harmless-spider

[harmless-spider]

Why did ignans decide to colonise the volcano in the first place, before they’d Adapted to its heat and fumes?

After the Nightless Day, the planet's seasons were notably thrown out of wack for a few years, and the island and other northern locations suffered from what they called the Long Winter where the cold lasted for multiple years and escalated to bitter, deadly temps in the heart of winter.

The people of Rakhn had once built their home around the Fireseed, relying on its influence for unseasonal warmth, but after the awakening of Fire, Rakhn in an earthshaking instant was transmuted from a simple island to a boiling caldera of fury that only sought to subsume the Fireseed into itself, and the Fireseed's firemage priestess in the same moment had become a humanoid pillar of awakened flame. She warded off Rakhn's efforts to consume the Fireseed for three days and nights of battle that tore the island apart in catastrophic eruption, driving the rest of the people to shelter in the shallow waters around the island. The priestess raised high obsidian walls in defense of the ancient shrine, drawing it away from the forming caldera that sought to consume her people's only source of warmth in the bitter winters.

Nobody knows exactly what was said or done between them, but at the end of the three days, Rakhn's eruption ceased and the priestess returned to her human form to tell her people that the Fireseed was safe, and its warmth would be theirs to shelter in. But Rakhn himself was to be left alone, as he had become something new, with dangerous whims and moods and no attachment to the shape or structure of his island, and the fireseed sheltered in the core of his caldera.

But this had all been long ago, and as the long winter deepened, the fireseed could not warm the island's soil. The freeze was tightening its grip.

To survive, the people finally worked up the nerve to petition Rakhn with a deal: he would let them shelter in his heated caverns until the Long Winter ended, and in return they would provide him with something new every day - a new song, story, physical work of art, etc. Rakhn agreed. He stilled his volatile rumblings and even paused his eternal war with Winter so that the collateral damage would not destroy the fragile beings that now called him home. In exchange, they broadened his horizons.

The people quickly learned that ephemeral creations like songs and stories were the way to go, because Rakhn admired physical works of art, but after the first blush he would immediately burn them for the joy of seeing how they changed in the process. The children saw this as an absolute win, but the adults found it rather disheartening.

Cold years crawled on. Bundled-up hunters would venture out onto the slopes, then quickly return to the safety and warmth of the caves. They adapted to life in Rakhn's domain, basking in the Fireseed's radiance and power.

Then came the day that the snow melted, and the ground softened and sprouted again. The people were overjoyed to walk under the sun again. But compared to the radiance of the Fireseed, they found it cold and inadequate. The plants and animals thrived, but the people did not. They had become too much something of the fire down there in the dark. Now the lack of it sickened and drained them.

Their emissary returned to Rakhn with another petition. He did not ask Rakhn to return to their previous deal; he knew Rakhn's patience was pushed to the breaking point already, having to still his destructive nature to shelter them for several long years. The people did not ask for his shelter this time. They only asked for his warmth. Rakhn was a destructive force, temperamental in his moods; they could not ask him to forever become the sort of guardian force that would never harm his own. Instead, they would build structures of their own within the deep places of the island, harness the lava, build their own way to live with the skills they'd refined over the Long Winter - and if he chose to knock it down, they only asked to be able to build it back up again.

Rakhn considered how much more boring his life would be without these little mortals, and set his price. Once a year, every year at the onset of winter, the people would honor their first deal. They would shelter in his halls and regale him with stories, so they never forgot the deal they had made that joined their fates so inextricably. It was a small price to pay for the hearth.

[harmless-spider]

What was Rakhn like, pre-volcano-fication?

Rakhn was an unusually temperate island for its high northern latitude, populated since the Emergence by a small colony of mostly humans that came up out of a Caves entrance and stayed because it was warm and green. The god of the island took form over the following centuries as a sedate, steady caretaker of the forests whose shrine could be found above the treeline, with a clear view of the far horizon.

The influence of the Fireseed caused rapid fire-adaptation in the people, faster than the people settled in more low-density fire-influenced regions, so they could plausibly be considered the first Ignans. Their settlement was centered on the Fireseed shrine because when the winter came it was the only part of the island that stayed warm.

