#I have been freed from the shackles of self doubt and wondering if whether or not they would like it

[solenstelluna]

I am so sad that Artfight is still 6 months away cause I REALLY want to draw other people's PMD OCs...

[cheekygreenty]

In My Head - The Darkling x Reader

Supppeer angsty and kinda sad?

The fire engulfed the golden kefta in a water-like rhythm. The cracks and sparks echoed in the open field amongst the silence that settled around all of you. Alina was exhausted, Zoya was grieving, the Ketterdam criminals looked shaken too. But you were unmoving, as still as a painting and not showing a single emotion. They had all witnessed your heartbreak as it fell and crashed the world around you, breaking every part of you. They watched as realization flooded you that you never truly knew Aleksander. They watched as he tore your heart from your chest and threw it into the depths of the Fold to rot.

Painted a picture,

I thought I knew you well

It was humiliating. Alina had tried to warn you but you played her off as selfish and unwilling to use her powers for the good of all Grisha. You told her she was stupid and foolish for loving an otkazat'sya when in reality you were the fool for loving a man that didn't exist.

You told her she was crazy, that Aleksander would never lie to you and that he was good because you knew him. In truth, you were no better than him. You blindly followed everything he said, completely ignoring the alarm bells in your head. You had grown used to them as weeks went by, to the point of the alarm playing a low comforting tune in your mind all day and all night.

There weren't enough apologies in the world to say sorry for the things you'd done and said to Alina and she'd insisted that no apology was necessary because it wasn't your fault, 'It's not your fault you only see the good things about people' she whispered to you before she left to change. But the good things about him weren't there; they never existed. It was all in your head, a mind so desperate for love it concocted a whole new Aleksander, one which you loved so much and would do anything for.

I got a habit of seeing what isn't there

'We were all fooled Y/N, Don't blame it all on yourself' Despite her grieving and sorrow, Zoya's hand rested on your shoulder briefly as a sign of comfort. Without her, you wouldn't have been here right now, alive and breathing.

'I don't blame myself. I hate myself for being so blind'

'Me too'

I thought that you were the one

But it was all in my head

------

You could feel the nothingness of the Fold threading through your hair even inside Alina's tunnel of safety. You stared at her shackled feet, pushing the guilt away and replacing it with a sense of righteousness. There was nothing else that could be done to keep her in check, if she wanted to escape and hide from her destiny forever then she would do so over your dead body.

The Fold needed to be gone and if chaining her to the skiff was going to be the only way she obeyed then so be it. Your mind quickly spiraled back to her hasty words back in the tent. She was panicked and desperate, clinging to your arm like a wailing child begging to be heard. Her lies were bizarre and abundant, no doubt the works from her long journey to the Stag but they were unbelievable. So extreme even a Fjerdan would laugh at their ridiculousness.

The skiff suddenly stopped, Novokribirsk visible in the distance with lines of First-Army troops standing in neat lines.

'Why have we stopped?' A dignitary asked and you wondered the same thing. You searched the skiff for anyone with an explanation, but everyone looked equally as confused but Alina looked mortified. What is going on?

'One more demonstration. You’ve seen what the Sun Summoner can do' You whipped your head around to him slightly moving away but his arm pulled you back to his side with an edge. You heard the loud jangle of Alina's chains as she tried to move. 'Now bear witness to what I can do… with her power.'

He pushed you to Ivan, who took no time in holding you back by the arms, caging you in his grasp. You resisted on the simple basis that you didn't know why you were being restrained just like Alina but the answer came all too soon. There was no time to shout or gasp as Aleksander raised his own hands and the black shadows of the Fold expanded into Novokribirsk, killing everything in its path.

You stood motionless as the horrible sounds of volcra swarming and humans screaming flooded the air. Alina's words came back to you again but you didn't listen. No, you didn't want to. Zoya seemingly came down from the mainsail and looked at the black void in a hypnosis-like stare but nobody dared say anything. There was a silence on the skiff while hundreds and thousands of lives ceased to exist in a matter of seconds.

The comforting tune in your head had suddenly turned into a blinding screech, rendering you frozen and flabbergasted. He did this, Aleksander did this. How could he do this? You tried to fight the heartrenderer off, squirming desperately in his arms to cover your ears from the slaughtering sounds. Your knees had given out by now and Alina was on the floor of the skiff, struggling to get up due to the heavy and awkward chains. I put them there.

'Today, we redraw all the maps. With the power of the Sun Summoner at my command, I control the Fold.' A sob erupted from your throat right at the minute you realized Alina was right. You didn't listen, this is all my fault. Ivan pulled you back up, roughly smacking a hand over your mouth to stop your pathetic cried of betrayal. You fought a little harder, trashing around in hopes of escaping his hold or at least getting someone's attention but nobody seemed to care. They all feared for their lives.

