged to his brother-in-law and best friend, so they have to at least be acquaintances. They happen to be friends.

Friends or no, they certainly aren’t best pals.

To suddenly be possibly the closest person to Scott at the time of his death is more than a little pressure.

Well, Katherine's there, too, but she seems even more shellshocked than Joel.

It's—well, the whole thing is . . . incredibly violent. Xornoth throws Scott around with tentacles, kicks him into the ground, breaks his wing. . . .

Katherine covers her eyes. Joel watches, flinching at every knock of Scott's head against the stony ground.

When Xornoth drags Scott up for the final time, Joel gets one last look at him—dusty, hair tangled, scraped and bleeding and eyes barely open, limbs dangling helplessly—and then he's thrown off the edge of the cliff.

Joel doesn't run with everyone else to peer over the side.

Joel flicks open his elytra and takes off into the sky, heading the opposite direction.

Xornoth watches him.

Joel doesn't know why, but Xornoth lets him go.

And that's terrifying, just a little bit.

Xornoth doesn't think the massive armies of Mezelea are enough of a threat to kill him here and now, like he did Scott.

Scott's dead.

Goodness, Scott's dead.

Rivendell has always been a force to be reckoned with. Ancient and up in those frozen mountains, Joel hadn't even considered that such a country could fall so early in a war that hadn't yet reached its borders.

The Codlands had fallen in one bloody day.

Now, in a reflection of its deceased lover, Rivendell has too.

Joel soars across the ocean, wondering just how long it will be until Rivendell is forced into servitude. Mere days, like the Codlands? Or maybe more gradually, a months-long process designed to make the elves feel in-control of their descent.

How many are left to fight the evil? Him, Lizzie. Shubble's certainly been conquered as well, seeing as Grimlands army would have marched through the Undergrowth to reach Rivendell. Katherine has thus far declared neutrality, as has Pearl. Pix hasn't been heard from since the war began. And Gem—

Gem's down, too. Possibly dead. And her students aren't really built for war, try as they might.

So it's just him and Lizzie.

Goodness. And they're supposed to win this fight, let alone survive?

It isn't exactly black and white, of course. There are likely fugitives leaving Rivendell and the Overgrown as he flies, and he has a small army of Rivendell soldiers in his forces that Scott sent over several weeks ago, and he and Lizzie have already been strengthened the slightest bit by dissenters from the enemy armies. They aren't as alone in this as he feels.

Still. The loss of Rivendell is a terrifying, war-changing blow. Rivendell gone, Scott dead—

Joel feels like nobody ought to be able to blame him for feeling a bit hopeless.

He needs to get back to Mezelea, reorganize his armies, inform his support from Rivendell that they cannot return home, contact Shubble and see what they can do to help. He needs to do all sorts of kingly matters that really shouldn’t wait.

But he stops at the palace rising out of the depths of the ocean, landing on one of the towers and hitting the ground running, elytra flapping in the wind behind him.

He sprints through the doors, down the hall, takes a left, Lizzie's probably in some sort of important meeting so he takes another left toward her war room—

There's a soldier standing guard outside of the room, and when Joel approaches, he shuffles to block his entrance.

"Her majesty is not to be disturbed," the guard says, blocking Joel from entering. "She is in a meeting with—"

"I'm her husband and I do what I want," Joel tells him, before shoving him aside and going in.

Lizzie is standing at the opposite end of a somewhat large, square table, pointing at a map, a gnome amongst three other advisors (one the Rivendell ambassador, another clearly fae) gathered with her. When Joel enters, they all look up.

Lizzie isn't wearing grey.

Her dress is purple, the sleeves billowy and light. Her hair is down, neatly brushed and falling into her face, her crown set upon it.

Her mourning period has ended.

"Joel?" she says, brow furrowed. "I asked to not be interrupted."

Joel strides across the room, stopping at the other end of the table. "Right, right, but—"

"These plans are only to be known between those of us present, it's frankly a war crime for you—"

"Scott is dead," he says loudly, and Lizzie freezes.

"I—what?"

