lazulian-devil

[lazulian-devil]

Im doing this project with my partner. Essentially, we are using Daggerheart + Mythic 2E to not need a GM and just tell a story together. And each letter, I'll just upload here after the fact to tell a story :)

Adressed to Yorinde Shine, a letter smelling of seasalt, salted fish and chalk.

Dear Yorinde,

we finally made it to Orkos, after two long weeks on that wretched ship. I cant believe I left it all behind for what amounts to be a castle in the sky, some sea sickness and no leads. I know you said I should go. It was exciting at first, I do admit. But I longed for land the moment the first storm hit and I could do nothing but hide. The ocean is very different to the streets of Fern. Its sheer vastness felt like... I dont really know. Apparently Im terrified of it. No people, no buildings. Remember when we ran away from Morays crew? Stuck in that alleyway with nowhere to go but directly into their blades? Thats what the ocean feels like all the time. I watched a ship go down after lightning struck it, flames eating away at wood and bone. We did help the survivors, but there werent many to begin with. The image of the firey sails againt the waves is probably burned - ha. - into my mind. We could see and hear them, but we couldnt help.

Obviously not everything is this dreadful. When we finally set foot on the Dawncoast, a lovely little town named Driftwood Landing swallowed us. You would like it, I think. If it were dirtier, bigger and had more scoundrels, it would be just like home. So really, it isnt like home at all. Quainter, smaller and less muddy. I took Osrick to a tavern away from the ports - too many ears. If Im going to throw my life away to prove myself, I might as well do it shamefully in the corner. Unlike the last few weeks, we actually got lucky. The tavern owner - a Filburg Lady named Catherine, with more scrap than brain to her name - had seen the carvings before. I might still have gotten my face beaten in by a fired up Mob and Osricks finest shirt is basically scrap, but at least we have a lead. Its not unlike our family to meet new people fist first (or in my case: spell first) after all. Im just holding up tradition.

... Maybe thats what you should tell Ma. "Zeres is out there, upholding our family tradition of getting beaten up in a square and somehow getting out of it alive, with a lead and a newfound connection to an underground boss." Because Catherine definitely has some smuggling going on. I dont judge and I dont think Osrick noticed. Hes weirdly... middleclass. I forget sometimes.

Point is, apparently there is a place east of Driftwood, somewhere in the Brinewood. A forest village thats been abandoned many years ago, but whose buildings used similar slabs to the one we found.

I cant believe how lucky I am - broken nose not counting - but its also worrying. Maybe it wasnt so rare a discovery after all? Maybe we are following a silly rumor into nothing besides death. But i cant go back empty handed. Whatever ratlike pride I have, it wont allow it.

So Im dragging Osrick to the Brinewood, right into that treacherous forest everybodys warned me of. And hopefully back out again.

With love Your idiot sibling Zeres

[lazulian-devil]

I love getting older and having your own apartment and job and being mostly stable because on occasion your (finally not always stressed out) brain goes: "Hey, do you remember those gender-ambiguous feelings you had a few years ago? Yeah? Great. Ive prepared a presentation actually -"

And you just sit there, with your breakfast yoghurt looking just as confused as you do.

[lazulian-devil]

One of my coworkers couldnt decide between two tables for her room, so she... Had... A conversation... With ChatGPT.

She also wanted to make music, so she made a poem with ChatGPT and fed that into another AI.

And somehow, shes proud of that.

I dont... Understand these people.

[lazulian-devil]

Beige, my dear, have you never hears of sailing the high seas? 🏴‍☠️

I should go through my bigass list of indie shows and watch some more of them to see if they're any good

[lazulian-devil]

This is another dice box :) I unfortunately messed up the Placement and painted the fish upside down, but it works :')

At least, they're super pretty! So who cares, I made it myself.

[lazulian-devil]

Frog Dice-Chest.

Enjoy your Weekend.

[lazulian-devil]

The Spiral I: "The Night"

The night comes with the sound of slower cars and fixtures buzzing, with chatter among quiet friends and streets emptying of bustling. With desperate moths at windows shut and memory of laughter. Echoes of the steps in empty halls and those that hurry after. Trains that carry empty faces, backpacks full of work. Keys clutched in sweaty hands because of shadows that could lurk. It comes in shapes and sizes that can be anything, yet gray. It comes in whispers and in wonders and in woeful walks away.

by Cece Lazul (thats me)

[lazulian-devil]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of the people I interact with. I have a coworker who I am pretty sure is a MAGA type, and she is also a lovely woman who is dreadfully overworked and so good at connecting to patients when they call. I can see the conflict on her face when she talks to me, a gigantic tranny dork who speaks Spanish and affirms the LGBT community, but can also talk to her about her cows and knows about guns and stuff. I can see the fear in the eyes of my former Young Men’s leader when he misgenders me and realizes that I’m not an ideology but a person he has known for a long time. I can see the way my extended family stop and stutter over political discussions when they realize they are talking about me. And I don’t know why but lately it’s just made me think about my neighbor as a kid.