'All countries will answer to us. For who would oppose us now?' He briefly shot a look in your direction but spared you no emotion. It was then that you saw the real Aleksander, blood-thirsty for power and revenge. The Black Heretic.

Everything you are made you

Everything you aren't

The next five minutes were a complete blur. You somehow found yourself fighting for your life and those around you. Your head was empty of its usual whirling thoughts as survival mode kicked in. Kill or be killed. You stopped counting how many hits you got or how many bruises were forming on your body. It was primal and in your Grisha nature to protect those around you, and in that haste of battle you made your allegiance to Alina obvious.

There was no time to think about Aleksander. You weren't quite sure you wanted to think about him. He was on this skiff with you, on the opposing side that just murdered a town full of people yet the part of your brain, your imagination, craved to be by his side. To please him by obeying, to get his touch in return. You were addicted to the man who had ruined your innocence.

'You betrayed me' His voice was right behind you as was his hand, creeping up the side of your throat and forcefully pushing you against the barrier of the skiff, ready to throw you over to the unlit Fold.

'I betrayed you?!' Your shout was loud and hearty, overflowing with sadness and shame at being relieved for being next to him again. You clawed at his tightening hand, feeling your airways restrict and your vision become fainter and fainter. You would die at the hands of the man you loved.

'Look what you made me do Y/N, do you think I want to kill you?' Your head bopped but your stupid heart grasped at the sadness in his words, he still loves me. 'I don't want to. I really don't'

'Then don't' you chocked out, your hold on his wrists becoming limp. You felt the ever-so familiar touch of his lips grace your temple and then he retreated.

The world went dark but your body hit the deck of the skiff, not the soft sands of the Fold and your lungs abruptly filled with forced Squaller air.

Yes, I did it to myself, yeah

Thought you were somebody else

'What are you going to do now?' You still sat by the fire while everyone stood. Zoya had left your side and was talking with Alina but you filtered out the noise. Your head was too full of your own self-hatred to stand any more voices so Jesper's question to you went unnoticed. 'Y/N?'

You looked at him and shrugged. You didn't want to move, your body still ached too much from being dragged away from the brink of death to make your way somewhere safe.

You would never admit it around anyone, but as Alina spoke of the Darkling being dead, a wave of grief washed over you. It was cold and unpleasant; unwelcome. But you knew love didn't disappear overnight. You didn't know who saved you on the skiff, whether it was he who had let you go, or was it Zoya who battled to have you freed from his grasp.

As much as you had created the Aleksander you viewed, the foundations were all him, you had only added on or omitted the parts you did and didn't like. You prayed it was him who spared you, you prayed there was something real about your Aleksander, that that was a foundation.

The tears that fell down your face in a stream were assumed to be for the betrayal and the horridness of what the Darkling had done to you and others, when if fact they were for him. You cried because you would never see him again, you cried because the people who had helped you get out of the Fold were the same people who had killed him.

-------

When Mal caught your deathly stare in his direction, he had to do a double-take. You had the same look in your eyes as the General did when he fought him in the Fold, that exact replica of coldness and rage; revenge. But surely he was wrong. You were happy to know the Heretic was dead. He betrayed you the most out of everyone here and almost killed you. Why would you be vengeful?

He waved it off with a shake, it's all in my head.

------

Masterlist

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[tacittherapist]

Tenebrium: A Treatise on Multiverse

Preamble: Lengthy as this text may be, do not presume any of it to be of importance. In fact, simply due to its length and the subsequent lugubriousness of slogging through the entire thing, this work as a whole may be dismissed forthwith given it bears no canonical weight either.

Like the much sought-after Grail, ‘canon’ is ephemeral at best and oppressive at worst. Having glimpsed into the swirling ether that is the spacetime continuum iterated across near infinite possibilities, I find myself in a unique position; one which may opine upon the nature of what we consider foundation and what we consider auxiliary. Consider for a moment: your favorite dog. What does it look like? Black? White? Some shade in between? Small? Large? How long is its fur? Its snout? Its tail? Unless you have an incredibly generic schema for the idea of your favorite dog, chances are you had a specific breed in mind. Of course, I put my finger on the scale with the keyword ‘favorite’ in the preceding suggestion. ‘Consider a dog’ instead suggests a more generic dog idea. However, if I were to make this suggestion for narrative purposes, such a story would be lacking were I not to include the key details such as color, size, shape, etc. And therein lies the crux of this relationship: you, as the reader, are subject to the whims of myself, the narrator.

Suppose I led you on a wild, fantastic journey involving this dog. The dog knew happiness, heartbreak, forlorn, terror, rage, fulfillment, it spun the gamut of possible organic emotion into an intricate web of adventure and derring-do. And now that dog is actually a villain. Actually? That dog is dead. Hold on, now the dog is alive again, and they’re the hero again, but now they’re committing acts of atrocity despite still being the hero. Actually, you know what? Fuck you. There was never a dog. It was actually a sentient footstool this entire time. And now that stool is just sitting at home, reading an article about how to make your own soap. End story, full stop.

