#all the plants relate to things like death. immortality/mortality and love

[xxcherrycherixx]

I have no caption, please just think its good 😭 my wrist is killing me and im so tired, its 4:30 am👁️👁️

I looked up flower language for this shit, featured flowers are: red rose, wolfsbane, white chrysanthemum, dianthus/carnation and ivy

( i will put a cheat sheet in the tags so you know what meanings im using instead of having to look it all up)

EDIT: this post has been updated with a slightly edited version of the drawing to fix some issues that have been annoying me.

[askamnesiamoonjumper]

uhhhh. how about alpine thoughts? or how your alpine lore works?

CRACKS KNUCKLES. I’m not proof reading any of this btw ok unfiltered yapping session GO

ok not gonna go too deep into it bc the next chapter is big alpine lore related so it would basically just be redundant but I can still just jot down some general hc stuff that I think will be explained in story but still just wanna have fun jotting down :3👍

-Ok so. Bc the twilight travels rift (that’s the name right??? The twigoat statue/bell one? That) has the three colored bells/statues (red blue and yellow) my thought was the bell might have been made by three people? Or goats in this case I suppose lol, haven’t thought much beyond just some kind of sorcerer/mage group of some kind, that’s basically it, not thought super hard on it beyond that but we’ll get there when we get there ig

-Accession/twilight spirits are essentially like the opposite of ghosts !! Even though they look similar I think they are actually more similar to mj, in that they still have their bodies. But for twi spirits it’s because they are basically frozen/immortal and NOT dead. As I said they are opposites, life and death and all that. The way they form is the same as corruption BUT the difference is they are calm/control their emotion/can accept the magic from their soul, where as corruption is rejecting it/being overwhelmed by it. I think a good example of this is in the prologue it was shown that snatcher makes flowers/plants wilt but twilight spirits have their whole flower thing going on yk? You get the idea

-the alps and subcon I think would be close/trade often!! (I think this got mentioned in the prologue Iirc?)

-Delilah’s mothers side of her family live in alpine while her fathers side of the family lives in subcon, hence she vaguely mentions it in fic a few times (but I also think she also clumped lotus in with her family too but more so to use as an excuse to not be super detailed abt her alp trips) (oh yeah uh if u don’t know Lotus is my TG follower twilight spirit goat oc who is dels guardian! :3)

-the bell isn’t supposed to ACTUALLY lead to the twilight realm, it’s more so meant to just a window/peek at what it’s like, …meant being the key word here (hence Hattie’s in game diary mentioning she thinks she wasn’t supposed to be there) probably gonna slip in some lore about it being under a spell/enchantment of some kind? Maybe only people tied to magic or the twilights specifically can enter, weither it be literal as in knowing TG/Lotus or following them, or more metaphorically like hat being from space counted her? Shrugs I’ll think on it a little more later ig all I know is if you got magic or ties to it you can go to the astral plane directly yayyyy :3👍 fun!!! I love going to the disorienting space afterlife for a visit it’s just an average Tuesday for me it’s fine dw about it

-twigoat religion/following is based more so on Buddhism/concepts of nirvana in my head, like there isn’t an underworld or hell or anything it’s all just one place, but TG isn’t actually a god or anything it’s like the game lore they were just a regular mortal goat who decided to protect the astral plane/watch over it after becoming a twilight spirit/traveling to the bell.

-Design detail is all twilight followers wear silver bells! :3 but NOT gold bc that’s basically saying they are doing it wrong/don’t care. (Examples of this: TG, Lotus, Dels, shady sunburnt, Rei (gold), shapes later/timeskip specifically for a different twilight character later that I’m not spoiling rn, and also party crasher has gold bells but not so much for twilight lore reasons but changeling council lore reasons which I’m not spoiling here sorry womp womp)

-I feel like believing in the twilight realm VS following the twilight goat are like separate things? Just bc the actual astral plane is a concept while TG is a person/religious figure so like most characters would know of or believe in the astral plane but not all of those characters actually follow TG youknow? Having proof of an afterlife basically means beleif in that plane isn’t part of the religion but following the religions morals/teachings IS if that makes sense???? hopefully u get the idea.. lol

-Lotus is TGs follower > dels was Lotus’s Follower > so I think @twipsai s oc zebu would be dels follower :3 (like I think they’d just be a reference and not an actual character in aau but idc I’d still kill for a!zebu <3 love that thing)

Uhhhhh I think that’s all bc my other hcs i think of either bleed into spoilers or I’m already gonna bring em up in the next chap sooooo yayyy :D👍

[furubaa]

Notes on Mushishi - Vol 1 & 2

This is the start of my personal notes on every Mushishi chapter (anime ep # in brackets). I’ve reread the manga over and over again looking for specific stories, so this is just for easier reference. 

VOLUME 1

1 - The Green Gathering (S1E1, The Green Seat)

Ginko learns of a boy who can create life by drawing or writing and decides to pay him a visit 

“The green here is so vivid it’s eerie”

A personal invitation to a banquet, presented with clear sake in a shallow green saucer - the exquisite scent of kouki, the water of life. 

The dull pain of being frozen mid-transformation, one foot out the door; realisation of emptiness, and yearning for a full exit from the world

Color seeping out of an untouched brush; power passed down the generations

Everything covered in moss where the kouki soaked in the ground

2 - The Soft Horns (S1E3, Tender Horns)

Ginko is summoned to cure villagers from hearing problems caused by Mushi, and to cure the village head’s grandson Maho, who has sprouted four horns on his forehead.

A quiet village deep in the mountains where even the wind does not pass; absolute silence on snowy nights, when even the sound of your voice disappears.

Bombarded with a flood of sounds, the spirit tires, and body weakens til death. The murmuring of a single Mushi is a microscopic sound, until made aware of the trillions of Mushi clamouring all over the world, calling to each other like echoes.

An intimate gesture of protection - the sound of your mother. A volcanic eruption seen long ago. The lava inside of you, dissolving everything.

3 - The Pillow Path (S1E4 The Pillow Pathway)

Ginko pays a visit to a man named Jin who has premonitions in his dreams as a result of a Mushi affliction caused by Imeno no Awai. 

4 - The Light in the Eyelids (S1E2 The Light of the Eyelid)

Ginko visits a girl named Sui, who is suffering from a Mushi affliction that has made her eyes sensitive to light.

“Behind your eyelid you have another eyelid.” 

There's a river of light flowing underground that illuminates even the pitch black; there has to be total, true darkness to see it. “Light particles come from very far away/ and they flow past me.” “Stretching out for eternity at your feet”

Ginko sitting on the opposite side of the river bank; a warning from a stranger.

“You spent too much time in the dark with Sui” ... Mushi that breed in the darkness. 

5 - The Traveling Bog (S1E5 The Traveling Swamp)

Ginko is traveling through the mountains to see his friend, Adashino. Along the way, he meets a girl named Io, who lives inside a swamp that is capable of moving by itself.

Ginko finding himself travelling in step with a swamp that sinks into the earth and then floats up over and over again, passing through the mountains

A girl sacrificed to save her village from a flood, wearing ceremonial robes; a bride presented to the water god, pushed off a cliff in a storm.

A large green thing that calmly rose up through the raging water; swimming at the bottom of a river that was overflowing its banks. It said, “You should continue to live.”

“When people drink them, their bodies become transparent... and then, they flow away.” Choosing to become Mushi is to exist between life and death; slowly wearing away at your human heart.

Following the journey of a ten thousand year old swamp to its death; moving towards the sea, the dying form of a liquid mushi. Accompanying it on its final journey.

“Swamps are born, eventually they stagnate, and when the universe they have contained within themselves ends... they get up on their own and start to move.”

VOLUME 2

6 - The Mountain Sleeps (S1E11 The Sleeping Mountain)

While traveling, Ginko passes through a town settled near a mountain. He learns that a Mushi Master is living on the mountain, but hasn't visited the village for quite some time, and every person who had been sent to find him has fallen ill and died.

“A smell both sweet and rancid that rises from the ground and touches each leaf. One by one. Coiling around them and choking their skin. A light vein, where the river of light flows.”

Ginko tapping into a mushi that acts as the mountain's nerves, sinking their wills into the plants and running around. 

“The water of life (...) Women bear children like cats or dogs; twins, triplets, or even quadruplets, abandoned in the mountains.”

A travelling Mushishi who puts his roots down. The one he loves committing an unforgivable act so that they can be married. Assuming the role of a slain mountain boar god; his bones will lie here. 

An aged man, summoning an immortal spirit to take his place of guardian forever - a necessary sacrifice to return the world to natural order.

7 - The Sea of Brushstrokes (S1E20 A Sea of Writings)

Ginko comes to a house which has a library full of mushi-related scrolls. There, he meets the girl who writes the scrolls, and hears the story of the curse that has been afflicting her family for generations.

A large dark crypt; an enormous library of scripts recording ancient history

Scribes cursed with immobility and marked for death, the only way to quell the Mushi is to seal them with words. A tradition of inviting travelling Mushishis to feed the writers myths in order for them to expel their words, physically manifesting them, an excruciating process for survival of self - and if not, the survival of your descendants. Plucking words and returning them to order, duty. Little by little, a receding scar. 

8 - They That Breathe Ephemeral Life (S1E6 Those Who Inhale the Dew)

Ginko's services are requested by a boy named Nagi, who lives on a distant island, to investigate the case of Akoya, a girl revered by the people as a "Living God".

A brief moment during the spring tide is the only time you can get to the island; only safe one day per month to take a boat out. a barren island with little soil, villagers surviving with moral support from their god. 