When we moved to Arizona, we moved next door to a lovely retired couple - John and Lucy. John was a veteran of WWII, he had an M.D. and a Ph.D. in radiology, and he LOVED us to pieces. His wife, Lucy, was a sharp and gifted woman - well spoken, very observant, and VERY clever. I just know that she used that cleverness as a mom to great effect, because with my and my siblings she always managed to find a way to send us home with candy and treats for a week despite my dad’s protests. We loved them, growing up, and even though they have long-since passed away I love them still, and I love what I learned from them.

John was, as stated, a WWII veteran. He was enlisted as a rifleman, and later as a front line medic, starting at Point Du Hoc and moving inwards to France and towards the Rhine. He let me do a report on him in 6th grade where he shared war stories with me he had kept to himself his whole life - he said it was out of respect for his friends who didn’t get to come home and tell their stories.

He said he told me because he knew I could respect the memories of his friends.

He showed me his collection of medals, and which he’d kept hidden away in a sock in his attic because he’d feel an immense grief any time he saw them. He had wanted to be a doctor his whole life, prior to being drafted he was studying medicine and had taken the Hippocratic oath to Do No Harm. He saw his medals as a reminder that he had Done Harm.

After telling me his stories he was able to convince himself that while he had Done Harm, it was only because his only other alternative was, to him, cowardice. He chose to be brave even if it meant acting against his Oath because he felt that if he didn’t do it someone else would have to go in his place and he would be responsible for the harm that befell them. I don’t think that’s true, but for him it was and that was something no being on earth could have ever dissuaded him from believing.

He shared wild stories - melee combat on the beach, clearing artillery bunkers, receiving a Purple Heart for being injured in hand-to-hand combat with a Wehrmacht rifleman he said he felt pity for because they were the same age and he had to imagine the man he was fighting had been drafted just like him.

He shared how he was awarded a Silver Star for charging a machine gun nest, but shared that he was most proud of not killing anyone in the process. He threw a grenade with the pin still in it and when the machine gunners jumped to avoid being blown up they were killed by someone else so he didn’t have to do it. He took the machine gun and shot the other machine gun in that French field to pieces so he didn’t have to kill the people operating it. He said they were giving out Silver Stars like candy but I knew he was being modest.

He told me about being redesignated as a medic, about how he crawled for about 500 yards on his belly to rescue an injured tank driver, then threw him over his back and crawled the same 500 yards back (1000 yards total) to treat his injuries. He said he met the man in an Army hospital in England after his spine was broken by a high explosive panzer shell was fired through a hollowed out French farmhouse and landed about 20 feet away from him.

He told me about all the people he helped and saved as a medic, he told me about his work in radiology and research after the war. He showed me a hallway that was quite literally wallpapered with academic honors he’d earned as a researcher. He told me about how his first Fourth of July back was a horror show for him because fireworks and German artillery make very similar sounds. He told me about how he woke up in a cold sweat well over half a century later hearing the screams of German artillery men being burned alive with flamethrowers, or hearing his own voice apologizing to the young German soldier he stabbed in the heart at Point Du Hoc.

He told me that when he was asked to present at a medical conference in Germany 25 years after the war ended that he was so scared he couldn’t step off the plane, and that his wife had to hold his hand and lead/pull him with her. He said he was not scared because he was worried about being triggered, but because he knew that someone somewhere outside of that plane had the course of their life irreparably altered by his military service. That to someone out there he was the cause of immense suffering and harm. That some unwitting waiter could be the son of the Nazi Officer he stabbed in the heart with a 12-inch hunting knife. That some woman asking questions in the audience would be the daughter or widow of a man he sent to judgement with a .30-06. He was scared that they would hate him.

He knew what the Nazi’s had done, he knew better than anyone I’d ever met. He’d watched the documentaries, he’s seen the PoWs returning from camps, he’d seen the civilians massacred and tortured by their regime, but he also knew that among the monsters were people like him - idealistic 20-somethings who only wanted to make the world better and were ripped away from that life by the Nazi war machine. And he spent his whole life mourning the loss of innocence and peace that was forced on so many people by such a corrupt power.

To be honest I don’t know if I could do that, but he could. He told me he could still feel the dead and lost with him, both when he slept and when he woke. He told me he thought he’d go to his grave never having told a word of this to anyone. That the stories of him and his friends and allies would disappear silently with him and those like him. That he had wanted that until he realized that he didn’t have to sell out to share the stories - that he could give the stories away for free to someone who would love the people in them, and not just the content of them. He didn’t want his stories to be used as Patriotic Pornography by some TV network or magazine. He wanted the people he knew to be respected, he wanted their memories to be honored and loved, and he entrusted me, a 12-year-old “boy” to do that.

