#Per aaravos' demands

[raayllum]

what fae like qualities do you believe aaravos has?

I don't know enough about the fae to say definitively (I've read some works depicting fae, such as The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser from the 1500s, A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare, some other folklore myths) but I try to stay away from sources that are too Christianized for stuff that's more Pagan / northern and western Europe and the 1500s has plenty already.

When in doubt I'm loosely using wikipedia / old class notes for reference but if there's a site or source I think is cool and helpful I'll note it down below.

There is some that are generally common knowledge, such as:

Fae being mischevious tricksters with very particular phrasing. They don't tend to often be outright malevolent as a motivation, but often do harm to humans anyway either due to ignorance or blue-orange morality.

Blue-orange morality (for those who don't want to watch a video) is basically when a creature or being does not have a morality that operates that we would define it (on a spectrum of ethical right or wrong actions per consequence or intention). A good example is the spirits from ATLA (not LOK) or One-One from Infinity Train. He's a helpful little robot guy and he loves his friends, but he is ultimately bound and operates within the Train's rules. It's not that he can't deter from the Train's rules without distress or that he doesn't want to, it's that deterring from the Train's rules just doesn't compute to him as even a thing to do. He's operating on his own unique level and it's what turns him from a S1 ally to a S2 antagonist (but not villain).

There tends to be an emphasis on names, deals, and exchanges, i.e. if a Fae says "Can you give me your name?" and you tell them it, they own it and you by extension now, stuff like that. Also have a tendency to give humans they like, or humans who do nice things for them, gifts (whether it's actually a beneficial gift is sometimes debatable).

The Fae often lure humans away from the Ordinary Realm into the Faerie Realm, where time and magic work differently. Sometimes this means being whisked away, or unknowingly stepping through fairy rings. This can include both the Seelie and the UnSeelie Court (Scottish folklore).

Examples of the Fae in popular culture include Spirited Away (don't eat the food!), changeling myths (faerie leaving their babies in place of your own, nowadays seen as a connection to old stories of Autistic individuals), arguably Coraline (film and book), will-o-the-wisps, and other figures in Welsh, Cornish, and broad European folklore, etc.

Variants / similarities include huldufolk (Icelandic and Faroese folklore), sirens (Greek), kelpies (Scottish), etc. Over time Christian (bc of course) associations have also been applied as both demoted angels and tempting devils, but that sort of works given one of Aaravos' most prominent comparisons is Lucifer, and Prometheus, who were as crafty and clever as they come.

Basically:

Aaravos emphasis (or lack thereof) regarding his name and the general mystery surrounding it — "My name would mean nothing to you" even in the face of Viren's demands

We see the emphasis on phrasing given that it's been stated by the crew that Aaravos never lies, but we know he purposefully obscures and omits information

Entering into deals and exchanges with humans, giving them gifts and promises (Ziard's staff, Viren's rule for himself and Viren's life for Claudia)

Him seducing Viren yes I said it / everything with Sir Sparklepuff tbh

Fae can also sometimes set trials to pass or tasks for people to fulfil, similar-ish to Aaravos giving Viren a little fetch quest for them to communicate / "Those who fail tests of love are simple animals."

We don't know what Aaravos actually wants, exactly, or why, but given the indifference of the other Startouch elves to humanity's plights (and the fact they've let Aaravos wreak havoc and have never stepped in to stop him) it's a far bet their long, illustrious lives have given them a decidedly warped morality, and that Aaravos is pretty indifferent to other people's immense suffering at this point, too

His mirror realm being its own sort of faerie realm that he can bring Viren in and out of

Aaravos having multiple names and monikers — the Fallen Star, the Midnight Star, one of the Great Ones — much the way the Fae folk have many — the Good Neighbours, the Fair Folk, the Kind Ones, the Wee Folk, the Others (citation).

This isn't as much of a thing but all the nature motifs surrounding Aaravos (Elarion as a flower, the nature-esque patterns on the box that held the Key and that match the key, the flower and vine emulations on his mirror).