The mage who invoked Fire's truename and awakened it was not one of the Rakhn Ignans, so they didn't know it was happening until the island exploded. Fortunately at that moment all of them also spontaneously became fire mages, except for the handful who were already fire mages who instead transformed into beings of pure fire. It gave them a fighting chance to survive the cataclysmic eruption until the island stabilized.

[harmless-spider]

If you were to use soul shaping to grow a new soul-limb, but did not add a prosthetic, could you use the soul limb to take control of objects? (also I really love your comic and think that the way you've built your world is fascinating)

Aw, thanks!

The short answer is that a soul-limb without a physical body part to sustain it will usually unweave itself again. Mortal souls generally need their bodies in order to hold together - it's why death happens when the body stops functioning.

The unweaving doesn't happen immediately, though, hence why someone with a soulshaped prosthetic limb can temporarily remove the limb without issue. That person could then theoretically use their soul-limb to move other objects if they were very, very determined, but it's risky, since the soul-limb tends to mirror the shape of the object it's in, and any kind of dramatic soul-reshaping can have negative mental consequences. So like, someone with a soulshaped prosthetic arm could make do without the prosthetic in a pinch by, for instance, using a length of fabric as a replacement limb, but the soulshaped limb might lose its jointed structure in the process and become more tentacular to animate the unstructured fabric, and then might have difficulty animating a more standard prosthetic limb afterwards.

[harmless-spider]

Reblog this to let your mutuals suggest a character they think you could write for!

be sure to include what media the character is from [ i.e. book title, film, video game, anime/manga, etc. ] — can be sent anonymously as well!

[harmless-spider]

choirs of angels sing my praises for I have finally worked out a fast and clean way to draw foliage that doesn't look like ass or take one million years

[harmless-spider]

Your explanation for why Tahraim operates the way he does makes so much sense. And, fun fact, Tahraim actually helped me a lot with dealing with intrusive thoughts and guilt.

I've done a lot of things and thought a lot of things over the years that I regretted and felt a lot of guilt over. And for the longest time, all I knew how to do was ignore the guilt and try to improve as a person, but that guilt was still inside eating at me little by little. It wasn't until I read Tahraim telling Dainix "This time we're going to let the fire do what it does best, we're going to let it change you" and "now you're not the person who'd do that anymore. Well done." that it really clicked for me how to cope with those feelings.

I ended up being able to take it a step further too and apply it to coping with not having been able to protect people who weren't my responsibility because I was just a kid (ngl the panel in Erin's dream of him desperately shouting "I was a child!" helped a lot on this journey too). I tried to apply using guilt to change me into somebody who wouldn't let that happen again. But then I realized that I'd done everything in my power. I didn't want to change into somebody who didn't try, and I couldn't change myself into somebody who successfully fixes everything for everyone. So instead, I let the fire inside me change me into somebody willing to forgive my past self and let go of the pain and self-blame.

Sooo uhhhh, I kinda lost the plot on the point I was making, but suffice to say that Tahraim makes a lot of sense and you very successfully ended up guiding me via him into a lot better coping mechanisms than I'd had previously.

cool cool cool c-

[harmless-spider]

Tahraim is my fav absolutely adore him! I love that you’ve made the smith deal in introspection and cryptic bs, a lot of times smiths are very straightforward characters in stories. What made you decide to shake it up?

Can gods be tied to concepts as well as cities? As Tahraim seems to be a god of blacksmithing (or at least has some serious motifs) does he have a city thats just forges?

He also seems a lot more mobile than the other gods, or is he just “tied” to Danix?

Tahraim is a conceptual god, a class of deity considered grander and more untethered than city or nature gods. Also in his weight class are Emnis and Erebas (dreams and nightmares), Shanyasi (music), Sennaia (knowledge), Jiya (war), and a whole bunch of others. They're gods of ideas, and their domains are in the collective consciousness of mortals. They can manifest anywhere they hold sway, and several of them have constructed domains of their own in pocket dimensions; Sennaia has a transfinite library hidden away somewhere, and Tahraim has a forge.

Tahraim's personality comes from my own experience with artists and craftspeople. Many artists are acutely aware that in order for their work to be better, they need to be better. The process of creation and introspection becomes inextricably linked. Forging a tool changes the forger, little by little.