Tapping the center of the forehead with a needle, a curlicule of a mushi spiralling out

“When i was the Ikigami and aged when the sun set i could always shut my eyes and fall asleep feeling satisfied (...) But now my legs tremble at the immense amount of time ahead of me.” Living Mushi's life cycle of a single day - every second of every day experienced fresh, so much wonder you can't keep up. “My heart was always satisfied.”

When faced with tragedy, the girl finally chooses to return to the state of suspension - the luxury to forget and detach from mortal burden.

9 - Rain Comes and a Rainbow is Born (S1E7 Raindrops and Rainbows)

Ginko encounters a man named Koro, who has a strange habit of pursuing rainbows, and helps him find one particular rainbow that he is looking for - the Kouda.

A father delirious for rain - a strange man running around happily, and a mysterious rainbow dancing in odd shapes. A body that thirsts - “I miss that rainbow so much… I can’t stand it.” 

A boy who runs away to escape the burden of a dying father; to prove his worth and his father’s.

Ginko who must travel constantly, taking a break by finding purpose in small goals - You can’t live only for the sake of living; rest is essential. 

A natural phenomena created from light and imbued with kouki - “There's a reason they occur, but they have no purpose - existing only to keep flowing. Nothing can affect them, but they affect those around them, and then they leave.”

* 10 - The Veil Spore (S1E21 Cotton Changeling)

A couple summons Ginko to investigate their sick child, Watahiko, who has developed green spots all over his body. The father explains that the child didn’t look human when born - instead, it was a strange green mass that swiftly escaped. A year later, he found a baby under the house.

A wedding procession that passes through a forest - “A green stain on my cotton wedding gown.” A boy born green and formless, that slipped out and under the house. The main body; a mat of spores spreading under the house, dirt that wriggles under the sun.

One year later, it sends out a human-mushroom; every half year, the same child born again and again. Harmless children joined together at the root, that exist only to collect nutrients, that die and spit out seeds. “Mushi that wear the skin of your dead child.”

The human instinct to kill everything we don’t understand.

A baby with a body that grows faster than the mind. Children that evolve rapidly - “After learning words i forgot how.. I forgot how.” The primal instinct for survival lost. The cost of intelligence.

The Watahiki, when faced with danger, disconnects its children from the root, in an attempt to save at least the seeds - the children change form and enter a long dormant period.

An organism that strays from its recorded life cycle. 

Not that I’m doing this for public consumption (who even is going to read all this) but anyways FYI I’ve got structured notes on the next volumes in my drafts & if I ever get round to finishing all of them they’ll be tagged as #mushishi notes 

[scribeofmorpheus]

Himmeløyne [9/?]

Pairing: Loki Odinson x Reader

Catch Up Here | Masterlist 

Warnings: Odin being a God-King...which is code for ‘dick’.

A/N: Hi, this probably my most IMPORTANT LOKI RELATED NOTE: The very talented and delightfully risque writer @lokilickedme​ has just released a book. I love her work (especially Sanguine)! Refer to this post for all details about her book. 

Now, onto triffles.

Taglist is open! Reblog, comment or leave a like please ☺

~Y/N

“—I do not think I can keep this from her any longer,” you heard Heimdall say mid-conversation. He sounded like a man desperate to shout but too afraid to do so.

You swallowed, feeling guilty for impeding upon something so personal.

Just as you had made up your mind to leave, you heard Odin warn: “You remember what the Oracle said, old friend.”

Oracle? You wondered. And that was all it took to get you to plant your feet before the throne room’s doors and listen like a mouse in the night.

“Her vision already came to pass,” Heimdall said, defeated. “I’ve lost one. I cannot lose another. Not when she is safe within our walls. Safe here.”

“No place is impregnable to violence,” Odin let out a sigh. “I already took a risk in allowing my son to train her. If he knew what she was…”

You shifted, a soft noise coming from your hand that braced the door to steady your stance. Was there more about your powers that you didn’t know? Why did Odin speak with such animosity towards you? Did he fear you?

Heimdall’s works quaked with emotion: “Please, Allfather. I cannot keep this lie any longer. I cannot pretend as though my heart doesn’t ache when I see her. And ache all the more when I must remove myself from her presence. She is my daughter. What would you give to have your daugh—”

And that was the moment. The moment everything snapped into place. Heimdall and Odin kept speaking in secret and your mind struggled to make sense of things that were right in front of you the entire time: the bloodkin spell leading you to Heimdall’s post by the bi-frost; the gold in your eyes reflected in his; the mark that shielded your power from his gaze; Loki’s coy words during their Game of Fates; the disapproving glower Heimdall had flashed Loki when the dark prince had placed a finger on your knee; Your mothers mantra: “The universe rests in your eyes.”

Magic screeched inside you. Angry and betrayed. How many people knew Heimdall was your father? How many lies had you been subjected to?

“Hnnnfff,” the magic grew painful; piercing. You clutched your body. Everywhere ached.

Odin and Heimdall’s voices grew sharper.

“…Odin,” Heimdall’s voice shook. “I beg of you. When you ordered me to never look for Sigrid, I did it to protect her. To keep the prophecy from coming to pass. And she died all the same. Without ever knowing how I truly felt for her.”

“I am sorry,” Odin sounded regretful. “But if it came to it, I would take her from you as Sigrid had been. Such is the weight I bear. The weight of King. To protect my son, I would destroy your daughter. It is for this very reason that I cannot allow you to tell her the truth—to love her as only a father could. It is the smallest mercy I can give. And the only mercy I will allow.”

You wanted to escape, go somewhere far. Away from gods and magic and kings. You didn’t cry, there were no tears left to shed. Niflheim had broken you. Asgard had reset you wrong. Frayed, like the ice wound that scarred your chest.

You thought of the ocean, the one back home. And with gut-punching intensity, you were swallowed by a portal of your own making.

Home. You were home. And it was gone. The longhouse that belonged to the chief was nothing more than snow extinguished timber. The fabulous fabrics and furs that decorated his walls left no traces. The polished silver tankards you’d always wanted to drink from were black. The rest of the village suffered a worse fate. Huts leaving nothing behind but black shapes in the snow. There were no bodies to identify. No history to reclaim.

Slowly, you made your way back to your house. The air was colder than you remembered. Wind biting at your skin till you turned pale and stiff. The dress you wore provided little protection from the weather.

Your house barely stood. A state of decrepitude would be too generous a description. Stone walls struck down; no door to walk through; the eight pronged symbol visible on the stone floor beneath the foundations. With a heavy sigh, you tried to rebuild. Placing each stone block back where it had been. Reanimating wooden doors and burned furs from the ash. When you opened your eyes again, you were surprised by how faithful your iteration of home was.

The house stood again, walls shivering with magic. If it was an illusion, you weren't interested in breaking it.

When you walked in, you were disappointed to learn it smelled of fire. No herbs or mead or tanned leather scents to bring comfort. Just fire.

Your mother wasn’t sitting in her chair with her lit pipe. The only trace of her resided in the seer bones cast on the floor; untouched—predicting the future for no-one.

Without a plan, you walked to the small space with a mead stain on the furs. It was where you used to fall asleep to the warmth of the fires as a child. Then, with a wave of your fingers, you conjured a real fire in the fireplace. Sitting back to stare blankly into the flames. You drifted. Too tired to remember to blink from the dry air. Too tired to remember to be present.

Heavy boots broke your stupor. A man, shed of armour and wearing mortal weaves, sat beside you.

“Everyone was worried,” Heimdall’s voice found its way to your ears. He sighed. “I was worried.”

“How did you find me?” You asked, voice raspy.

He opened his palm to reveal a cut, “How you tried to find me, I suspect.”

“Bloodkin spells,” you intoned.

"Of sorts," he chose to sit close enough to seem familiar, but far away enough to let distance be a kindness. “I had to use older magic, more…dangerous magic, to find you.”

“And so you did.”

“Your powers are impressive,” he said. “To conjure a portal on your own and actually end up where you wanted to go is…impressive.”

Your heart beat sluggishly, neck straining from barely being moved for so long. “Is it true?”

Heimdall’s chest sunk, a deep exhale disrupting the flames in the fireplace. “Yes.”

“How?”

“It is...” Heimdall stopped himself. His open palm balling into a tight fist that shook. Something shifted in him. The next time he spoke, he sounded different: “Before you were born, the prince—Loki—fell ill. It wasn’t a sickness of the body, but…something else. Odin was secretive then. More than he is now. Frigga didn’t eat for days. Thor had been sent away so he wouldn’t cause a scene…

“There had been an attack, you see. Jotuns. Somehow, they managed to slip past me and into the castle. A portal I couldn’t sense. There had been a battle. Some died. Not many. But enough. In the fray, Loki had been injured. Odin had shut him in his quarters. I remember hearing Loki scream with fever for days. Spouting heinous accusations at his father.”

You shut your eyes tight. The thought of Loki suffering made you feel uneasy. Heimdall noticed this and quieted his words even more. He probably thought that by making his voice softer the words would hurt less.

He continued: “Odin called for a witch with strange abilities. Her name was Dagna, she was known to her people as—”

“Minnevever…” You turned to look at Heimdall. “She was my great-grandmother.”

Memory Weaver

He smiled humbly, the lines on his face showing the age that his immortal body hid so well. “I had been sent to a village near Lake Mälaren. That is where I first saw your mother. She told me I’d fall in in love with her the first day we met.” Heimdall’s cheeks pulled taut as his teeth peeked through his smile. “I had brought Dagna to Asgard to cure the prince. His treatment took days. For a few hours, during those days, I’d find myself slipping away—going back to the village. Again and again and again.”