He told me for years afterwards that after telling me these stories that he slept better than he ever had. That by sharing the stories with someone who could hear Him over the din of victory and glory and honor and revisionistic history. Someone who could see the man in the story and not just see the plot of a battle being won. He wanted to be human, and he wanted the people he saw die to be human too - everyone, not just the people on his side. He wanted someone to see and to know the anguish of having to look someone in the eye as heartblood muddies the ground beneath them and hope that they understand that this was not an act of love or hatred but an act of desperation. To hope that you had just taken out One Of The Bad Ones instead of a medical student or a poet who had been drafted. He wanted me to see how hard he had worked since then to build a world without scarcity, to build a world of peace. He wanted me to know SO badly that the cost of violence, any violence, even necessary violence, is always ALWAYS paid by both parties involved.

I think about the rise of the new right wing - the new Nazi movement’s traction in politics, and I feel sad and scared - the world that Johnathan J Yobaggy, my neighbor, my friend, and my hero, worked SO hard to build is being done away with by people who do not understand the cost of the path they are entering. I can see brief moments of recognition in the eyes of some of the people I mentioned - The former young men’s president who immediately regrets misgendering me and hen he makes eye contact with me and sees Me staring back at him and not a faceless “ideology.” I can hear it in the voice of my uncle who quietly comes up to me to apologize for some homophobic comment he made absentmindedly. I can see it in the eyes of racists and sexists being interviewed on TV when they realize that they didn’t vote for a concept, they voted for a real thing. And honestly, I have mixed emotions about it. Because while I understand frustration with the status quo, the importance of basic human needs like affordable good and rent, and I know the fear that comes with feeling powerless, I also can’t help but grieve the endless wheel of history bringing us back to this God Damned Fucking Place again. I hope we can avoid this fate, not just for our sake but for the sake of everyone who has ever tried to make the world safer. For everyone who has ever tried to make up for human nature, for everyone who has ever placed themselves on the offering plate to protect others from the cruelty they know lies just under the surface of mankind’s tenuous grip on progress. I want SO badly for there to be a solution to this, for the people who idolize the Nazi party and the impact of fascism to see that the price of this path is paid in more than just blood but in soul. That they’re allowing themselves to be devoured too. I want for the centrists and the fence sitters and the idealists who want to “change it from the inside” to see how dangerous our politics have become. I want them to see that they’re losing the things that make them great in exchange for a security blanket that’s now become far far far too small to ever work for them again.

Safety found in the past is already gone, and safety found in the future is only as real as a daydream. That any ideology that promises that by “joining us now we’ll make things rough so we can make things safe in a decade” is a promise made by those who will not have to fight the battles they send you to.

I don’t know if America was ever really great, but as long as John was alive it felt great to me. There is no ideology that can replace a neighbor. No tax plan that can replace a friend. No grocery bill that can replace community and connection. No amount of budget cuts that can replace kindness. No amount of suffering from people I hate that will ever make more love. I don’t know how to make America great, but I know how to make my America great and it is not by selling out integrity and compassion and community and fucking humanity to make eggs and gas cheaper. It is by seeing and hearing the people around me. I’m not Mormon anymore, but I still know the value of mourning with those that mourn and comforting those that stand in need of comfort. I’m not Christian anymore but I still have Eyes That Can See and Ears That Can Hear. I want to make this all stop but I can’t stop the collective power of tens of millions of people so instead I listen to my MAGA coworker tell me about how sick her kid was last week. I make jokes with my Young Men’s leader. I hug my uncle. I let them see me fully, as a human and not an ideology. As a woman and not the concept of gender. As a whole person and not someone who can be easily summarized or boiled down into something short and quippy. And I let them know I can see them fully too, and I can see all their humanity as easily as they can see mine. I just have to hope that this works - that enough people can See and Hear the people in their lives who matter to them to bring them out of their personal world of forms and into the real world.

I am probably, honestly, just spiraling a little bit. I took my ADHD meds today and in addition to helping me focus they make me a little anxious so I doubt things are as bad right now as they seem. But just in case there’s any truth to the way things seem to be going, remember, and I mean this seriously: Be kinder to each other, be gayer, and read more Terry Pratchett.

And for the love of god day hello to your neighbor.

[lazulian-devil]

I am genuinely in a tiny crisis right now.

I started Into the Frayed as this small Project, trying to stress-free work on an AD and just like... Have fun with it.

