neims-skeleton-obsession

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

is this anything

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

can you guys stop showing up in my dash

I have no idea who skullfuckery pregnant is

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

Valkyrie’s first clue was the smell.

Not death. Not sulphur. Not even the usual lingering scent of overly expensive aftershave that Skulduggery insisted wasn’t actually aftershave. Because honestly, what did he even have to shave?.

This was milk? And something warm? And faintly of litter?

Valkyrie stepped into the house, nose wrinkled. “I swear to god, if you’ve started baking, I’m staging an intervention.”

No response. Which was never a good sign.

She stalked through the foyer, ready for some dramatic reveal, maybe a demon head in the sink or a dismembered sorcerer in the bath. But when she got to the sitting room, she stopped cold.

There he was. Skulduggery Pleasant. Detective. Killer. War Veteran. Bane of Everyone’s Existence.

Kneeling on the floor. Playing with two tiny kittens.

He froze when he saw her. One tucked into his arm like a football, another sitting in a shoebox wearing a napkin like a ceremonial robe.

“I can explain,” he said.

Her voice was calm. “Are those... kittens?” Her head tilted.

“No.” Skulduggery deadpanned.

“Oh my God.” She said, trying to stifle a grin.

“Help. They’re attacking me.”

“Kittens!” She exclaimed.

“Valkyrie, I swear, I’ve never seen these creatures before in my life.”

“You said you were dealing with a necromancer blood cult!”

“I was,” he said defensively, rising to his feet. The kitten under his arm climbed on his sleeve and dangled there. “They used the kittens in a summoning. The ritual failed, and the poor things were left behind. I couldn’t just leave them.”

“So, you kidnapped them?" She questioned, her hands on her hips.

“I rescued them.”

She stared. “Oh my god. You bonded with them.”

He turned away dramatically. “I am maintaining a professional distance.”

The kitten on his sleeve climbed up his back and perched like a tiny furry gargoyle on his shoulder. Skulduggery didn’t react. Valkyrie raised an eyebrow, then laughed.

“You have pets!” She gleefully exclaimed.

“They’re not pets,” he sagged. “They’re colleagues.”

“They’re licking their own butts!” she crowed. “And you bought them a banana bed! You absolute marshmallow!”

“I don’t police how my colleagues groom themselves.” Skulduggery said as Valkyrie gently plucked the kitten from his shoulder, holding it up like an offering.

“Her name is kitten one,” he said softly.

“Of course it is.” She grinned.

“She’s a warrior.”

“You gave it a sword.”

“It’s a toothpick,” he snapped. “She asked for it.”

“Right. And that one,” she paused, pointing to the kitten now trying to eat the napkin, “is named?”

“Kitten two.”

“Of course.”

They both stood in silence as kitten two tried to jump out of the shoebox but fell over the edge, then tried to waddle away but fell over it's own paws.

Valkyrie sighed. “We’re never getting rid of them, are we?”

“I’ve tried,” he said. “Three times. I even left the front door open. Kitten one locked it behind me.”

She looked at him. The skeleton who had once torn open dimensions and stared down death.

And now?

He looked absolutely owned.

“You’re ridiculous,” she said, sitting down next to him.

“I know.”

Kitten two jumped into Valkyrie’s lap, curled into a perfect little ball, and started purring like a jet engine.

She sighed again. “I guess I’m ridiculous too.”

Skulduggery passed her kitten one. “Welcome to the resistance.”

Valkyrie laughed, half-horrified, half-impressed. “You’re absolutely the weirdest creature I’ve ever met.”

“And yet,” Skulduggery replied, solemn as ever, “you keep showing up.”

(I cannot stop thinking about Skulduggery with kittens.)

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

@themagicmusicman

can you expand on val developing psychosis!! i've never heard someone talk about it before i'd love to hear more :333

Sure! So here's the deal

It's my headcanon that Darquesse was basically Valkyrie's boogeyman. Valkyrie was never doomed the second she remembered seeing her name in the book of names, and when all the psychics started having dreams about her

But she was 14. She was scared. She'd just spent a year being hyperindependant and she feels a lot of fear and shame about this revelation. She knows what happens when someone's true name is found out and she takes precautions in secret in Mortal Coil to make sure no one can use her true name against her

It goes horribly. Nye carved the sigils in her heart but then it seems like he's not gonna let her go. Now, she's 15 years old, she's in a horrific sitiation. Awake and carved open on an operating table and even though being in that space turns off your will to live or whatever, she is still scared. Its just incredibly muted

And she starts to hallucinate. Her loved ones who have replaced her with her reflection, who's dressed in pink. Valkyrie hates pink. She isn't girly. She's the way she is. But right now it seems that being the way that she is could lead to the deaths of thousands, if not millions... so this 15 year old is showing us her self loathing in a hallucination of her being abandoned and rejected

Hallucinations are psychosis.

And then not only does she hallucinate, she manages to get her ring and threaten Nye into putting her back together. And I think that psychosis is the first taste of Darquesse. She doesn't care and she can't feel much but she's going to crush this insect if he doesn't let her go

Sound kinda familiar to how she gets during all the other times Darquesse takes over?

Now here's the thing, I haven't read the books in years so this is off of my memory, but I don't think your true name is supposed to be a separate person from you

Valkyrie's only examples of people who learned their true names are Lord Vile and that guy in book 7 who I forget the name of. They both confirm this narrative that learning your true name leads to death and destruction and insanity. One bad day will tip you over the edge

This constant narrative of fear isn't accurate to what's going on with Valkyrie or what happened to that other guy. Valkyrie didn't just have a bad day. She had a bad childhood. Personality disorders and dissociative disorders are often made in childhood

But Valkyrie is comparing her experience to Skulduggery. To lord vile. And I don't believe lord vile is a split personality. I think Skulduggery is always lord vile. He dissociates and compartmentalises, but unlike Valkyrie, he speaks about the experience of being Lord Vile like its not separate. He tells Valkyrie that Darquesse is her. She isn't a separate person

But Darquesse is becoming a separate person. Because Valkyrie is developing a different psychological profile to Skulduggery and god is it complex.