There's also an element I've observed from teachers. I was always a firm proponent of "don't be cryptic or cute, just tell me the thing and I'll get it," and while that's true a lot of the time, there are concepts that cannot be Just Told in any meaningful way. They don't hit or stick if the person doesn't put them together themselves and construct a way that works for them. Teaching isn't always the impartation of information; a lot of the time it's guidance so the student crafts the tools that work for them. Even if the teacher can perfectly communicate what method works for them, everyone is different, and a student that does the exact same thing exactly right might gain no benefits or be actively harmed by the process. Instead, the student has to parse the lesson and create their own tools to execute the same goal.

Personal example under a readmore because it got a little long:

I've sporadically dealt with intrusive thoughts my whole life, though I didn't understand what they were at the time and they've mostly gone away on their own. When I was little, upsetting thoughts would get stuck in my head and stay there; things would give me nightmares that lasted for weeks, or I'd be stuck awake in the wee hours ruminating on every time in my life I'd done something shameful or harmful or wrong. My dad recognized I was upset, and tried to teach me a method of "counting thoughts" that worked for him, where I could sit for a few minutes and just passively observe the thoughts floating by, counting them and observing them and thus becoming aware that they were small, fleeting things with no power on their own. The problem is, this method didn't work for me at all, because "count the thought" didn't communicate to me "and that makes the thought not a problem anymore." The thought still hurt just as bad, all I was doing was reminding myself how many bad thoughts were happening. I would get overwhelmed and end up more distressed, and the fact that this thing that should have worked didn't work just convinced me that I was trapped and nobody could ever help me.

It took actual years before I found a method that clicked in my brain, and it was just one step further down the path of counting thoughts:

"Having that thought is harmless."

Every thought that got stuck in my head was about times or ways I might've harmed people. The things that distressed me most were things I'd done wrong that I had zero power to change, so the wrongness would just haunt me forever, making me miserable forever. But the root of the distress was that I had messed up and hurt people.

The thing that clicked was that having the thought does nothing to anyone but me. The thought is harmless, even if the event the thought is about wasn't or wouldn't be. Having the thought hurts no-one else. And since 90% of my distress was distress at the thought of hurting other people, it hit me that in reality, even in the depths of my angst, I was just sitting there, hurting no-one.

And suddenly I found that the last few intrusive thoughts rattling around in my brain withering, because the last thing that had been feeding them was gone. I was given the technique for Counting Thoughts, but it wasn't made for my hands. I had to make my own version out of it. And just because it worked for me and my own personal brain doesn't mean this method would work for someone else, just the same way the method that worked for my dad didn't click for me. If I wanted to teach someone a way to bypass intrusive thoughts, all I would have to work on would be what worked for me, but I could try to guide them through a path similar to the one I followed to find my method so they could maybe find their specific hangups and what specifically would work for them. Every mind is different.

This is also why it's so frustrating to hear someone say stuff like "Oh I used to worry about that too, but it's actually fine, you can just stop worrying about it!" And it's like, "oh, fuckin brilliant, just stop worrying about it? Absolute genius, I just hadn't thought of that-" like yea it sounds flippant and yea it's not helpful, but they are using the only frame of reference they have and describing what they did. They stressed about something, realized it was not actually a problem, and knowing that was enough to make it leave their mind alone. But saying that they "just stopped worrying" doesn't make you understand or internalize how they did it. And because they can't seem to help you, it makes you mad. But then sometimes, with time and perspective, you look back and think "wow, yea, at some point I really did just stop worrying about that." It doesn't mean their advice worked, it just means somewhere along the line something clicked in your mind and started working.

Tahraim is a smith who sees no difference between shaping a tool and shaping a person, but there are some ways that people can't be shaped from the outside, and instead have to shape themselves. He likes to be subtle and cryptic, but he also has good reason to be. The only way to make something click in someone's head is to guide them towards it and nudge them when necessary. It's not all hitting stuff with hammers.

[harmless-spider]

I whittled again! Mostly small things to get back into it. I cut a few 1x1x2 inch blocks following the Linker series. Only to then notice that my knife is big enough to make it a bit of a hassle, but we lived through it (　＾▽＾)

In chronological order:

The Linker bear. Needed something relatively simple to get back into whittling and if anyone asks, he was meant to be an amputee. I was kind of frustrated at the time due to the aforementioned problems, but he's really grown on me.