[postsfromthedark]

Theory for s4

So, we see that rayla left to find viren- she did this two years ago now. We also know she struggles with self doubt, feelings of not being good enough. She's holding out hope that runaan is still alive that she can right what she vies as her wrongs. All thos combined leaves a rather reckless, highly trained teenage assassin

But maybe she found claudia. She didn't do anything for a whole but follow her around a bit, see where she went, what she did. Seeing if viren was with her. Maybe, on this path, she leaves... traces. Slips her name to someone running a stall, leaves a piece of her clothing/gear/weapons on an alley when she ducked in to avoid being spotted. Maybe callum sees someone with it -recognizes it. He asks the earthblood elf, a stranger, where he found it. He tells him and thus starts callums search for rayla (she would never leave something behind unless there were no other options, trained and practical as she is).

Maybe the elf lied.

[beautifulterriblequeen]

Dragon King v. Aaravos (year unknown)

@klashta-neali‘s post asking, Has Aaravos really been in the mirror for 1000 years? got me thinking and I went digging in the show to see what it actually tells us, because if there’s one thing this show does well, it’s mislead us. 

Let’s start with the prologue--and keep in mind, every word of the prologue is given to us by a smartass Star Touch who proudly proclaims that he never lies while absolutely messing around with the truth in every way possible. We are blithely handed this information, but we should not trust it entirely.

Dark magic was discovered 1000 years ago (per TechnicallyNotLying!Aaravos)

Aaravos paints himself with the good guys, working against “the madness.” Not specifically against dark magic, I note. This guy’s wording matters.

This line about driving out the humans may or may not be a restatement of what “put a stop to the madness” means. Was anything else done besides kicking out the humans? Like, say, throwing a certain sparkly boy through the Moon Portal? Dunno yet.

Aaravos kindly showing us a map. Possibly on the table in his library? Depends where and when he’s narrating this from. Clearly, from this angle and from his careful wording, he wants us to see this from his perspective.

(And this is a thing I love about this show. It draws us in by having the characters interact with us almost directly. I’m put in mind of how Runaan binds “our” wrists during the binding ritual, and how he looks right at us later and demands that we give him the egg. We are meant to feel like we are a part of this world.)

Aaravos conveniently doesn’t say who exactly did the dividing of the land, I note. Passive voice is a bitch. Was Aaravos still around? Did he do the split himself? Was he in the mirror already? 

It seems logical that dark magic, the booting of the humans, and the splitting of the land took place in relatively rapid succession, and then we get some passage of time. “Centuries” means anything from 200 years to the full 1000. It’s just Aaravos vaguebooking so we don’t know what happened when. But this is the dragon who had Aaravos’s mirror when Viren came a-knocking.

Aaravos could technically have been locked away at any point in here, or even before the humans were booted out. He gives us no clues. I mean, he doesn’t even tell us he’s locked up. He doesn’t want us to start off thinking he’s a terrible criminal. We might not like him as much if we knew that from the start.

These elves are shown apparently helping to defend the border, since Thunder’s shadow crosses them on its way to attack the humans. Aaravos is not here at this point. Is this the beginning of last winter’s turn? It’s unclear. This could be a timey-wimey shot that generally sums up those several hundred years, or it could be five seconds before winter turned. They’re pretty and all, but I’m missing a bunch of context here.

If this is last winter’s turn, why have they all come together like they’re armed for war? Did they know the humans were coming, and they had enough time to prepare to meet them? And yet, somehow, their combined magical strength was not enough to defeat one human high mage? squints

Either it’s not meant to be taken literally, or there’s way more to this story.

Here, we definitely seem to have an actual event. Thunder fighting off human soldiers.

We don’t get to see how they slew him, but it seems clear from later context that Viren was involved.

And here, we have either a lie or a lack of knowledge. Does Aaravos lie to us about the egg, or does he simply not know its fate? What did he see, if anything, through his mirror the day the Dragon King fell? 

