chrysoliteandlightning

[chrysoliteandlightning]

I recently reread the Cohort Intelligence Files, and I feel as a fandom we've not given nearly enough consideration to the possibilities of the year 9995, five years before the beginning of GTN:

17 year old Second Lieutenant Judith and 22 year old Marta are on the Leviathan-class ship Emperor’s Dominion and awarded commendations in within-system war games.

The twins turn 16, presumably with some pageantry (and the looming realisation that perhaps they will not be able to continue their ruse indefinitely).

Isaac and Jean, aged 8 and 9, make their cav vows, presumably while they are still attending school at Koniortos Court.

Abigail becomes head of the Fifth House and makes her husband/seneschal her cavalier (an action which is perhaps only allowed to slide because she apparently doesn't plan to stay in post for long).

15 year old Cam and Pal are two years into Pal's extraordinarily young tenure as Master Warden, perhaps beginning the first overhaul of the Spire in half a myriad.

Dulcinea stops making public appearances as Duchess of Rhodes.

Eleven year old Silas begins to learn how to siphon from Colum.

Harrow begins to puppet her parents, the last Cohort chaplains and construct adepts are lost in action, and the Ninth is closed to pilgrims (and in the Harrow Nova AU, Mortus steps down from his post and scarifies Ortus).

And presumably, John Gaius is running the numbers on the approach of Number Seven and his remaining numbers of Lyctors, and considering his options...

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picturing griddlehark college/otherwise normal aus is so fucking funny. like. you meet this lesbian couple, right. one of them is on a full sports scholarship, she's big, beefy, a little lacking in social skills but obviously happy to try. she swears every other sentence, has a poster of megan fox in transformers in her bedroom like a 13 year old boy. she's got an anime girl phone background. she wears a black choker all the time which does NOT match her otherwise purely sun's-out-guns-out-paired-with-cargo-shorts type wardrobe.

the other one is a full head shorter than her and shaped like a stick, wears exclusively big, shapeless cardigans and skirts that reach her ankles, will not speak to anyone but the beefcake in full sentences if she can avoid it, and visibly has not slept in a week. the one time you convince her to speak, she ends up insulting you in the most unnecessarily graphic and specific terms you have ever heard, gives you a look which singlehandedly curdles every ounce of self-esteem you've ever possessed, and immediately returns her attention to studying.

one day, you finally work up the courage to ask how the fuck they met and why they're dating. they tell you that they both grew up in a small-town christian cult which the stick figure's parents actually led, beat the shit out of each other daily for their entire childhoods, and finally resolved their differences in their late teens and immediately ran away together. the stick figure twitches up a sleeve of her oversize black cardigan to reveal a bracelet made of the beefcake's baby teeth that she personally knocked out of her skull. the beefcake smiles at her like this is the height of romance. the only issue they will acknowledge in their relationship is that when she was little, the stick figure fell madly in love with a painting of the virgin mary and has never quite recovered. they've been married for 3 years. they are 20 years old.

also the beefcake wears the choker because the stick figure said "no" to dog collars in public.

[chrysoliteandlightning]

im doomed by the narrative but the narrative is a bunch of conscious choices i've made in the past

[chrysoliteandlightning]

For con season this year I did a series of prints in a style I call "Duos" with two characters surrounded by a bunch of objects from whatever they're from.

Here's the Locked Tomb ones...it took a long time to come up with the objects please appreciate them...

PRINTS

[chrysoliteandlightning]

" "Why did you ascend to be a Lyctor?" "Ultimate power-- and posters of my face." Fair. "

-Harrow The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir ⸻ Ianthe Tridentarius Ianthe the First, Prince Ianthe Naberius; Lyctor, Eighth Saint to serve the King Undying, Tall Hot Glass of Skank. A girl who'd tell you she's gotten everything she ever wanted—and you'd almost believe her.

I thought of drawing her propaganda poster as a closer likeness, but decided it was funnier if it was obviously retouched to look more healthy and saintly.

(process pics from sketch to final artwork available to see on patreon! This one had a longer journey than some of my other illustrations.)

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in a roleswap AU you could have so much fun with Cav!Palamedes stupidly high risk tolerance now that he has the muscle and fighting skills to back it up

[chrysoliteandlightning]

The final stage of every OC's creation is having to go through websites like this to name it:

[chrysoliteandlightning]

To my pals

i am less than happy to report that P’s notes on recyc air have proved PERSONALLY useful. My lung has fallen victim to the family curse, and my rooms and offices have been relegated to the surface. It is certainly beautiful (to my lungs as much as my eyes). But a mere week has me craving artificial gravity and thrumming machinery. I spent nearly a year down here on the planet once, and in all those months I didn’t miss the city as much as i have in the past DAY.

It is not to be exile yet. My cousins’ passings have left the court with too many tasks and too few hands. I have been fortunate to wrest away a greater portion of the work available. My title may not have carried it to me, but a surfeit of paperwork will at least keep me busy in the coming months.