Tiny Nijntje/Miffy, whom I whittled for a friend I met for the first time this year! The photo is from my friend, as I forgot to take one before gifting it xD

A bit more complex here, the Conductor from A Hat In Time. Technically not fully finished, as I still want to add the gold trim to the hat, but I'd need a fine gold pen and so that'll probably be a next year thing. Whittled for another friend, gotta see when I meet them to gift it ( *・ω・)ノ

Don't recognize this guy? Then you obviously haven't seen @comicaurora 's latest Journey to the West. This is Sun Wukong, disguised as a messenger demon, delighted at his plan working. That drawing and the one of Jupiter's Rival being surprised that Sun Wukong has the same artifact absolutely sent me! I had to stop the video both times because I was laughing so hard xD

This was probably the most technically challenging whittle of all of them. My knife is curved, so v-cuts are weird and because it's also quite wide, the space between the horns needed some creative solutions. Painting was also kinda weird, since it's really hard to give a 3D object outlines that look decent from more than exactly one angle. I'm still quite happy with him though ( ´^ω^)

I still have quite a few small blocks to get through, we'll see what I'll do with those. These were all basswood, which is nice to carve. I also have bigger blocks of cherry and that is still quite a challenge for my noodly wrists xD

[harmless-spider]

I've always thought Margarita would be a beautiful name for a little girl

[harmless-spider]

#SundaySermon

'Fake Christian' is the largest denomination in America.

[harmless-spider]

t-shirt that says ‘I LOVE BEING ALONE IN QUIET DARK PLACES.’ on the front and ‘I AM NOT A FUNGUS.’ on the back.

[harmless-spider]

goodreads reviewers aren't human

[harmless-spider]

steven moffat changed lives when he wrote “the day you lose someone isn’t the worst. at least you’ve got something to do. it’s all the days they stay dead.” like he was on the astral plane when he was writing that to me

[harmless-spider]

Kieran has Branwen back when he’s with the O’Driscolls. Branwen is the one who snorts and steps back as Colm O’Driscoll strikes him across the face, is the one who flees for his life from the Van Der Linde stooge through knee-high snow, only bucks Kieran off when ridden to his absolute limit.

When Arthur hogties Kieran facedown in the snow of the Ambarino mountains, somehow, someway Branwen finds his way back to Kieran. And I love the idea that, while Kieran is tied to that post in the barn, he hears Branwen outside the doors in the blistering cold and wind. Knows his horse has come for him, snorting at the door, whinnying panicked and searching. Kieran begging Charles to let his horse into the barn, knowing how cold it is out, trying to appeal to this stone-faced man that if left outside, his horse shall surely freeze to death outside.

And Charles, not meeting Kieran’s eyes, unlatches the barn door to let Branwen in, who immediately shivers in against the other horses. Charles, who shrugs and avoids directly addressing nosy questions from Micah or Uncle on whose horse it is that’s suddenly following their wagons down. Charles, who keeps Branwen tethered within Kieran’s sight once they touch down in Horseshoe Overlook, even when he’s unsure if the former O’Driscoll will make it out alive.

Branwen doesn’t lose Kieran again until later, much later, and he follows again to try and find him. And another man takes his reins, with a face much less kind than Arthur, or Charles. And Kieran rides again, but he’s not the same, doesn’t direct him with his legs or reins, mutely mounted. But Branwen takes Kieran back home. Bolts and bucks in fear when the shots rings out, but this time, when he tries to find his way back to Kieran, the smell’s all wrong and he can’t find his way back, not in the heat and the humidity of the swamps, with Kieran gently rotting in a Scarlet Meadows grave.

[harmless-spider]

Having a really long-term hyperfixation that has since faded is terrifying yes but it's also so embarrassing. Hi I used to think about Scrimblo Splungus 25/7. Yeah, for 2 years straight. Nah, I don't think about them anymore except for with a vague sense of melancholy as I recall how they used to make me feel. Anyways this new one, Blimpkins McGee? I'm gonna think about them forever and the cycle will NOT repeat in 2 years. Trust me guys.

[harmless-spider]

no neurodivergent infighting here

[harmless-spider]

Alien pulling your sleeve to get your attention: and who is this Cunt you all serve