Heimdall reached into his pocket and pulled out a lock of hair. You gasped. His smile fell. “On the last day, she gave me this. I didn’t know it was to be our last day. If I had—” He cleared his throat, eyes blinking rapidly.

You felt the urge to ease his pain; or maybe you wanted to mourn with him as the only other person alive who remembered Sigrid. Either way, the strangeness was too thick, your hand never managed to make its way to his side.

“She saw her death too,” you added. There was anger there. Between the octaves. “She saw and yet she didn’t tell me either. Such is the elusive ways of those with godly gifts.”

Heimdall wiped a tear from his cheek, “When I opened the portal to return Dagna to her home, she told me something. A prophecy. She said that I would only know pain if I let my heart know love. I was destined to be the Watcher—and one cannot watch the stars from above if their heart belongs below.”

His fingers played with the ridges of the braided lock of hair. “She warned that if I ever returned to the village, death would follow me. So I never returned.” Heimdall turned to look upon your face in the glow of the fire. Eyes moving over every spot and hair and sculpted angle. It was then that you noticed you shared more than the gold in your eyes. You shared the same chin and more of his lips than your mother’s. Two dark spots mirroring his beneath your left eyebrow.

In a strangled voice, he said: “And I never knew you existed until you were brought through the bi-frost…half dead.”

His choked up, finally giving in to his tears. Heimdall wept then. In the rawness of the moment, your hand finally found the strength to cross over and comfort him. Soon, you were both crying; mourning; celebrating; letting go. As you did, the house proved itself to be an illusion. It fell back into disrepair as you held your father's hand for the first time.

[princessofmerchants]

15 and 17 please!!

Yay, my first ask ever! Thank you @silver-flames ☺️

15) Is there anything you DON’T want to happen in this book?

All the things Nessian related I would not want to see in this book, I feel really confident from SJM's lives and my instinct for her priorities as a writer that we won't see, so I'm not stressed, but for posterity some of those things include: Nesta rejecting the mating bond. Nesta blowing off the eventual opportunity to repair things with both of her sisters, once she is healed enough to do so. Cassian continuing to let his pain get the best of him and saying cruel things to Nesta (to be sure, I absolutely expect and welcome them arguing and yelling at each other, lol, but that's different from selecting intentionally cruel things to say that are designed to hurt the other right where they are most insecure). Related, that last one but same for Nesta (though I worry with the extent of her PTSD that Nesta being cruel because she's in so much pain still and resentful about...a lot...is a tiny bit more likely—I still don’t want to see it though, my poor bbs 🥺). And, any sexy times that in tone and mood remotely resemble what we saw with Nesta in ACOFAS.

Outside of Nessian, I also don't want to see SJM show her hand with regard to Vassa/Lucien/Elain/Azriel, but I welcome her planting more seeds and setting the stage for an epic future novel that focuses on all four.

17) What are your top three wishes for this book?

Oh I love this question!

1) That Nesta and Cassian accept their mating bond, but that it's accomplished in a way that is in character for both of them, which for me means Nesta somehow reconciles the bond with the question of having a choice in her long term, romantic partner, and for Cassian I think this means that we see how much the fact that he has been given this rare gift of finding a mate is expressed somehow to Nesta, and that (eventually) she recognizes how, for who he is and the world he lives in, this is a beautiful and worthy thing to be a part of.

2) I want to see Nesta kicking ass with her powers, and find out all the dimensions of what she stole from the Cauldron, and for it to be more than just the power of Death itself (for instance, we saw in ACOWAR the Cauldron also has the power of life/creation so I'd love for the part she took to include both sides of that coin, and for her to accept and then master it).

3) I want to see both Nesta and Cassian become kickass heroes on the global scene, as it were, when it comes to their distinct roles in thwarting the mortal queens (+ one now-immortal queen who has it out for Nesta after the Cauldron stole her youth). I want to see these two be as essential to the wider meta narrative as Rhys and Feyre were in the last three full novels. Maybe that means they assume political roles in one or more cultures they are living among and working with, but it could play out in other ways as well.

Edited to add another thing on my wishlist for the book, which probably supercedes my third item above: For Nesta to work through and address her complicated feelings about her father, and what it was like for him to raise an armada and arrive in time to save the day at the Battle of Hybern, her feelings about his words to her when the King brought him face to face with her, and then what it was and has been like to have him killed so brutality before her eyes just after he acted to redeem himself in his daughters' eyes. 💔🥺😭

Thank you for the ask, this was so fun! ☺️

Ask me about ACOSF!

[shadowgeist-stars]

Vitam et Mortem: Divine Pride

A small gift for Pride Month before June ends. I probably should've come up with this earlier, but hey, I hope you enjoy it regardless.

Bridget had wanted to show Emily her new favorite part of June for years since they first began. After all the time they spent together for the last five or six centuries, she found it quite fun to introduce the otherwise reclusive Mother Nature to all the things she otherwise ignored among the mortals.

But this particular celebration wasn't just a joyous occasion for herself. Many lost spirits and even deities from all over the world rejoiced at the celebration of their own way of love and life.

From the gods of ancient Mesopotamia, to the far-flung rainbow serpents of Australia, to the hidden deities in China and Japan, to Bridget's own neighboring Loas and other divine friends in the Americas. The jubilee expressed by the immortals could only be matched, let alone surpassed, by that of the humans. Finally, all of the unfortunate people who lost themselves for the sake of their own hearts wouldn't have died in vain. All of the poor children close to that edge had something to look forward to.

"Come on, Emily, it's this way!" she called, leading her companion by the hand. "I promise you'll love it!"

Mother Nature chuckled, following the winged girl as quickly as she could. "This is the most excited I've seen you in the past few centuries. Have you met another holiday spirit?"

Bridget shrugged. "Not exactly. But I think you'll especially love it. It can't be much further now."

They stopped when they reached a crowd of people down the road.

Marching through the street was a parade of celebration. Flags of many bright color combinations littered the area. Some were blue, purple and pink. Some were pastel pink and blue and white. But a great many of the flags and all-encompassing banners -- and there were so, so many of them -- were all the colors of the rainbow.

"Bridget, my dear… what on Earth is this?"

Before her eyes, the rainbow painted itself over Bridget's otherwise black cloak. Strips of each color encircled her long cloak in luminous, vibrant hues. Shades of deep bright pink and fiery red orange sought out her shoulder cape, imitating one of the proudly-waving flags in the parade with black between each stripe. Emily soon learned exactly what it meant, as many couples in the parade embraced one another without fear or shame.

"It's a celebration of people like us," the redhead explained, no less than sheer jubilee on her face. "You once showed me how many animals are able to love in the same way we do. And according to the older gods, mortals who were the same way never had such a chance to be themselves since before the Dark Ages. Now that they have that chance again… isn't it beautiful?"

Emily did remember showing her all that. From birds of all kinds to various cats and other mammals to even insects and fish, and a whole lot more. The colors around her and the light in Bridget's eyes and all over her cloak… it truly was a sight to behold.

"It's wonderful," she replied simply. "Absolutely gorgeous. I've never seen anything like it."

They joined the parade like it was the most natural thing in the world. Following families and children greeted the two, as did many more immortals who began to appear. The children were laughing and dancing together with the other immortals, sporting their own flags.

"Lovely day for a parade, ladies," greeted a man in a multicolored tribal outfit framed with various flowers. "I'm certain I saw someone handing out Sapphic flags. Just watch for the usual, ahem… intruders."

"Thanks so much, Xochipilli," Bridget thanked the stranger. "I'm sure Emily would love that."

He smiled. "Never thought I'd see the day that the infamous Mother Nature would appear here. I'll tell the others; all of your Loa friends are bound to be nearby, and they'll love hearing about this."

Emily was confused by the names. "Who was he talking about?"

"My Voodoo-related associates," Bridget explained. "Many of them like both men and women, so they'll almost definitely be sporting pink-purple-and-blue flags like those over there. Though it takes a trained eye to know who’s who with the outfits they wear.

“Xochipilli is Aztec, and one of the few gods in that group with a decent amount of common sense. Back in his hayday, he was the god of games, the arts, and flowers, as well as the patron of people like a lot of the mortals here. Really nice guy, but I wish I could say the same about some of his friends.”

Emily chuckled. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Are there others like the ones you mentioned?”

The redhead nodded. “Lots of others, all over the world. They’re all probably having a blast at parades on their home turf just like this one. Oh look, there’s the flag Xochi was talking about!”

The flag in question was actually quite darling. It had two pastel pink stripes around one that was white, with a pretty little violet directly in the center. The person beside the girl handing such flags out was handing out flowers of all kinds.

Bridget went for the flower person, taking a violet before flying up to plant it above Emily’s ear, adding on a kiss on the cheek.

The swell of warmth in her chest from the gesture caused the violet to spread into a crown on her head.

The Grim Reaper giggled. “Now it looks even prettier. It suits you!”

Emily sighed at her reaction, but eventually couldn’t help a smile. At least until she noticed the white-robed and white-winged people hovering above a different crowd. They glared at the celebration as they stood guard over the yelling people holding some… rather rude signs.

Her beloved noticed her expression. “What’s wrong?” Bridget followed her gaze, lifting off the ground a little for a better view.

Angels. And a whole lot of their own downline.

“Oh, for the love of vultures…” she muttered under her breath as she pulled her scythe out of her shadow. “Ignore them, Em. They should know by now that they can’t do much of anything without getting people upset.”

“Is that… normal of them?” asked the dark-haired woman.