I will petition you again to visit. I would invite all the house scions to an event here on the Seventh if I felt the Sixth wouldn’t find a perfectly sensible explanation for why you couldn’t attend. And then I’d be stuck spending much too long entertaining the third house heirs, again. I would happily NEVER attend another party in my LIFE if it meant I didn’t have to see the Tridentarii again.

FALSE. I love a party too much to make good on that bargain, but I would pay a dear price not to have to make idle conversation with Ianthe again. So please, find some stuffy library bureaucratic excuse to visit before drastic measures are called for.

DESPERATE MEASURES loves. I won't be able to resist sending you a formal invitation for much longer, so be kind to this old woman and visit on your own recognizance before I must make good on my threats.

Dulcie❤️

[More letters written by Yours Truly can be found on Archive of our Own]

[chrysoliteandlightning]

so, wake’s soul is hitching a ride with ianthe, yeah? during the big confrontation in htn, pyrrha shoots cytherea (wake) by putting a gun to her head. at the end of ntn, she shoots ianthe and grumbles that she was saving the bullet for john. safe to assume wake’s soul was transferred to the gun and pyrrha was planning to help her out by getting her to possess john?

anyway please I need to see ianthe’s river bubble aus (fanfic about her and harrow) crashed by wake in her hazmat suit

[chrysoliteandlightning]

who do you think the most UNethical character in tlt is? for extra points, who is the most sane?

beloved anon I have been pondering this since you sent it and I fear I’ll get in trouble no matter what I say. it’s also tricky for me to think about ethical vs unethical in the tlt world where ethics are quite different than what we have going on in our world.

I also feel like most characters act the way they do for a myriad of reasons including house society, the way they were specifically raised, their specific house culture, etc. or, in the case of the lyctors, how long they’ve been alive and the effects immortality has on the fragile human psyche

like, for example, do I think anything ianthe does is ethical? no, but her behavior absolutely tracks for a third house princess raised by aloof parents in the shadow of a sister who needed her to work twice as hard to keep up their act.

there are definitely characters who make questionable, manipulative choices while having the agency and privilege to choose otherwise. much has been said by better analysts than I about how abigail and magnus watch over the fourth house teens in an ostensibly parental way while also having designs on annexing the fourth house. to me, that’s more unethical than for example, silas siphoning colum, given that silas is a child behaving the only way he knows how to.

as for who is the most sane? I probably wouldn’t use that word given that harrow is canonically schizophrenic and describes herself as insane, and it’s an incredibly important aspect of the series especially htn. I’ll ask instead: who makes the best choices given their circumstances? I’m gonna go ahead and say dulcinea. from what I understand, she never led palamedes on. she catches on to cytherea’s plan fast and decides to lie to her hoping that palamedes or camilla will see the deception. she stays with harrow as the bubble is collapsing because she thinks what she has to tell her is important enough to risk her soul. dulcinea darling I love you

sorry for the super boring and long response but once I started thinking about it I got carried away!

[chrysoliteandlightning]

i’d say “sorry for swinging a bat at the hornet’s nest,” but i’m not, actually! it’s been almost five years since harrow the ninth was released, and i STILL see people insist that harrow isn’t schizophrenic; she’s just being haunted. fandom takes representation of an intensely stigmatized mental illness (that the author candidly says she has!) and ignores it!!!

[chrysoliteandlightning]

Teeth of the Valley

[chrysoliteandlightning]

i’d say “sorry for swinging a bat at the hornet’s nest,” but i’m not, actually! it’s been almost five years since harrow the ninth was released, and i STILL see people insist that harrow isn’t schizophrenic; she’s just being haunted. fandom takes representation of an intensely stigmatized mental illness (that the author candidly says she has!) and ignores it!!!

[chrysoliteandlightning]

Gideon raised by Wake Au!

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ianthe is so kind

[chrysoliteandlightning]

Pyrrha saved Harrow's body with Gideon in it despite finding out she was not the mother, committed herself to Gideon and Harrow for six long months not knowing who was in the body, loved both of them, loved Nona, loved Camilla and Palamedes, did gruelling work every day and lived on eggs and in hiding, and would burn the nine houses and all the planets to see them safe, and she didn't even have an inherent connection to them beyond having known Gideon's parents.

Meanwhile, Jod's approach to parenting his BIOLOGICAL DAUGHTER was to say "Yikes!" and decide not to immediately kill her, but make a point of saying that killing her would be easier!!!!

[chrysoliteandlightning]

ok so u know how Colum Asht is missing a finger on his left hand but like it never specified what finger (GtN p. 109)

and u know how the Nine Houses not only retains marrige as an institution, it also canonically still uses wedding rings (GtN p. 242)

and u know how like, despite the Nine Houses being homophobic about necrocav relations, cavaliers are generally still allowed to be married as long as their spouse is not also their necromancer (see: Protesilaus/his wife, Mortus/Glaurica, etc)

but u know how the Eighth House (Templars of the White Glass) aren't just normal space catholics, they're based on the Knights Templar, which had very specific rules about chastity/celibacy/marrige

anyway. Column Asht cut off his left ring finger