Aaravos doesn’t seem like the type to not know something, what with his skill in divination and all. But unless there’s something else going on here--magical shenaniganry, etc.--he’e possibly straight-up fibbing. Shame, Aaravos.

Okay, there’s Aaravos’s version of events. I love the idea of the whole prologue narration being a story meant to sway us to a certain mindset: Aaravos’s mindset. What does he want us to think? 

I think that he is a friend to humans, in his way, and he wants us to think well of him. He thinks we won’t understand the whole story yet, so he only gives us the parts where he doesn’t make weird scary decisions and make us hate him. I think that, once we’ve seen him in action more, built up a love for him, too, he’ll show us, in careful context, what he did and why. 

This whole show could be a kind of love letter from Aaravos to us. D’aww. You shouldn’t have. But I’ll take it, give me that. swipes it, hugs it to my heart

So, skipping ahead to Viren’s POV, here. He’s talking about finding the mirror in the Dragon King’s lair. It honestly sounds like he pillaged the heck out of it, like some kind of Indiana Jones villain.

And this is where I think so many of us, myself included, cemented the idea that Aaravos had been in the mirror for a thousand years. 

I’m reminded at this point by a post I saw recently that theorized that the orcs of Middle-Earth had no idea that the elvish swords ever turned off their blue glow. They would think that the blades always glowed, because from their perspective, every time they saw one, it was already glowing.

To Viren, the mirror was already in the Dragon king’s lair. Therefore, it may have always been there.

Humans are really good at object permanence. It’s one of our first mental capabilities as infants.

And because Viren is a smart guy, canny, scheming, we believe his perspective. We trust his interpretation. When he muses that the mirror and Aaravos meant something to the Dragon King, that implies that Aaravos, the mirror, and the Dragon King had enough time to develop that meaning.

I gotta say, this one shot caught my attention. The view shifts to Aaravos here, while Viren is still speaking and looking the other way. And look at the way Aaravos smiles. He starts to smile the moment Viren, who can’t see him, says the word “You.” Emphasizes Aaravos above the value of the mirror itself.

Aaravos’s face is neutral until Viren tells him that he, Aaravos, meant something. And Aaravos smiles. Not a smirk. He almost looks fond. As if he and the Dragon King were indeed meaningful on some level, at some time, to each other.

Or perhaps he’s just pleased that Viren is seeing him as a person separate from the mirror as a magical object. Maybe the Dragon King treated him like a Magic 8-Ball.

As Viren turns, though, Aaravos hides his fondness and plays it off with a meaningless not-a-lie. Whatever he felt regarding his connection to the Dragon King, he keeps it to himself. It is not for Viren to know.

It is easy to assume Aaravos has been in the mirror since the humans were cast out of Xadia. The last time we see him out and about is right before that. But there is room for alternate interpretations in this vague and twisty version of events, and I think Aaravos wants it that way. 

There is plenty of circumstantial evidence that would warrant Aaravos getting locked away--the existence of a Moon Portal, the elven-made dark magic staff, the poem, the color of dark magic itself. But there is no proof. And the star (ahaha) witness isn’t talking.

Legally, we can’t convict him. Yet. But there sure does seem to be a preponderance of evidence. Aaravos, you’d better have one good story to tell, my dude. You’re about to get called to the stand.

[raayllum]

but i knew you, playing hide and seek

a/n: i got claudia and ezran feels when rewatching the back half of s2, so here. title is from “cardigan” by taylor swift

The next time Claudia sees Ezran, he is a proud king of sixteen years old. She almost doesn't recognize him at first, because he's tall and with a remodelled crown and on a horse aside her brother on his right. But not everything has changed. Traces of boyhood still cling to his face and they're still on opposite sides of a war, even if she's crouching in the shadows on a mountain pass in Xadia. The king and his guard travel underfoot and Claudia eyes the carriage they're towing along. Goodwill beneficiaries for the nearby Earthblood lords.

