octakiseronliker

[octakiseronliker]

Had to screenshot this instead of reblogging because the thing I almost said in the tags at the prospect of Colum being over 7 feet tall compared to certain other individuals conveniently unnamed in this post was so incredibly disgusting I would have been immediately extradited to the United Kingdom so Tamsyn Muir could deal with me personally

[octakiseronliker]

Guards? That man holds virtue like a font, and wisdom like a well. Seize and milk him.

[octakiseronliker]

*giving you a loving handjob* and you love me. btw. youre in love with me. *gives it a cute little kiss* and you love me the most. right? *puts it in my mouth* sayw it or ilw bite as hard as i can

[octakiseronliker]

your post about the cock sizes of these characters portrays a lack of understanding of their role in the narrative.

[octakiseronliker]

Care and feeding of your knight includes deferring to his wisdom in matters of your personal safety, complimenting the surety of his blade, and finding one non-sexual command that makes him hard enough to black out every time it's spoken.

[octakiseronliker]

Surely the tall, battle hardened, scarred, hairy, rude, vulgar, disheveled, but loyal and ferocious knight I have sworn in as my maiden daughter’s personal guard would not dare to look upon her fairness and her his roguish ways and dare to defy the marriage arrangement I have put in place for her.

[octakiseronliker]

I keep getting kicked out of esoteric orders when they learn I have an initiations fetish. They try to blindfold me for the ordeals but I just keep giggling and twirling my hair.

[octakiseronliker]

boring take from real 21st century idiots: bdsm is bad because it's basically torture

interesting take from a fictional 14th century monk: torture is bad because it's basically sex

[octakiseronliker]

I'm a simple reader, I like it when the pov switches back and forth between one character thinking "I am so ugly.....too rugged and broad shouldered and good at chopping logs to ever be attractive to this beautiful ethereal person.....even now they stare at me in disgust" and the other character who is thinking "NUT but I must control my passion.....they know how lecherous I regard them and pity me for my hopeless lust NUT NUT NUT"

[octakiseronliker]

THE devotionshipping trope is "are they loyal to me or to my title" and the answer HAS to be that they genuinely don't differentiate between the two and are confused and slightly alarmed by the question

[octakiseronliker]

[octakiseronliker]

@thesaintofpatience made a post about this the other day that I didn't want to straight-up hijack, but necrocav roleswap AU for the Eighth is one of my favorite topics to sit down with a cup full of nails and a bowl full of barbed wire to think about, so I did also want to post about it because it MAKES ME CRAZY. Very long post ahead, as ever.

I'm personally strongly opposed to ageswapping here because I think so much of Silas's attitude and actions toward Colum are shaped by the fact that he's never known a day of his life without him. This leaves us with a Master Templar in his mid-thirties with a sixteen-year-old cavalier half his size constantly dogging his footsteps. How do we get here?

OP (are we on a first-name basis? Hi) mentioned the possibility of Colum having a previous cavalier who was killed in an accident and necessitated a rush-job replacement in the form of Silas, who in many ways makes a poor substitute. I like this, but the thought that initially came to me was rather that Colum had previously never had a cavalier with whom he was sufficiently genetically compatible to be a truly powerful siphoner.

We know that compatibility has something to do with blood type per ch. 28:

“Three brothers with different blood types, because we couldn’t tell what you’d be and which of us you’d need.”

This makes sense given how tied-up bloodletting and spirit work are in TLT, particularly re: speech to the dead and stele travel (shoutout Hannah @katakaluptastrophy for more on this ⁠— I had planned to link a specific post but honestly just search the word "blood" on her blog). However, other than that it's all incredibly vague. I'm thinking about the Master Templar raised with two brothers close to him in age, one of whom should have made a suitable cavalier given their close relation, and it just ⁠— didn't work.

So now you have a Master Templar who spends 16 to 21 years being able to siphon and otherwise perform Eighth necromancy, but it's not good enough. There is no replacement for Colum, though growing one rapidly shot even higher on the House's list of priorities when it became clear neither planned contingency would work. It's a long decade or two of the Eighth subtly turning inward (as is implied in the book by their ceasing participation on the cavalier duelling circuit) to shield the Order from the fact that its master is insufficiently armed while it tries to devise a solution. This leads to experimentation with stepping back up Colum's family tree in the name of cultivating a viable offshoot as soon as possible.

You could go a lot of different ways here ⁠— personally I'm doing some handwaving for the purpose of this post. Maybe early assessment of Silas seemed promising even though he was sickly and small ⁠— maybe he was the only one or one of a few to survive to birth ⁠— &c. as you will. Either way, the first time Colum tries to siphon him ⁠— and it does not feel good to siphon from a child, particularly an undersized child barely ten years old, of whom Colum has grown quite fond ⁠— Colum lights up like a fucking firecracker. Baby, that's the Master fucking Templar.

The Order remains a little hush-hush on this, imo, because it does seem a bit in poor taste, but what matters is that the House is being headed once again by a necromancer at the height of his power rather than one being forced to make do with what's available.

What does all of this mean for Silas?

Colum makes very clear in GTN that his entire life is his cavaliership. There is no separable distinction between Colum Asht, the person, and Colum the Eighth, cavalier primary.