“Very,” the redhead replied with a sigh, leading Emily away from the protestors. “Their minions love to say that living the way we do isn’t natural and that it’s corrupting their children. All because they like to listen to the one who commands those angels. We just call them the usual intruders. I think I’ve already told you how troublesome they are to my fellow death spirits.”

“Ah, yes. Of course.” She noticed how the blade of Bridget’s scythe shined with iridescent colors. “Hm, even your weapon appears to have gotten into the spirit of the celebration.”

“There’s a reason for that, actually.” With a snap of her fingers, Bridget unveiled a slew of visiting wandering souls in the broad daylight. So many of them floated around in groups, like the other immortals in the parade had called them here. Many bore dark scars that only occurred among souls who sought their own destruction in life. “These are all of the people in just this area who lived the same way as all of these mortals, in worlds that didn’t allow them, or hearts that no longer wanted to beat.”

Emily gazed upon each spirit, seeing the joy and peace on each and every spectral face in the procession. “This is far more than the joy of the living... it’s also a comfort for the dead.”

Bridget could see the angels daringly lean towards the ghosts from above their followers, and firmly tapped her scythe against the ground. All of the ghosts turned their attention to the Reaper, and to those she glared at. The protesters faltered, as if perhaps they had seen her standing there. Either way, they knew better than to test an emissary of death with her albeit passive army, so she’d count that much as a win. So did the ghosts, who peacefully returned to their own mingling.

Fingers found their way into soft, owlish feathers. “Where did you learn that trick?”

Bridget’s smile returned with a chuckle. “The Valkyries have shown me how they command their soldiers a few times. Angels are a pretty popular overarching reason as to why the ghosts around here have perished. It's just a matter of setting off the alarm. They know better than to trust what killed them."

A couple of the children seemed more than a bit intimidated by the parade's protesters, regardless of their dropping momentum. "Come with me, Em. Forget the angels and their little friends. This is a time for celebration."

Mother Nature was quite willing to comply, her leaf-bearing winds gently guiding the children away from the scary people like large, caring hands. As they went on with the parade, the two eventually grew more cheerful again. More immortals dropped by to meet them, such as Nibo, one of the Loas Bridget mentioned earlier; Oua Oua, a higher-ranking Loa who led the children, also said hello. Several "Voodoo" figures made appearances, really, and all of them offered nothing but coos and congratulations.

It certainly made it a far more lively experience than Burning Man, where they usually wandered about largely unseen. But oddly enough, it wasn't quite unpleasant. Emily enjoyed meeting so many wonderful divine friends. Seeing Bridget's multicolored stripes grow brighter, and her hair shining in the sun like fire, against eyes so pale silver in the daylight they almost looked pure white, was a simply mesmerizing experience.

Near the end of the parade, Emily had discovered a work of art made entirely from flowers; an entire wall of words shaped with roses of every color. Red, orange, yellow, green, even blue and purple. She used her power to grow out a bouquet of separate lavender roses, with a little help from Xochipilli. After which she gently wove each flower into Bridget's lovely wings and hair, pale and beautiful against her bright red locks and dark gold feathers. Bridget was delighted at the gift; something she knew Emily would most certainly do.

"Now you look even prettier,” she said warmly, parroting the reaper's words. “It suits you.”

The look she got in response was so full of affection… Emily could feel it taking something else from her chest aside from her breath. Bridget floated to her eye level, cupping the taller spirit's face between her hands.

"I think you deserve a thank-you for it."

With that, she leaned in for a kiss.

Emily’s heart filled with a familiar, welcoming fire at the soft and warm touch of Bridget’s lips, yet entirely new and exciting. A wild and joyful tune, yet sung in the tone of a lullaby. Miniature earthquakes rattled through her body, and she felt like she was floating. Her hands started flexing and lifting up on instinct, until they dug into the soft down between the reaper’s shoulders, pulling her closer. The flower-decorated wings swung low, the ends of the joints resting on her sides.

A moment meant to last forever.

“Ah, young love. Truly a beautiful thing.”

“It’s like something straight out of those romantic fairy tales.”

The two voices startled the two from their reverie. Bridget sank to the ground with a face as red as her hair; given the fiery heat that went from her heart to her face, Emily probably wasn’t much better.

“Lundy! Limba! You ruined the moment!” scolded Èrzulie Dantòr, batting the two men away with dark-skinned hands. “Out, out, and away, boys, before you ruin their mood any more! Shoo!”

Bridget giggled at the sight of the Loas. “I take it you enjoyed that, Emily?”

Mother Nature cleared her throat, smiling down at her sheepishly. “I suppose I did. Though I… can’t say I expected to… Will there be other parades like this in the future?”

“Of course!” She took her hand as they prepared to return to the realm they shared. “It’s an entire month out of every year that celebrations just like this will occur. Why? Do you want to go to another one?”

Emily chuckled, mustering the courage to kiss the top of her head. “Perhaps…”

To see such colors like those still lingering on the Grim Reaper’s cloak… To feel such childlike glee she hadn’t experienced in millennia… Mother Nature could hardly wait for the next adventure outside of her fog.

[desanctii]

@the-immortals-assistant:

“I’m sorry to have disturbed your tranquility.”

Her voice was too distant to sound sincere, too nonchalant. She did not mean to be rude; she had simply lost herself in the contemplation of the Moon. Its powerful light was bathing her skin, like a mother caressing the face of her child. As time passed, people withered and died. Fish didn’t. She stood, unchanged, untouched by time. If her soul was exhausted and drained by time, her flesh was young and strong. Unlike mortals, immortals’ spirit is weak, and their body is willing.

She had found cemeteries to be a place of quiet and peace, it was nice to see old friends. She would always ask them how it was to die. She had met Death before, but Death was uninterested by her. She loved her children dearly but did not care for those who escaped her embrace. Fish was motherless in all the meanings of the word. Her first mother had passed away many centuries ago, and the last one had abandoned her forever. She had hoped for her friends to describe the feeling of Death’s arms. Was it warm, or cold? Did she smile, or sing to them?

But no one ever replied.

“Cemeteries are a place for mourning and lost love in the daylight. But once the Sun hides and the Moon rises, it’s a safe haven to hide pain and shame… I’m used to being here alone, I did not mean to intrude.”

Santino could relate to none of the things this strange woman said, and he didn’t think he needed to. She was very evidently only voicing her thoughts because there was now someone around to hear them. They had nothing to do with him. He glanced back at the grave, familiar as ever, and thought that someone ought to tidy it up, plant some new greenery. Only the small bouquet of flowers he had set down for her was any indicator that someone was still remembering her. And what use was he?

His attention drifted back to the living body nearby, the only living body in the whole cemetery. “You did not intrude.” He assured her kindly. His hands remained firmly in their pockets and his lips kept the sight of his teeth sealed away. “But I am used to coming here by myself as well, especially at this hour.”

[thisiswhatwereupagainst]

Another array of my fave minor Marvel characters, mainly mutant/X-Men related! Info beneath the cut on each:

