starryeyed-seer

[starryeyed-seer]

New OC finally has? A design?? Been stuck for ages on it, but kept leaning towards this shaved half of head, tattoo look. Usually, their eye is in better shape... or better hidden.

This is.... LIVID LOVEDAY! (They/she) A name you would not recognise as being medieval (though even if you did, it's still Off)

They are many, many things, and none of them true. The only true thing about them is something which cannot be remembered:

a long time ago, there was a pair of celestial lovers. one began to die, and no mercy of law could be found to stop this. the pair conspired to find an answer beyond knowledge, knowing of a place-beyond-light: the beloved gave what strength it could, and the lover changed its body into something which could survive in the night. The lover seeks something to save the beloved, not knowing what that could be, and what is possible within impossibility. to survive the transition, it had to forget what it was, and trust only the memory of love and duty to guide it.

Or...... Livid is a zailor with aspirations towards the Mountain. They are often at zee, a crewmate on many ships full of stories of adventure and travel. They are covered in tattoos which mark these tales. The tales change though. The dates don't add up. But they don't seem to be lying, either. They talk of a beloved, far at home in London, ill and in need of a miracle. They know they need to save them. They don't seem to know how, or their face, or how long they've been away... and the more this is revealed to them, the thinner the veil between their nightmares and reality becomes.

Livid has lived many lives under many names, and has been in the Neath for well over a hundred years now. They can't recall anything that is out of place with their internal narrative, so from their perspective they've only been a zailor for like, 7 years. Several times, they have had a Hard Reset where they have consumed souls, reshaped their vessel, and begun anew.

[starryeyed-seer]

(Firmament spoilers):

It's kinda wild how long it's been clear Tatterdemalion escaped from the dawn machine... and how it hasn't actually come up or been expanded upon. Like, the main plot is ELSEWHERE, I get it!, but also it's implied and pretty much confirmed by chapter 2. One of your crew is the creator of the dawn machine. Does... he even realize who she is? Can we touch base with him on this soon pls

[starryeyed-seer]

Year of the Snake 🐍 Happy Lunar New Year! 🌞

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I never posted this separately... a papercraft Sol i did recently! Very simple design, EXCEPT.... i then spent a long while drawing 77 7-pointed stars on its robes.

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So close to finisheddddd

After I should do some non fl papercraft....... but also i kinda think I could do a dawn machine

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The Star

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Art fight WOULD be cool i always say, but. Art is hard! I need better new full bodies for my ocs, and my fav character designs rn aren't my ocs— i like my ocs a lot but haven't done enough with them (but also I'm too fatigued to do many things)(so I just keep drawing the bazaar and sol and such)

Speaking of, in general I continue to be busy, sigh. Very long big book review I'm chipping away at, gonna DM soon for a few weeks, doing intensive therapy, and have new social events twice a week >_< art fight.... would be really cool to do. I LOVE drawing ocs for people. But sigh, it's probably too ambitious!!

We will see....!

[starryeyed-seer]

The first lines of Creatures of Heaven was in my head way before I had anything else idea wise, and I still am very fond of it

Nothing in this fic is human and can be understood by human gender— the use of pronouns is all about the characters are defined. She not as a woman but as a vessel— a ship in flight, and empty containing, an object. He not as in him but as in Him, the importance and holy-definition of the divine— He as in Him, as in a pronoun on its own rather than an item. Only the sun, by the rules of the Chain, is truly a person.

She as in a daughter— the role of a daughter, the item of a child. Like so many, it is Stone's destiny to become a long lost daughter. He as in a tool— a weapon, a soldier, a lesser he who still can't be referred to with his own merit, only the title granted by someone greater.

Several times, the sun is a lowercase he/him. In the dark, in the most treacherous of the Messenger's thoughts, she understands Him as he: less than, and so more equal. Maybe neither of them are people under the chain, and maybe that makes them equal.

[starryeyed-seer]

It'll be who knows how long until chapter 7 of creatures of heaven is done, but i finished the second scene and really really like how it has gone, so I'm gonna share what I have so far :)

You don't need context of other chapters to understand what is going on. Basically they're in their #divorceEra but neither is able or willing to discuss or acknowledge it.

Also, in the first scene, Mr Veils is there. DW about it.

Length: 1,500

Content warnings: (Technically) cannibalism, overeating, vomit— all quite mild and artsy

—

Within the shelter of the witherways, under the light of no sun, the Messenger does not bask— she hungers.