She knows somewhere deep down that she should follow Aaravos' orders and attack him. Knows that if it was his ambassador brother and sister in law that she wouldn't hesitate. But Soren and Ezran have always felt different, somehow. She'd sat with both brothers in the aftermath of their father, Callum crying but closed off, stumbling away from the comfort she'd weakly tried to offer. Ezran had curled into her arms and shaken with sobs. Neither boy is like a little brother, per se, firmly friends despite the age differences between them all but...

Claudia's seen Callum since then, married and magical, and his elven bride, features smoothed over by peace. They don't know it's going to crumble around them soon enough and there's a bite of satisfaction in it.

She doesn't have the same teeth when it comes to Ezran and Soren. Perhaps because she has too much love for her brother, damned and daft as he is. Perhaps because she remembers what it is like to be Ezran's age, even if he seems more well adjusted to this new world than she will ever be.

(Sometimes, her father and Aaravos will discuss how they can use the young king's kindness to their own advantage, and it's the only time she doesn't smile.)

###

The first time Claudia looks at Ezran and he sees her back, it is two years later when he is eighteen and she is twenty-four, but both feel so much older. Plumes of smoke rise up over the flat, barren battlefield, and Ezran stares at her through the smog. He holds a sword tightly in his hand, his brow smeared with dirt, blue eyes narrowed.

But despite, he still doesn't seem angry as he takes her in, her hair almost all white except for a few dark streaks flowing behind her, her old stolen Sunstaff in hand. His eyes demand an answer. Aren't you better than this? they seem to ask, like he already believes the answer is yes.

She thinks that's the most frustrating part of it all.

She can't remember when he was born, almost seven years old and too consumed by her parents' infighting and that Soren wouldn't play dress up anymore. She doesn't remember him at age two, because Viren started training her in Dark Magic and that took up time and years wore on quickly. She'd always been so much older and so much closer with Callum and Soren.

And if so, why have they given up on her, but Ezran won't?

(It's after she tries to kill Callum in front of him and she sees the hurt in his eyes, and it seems like he has, that the full horror of she’s down sends her spinning and she hits rock bottom.)

###

Often times, Claudia will look up from her work of pressing plants into pages and smile at Ezran writing at his desk, and he will smile back. Which is to say, Claudia works as Ezran's High Mage after the war.

It isn't planned, per se. She'd been his enemy if not a threat at least for most of it. For all intents and purposes, she should be locked away in the castle dungeons for good. But Ezran has always been forgiving, and she'd helped him and the rest take down Aaravos, and the castle has always been a comforting place. Claudia had wandered everywhere in her travels under Aaravos' tutelage, lost in more ways than one. There's a satisfaction and safety in coming back home again—and being able to stay close to Soren, who is the only family she has left.

Callum and Rayla have finally embarked for the Silvergrove and Xadia full time, content to do some mage training and ambassador work. It is somehow both a simple and unsimple life, but it seems to suit them just fine, or so Ezran says from their letters. He doesn't read them to her the way he does with Soren, nor does she exchange letters with the pair the way the boys do, but that suits her just fine. It strikes her sometimes, how much they've all grown up.

Her brother is here and she has fulfilling work. She's a healer, now, using her knowledge of ingredients and plants to brew potions, a hobby turned necessity for her own ailing health (at first). Dark magic takes it toll on the body. She uses it to help other people, which is nice. A piece of atonement day by day for all the harm she'd caused.

In her free time, she gardens, and Ezran will sit beside her when he can in the flowerbeds. He helps her pluck out weeds and when field mice gnaw at her tomatoes he gives them a gentle scolding before the mouse or two nuzzle up against his palm. It'd been his idea for her to start a garden in the first place.

"It can be nice to grow things," he'd said simply, "rather than destroy them."

Claudia learns how to exhale.

She thinks she could grow here beside him.