Lifeguard - Born in Australia, Heather Cameron and her brother Davis grew up with no idea that their biological father, whom they never knew, had been crime lord Miles Warbeck. Heather did, however, know she was a mutant with the ability to rapidly evolve whatever traits were needed (wings, gills, bulletproof skin, etc) to save herself or another person. She embraced these abilities, and used them in her job as a lifeguard. When her brother and her became targets in a gang war due to the power vacuum left after their bio-father’s death, they joined the X-Men for their own safety, and Heather’s old job became her new codename. The identity of her father, she could take in stride, but not so much the identity of her mother. On a mission in space, Heather began mutating further, showing the traits of an atavistic Shi’ar Royal, suggesting her mother was one (most likely the evil Deathbird). Her mindset changed as well, and she was horrified to find she viewed everyone around her as prey now. Her brother Davis, aka Slipstream, did not undergo such changes himself, and rejected Heather for hers, stating that “that THING is not my sister!” He has not been seen since, but Lifeguard has continued to work with the X-Men off-panel as a member of X-Corps. Monet St. Croix - Intelligent, beautiful, and rich, Monet Yvette Clarisse Maria Therese St. Croix has been described as “perfect” by many, a sentiment that she openly and wholeheartedly agrees with. The daughter of an ambassador from Monaco, this spoiled and haughty but still heroic mutant boasts an array of powers including flight, super-strength, and limited telepathy. Her siblings (a villainous vampire-like older brother named Marius and two younger twin sisters, Nicole and Claudette) are mutants as well, and all the siblings can merge with each other to form various combinations. Monet got her start as a teenager in Generation X, where she used the codename “M” but she went simply by her civilian name as an adult when she served in X-Corps, X-Factor, and the X-Men. Monsoon - Aloba Dastoor is a mutant from Mumbai who can control the weather like the much more well-known Storm. He was the younger brother of Radha “Haven” Dastoor, a saintly philanthropist who helped the poor and needy as well as being a supporter of mutant rights. When his beloved sister gained extraordinary superpowers of her own and began a crusade to destroy the world and bring the Mahapralaya (a sort of Hindu apocalypse), Monsoon at first followed her, blinded by his idolization. Unbeknownst to him, Haven had been possessed by a demon that had given her these powers and was making her act this way. Despite his love and reverence for her, Monsoon eventually had to accept she was doing evil, and, believing she had gone mad and must be stopped, betrayed her to X-Factor and the government. Haven disowned him as a result, and they do not seem to have gotten the chance to reconcile before her untimely demise by the demon that had warped her so. Monsoon’s whereabouts since are unknown, but he is listed as one of the mutants to have lost his powers on M-Day. Astarte - Astarte is one of the Eternals, immortal and extremely powerful beings that were engineered from early humans by the Celestials. Astarte boasted the immense and myriad powers common to all her species, as well as the individual ability to influence and control men. She was a member of  The Damocles Foundation, an organization of Eternals, Deviants, and humans who were tired of the constant battles between the various offshoots of Homo sapiens. They desired to work together for peace, and to this end attempted to create a race of super-beings which could control the Earth, and thus put an end to all warfare. These experiments caused the death of an entire town of children, and brought them into conflict with X-Force. Firewall - The child of a Cambodian woman and an American man of Vietnamese heritage, she has been called both Theary (a Cambodian name) and Min Li Ng (a Vietnamese name) as a civilian. Either way, she is an angry young woman whose temper matches her pyrokinetic powers. She originally believed that her abilities came from  accidental exposure to an experimental napalm during the Vietnam War, but she later learned that she was in fact the product of a Cambodian cult that had practiced thousands of years of selective breeding to produce super-powered children. She was originally a member of Force of Nature, a team of four supervillains, each with a power relating to one of the four classical elements, who worked for an eco-terrorist organization. After the truth of her origin was revealed to her, she joined the other children of the cult in The Folding Circle. As a member of Force of Nature, she went by Firewall as a codename, and her Cambodian name as a civilian. After she joined The Folding Circle, she began using the codename Silk Fever, and went by her Vietnamese name as a civilian. Kleinstock - There were originally three Kleinstock brothers, Eric and Harlan and Sven. They were identical triplets from Switzerland, and all of them were mutants, members of the Acolytes (successors to the Brotherhood, first led by Fabian Cortez then by Exodus and Magneto), and absolute assholes, bullies, and idiots. While some mutant supremacists have been noble or sympathetic, the Kleinstocks were simply aggressive, none-too-bright psychopaths who enjoyed killing anyone that was weaker than themselves, including human children and hospital patients. Eric was killed by a shotgun blast in their first mission, and ever since then, Harlan and Sven have merged their bodies together, so that one brother protrudes from the other’s back. Their powers include super-strength in their merged form and the ability to fire plasma blasts. Benazir Kaur - Benazir Kaur could induce or accelerate disease in others, such as making Gambit begin dying immediately of rapid-onset lung cancer the moment she touched him. However, the effects reversed when she was knocked unconscious. Benazir was the White Queen in Shinobi Shaw’s Inner Circle, and while no one can ever truly replace Emma Frost, Benazir sadly never even got much of a chance to try, as she only appeared in one issue, the 1994 X-Men Annual. It’s hard to glean much personality from this sole appearance, but she seems to have penchant for red dresses and playing chess. Red Lotus - Paul Hark is a Chinese Australian mutant with enhanced strength, speed, and agility. He is also the grandson of Father Gow, who ran the Chinese Triad in Sydney. When Gow was murdered, Red Lotus sought revenge against Gambit, who had been framed for the crime, but then allied with him and the X-Men when the real orchestrators were revealed to be a fellow member of the Triad as well as Sebastian Shaw. He attempted to attack (and presumably kill) Sebastian Shaw for this, but later worked with him to infiltrate and shut down a mutant slave ring. He seemed to have some romantic chemistry with Rachel Summers, who saved him from being nearly killed by Selene, but has not been seen since. Gaea - Gaea is an Elder God, one of the first deities to appear on Earth, and it is Earth itself that she represents and embodies. Every earth goddess in every pantheon of gods in the Marvel universe is actually Gaea in disguise, and she is the true biological mother of Thor, whom she conceived with Odin in her guise as Jord, the Norse earth goddess. It was Gaea who favored small mammals over dinosaurs, eventually leading them to evolve in her image as humans, and who allowed the Celestials to experiment on early humans to create the Eternals, the Deviants, and perhaps even plant the potential to become mutants thousands of years later. Though is an immensely powerful being, she rarely interferes directly with any mortal affairs, and in fact is more often in need of rescuing from even greater forces. Gaia - Not to be confused with Gaea, Gaia is a teenage girl from another dimension who is actually thousands of years old, most of which she spent chained to a machine called the Universal Amalgamator at the end of Time, a device that would be used to merge all sentient consciousnesses into one being. Gaia was apparently the safeguard that was supposed to prevent the Amalgamator from being activated by malicious people. When the villainous M-Plate (the fusion of Monet and her brother Marius) traveled to her dimension and attempted to use the Amalgamator, Generation X followed and destroyed the machine. This freed Gaia, who escaped with them back to Earth 616, and became one of their team. While her name would suggest earth-based powers, Gaia’s abilities are actually telepathy, empathy, telekinesis, and reality-warping that allows her to conjure objects from nothing, even making a house and car for herself. Since she had spent centuries chained to one duty, Gaia decided she didn’t want to spend her newfound freedom shackled to another, and left Generation X to live her own life on Earth as a normal person instead of a superhero. Chimera - Chimera is a pirate who comes from an unknown dimension. It is not known if she has any other name, nor exactly WHAT she is, besides that Wolverine says she doesn’t smell quite human. Whatever she is, she demonstrates an ability to generate ectoplasmic bursts that take the form of dragons, which attack foes both physically and psychically. Desiring to plunder the space-time continuum, Chimera came to Earth 616 when she was hired as a mercenary by a villain named Genesis, who wished for her to kill Wolverine. To this end, she worked with the Dark Riders, though of course they did not succeed. She later formed an alliance with Emplate (Monet’s brother again) when  when he accidentally opened a portal, summoning her. However she later tried to leave his side, and he incinerated her, seemingly killing her. However, she turned up again, working for Madelyne Pryor’s Sister of Mutants for unknown motives, then turned up as a member (seemingly against her will) of the Marauders. In her early appearances, Chimera has a strange habit of using her hand as a sort of sock puppet that she talks with, often pronouncing her “r” as a “w” in a cutesy way when she does so. This has led to speculation that she’s insane, but I think it’s just a quirk. Black Swan - Princess Yabbat Ummon Turu is from another dimension, and, as a character deeply tied to the Incursion event, is extremely difficult to explain. Long story short, her world and family were destroyed, and she was the only survivor as a child due to being rescued by the Black Swans, who raised her to be one of them and to serve Rabum Alal, the Great Destroyer, who is actually Dr. Doom. As an adult, Black Swan began searching for a refuge where she could regrow her loved ones, killing Earths along the way until she arrived at Earth 616, where she was captured by the Illuminati. She told them about the Incursions, and how the only way to save their own Earth was to destroy another, which she encouraged them to do. Black Swan possess telepathy, flight force fields, super-strength, optic blasts, and a liking for French fries. Lorelei - One of the lesser known members of the Brotherhood of Mutants, Lorelei possessed the ability to hypnotize men with her voice. Despite her alliance, Lorelei is not actually a mutant at all, but one of the Savage Land Mutates, native people of the Savage Land (a sort of “land that time forgot” in Marvel comics canon) whom Magneto artificially mutated using a machine. Lorelei was apparently his favorite of the bunch, as he brought her back with him from the Savage Land to serve in his Brotherhood, though she seems to have returned back to her homeland offscreen. This is good for her, since she seems to be quite innocent and simple-minded, and had little idea of what was going on, why she was fighting, and even what her powers were (”Can Lorelei stop making strange noise now?” she asked Magneto once) Zaladane - The sorceress Zaladane is a far less innocent resident of the Savage Land than Lorelei. And unlike Lorelei, she claims she is not a native at all, but the long-lost sister of Polaris! Zaladane kidnapped Polaris and used a machine to transfer her magnetic powers to herself. She used these abilities to conquer the Savage Land, then did the same to Magneto so that she could take over the world next. Of course, her plan was thwarted, and the magnetic powers returned to their rightful owners…and the first thing Magneto did with them was slaughter her. But what of her claims that her name wasn’t Zaladane, but Zala Dane? Could she really be the sister to Lorna Dane? Retcons made to Lorna’s backstory later would make this impossible, but at the time this story was written, Dr. Moira MacTaggert confirmed that the power transferral device that Zala used could only be used between genetic relatives, so who knows! Minxi - This Inhuman lass was the daughter of common criminals, but a good girl herself. Minxi was the handmaiden of Queen Medusa, and stuck by her side when she had to flee to Earth to have her son Ahura, whom the Genetic Council had wanted to terminate for fear of what powers (and what madness) he might have inherited from his father’s side. Minxi’s power to temporarily take on the physical traits of any animal she touched was useless in the Inhuman city of Attilan, where there were no animals, but it proved to be useful on Earth so that she could catch food for Medusa and the others who had come with her. However, Minxi also took on the mental traits of the animals as well, often leaving her horrified by her feral actions when she returned to her right mind. Minxi might seem a little vapid when it comes to Captain America (”The one with the hair…and the eyes…”) but she had the good sense to point out that pure intentions and a good heart don’t negate the consequences of unwise actions. Despite her low birth, Minxi was romantically pursued by two of the Inhuman Royal Family, Karnak and Gorgon, though it is unknown if anything came of either man’s interest in her. Auran - Auran was an Inhuman cop who gave her life in the line of duty to save her partner. She was also a single mother of twin girls, who sought to resurrect her with the powers of another Inhuman, Reader. They succeeded, but what came back wasn’t actually Auran—it was everyone’s memories of who Auran was. Some of these memories contradicted each other (some people liked her, some thought she was a jerk, some misunderstood how her powers worked, etc) and it thrust the new “Auran” into conflicted madness. After her mind was healed by a telepathic Inhuman, the new Auran set out on her own to come to terms with her new existence as a living memory. Her Inhuman abilities are a pair of large, rabbit-like ears that allow her to choose any word and hear it wherever it is spoken, no matter how far away.