It is not quite dark in the tree-burrow. Dim roots cast her skin in carmine-black light. It is only on the long journeys she is allowed rest, to feed her aching feet. Her fingers dig at rotting wood and peel mycelium from the walls.

She is not the only creature taking refuge among the refuse. The damp air is punctuated with flutters and creaks, rot and rummaging impossible to differentiate. Rather than mask her digging, she clicks her dorsal plates— a constant rhythm warning all to keep away.

“Lost,” comes the voice of a fool. She twists in her burrow, claws at the ready.

“Hungry,” she corrects. “Little bird, foolish owl, do you know the Name of the one you seek to make prey? Be gone, or be made into something worse.” She cannot see the visitor. It is wise enough to keep a distance.

“O Courier of Pallid-Gold— your Name is more than known,” its voice is air, light as silk. “You are returning to your master now. You tarry.”

“I hunger,” she repeats, tasting the damp and not finding the intruder. She taps her claws in staccato rhythms as she sidles out of her burrow. “I know well your flesh, and how little it will sate me.”

“It sent you to the lands of the Saffronic Lord.”

“It is a violation of Law to read the mail of a King.” She pokes out, tendrils hunting for the slightest tremor.

“What law? I see none.” It purrs. “Only the letters and the light, only a Courier who feasts for nights upon nights. The journey before this one was to the Saffronic. The one after shall be as well.”

“You are canny for your kin.” She scuttles out of her hole, searching the far branches of the witherways for the crimson gaze of her guest.

“How many golden millennia has it been?”

“Is this how you hunt, night owl? Needles to the skin?” she says. Then: a soft noise from behind her, the rustle of fabric in the wind. It is clinging to the ceiling of the burrow, in a niche which had escaped her notice. “Or is this what you hoard— inadvisable decisions?”

She strikes at the visitor with her tail, barb aimed to impale. The visitor drops with anticipatory speed, twirling on silent wings as it darts away from her tendrils and claws. “We might have spoken,” it says, the words a wake as it sails into the darkness.

“We have,” she says.

She returns to her hunger.

His mail would be late, again.

A long, long time ago, the Messenger would visit the surface of the sun warmed Earth. Her fingers would reach into the soil, and her eyes would close, and she would mourn.

He allowed this.

Now He does not.

His world is blue and gold and green and beautiful. What worthy fruit the deathrattle has born! His table is heavy with harvest and at last He may be satiated.

Iron teeth and aureate tongue devour ripe fruit— one, one, one. It will end, when the hour comes for tithes, but He was starved. Of course He gorges. Of course He hungers.

The Messenger waits and wonders what they taste of, these children, and if she tastes better. If she threw herself at Him, if she swam into His eye, if she drowned within His jaws— would He tell her, then, before He swallowed? Would He tell her— would He say—

Would He hunger, when she was all gone?

Would He miss her?

(If only for her flavour).

“Here I am, O Lord,” she calls.

“O Messenger.” The turn of His gaze. He does not look at her with desire.

“O Lord.”

“Messenger.”

She does not answer and He does not question. This is not the way of things, but theirs is not the way of things. Let silence speak— it cannot, but for a moment the God and the Messenger look at each other, and nothing else exists.

His voice shatters it, and everything is there once more. “I have been waiting for you.”

“I am late,” she speaks, knowing otherwise it would never be said.

“I know. I have been waiting.”

He outstretches one arm, and watches her with one face. She crawls to Him and buries her face against His fingers as she is read. Six hands do not touch her, and six faces do not gaze at her.

It does not take long.

Her Lord threads a singular word into her flesh: coordinates and instruction. The next move in the game He plays with the Saffronic; perhaps this time He will win. (Perhaps He loses so that He may continue to play.)

The letter sears against her, agitating her blood until it boils. She is His Messenger: now she is to leave, so that years from now she may return. Now she must do as her bones command, because her body knows no other way. Her legs ache with the need to run, gnawing the longer she resists.

His hand withdraws, and she is set adrift. It is cold on the outskirts of His attention, at the shadow of His table.

“I am starving,” she lies. “I cannot leave without food.”

She shivers below the shade of His high table, the passing of a cloud before her sun. He is obscured, as much as He can ever be, as she drifts in the solar winds.

His voice is a whisper, when heard in the shadows. “Whither are the witherways? The shattered copse of Yesteryear's King? You called it a feasting ground to last seven thousand years more.”