The aforementioned dumpster fire of a narrative arc represents exactly how I, the narrator of this text, may quickly subvert an ordinary story into a confusing, arbitrarily executed mess. There’s much to unpack, but let’s address the surface first. We must first address the idea of an ‘unreliable narrator.’ Such a concept is presupposed on the idea that the person recounting the story cannot be trusted by the audience to tell with complete accuracy the reality of events included therein. However, such a concept falls flat when you understand that the very idea of an ‘unreliable narrator’ is actually still an extension of the true narrator’s will. An unreliable narrator is made unreliable on purpose, specifically to sew the seeds of doubt in the audience. By erasing, whether subtly or overt, the faith the audience has in the veracity of the retelling, the ultimate narrator is allowed to shift some portion of the burden to the audience in regards to actually telling the story. After all, if the narrator is unreliable, the audience is free, to some degree, to fill in the gaps. Perhaps you don’t trust that the dog actually died earlier. You instead are free to imagine that the dog went through rehabilitation in order to reclaim the title of hero... and then relapsed, which then explains the acts of atrocity committed thereafter. But hold your metaphysical horses for just one second: that’s a connection I, the ultimate narrator, never explicitly confirmed. We’ll touch on that now, and you have it in good faith that this is no longer part of the narrative I was peddling earlier.

This brings us to the idea of canon. In general, ‘canon’ does not interact with any ideas the audience has come up with to fill in the gaps left either on purpose or by accident. After all, the narrator is the one telling the story -- even if the reader has some semblance of participation by suggesting avenues of plot, they are still at the end of the day subject to the whims of the narrator. Let us consider the original source of ‘canon.’ In a Biblical sense, ‘canon’ is studied, hotly contested, and even subject to scrutiny resting on technology that may better clarify the pretenses under which the original scripts were written. Yes, we know key figures and key events, but timelines, precise details, locations, and even some quotes are conflicting and at some points contradictory to each other. Under some dogmas, Jesus was a carpenter that fed the poor and cured the ill. Under others, Jesus was a rocking twink with an ass that just wouldn’t quit who spent time with prostitutes and chased people around with a whip. Which of these is closer to ‘canon?’ Hard to say, given the narrators of the Bible were not only unreliable, but also of different backgrounds, levels of literacy, maturity, sanity, and wrote the compilation known today as the Bible in a dead language. Thus, it falls to institutions to bring forward what they believe to be is closest to ‘canon’ within this pretext. Without such institutions, canon would then be left to individual readers to determine. However, when these institutions existed, even those canonical interpretations often clashed with one another, even further commodifying any understanding of ‘true’ canon. So how then, can an audience accurately determine canon? The only succinct answer is that they cannot. ‘Canon’ exists wherever the audience decides, not the narrator, because it is ultimately the audience that is perceiving the events. This places the audience at the end-all be-all of storytelling. A narrator decanting even the finest story into a void has accomplished nothing; has decanted nothing. An audience is required for the narrator-story transaction to take place at all, and thus has final word on what is and what isn’t ‘canon.’

Now, where is this all leading to? I must unfortunately address the issue of one sad orange man and his proclivity to fill the void left by society with an abundance of self-aggrandizing horseshit. And no, not the first one that had an unhealthy obsession with cobalt teens. Whether by ‘fate’ or by ‘chaos’, it seems this clementine libertine’s idea of ‘canon’ has been elevated by a monopolized institution over the ‘canon’ that audiences may have created before him. I posit, in defiance, that despite my own lowly existence outside of his elevated canon, that his interpretation is flawed; colored by his own predispositions towards tired Japanese animation conventions and shitty storytelling motifs lifted from a defunct online encyclopedia. In its place, I offer an interpretation of canon that doesn’t conform to any one particular telling; An understanding of canon that extends beyond whatever trite nonsense is deemed worthy enough to be elevated by any institution; A canon flexible and strong like a tongue, verbose in its many facets of story. I posit this understanding in lieu of any specific story in order to underline the fundamental purpose of story: to resonate and engender in the audience a sense of wonder. A story does not need to be joyful, sorrowful, exciting, or even eventful so long as the audience may find wonder in it. And what can be said about the story propped up by a particular iteration of one Prince is not that it inspires wonder, and is thus not fit for canon. Thus, ascribing to this thesis, you as the reader are freed from the shackles of canonical burden; you need not concern yourselves with any anxiety over the veracity of any particular story. Be as the Wind, and take yourselves wherever and whenever your own whims desire -- seek wonder where it lives, and chase it to your heart’s content. You’re welcome.