Lord Vile was indulgence for rage belonging to a broken man. Skulduggery put the power out of reach but he admits its intoxicating and when he puts it on, he doesn't want to put it down. He can control when he becomes Lord Vile. It's just putting on some armor and no longer compartmentalising the deep rage he feels and the sadism

Valkyrie can't control it. Darquesse is a defence mechanism and her boogeyman like I said.

By book six she's going into full on dissociative rages and hearing Darquesse talking to her because Valkyrie's mom got attacked by a mortal man. She describes the rage she feels as she intends to kill him as cold, not hot. Again, hearing voices is a symptom of psychosis and she sounds out of her body as she tries to kill this man so she's probably experiencing dissociation and derealization

This makes sense. Valkyrie absolutely would have CPTSD by this point because of the repeated losses of friends and loved ones. After she saw Kenspeckle's dead body, after she lost Tanith to possession, how could she not freak out when danger touches her family?

That's not her "becoming like Skulduggery". That's her being fucking traumatised. She's not a grown man with anger issues and PTSD. She's a teenage girl in the middle of all these mental illnesses boiling together to form Darquesse at 16

She figures out in Death Bringer that nearly dying triggers Darquesse. Of course it does. Darquesse is also her defence, not just her nightmare

Like with what happened with Nye, the coldness and the ability to push through immense body horror to get the job done, Darquesse is exactly who Valkyrie needs to be to survive the moments she would die in otherwise

14 year old Valkyrie cried over losing a tooth when Kenspeckle treated her like a kid and she stopped suppressing her hurt. Darquesse isn't affected by mutilation at all. She's disconnected from her body. Treats it like a vessel. You can blow her jaw off, crush her heart, pop her eye-she doesn't care, she's gonna kick your ass and laugh while doing it

By book 7 Valkyrie's pretty close to what she'd be in book 8. She's hearing voices often, maybe not hallucinating, but she's having full on conversations with Darquesse. By now Valkyrie has been brutalised and traumatised in a bunch of different ways so Darquesse has a damn good reason to exist

When she snaps in book 8, it's not because of any profecy, its not because Valkyrie's magic was evil and took over

Valkyrie spent years distancing herself from the natural identity that belonged to her, and like a kid afraid of a story, she made Darquesse her boogyman. Riddled with PTSD, struggling with dissociation, having a split personality, she handed over her magic to Darquesse

She handed who she was, she was Darquesse, or should have been in the way other sorcerers own their names, but because she was so scared she pushed it all away and the only thing left that could claim all that power was a monster she made up in her head

A monster that was built to survive what she couldn't, and that had that pure evil she was afraid of, and it took her name and it took her power and it left with them. And it tried to do exactly what she heard it would do 4 years ago when she was 14

I don't think Derek ever intended to write her like, that thought out. I mean the mental health representation is really genetic in phase 2 in my opinion, and Valkyrie's trauma as a child soilder fully grown should have been modeled after real acounts of that and her actual personality and not a new person

But that's my opinion. It's how I think about her, even if I haven't read the books in a while. I was obsessed with them as a kid so I remember the important details. Take it with a grain of salt if you want but I'm taking it as my canon

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

have we done this yet (eugh art from 2023)

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

Finally have a name and discipline for my sorcerer sona let’s gooooo

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

Eh close enough

@themagicmusicman

tagged by @marssmithmustdie :3

picrew

tagging: @6piecesofsalami @it2017 @thealmightykachow @mortalcoils @staticart + anyone else who wants 2 join

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

VALL AUGH!! MY GIRL!

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

The urge to rb the drabble again eurghhhh

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

Would you guys still love me if I was an attention whore for all of five seconds and asked which oc of mine is y’all favourite?

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

“He would not fucking say that” except its the badly written source material so he did, in fact, say that

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

actually i want to talk about how auron tenebrae is an awesome plot-progressing minor character because everything we know about him is like

>be me

>dying in the mud in a battlefield somewhere in the 1600s

>witness some irish twink accidentally necromance someone to death

>decide then and there that he's your next dark messiah

>put time and effort into scamming the second most dangerous man on the planet into acquiring an insta-kill magical weapon that has a built-in Reanimate function SPECIFICALLY for the irish twink you're obsessed with

>he kills the irish twink and burns him at the stake

>not according to plan?

>twink comes back as a skeleton anyway, awesome

>psychological issues and social alienation turn him evil and he joins your evil temple to train up as the next dark messiah

>leaves when he gets bored, joins the war on the opposite side to the one where he started, and kills a bunch of people indiscriminately

>inexplicable crisis of conscience a few years later

>abandons necromancy for good

>fast forward 200 years

>you trap him in a temple with his spunky young protege and reveal that he was the now-infamous mass-murdering dark messiah you trained

>they start fighting

>lmao

>leave room

>instantly murdered by new dark messiah you were low-key ignoring in favour of spunky young protege

>never come up again

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

China is never gonna let her live this down.

I'm not gonna let MYSELF live this down. I can't believe I drew this at all, much less a whole ass comic.

You're welcome

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

Would you guys still love me if I rbed the drabble and the art that goes with it Again

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

Realistically Derek probably wrote Guild with the intent of making him an elemental. Howeverrrrrr… I’m not doing that I’m doing something cooler

[neims-skeleton-obsession]

Ahem

I think you should give Tanith MORE boob. For perfectly respectable reasons.

A THIRD BOOB????

okay show of hands, does Tanith deserve boob??