"Scott is dead, and Rivendell surrendered," he says, and the elf in the room (Elif, if he remembers correctly) actually staggers back.

"The king?" Elif demands, his hands shaking. "King Scott? You—you jest!"

Joel shakes his head. "I saw it," he manages, the shock of it all really hitting him. "He's dead."

"What happened?" Lizzie asks, rushing around the table.

Joel shrugs helplessly. "He just—the demon killed him. Scott—he tried to do something, something with magic or whatever, but it didn't work, and the demon just. . . ."

He doesn't want to tell them everything he saw. He doesn't want to tell them of how Scott's body lay crumpled on the ground, his mourning clothes torn and bloody, while Xornoth towered over him, declaring victory.

He doesn't want to tell them that at no point in the battle did Scott have the upper hand.

That it was hopeless from the start.

That he didn't even try to help.

"He's dead," he whispers.

Lizzie's eyes are wide, horrified. She almost seems to search his face for any sign of a lie.

"No," she breathes.

Joel only nods once.

Tonight, he'll tell her what happened.

Tonight, as they get ready for bed, he'll recount in a whisper the demon appearing, the way ice had seemed to burst out of Scott in jerky and uncontrollable ways, the way Xornoth had broken free nonetheless and beaten Scott to the ground and cast him to his death.

He'll hold Lizzie close to his chest as she cries, and a year ago she wouldn't have cared if Scott lived or died but now it's almost like he was the last living piece of Jimmy other than Lizzie herself and with him gone, everything is lost.

He'll lay awake in bed, wondering what on earth will happen now that Rivendell has fallen—will the elves be hounded out of their lands, forced to find homes elsewhere? Will they be forced into servitude? Will Katherine declare loyalty to a side?

Will there be a funeral for Scott?

But right now, as Lizzie turns away, as Elif collapses into a chair, as the gnome mournfully asks Joel what has become of the Overgrown, Joel can't say anything.

He can only stare at the table (with maps and figurines and inkpots) and think of all he must do.

-

"I'm going to mourn," Joel tells Lizzie the next morning.

It's a senseless decision. He should be in gazillions of meetings, preparing his country for refugees and attacks, deciding how to divide his forces, proportioning what to give to those in need. He doesn't have time, in the wake of everything, to spend three days secluded in his quarters.

"You shouldn't do that," Lizzie advises, pinning her hair behind her ear. "You have too much to do."

Joel shrugs. "I'm gonna do it anyway."

"Why?"

"Just feel like I should."

Lizzie sighs. "Joel, you really can't. I need your help with this, your country needs you, you can't just—"

"It's only—"

"—other mourning periods, it would be fine, but Mezelean—"

"—without me for three days—"

"—total isolation, you have—"

"Who else is gonna do it, huh?"

Lizzie falls silent, arms folded. She raises an eyebrow, and Joel struggles to come up with the words.

"Who else is gonna mourn him?"

"His people," Lizzie is quick to answer.

Joel scoffs. "They've just been conquered by the archenemy of their dead ruler—you think the demon will let them?"

"Katherine."

"Katherine doesn't mourn, it isn't a part of her culture."

"Gem."

Joel remembers Gem, lying on the ground, hair entirely white, and shudders. "I don't think she can. She was . . . injured, yesterday."

"We're all mourning him," Lizzie waves him off. "We may not be wearing black, but we all miss him. We're all thinking about him. It's basically the same thing, just without any outward sign."

Yes, but that's part of mourning, isn't it? Scott, at some point last week (it's just like Jimmy, Scott was fine last week and now he's gone forever), had mentioned that his clothing is designed to be as similar as possible to his betrothal clothing, to remind him at every moment of his loss.

The outward signs aren't for others, aren't proof of how sad you are. They're a tool in grieving, in memory.

"You weren't even that close," adds Lizzie. "Would it even be proper to take the mourning period?"

Propriety doesn't matter. Not anymore.

"I know that we've got different beliefs on what happens with death and all that," Joel says awkwardly, trying to figure out how to word this. "But for us, we believe that . . . that there's this, like, waiting period to get into the afterlife. So the three days—it’s like you're waiting with them."