[calamity-flames]

To break away from Sally Face for a bit, here’s an OC and what will probably end up as a large chunk of text were I explain a large part of my little universe I have here! (Meaning read if you’re curious and ignore if you don’t wanna read)

This entity is known as Fear, simply because of what he does to people near him. He doesn’t ever call himself by it or anything and in fact refuses to name himself, but others call him by it. Or the Shadow Being. Or something similar. Nobody is quite sure what he is, but the running theory is he is a Universal Being.

In my universe there are the gods (Flames siblings) who created everything and who control elements and stuff but they are not infinite or all knowing and they cannot control every single last thing, nor do they want to. So, in the beginning they set forth a powerful magic so when certain aspects of reality become common (life, death, space, plants, souls) or when they become common for human knowledge (sins, time, stories, love) a being called a Universal Being is born. These being are immortal in that they cannot be killed, but they will fade away or become weak if what they are tied to vanishes. Like if all humans died out, universals pertaining to human things would all die out too. It’s the best way I can explain it. Current known Universal beings are:

* Eros - Love in all forms

* Time

* Death

* Myth - Keeper of all stories

* Insanity - 2 heads

* Madness

* Mania

* Seven deadly sins

* Wrath

* Sloth

* Lust

* Greed

* Gluttony

* Pride

* Envy

* Harmony (Arts)

* Penelope (Dreams)

* War

* Pestilence (and famine)

* Gaia (Souls)

* Astra sisters

* Astra Terria - terrestrial bodies in space

* Astra Stella - stars and gasses in space

* Quest (Corruption)

* Sol - Sun

* Luna

* Destiny (Lady Luck) - Fortune, luck, and destiny

* Mother Nature - Earth’s natural state

*Chaos - Banished to a labyrinth for nearly destroying everything

Each one has their own realm they exist in outside of Earth’s reality, and many have minions as well or people they care for. They can also have “children”. Not in the sense that they go out and do the nasty, but that fragments of their being linger around the mortal plane and sometimes are absorbed by a baby forming in the womb or a young infant. These children then gain some ability that relates to the Universal. Sometimes they are weak and minor, sometimes they are quite powerful, sometimes it’s dangerous. Universals can also bestow gifts on infants in a similar manner.

Fear, is similar to a Universal in that he is immortal, incredibly strong, and tied to one element. However, he doesn’t seem to have a realm he exists in, as he wanders the mortal plane, and he actually has children that he conceives and that are half him. So it’s unsure what he really is.

Fear’s children often follow in his footsteps due to strong ties with him but some will snap out of it and be their own people instead of being basically evil.

He can also change forms, but commonly he sticks to a dark fog, black smoke with eyes, dark goop with teeth, a humanoid form with smoke for a head and often eyes or teeth over him, or a human male with greying hair, creepy eyes, and bruises on his neck. He might also take the form of what you fear most but that doesn’t seem to be a thing he tries to do, more just happens.

Drop any and all questions in my inbox about either of you wanna! And if you read this far, thanks ^_^ you’re amazing!

[kingbxsil]

BAZARI presents:

A doctor, an assassin and a florist enter a bar (actually it is an abandoned library)...

The florist was the last one to arrive. His dirty fingers held from the chipped edges of the entrance, the splinters laying down with an unnoticeable purr at the feeling of a fellow plant stopping by. Zachary Coltraine was no plant, no animal, but his constant interaction with nature had injected some of this green vitality into his soul, gifting him a green thumb and an uncanny ability to take care of animals.

“I’m so sorry, the shop closed late today”, he apologized, but with such a bright smile, it wasn’t even needed; he had charm, lots of it, his friends had pointed it out more than once; he was the only one who could get the sun to smile back at him, while the only things they got from the star were old curses. They were best friends with the Moon. Zach was the youngest and tallest, yet, his steps were the quiet ones. His body moved theatrically with no effort as his muscles showed off with any slight action. He liked to stay fit, that was obvious, but not because of common purposes, he liked to stay fit to fulfill the role his parents gifted him at birth: The Lost Prince, Michelangelo’s David, a muse. Even his hair seemed to cooperate, no matter what he did to it, his soft curls always fell poetically on his forehead. “You could be Superman”, he once heard. At first glance he looked human, but if you dared to keep your eyes on him more than a couple of seconds, then you would realize that within his humanity, there was something else, an otherworldly aura that made your throat dry and your stomach flutter. Zachary was dangerously alluring and you didn’t know why.

                                                                        It was the same with the other two.

Pebbles complained as Basil King shifts the weight from one foot to another. The brown worn-out leather of his jacket tensed as he crossed his arms, a gesture practically owned by this boy. Icy blue eyes shot a piercing, yet rather friendly stare to the animal lover that just had made his way into the old library. An attempt of a smile shows up on his lips, but there is no stimuli enough to provoke a full grin.

“You aren’t late”, those are his only words for now and those are the only words needed for the construction to mimic his short sentence with an imposing echo. The other two looked around in awe, a smile showing up on the third friend (yet to introduce). The boys liked to hang out in places like this one, where both time and space seemed frozen and eternal. It was Basil’s idea, probably it had to do with the (totally 100% proven) fact that there was some connection between him and the dusty abandoned buildings. As far as they knew, the second boy, who was also the shortest, has been exploring the unknown and frightening since he was able to crawl. Father Time and Mother Nature claimed paternity over the child and continuously presented him new places to find and conquer; most likely, it was them who commanded every structure to shiver at the voice of the King with no crown. It was decided, the friends knew it, Basil was the future governor of a decaying world of old gods and lost dimensions.

The thump of a heavy book closing with a quick movement attracted the eyes of the “muse” and the “king” towards it. Ah, the last one of the three and also the oldest. An impish smile appreciates the attention received and even though he intends no malice, his friends (whom he likes to consider brothers) are aware that he is the most prone to violent impulses. Every noise seemed to mutter at the exact moment he pushed himself up from the old wooden chair; everyone and everything was quiet and attentive to what he was about to do or say.

“They are already listening”, he said. His voice was deeper, but it didn’t even make the walls shake a bit, something that he secretly envied of his younger comrade. His index pointed upwards and the three of them remained silent. Riley Mendel was not only the smartest (in his group of friends and maybe even of the whole current dimension), but also the most dramatic one. He enjoyed performance very much and with the idea that the universe and its forces were always listening, he attempted his best to impress them at all times. Today, he was the leader. There wasn’t a specific head at all times, it was more of a... rotating role according to the presented situation; no one there would ever dare to claim superiority over the others, because then he would become an easy prey. An invisible halo adorned his shoulders as the cape of a temporary chief and casually, a window behind him filtered the stubborn rays of the sun to crown his head like a holy spirit. He had quite the ability to make things like this happen, to turn tables on his favor no matter how bad the situation could be. Basil and Zach were pretty sure that Riley had an unspoken ability to manipulate chaos, that he was the bastard son of Eris and Death themselves.

“It is unusual for us to meet on Friday”, the florist spoke again as he approached a couple of steps to accidentally form an equilateral triangle in relation to his friends positions. A moment of sepulchral silence is interrupted by a wind shaking the tree’s leaves as if hurrying the oldest of them to finish the dramatic pause. Everybody wants to know why those three old souls had to gather that afternoon.

“It’s Friday the 13th”, Basil remarked, the library creaking at its master’s voice. Everybody except the king looked around once again. Another brief moment of silence that the wind had to interrupt once again, louder and stronger this time. The spirits were impatient.

“I have a case”, the genius Riley finally dropped, but nobody moved. His friends, his brothers of arms know that he wouldn’t simply gather them with such hurry if this was just another one of his “simple” cases. Zach, the most insecure, briefly looked at Basil searching for some answers, but the motionless stance of the other ordered him to stay quiet and keep on waiting, eventually, the current leader will get tired of making them wait. “I want you to work with me in three equal parts”.

                                  The environment turned restless.

The sun touched the twilight, as if attempting to hide from the words that were just said under his watch. An eerie set of shadows hit the old building, creating disturbing silhouettes with the help of the trees in an attempt of scaring such idea from the mind of the boys. It’s inconceivable, outrageous, prohibited and overall... dangerous! Three forces like theirs should accompany each other, of course, but... work together... as one?! Somewhere in the universe the oldest immortals gathered around in an emergency meeting, the wind carried their panicking whispers to the ears of the boys as the sound of leaves brushing each other violently. Even the boys were confused, a simultaneous frown showed up on the faces of Basil and Zachary, but their postures remain untouched, one with crossed and confident stance, and the other with arms loosely at the sides of his body and a slight twist of his torso in an awfully natural elegant pose. Riley’s smile grew a tiny bit with every passing second. “Mortals” could wonder what’s so unusual about this? What’s the matter with three young men chatting about some case in an abandoned building? But you haven’t met them and for the love of any deity you believe in, thank them you haven’t and beg you never will, because these boys are not common fleshlings, these boys are hurricanes, are embodied danger that fell from the gods realm during a stormy night. The three of them are familiarized with death and loss, they are good friends with blood and misery, they served for The Fear and then sat on its throne. Impossibly talented in their own dark arts, these young men are the promise of a terrible (but grand) future.

“The details, brother”, Basil spoke again and the old library stops swinging, as if the voice of the king stroke like an order to let Riley expound.