It hasnt been fun in some time? I dont know If anyone noticed, but I am not... Here anymore. I dont post anymore. Ive become very quiet.

Between my job and my chronic illness, a breakup with my partner, a fuckup in prescription meds that has fucked me over for four months now and is only slowly starting to heal up and problems with my former Landlord, theres just no space for my art anymore.

I stopped writing poems. I stopped writing Altogether. I havent painted since March. I havent... Done anything, really. I just exist.

Ive read three books this entire year and its June.

And I dunno.

Its... Hard, I guess. Its hard being an artist. Its hard realising you dont live up to your standards. But I dont know where to go from here?

I kinda wish I could take a month worth of break and just figure shit out but I cant.

I am bound to sleep, work, eat and then be burned out on the weekends.

...

This is pretty depressing, ey? Dont worry, today I made summer rolls for the first time and also baked a cake. But today, I also called in sick at work because i woke up crying.

You win some, you loose some.

I think i'll just... Give myself more time. It'll be ready when its ready. It'll be done when its done. Its not gonna run away? I think?

I feel bad about this and its also 1:30 AM.

But yeah. The cake was good. And summer rolls are really fun to make, y'all oughta try those.

[lazulian-devil]

The realisation that you need your job for your hobbies but you dont have energy or passion anymore because of your job.

Its a devils bargain in which the devil openly vomits into your mouth.

[lazulian-devil]

Dogs in love is the best thing ever, dont come at me.

Happy Birthday, Coyote! It'll get better, I promise. My parents were and are questionable people at best but you'll have agency the older you get and you'll be better equipped to handle stuff. Things can - and will - change drastically in the span of a year and when you look back at this Birthday in a year, it might be bitter. But in five or ten, it wont matter anymore.

Imma sleep now, its way too late. Cheers :)

So, if anyone’s wondering how my birthday went

I spent almost the entire day crying alone in my room, because I can’t even have one single day where downstairs is not an actively hostile environment to be in. When I came downstairs for the final time I was asked why I’m choosing to be miserable, and immediately left

I tried confiding in my grandma that I actually entertained the thought of self harm for the first time today and she told me I don’t need to feel crushingly alone because I visited a stables two weeks ago. Also that downstairs is sensory hell all the time because I’m just too sensitive

[lazulian-devil]

That sounds at least somewhat nice. If you need something that will genuinely make you laugh and happy: "Dogs in love" by Jello Apocalypse. It will curr your depression momentarily, but in that fleeting Moment, you will be at peace.

Anyways, have a digital hug:

So, if anyone’s wondering how my birthday went

I spent almost the entire day crying alone in my room, because I can’t even have one single day where downstairs is not an actively hostile environment to be in. When I came downstairs for the final time I was asked why I’m choosing to be miserable, and immediately left

I tried confiding in my grandma that I actually entertained the thought of self harm for the first time today and she told me I don’t need to feel crushingly alone because I visited a stables two weeks ago. Also that downstairs is sensory hell all the time because I’m just too sensitive

[lazulian-devil]

Im so sorry that you live in an abusive environment, jesus. Is there anything you can do to make it better? Meet some friends on discord, play a comfort game, get some waffles?

So, if anyone’s wondering how my birthday went

I spent almost the entire day crying alone in my room, because I can’t even have one single day where downstairs is not an actively hostile environment to be in. When I came downstairs for the final time I was asked why I’m choosing to be miserable, and immediately left

I tried confiding in my grandma that I actually entertained the thought of self harm for the first time today and she told me I don’t need to feel crushingly alone because I visited a stables two weeks ago. Also that downstairs is sensory hell all the time because I’m just too sensitive

[lazulian-devil]

What kinda soil did you put it in because this isnt normal :D Is the pot too small? Is the soil at least partially made up of retaining materials (sand, clay, etc)? Do you just have the weirdest plant?

We'll never know.

Now I have to water my succulent again. It has been two days. It was fully upright last night. The moment the sun comes out it instantly flops over like "aaaaaauuuuuugh I need WATER I am going to DIE you must FEED ME" and then it perks up instantly when you give it water

[lazulian-devil]

Im playing The Ranch of Rivershine and its so good and makes me so happy. Excellent horse game.

My mare is called Ludwig because she looks like one and my partner didnt hate me until I named my Stallion Daisy.

Be the chaos.

[lazulian-devil]

Yeah that girl doesnt like too wet a soil. Basically get like a piece of wood and stick it into the pot every week or so. If the dirt sticks to it? You're good. If the dirt doesnt (because dry) you gotta water. Thats pretty much all.

I genuinely don't know what my succulent wants because it apparently only needs water every few months but it just rained for four days straight and the plant looked so happy during it, and now the sun's been back for a day or two and it's started wilting again