Lizzie nods. They've talked about this before.

Joel looks down at his boots, suddenly unwilling to meet his wife's eyes. "Nobody else will be mourning," he says quietly. "I don't want him to wait alone."

He and Scott weren't that close, it's true. But Scott had intended to marry Joel's best friend and brother-in-law, and that basically makes him family.

Lizzie doesn't argue any more. She only nods, then takes the pin out of her hair and ties it up into a tight bun.

And Joel goes back to Mezelea, and shuts himself in his quarters for three days, despite the contrary advice from his chamberlain.

When he comes out of the mourning period, he's resolved to save everyone he can.

-

And then Scott isn't even dead so it doesn't matter anyway.

But when Joel sees him—because the demon had blasted him to the side, and he'd heard a lot of shouting and chaos while blacked out and trying to regain his bearings on the floor, so it isn't until he stumbles out of the building that he sees him—, his heart actually leaps with joy.

He's alive.

Scott is alive, and he's right there, his back turned away and Joel has never seen him in homespun, brown peasant-like clothes before but it's definitely him, from the shock of blue hair on his head to the familiar satchel hanging from his shoulder.

When Scott turns around, Joel can't help the smile that breaks across his face.

He rallies the troops, claps Scott on the back (he wants to hug him, he wants to pull him in tight and never let go which is weird but whatever), and does his best to act normal.

"I don't know how you're alive," he says, breathless with—with wonder, or something. And maybe Scott isn't really alive, maybe this is some ghost version of him sent back to help them win this (but he feels awfully solid beneath Joel's hand). "But it's good to have you, for however long it'll be."

Scott only stares at him for a moment before asking (that's definitely his voice, his thick elvish accent, his funny-sounding Es and As, so inimitably Scott), "Why does everyone have weapons?"

And Joel just wants to laugh and laugh.

And later, when Scott's asleep in Rivendell's infirmary and Lizzie's some giant axolotl monster thing and Jimmy's also, somehow, alive (Jimmy’s alive Jimmy’s alive Jimmy’s alive), Joel laughs.

He sits on the front steps of the palace, exhausted and bloodstained and with aching arms from carrying bodies, and he laughs.

As his laughter dwindles into chuckles, he looks around at the reclaimed capital of Rivendell, the moon and stars illuminating torn palace grounds and those collecting the dead, and he sighs.

"I'm gonna claim this as my own country," he jokes to himself. "Who's gonna stop me? Rivendell's mine now."

"Good lord, your majesty, please do not," comes a tired voice behind him. Joel glances back to see Ilphas stepping out of the palace, easing the door shut behind themself. "I don't believe I would be able to restrain myself from attempting regicide a second time."

Joel snorts. "Right, wouldn't want to inconvenience you. A different day, maybe." Then, after Ilphas doesn't respond, he adds, "How is he?"

Ilphas offers a small, strained smile. "The king has not yet woken," they say, "though his majesty Pix believes it will not be much longer."

Joel had carried Scott to the infirmary after he had collapsed, the no-longer glowing sword under him. He'd hurried forward, while armies on both sides had remained frozen, and he'd dragged Scott out of the center of everything, laying him beside Jimmy's (Jimmy?) body, because Joel hadn't even known Jimmy was also here and now he was dead again?

None of it made any sort of sense, but as the soldiers of various armies tried to sort out whether or not they should continue fighting, Pix had pushed through the crowd and hefted Jimmy's limp body over his shoulder, before leaving without explanation.

Joel had stared after him for a long moment, wondering if maybe he had hallucinated the whole thing.

Then, gathering strength beyond his normal, he had heaved Scott up and carried him to the palace, where he had been met by several elves who quickly took over.

He'd really just hoped that Scott wasn't dead. Then he'd pushed it out of his mind and set to resolving this war.

Now, here he is. Jimmy is, somehow, alive, sleeping off a life-ending wound.

And Scott is also alive, asleep in the Rivendell infirmary.