“I have not eaten,” she lies. “My Lord, I am hollow. My legs will fail mere steps from your kingdom. Your message shall be lost as my body is devoured. I will not make it. I will not return.”

The Earth turns past in its slumber. How blessed, how sweet— the gentle curves of rivers and sea, where craters have blossomed, blue and gold and beautiful, so beautiful. The moon by its side watches over its sleep, silver dappled sunlight protecting the land from true night.

It hurts the Messenger, when the planet spins away. His light is sharp and sudden, and His eye is upon her. “Is that true?”

“Am I lying?”

She believes that the stillness of His tongue is her answer. She speaks for Him, as messengers are wont to do.

“No, Lord, I repeat only truth,” she lies. “I am ravenous, I am starved. One mere step outside your light and I would surely perish.”

“Then you must eat.”

“Then I must be fed.”

In everything they have not said, there is more they have not done. What would she be, if measured by all she could not? (And He— he would not exist at all).

They are too far apart, yet the distance between their eyes is an iron rod; She cannot rise to Him, He will not reel her. They are too distant to speak like this. They are witnessed by an orrery of eyes.

He blinks.

The mirror-moon is all that remains of his light, a stream of silver half-illuminating the Kingdom. Law withers in the shadows and the Messenger tastes ice underneath her tongue.

A clatter in the darkness, of glass and stone, and there in the blink (in the dark, in the night), the king has toppled his chalice. There in the empty (in the half-dim, in the dream-light) of his dining table, manna rains upon the Messenger.

She takes and she takes, pushing past what her body says about her hunger— what does her body know of being, here where it cannot be seen? The food of the gods is wax and wick, gum to her jaws, clay to her gut— she is not fire, and it will not melt as it is meant to, taste as it is meant to, fuel her as it is—

But it tastes like Him. Not the ash of after but the furnace of now, the eternity of promise and the certainty of glory. It is truth because it can be nothing else, it is truth because it has been shaped to be so, born to be so, not the end of the leash but the Chain in its entirety— the line never ending, the word ever lasting, a candle among a billion which from a distance resembles an ever lasting bonfire.

She will be ill. Only when the universe stops holding its breath will she stop. It tastes like Him. It looks like her.

It tastes of her.

This she had not known, but she knows everything when all that exists is this flavour and a speckle of moonlight. This is her— this is him— yes, this is them, and Stone (O Stone!). It is gritty and scrapes at her throat, and she will be ill, but in each soul she consumes, it is her taste that lingers.

The lights flick on, and the Messenger lays in a pool of blood and sick. Animal that she is, she has been licking her Master's wine off the floor— beast that she is, she can be excused, and this can be forgotten.

Hungry as she will be, empty and needing and wanting as she will be, she looks to the sun and the sun looks to her, and there is a letter stitched to her skin which is begging to be delivered.

[starryeyed-seer]

My unpleasant medical thing went very unpleasantly* and I'm gonna find a way to take this out on the cosmos [probably draw suncrab or the bazaar in a fun outfit or something silly]

(*I don't care to give exact details but do want to clarify this doesn't mean I've been newly ill or learned something terrible, it just was really bad. It's over now, though depending I may have another in a few weeks)

[starryeyed-seer]

If you're wondering why I'm posting a bunch, etc, the answer is typically some variety of "not doing well with my mental and or physical health". I hope you block tags if you don't want to see it, and that the posting is at all interesting if you do

[starryeyed-seer]

for some reason been thinking about Storm lately ⛈⛈⛈

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The reason I have decided to make Storm purple when I draw him is an unsubstantiated headcanon. Ultimately best we know aeginae like him are dark grey tones, it'd suit him more to be stormy coloured... but my headcanon: bc Aeginae are dragons that eat time, erasing forbidden things, I like to think they're full of Irrigo!

Plus, Storm has been dead from like the moment he entered the Neath... we don't know much about this incident still, but I like to imagine the Nadir is formed from his irrigo blood— he died at the high point of the roof, his blood pooled at the lowest point. Maybe Sol even sent him to the Neath, knowing he'd die, in order to create the Nadir— we know the irrigo there helps hide the Neath from Judgements, and it's mysterious why there's so much of it in the Nadir.... so i think it would totally track Sol is responsible creating it.

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Oh nostalgia items we're really in it now...

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I hope I'm not just the guy who really likes the bazaar to you, but also the guy who really likes Stone

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Neat accessory, made of real bat wing and everything

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admit it. you’re mad at me for secreting a black sludge that turned all the animals into bigger scarier animals