“A new client, a very powerful person, but apparently not powerful enough, requires us to help them achieve greatness, to change the previously established, to break their prophecy set on stone and build them an empire”, the genius started explaining. His brown eyes bounced between his friends and even dust seemed to freeze in the triangle they have formed. The light diminished as the sun slowly managed to hide from the presence of these old gods, but far from being left in the darkness or getting afraid of the menacing night that attempted to kick them out already, their eyes seemed to glow and their bodies projected a soft light that would keep the shadows away. As long as they were together, not even the destiny would dare to interfere.

“Sounds like any other of your old jobs”. This time it is Zach who declared, his voice way more serious and stern than his initial greetings. The leaves stopped moving, nature around them just paralyzed as their human sentinel raises his voice. This time even Basil broke his steel confidence to turn his head to the florist. The topic of Riley’s past was something rarely touched, it could be quite a trigger; yet, the tall Ent remained calm and strong, capable of holding back a whole tornado if that was about to happen in that exact second. But nothing happened. Riley didn’t snap and slowly, time asks for permission to run by again.

 “The difference, my dear aesthetician”, Riley begun, “is that those jobs were lost coins, ropes with no beginning or no end, wasted opportunities. Don’t you see? My contact was heavily interested as soon as I mentioned having colleagues, people that, even if they couldn’t match the gray matter in my head, they had access to other sides of their minds I could only dream of”. The tone of his voice rose with every sentence, taking some steps in, causing the others to take the same steps to keep their triangle working. Their eyes connected and an invisible link wired their three minds in only one. “And what’s in for us? You may be asking”, Riley added and searched in his pocket for a folded piece of paper, it was empty. Nothing on the front or the back.

“An empty piece of paper could mean either ‘nothing’ or... “, Zach started, but hazel eyes quickly shot upwards to face his companions.

“Exactly”, Riley grinned, showing off human fangs to his friends in a greedy smile.

“You want us to build an empire of our own”, Basil finally spoke again with an almost accusing tone to Riley, “if this person is offering us everything we want as payment, they don’t know what they’re meddling with”.

“Yes, I am thinking of an empire, but not in the way you suggest, My Monarch”, Riley assured him. Another simultaneous step. The windows shut close with a dramatic last note before all remaining spirits abandon the location. They had to reach the sky, the stars and the grand deities to inform them of the playfellows’ ideas, to try and stop whatever they were planning to do. “This person tried to fool us. When I asked for the payment, they extended to me this blank piece of paper. No more words were exchanged”.

“They assumed we are going to ask for everything we want as a reward”, Zach resolved.

“But in the end they are going to give us nothing”, Basil added, “most likely even try to end us”.

The three of them exchanged a look and dropped a harmonic snicker, immediately reading each other’s thoughts. Even Basil, the least expressive of the three, had showed a witty smile.

“So we are going to give them what they ask for...”, Riley begun again.

“...If they feed us, we will grow, but if they starve us...”, Zach followed.

“...we will swallow everything we helped them build”, Basil finished.

A thunder at the distance immobilized the scene. The night had already consumed the day and now the moon watched as her offspring planned the fall of a powerful perfidious person in the most patient way.

“Then it’s settled...”, the genius proclaimed, extending his hand to the center of the triangle. Another thunder at the distance. Zach and Basil joined with their own hands over Riley’s. More thunders, a big storm was approaching... or maybe it was the universe completely terrified, sending alerts to every living being in the planet to be careful, to seek for shelter, because the unimaginable had just happened: three chaotic forces of the universe had decided to gather together to accomplish a goal. It was useless, nothing could ever prepare anyone to what was about to come in the near future. Existence was doomed. The boys smiled at the same time, proving their unnatural connection.

“...This is how it begins, we have risen...”.

“...We are gods”.

[deathbyvalentine]

LARP Prompts

Of all the starports, of all the systems, he had to walk into mine

It was a seedy bar, the type that my mothers would be ashamed to find me in. It could have been on any planet, any station in the universe. It was pleasingly anonymous, the light dim, the music in some alien language I didn’t speak, dark and sultry, the cheap drinks able to kick even the biggest of us over. The taste didn’t matter. It was the forgetting we were in for.

I sat at the bar, elbows firmly planted, nursing something purple. I ignored the insistent glances of a few, wishing to drink alone. I didn’t want to have to perform or charm. I just wanted to exist without acknowledgement. Or so I thought.

Then he walked in. 

He didn’t look like he fit in here. He looked too clean, too self-conscious. A hand rubbed at the back of his head, sending his dark hair sticking out in all directions. He lingered in the doorway, eyes flickering over the patrons, hesitating on each face. In one hand, he clutched a ragged piece of paper. 

He was handsome, Adrian noted, as Adrian did. He was pathologically unable to see a man without analysing his appearance, either in direct comparison to his own or out of an abstract curiosity of if he would take him to bed or not. It said an awful lot about how he related to most people, where he found his connections. Generally, just talking to someone was out of the question. 

He finally committed and stepped inside, the door sliding shut behind him. He made a beeline to the bar, the music too loud to make out fully what he was saying. His brows were furrowed at whatever the bartender was saying, but she turned away with a shrug to serve another patron, apparently dismissing him. Against his better judgement, Adrian stood, only a little unsteadily. Carefully, he picked his way over to the taller man, taking a stool beside him and gesturing for two more drinks. 

“Oh, I don’t - “ His voice was softer than Adrian was expecting somehow, more delicate.  “What, ever?” “No.” There was a hesitation there though, as he glanced down into the glass. “But maybe I can make an exception...” With a heavy sigh, he dropped into the seat, and tried a sip, pulling a hideous face before returning for more. “Adrian.” They shook hands. “Killian.” “What brings you here Killian? Doesn’t seem like your usual scene.” “No?” He raised an amused eyebrow. “How come?” Adrian dragged his eyes up and down his body, raising his eyebrow in return. “Honestly, you look better than this place. Nice, expensive clothes. Clearly never been here before. Look utterly lost.” Killian mulled this over before acquiescing. “You’re right. This isn’t my scene.” “So why are you in it?” He carefully unfurled the paper he had in his hand. It was crumpled, and a little worn. “I’m looking for my sister.” Adrian glanced down to look at the photo and his stomach sunk. He recognised the girl’s face, and he didn’t have any information that Killian would want to hear. So instead he just nodded in acknowledgement

“I’ll keep an eye out.” But Killian had sensed something. He squinted, his friendly face suddenly not so friendly. 

“What aren’t you telling me?” 

Annoyance - Slayers

Tommy had never been good at maintaining hate. It wasn’t in his nature. Or at least, he hadn’t thought it was. He had managed to hate Apollo for a whole two years. A record, comparatively. 

What Tommy had learnt is that holding a grudge was different from hating someone. Hatred was a feeling, grudges were a series of actions. And Tommy would continue being passive aggressive or outright aggressive for as long as he’d live he supposed. A family trait he had inherited, which immortality had amplified.

But Tommy didn’t hate him anymore. He didn’t have that hot, angry magma burning in his chest when he saw him, he didn’t want to rend his flesh, or watch him die at his feet. He didn’t want to make him lose his wits or his music. He just wanted him to stay far, far away from he and his. 

The hatred had come tumbling down like a house of cards when disdain had blown in like wind. There was no joy in hating someone so delusional they were unaware they were being hated. Any wrong done against Apollo would be framed to fit his own narrative as a hero of the people, and none of it would sink it, would make a meaningful difference. 

As cliche as it was, Tommy realised that the only form of revenge he could take that wouldn’t harm himself more was flourishing. Becoming the best, healthiest, strongest version of himself he could possibly be and outstrip Apollo in every possible way.

That or dump a mountain on him in a thousand years time. It was a toss up.

 Family - Slayers

For the first time, he felt like a real member. When he was Asclepius’s, he felt something like a pet, included and tolerated but not permanent. Like in a hundred years, he would be dead or replaced and nobody wanted to get too attached to him. 

But now, well, he wasn’t an in-law. Zeus’s blood flowed through his veins, and his new-found immortality made him a fixture, rather than a passing fancy. And he had power too, both his own and his family’s. He was older and wiser. He belonged in these hallowed halls, because he was one of them now.

He loved as fiercely, felt as deeply, hated and loved them all in almost equal measure. He could keep up with them in a way he couldn’t before. He could see the eternity stretched out before him. One of arguments and blood shed and grudges. But also one of protection, belonging, adoration the likes of which no mortal was capable of. He would hurt them and be hurt in turn, over and over again, because that was their nature. And maybe it was his too.

He felt for the first time, like he was part of something. Ancient and wild and unknowable. And he fitted right in.

Laughing with the Queen - Slayers

Tommy adored Hera. It was not an uncomplicated love - it had fear and respect mixed within it, but it was a strong love. He had the distinct feeling that he would do almost anything for her, and desired to be counted as one of hers. Someone she would protect, close ranks for, count as family. 

It was her strength and grace he admired. Even when she was furious, she was composed. Even when she was frightened, she was calm. He wanted to be like her, at the core of things, to always seem in control, poised and clever. Whenever he felt weak, his weakness showed like cracks, all over him, unable to be hidden. 

A small hopeful part of him believed she liked him too. She smiled when she saw him, and he had made her laugh on more than one occasion. They could talk, happily, with no awkward pauses or hesitations. And on her shoulder sat the peacock pin he had found for her. 

The dread he had felt when he had upset her was not just fear of retribution. It was a fear of not being part of the fold, of being treated coldly by her. He would have happily taken a curse if it meant she wouldn’t discard him entirely. Luckily, he had clawed his way back into her good graces, and he hoped it would stay that way.