Joel kind of feels like he missed a chapter somewhere, because nobody has explained to him how they're both here in the first place (and some part of him still believes that they are spirits, brought back by some ritual to help them defeat the demon), but they're here and they're alive and that's what matters.

And Ilphas, judging by the way they finally seem to be relaxed enough to let their shoulders drop, feels the same.

"It's good to have him back," Joel comments idly, and after a moment, Ilphas nods their agreement.

"It is," they say softly.

Joel's still exhausted. He's still confused. He's got no idea what's going to happen next.

But Scott is back, and Jimmy is back, and the war is over.

So he gets up, and claps Ilphas on the shoulder (the elf starts in surprise), then returns to the fields.

He has to help Rivendell rebuild if he's going to conquer it, after all.

[meanbossart]

DU drow asks time

Lore questions/sweet messages/stuff that made me laugh that's about DU drow specifically that I decided to compile in a single post!

First of all, "outraged to be used as a medium for old man gay divorce" is a hysterical sentence LOL

As for his thoughts on the Ansur debacle? Negative ones. He hates the emperor, he doesn't care about his third-time-twist real identity, he doesn't particularly care about Wyll either (well - he kind of finds him entertaining, he's kind of really frustrated by him, it's complicated) but he saved his dad on a whim to spite Mizora anyway. BUT HEY, all that trouble would have been worthwhile if he's about to get an ancient dragon fighting alongside him - this old duke sounds a little too confident in this fairy tale, but stranger things have happened, right?

Then the situation unfolds as it does, and if he wasn't eager enough to use that orphic hammer before, he certainly is now. There is very little that the Emperor does past Act 3 that DU drow doesn't find a way to twist into something that confirms his resolve against him. If he could have taken Ansur's side in that fight, he would have - not that he shed any tears over killing him either.

Sick sword though, that helped soothe his nerves a bit and I'm sure spared everyone a little bit of a tantrum at camp later.

HAHAHAHA I can't confirm nor deny because I see so few large body-type elves as it is (which is fair, elves aren't usually... That massive). I did set age to 50% because it does look a little weird when it's all smooth. Maybe that's the trick?

Though I guess if you find it unsettling, then... No wonder it suits him! however this just looks like an impressively handsome fella to me, to be honest. I insist on fucking him up further whenever I draw him for that reason.

Thank you so much for following along and for giving the fic a try!!! And no worries, english isn't my native tongue either so I've been there 😎👍

I do actually have a couple of very short comics planned that take place pre-tadpole, but my backlog of WIPs is... Massive. Not to mention the commission work I do (currently not taking any more). I have one that's about his first interaction with Orin and another about a business dinner with Gortash gone-wrong, but I have no clue when I'll be able to work on them. Hopefully soon though!

You know, I've always hoped that after I died I'd be remembered as the guy who inspired others to make their nipples card-swipe-able.

Joke's aside, thank you LOL I love that my guys' nips have taken up non-insignificant room in your mind, it's always comforting to know that you aren't the only one.

Piercings and the such aren't really his style though. While he finds his scar-work weirdly comforting, he isn't so interested in aesthetic results as much as he just enjoys having pain inflicted upon him in a controlled environment, by people that he loves - He doesn't recall this post-tadpole, but the scars were a result of a kind of... Recurring ritual between himself and Orin that served to replace normal intimacy, pretty much.

Since you touched on it though, I do like to believe that Astarion finds his cut-up body fun, both on the eyes and on the hands LOL.

I'm starting to think you guys are all in on this. It's like the fifth time someone catches me in the act - god damn it, is it that obvious that I wanna slide down Peter Steele's cold corpse like he's a a ride at the Magical Ice kingdom... Which is to say, yes, both the guy and his music are not-so-lowkey a big inspiration behind a lot of DU drow's characterization!

That's all for now folks, thank you so much for the asks!!! This isn't all of them but I try not to spam people's feeds when I can help it/space them out. I see all of your messages and I guarantee you that if I have an interesting answer for them, you will see a reply eventually!