“Oath? Ten years of training, before you were even born. ... Ten years of antigens, antibodies, and waiting—for you. I am the oath.”

That said, Colum remembers what it was to wait. Colum's childhood was shaped by the absence of Silas; Silas's childhood was shaped by the constant presence of Colum.

So what of an Eighth cavalier who, in addition to training his entire life to serve the Master Templar, grew up as a small child who hero-worshipped him? We know from GTN that Silas thinks Colum is both inherently morally good (ch. 28) and physically/spiritually invincible (the latter which of course ultimately causes both their deaths — chs. 18, 34). In canon, these things point not only to the qualities of Colum as a person that Silas respects and admires, but additionally to Colum's effectiveness as a tool for Silas's use. We also know that as a child, Silas "[took] everything [Colum] said as gospel" per ch. 28. In a world where he's Master Templar rather than the cavalier primary, this sentiment is exacerbated dramatically by the fact that everything Colum says is gospel.

In a world where Silas was Colum's cavalier, taught his entire life that serving Colum was the destiny granted him by the Emperor and that he should be grateful for the honor, one can see how this would contribute to Silas's inexorable religious fervor. Silas's effectiveness as a tool for Colum lies in a very different sense of duty, honor, and service: he is not responsible for Colum's care, which is a major driving force in canon for Colum's feelings about Silas, but rather his physical defense and necromantic power. He's not responsible for watching Colum grow up, raising him with a specific sense of morality, or otherwise shaping him in any way; he's a conduit and a weapon, and he's proud to be those things when in many ways Colum would much rather he just be a teenage boy.

So we already have a seething religious zealot at the best of times, who rather than being aggressively sheltered and shut up in contemplation as the Master Templar has been trained to give up his body wholly to his necromancer and wage holy war from an extremely young age. We know that the Eighth raise necrocav pairs with particularly early awareness of their roles, to the degree that Judith, who (for perspective) joined the military at age 6 (ch.32), notes that Silas would have understood his position from young childhood.

Then we have a Master Templar who, rather than being hailed as a child prodigy capable of immensely powerful necromancy, scraped along for nearly two decades doing what he could do, knowing it was inadequate, thoroughly washed in the blood of the Emperor but wondering how and why the Emperor would put him through a trial so directly harmful to the Order and its interests. Colum's faith in the Emperor and adherence to Eighth religious beliefs is effectively unshakable in canon even when it actively harms and oppresses him. But this isn't about Colum as the Master Templar, who would likely still gladly lay down and take his lashes in the name of serving the Emperor. This is about the ways in which Colum has failed the Order for reasons beyond his control, knowing that he's been kept in this role so long only because it's proven nearly impossible to replace him in a timely fashion.

You have a man whose faith was already shot through with doubt he can't acknowledge as the foremost religious leader of the Nine Houses. This man is then put in charge of a small child — likely in a substantially less involved fashion than canon, given that his main responsibilities are to the system rather than serving and caring for a single religious official — whose job is to fight and die for him, a grown man. This child adores him and believes he can do no wrong, and grows into a physically weary teenager in obvious chronic pain who nevertheless fiercely insists that it is the honor of his life and his duty to the Emperor for the Master Templar to exercise the right to wear away at his health and well-being in the name of necromantic power and religious leadership.

These people arrive at Canaan House not only performing a deeply unpopular and offputting form of necromancy to begin with, but additionally effectively executing an act of ritualized religious child abuse every time they do so, which no one was really aware was going on until now. The strange divisions of power between them in canon are obviously different, but still present: a man with no replacement lined up for the position of the highest official bar the Emperor and his Saints of the Nine Houses' theocracy, whose ability to maintain that position and avoid throwing the Houses into a massive power vacuum depends on his ability to scrape away at the soul of a teenage boy he cares deeply for who's absolutely frothing at the mouth about the necessity of his doing so.

What happens next? How does this impact the Eighth's attitude toward Lyctorhood — when the cavalier primary isn't shutting his eyes and silently accepting his death, but demanding that Colum use him as he will to ascend to the station of Saint? To finally be able to wield the full extent of his power independent of an external party after years of failing to do so with inadequate substitutes? When does Colum draw the line between his responsibility to the system, the Order, and the Emperor, and his care for the child to whom the Emperor has bound him in contract, who he loves and has actively been harming for over five years?

[octakiseronliker]

what people you don’t realize is that you can be both a maid and a knight to your princess

[octakiseronliker]

trust me, possessively stroking your hair while my other arm holds you tight and prevents you from moving is vital to our alliance

[octakiseronliker]

Every time I see this I think oh it’s such a shame when an omega hits puberty and starts vying for alpha attention. :/ Dying his hair, rouging his lips, adorning his neck even under his collar smh. Is this what we want our children looking up to? Is this kind of obscenity really how we want to represent ourselves on the world stage, Canada?

[octakiseronliker]

[octakiseronliker]

Screenshotting this instead of rbing it a second time with my unrelated fandom commentary where OP has to see it but I've been thinking about this for weeks. What else is there to say. He could say this every single night if he wanted and Colum would just nod and say goodnight back. Good night. I am your favourite.