 Organs - Slayers

He woke up and the world had not ended. His heart still beat in his chest, his lungs still pulled in air, and his eyes could still see the morning light. He realised that part of him had expected to die this weekend. Death had not come, and peace remained in its absence. What a miracle his body was.

He could hear Jones making coffee downstairs, the spoon clattering against the mug. Somewhere, Michael would be waking up with Ava and Ana, in his own bed, with no obligations. Zeus would be waking next to Hera, and marvelling at the fact it was another morning where she still loved him. Daniel would be watching the sunrise over Athens. His twin would be getting ready for work, his father cooking his mother breakfast. The world was kept spinning on its fragile axis by these small acts.

He knew where he would be waking up in a few weeks. It would be hotter than here. He’d wake up with a God, both foreign and familiar. He would study his face, and memorise it, and learn it by heart. It would be the first time they woke together, without Asclepius disappearing like a dream. He’d see all the small intimacies he’d been deprived of so far. Maybe they would talk. Maybe they wouldn’t. But for the first time, they’d be alone together, with no urgency. They could just exist.

It wouldn’t last of course. There were still so many pressing problems, jostling for his attention, begging to be solved. He would still be woken by nightmares, and sometimes his breath would catch in his chest and he wouldn’t be able to breath. He’d feel the knife on his throat over and over again. But it could wait, for a little while at least. He needed this. He needed one good thing to keep holding onto. This was his hope. It was all he had.

Could/Should/Did - 3YGB

He crowed triumphantly from atop the inner wall, peeking out from behind a battlement to flip off the Empress’s armies below. Childish? Definitely. Deeply and profoundly satisfying? You bet. 

It was amazing really. The most rag-tag army the country possessed had managed to take the inner city, all but walking in and changing the locks. And he had been at the forefront, sneaking and planning and leading in a way he had actively avoided before. He had worn the mantle of leader uncomfortably, hating the responsibility, the pressure. But now, he realised, there was freedom in people embracing you whole-heartedly, in entrusting their lives to you. It forced you to grow up, to take some accountability. He finally felt like he might be who he was supposed to be.

And now, the victory was his as much as theirs. He had planned this, he had given them the orders, he had followed them into the mouth of the beast. And stolen the damn palace from right under their noises. Well, they were thieves after all. It was fitting. He walked inside the palace, clapping every soldier he saw on the back, sharing half-awed grins. Can you believe we did this? Can you believe that we won?

*

The shadows stretched long and dark in the corridors, eerily silent, unmoving. The moon shone through the palace windows, producing pools of light amidst all the dark. Cherry paused in the doorway, his own breath loud in his ears. He held up a hand to get his soldiers to wait, hang back. Then, slowly, he placed a foot down on the stone floor, edging his way into the passage. 

Something was wrong. The air hung oddly and it felt like the walls were holding their breath. The hair on the back of his neck prickled and sent a long shiver down his spine. Everything was still.

He got five steps into the corridor before chaos erupted. The shadows rippled out and exploded into a frenzy of movement. They bubbled and formed into palace guards, their armour as dark as the shadow they were formed from. It was a trap. The entire thing was a trap. He turned, hopelessly to his folk, with just enough time to scream an order to run. Some tripped over themselves to obey, others drew their swords.

The pain didn’t hit him right away. At first, his breath was simply knocked from his body, and he couldn’t understand why Cold Smile’s eyes widened in horror. Or why taking another step was strikingly impossible.

And then he looked down to see the blade that had pierced straight through his back. And the steady, dark stream of blood that followed. It still didn’t hurt, but the taste of copper in his throat and mouth was revolting. It seemed easier to go to his knees.

He instinctively patted his bandoleer, searching fruitlessly for his healing potion. Then he laughed, splattering the stone with splashes of scarlet. Of course. He had given it to Duty for the cut on her head. It still seemed a fair exchange.

Distantly, the battle was ongoing, and he could hear it echoing. But it seemed more important to sleep. He was only sorry that he couldn’t fall into that peaceful slumber the way he had last night, with his head in Duty’s lap, and her fingers tangled in his hair.

*

He was absolutely powerless. He stood in the war room, looking at the space where the flag had been. His flag that represented his soldiers. That had been utterly decimated. Three hundred thieves, liars, beggars, visionaries, friends, companions tricksters,, lovers, killers, artists and countless more. He knew each of their names, and many of their stories, and now they were likely dead, and if they were not, they were soon to be so.

And the worst part? He wasn’t with them.

He had become like the leaders he so hated, sitting safe in a command post far far away from where the action was, making them take risks that he wouldn’t take himself. It had been his orders that they had followed without question, and his orders that had gotten them killed. Fourth Raven was murmuring in his ear something about what they had gained, information that would aid them later, that would stop someone else’s army dying pointlessly. But it was his that had, his that was deemed an acceptable sacrifice. He didn’t think it was coincidence it was the army formed of the lowest dregs that had been the sacrificial lamb.

They still might win, he knew that. But all he could think of was the five hundred graves left to dig, and bless, and bodies to bury. The bodies of those that had believed in him where nobody else had. Part of him wanted to join the fight, to bleed and die beside them. But that was no longer an option. Someone had to remember them all. That would have to be him. Fates knew nobody else would.

Filthy Liberalism/Low Tide - Empire

Mattias trailed his fingers in the warm water, watching a few silver fish dart away from the resulting ripples. A little while away from the shore, the smart snapping of sails could be heard, and the bright flashes of colour seen. Refugees, more of them. From his position on the pier, he could estimate they’d be here within the hour. 

The trickle from Zemress had not yet entirely slowed, and Mattias assumed it wouldn’t until the island was empty. And why should they stay? There was an Empire waiting for them here, welcoming and inviting and not so different from what they already knew. Distant cousins, the lot of them. They had to earn their keep, to be told, but there was a place here for them. 

There was more than simple logic influencing his compassion. There was a pang deep inside his chest, an unspoken worry. Kahraman was currently inundated with orcs. They would beat them back, they always did. But a small hypothetical nagged at him.

If the Brass Coast were ever eliminated as a nation, he hoped that those neighbouring would take him in, not just as a guest, but as a citizen. How could they hope to convert the world into members of the Empire if by the Virtue of their birth, they could never truly fit inside the society. What about those that did not wish to be Hakima or Kohan, and wanted to be embraced, but could not brag of their blood?

Mattias valued his family, and his tribe and he was not sure what he would do without the fierce Pride that so informed that love. He was even less sure what he would do if he wasn’t given a choice about abandoning tribal and family links. He would not be happy, that much he could guarantee. 

He let his fingers still in the water, and the curious fish nibbled on his skin curiously. In an hour, he would stand and greet the new citizens, with all the fire and passion they deserved.

Dissolution - Death Unto Darkness

A part of them wanted to gather them all close to their chest, cradle them tight, and keep them all together. A little worry pricked at the back of their mind, that this might be the last time they saw all of them. The sector was growing more dangerous than the second, and the fragile peace they had enjoyed on the Chaser felt a million years ago.

Cal supposed they had been happy there. Lying in bed watching holovids with Nic when they couldn’t sleep, close enough to hear his heartbeat and his warmth, steady and true. Playing hide and seek with Baris on the engineering deck, their laugh giving them away much more often than their footsteps. Sitting on the observation deck with Bridge, looking out at the miracle of stars. Allowing Sister Anya to stitch them up, always grimacing, never shouting. Pip stroking their hair when the pain and sickness got too much for them to bear alone. Complaining about nobles and swapping ration packs with Gwyn. Their armscrew carrying them when they were too tired to walk and letting them lie in their bunks. Even Aleph and Mitra’s presence, foreboding and serious would be missed. And the Chaser itself, that looming, vicious presence that Cal had only brushed against but already held dear due to the minds that had loved hers.

They would be stepping onto a different ship, into a great unknown, with only Constantin and Argento at their back. Somewhere, there would be Nasser. At the end, there would be orks, and work, and death and pain. They were not alone any more, not truly, The Emperor ever present and glowing in their mind. But they would still be lonely.

They took a moment now to look over the assembled bodies with their new eyes, embedding this image into their mind. This. This is what they were fighting for. They must not forget the reasons why, or all would be lost. They could forget the details, the names, even the faces and feelings, but they couldn’t forget this humanity.

Vindication - DuD

They had never felt this before and it took them quite a while to realise exactly what it was. It felt like a physical warmth in their chest that pushed against their spine, making sure they kept their back straight and their head up high. It made them believe in every one of their words, kept their hands from trembling, and their eyes never dropped eye contact. They had never heard their voice like this, no stuttering, clear and calm.

It was confidence. It was knowing that they were worth something, unarguably and absolutely. They had been chosen, they were beloved, they could rearrange the surroundings with a click of their fingers. It was knowing, deep down, that they were right about the Emperor. 

Once, they were nothing. Stepped on, ignored, abused, broken again and again until a stone had turned into sand. They had believed every lie they were ever told about their own worth until they couldn’t even see their potential. The worst lie was being told they were unworthy of Her love.

Showed them. Showed them all.

[pamphletstoinspire]

MARY THE CHURCH AT THE SOURCE - PART 8

WRITTEN BY: JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER AND HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

________

III

CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY SPIRIT, BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY

I

It is impolite to cut someone short. He rightly protests and says: “Let me finish!” It is just as impolite to cut the New Testament short, to click one’s stopwatch at some stage of its reflection on the phenomenon of Jesus Christ, to interrupt it in the middle of a single connected idea or sentence. A few exegetes are guilty of this impoliteness, and many people echo them without sufficient thought.

Everyone knows that the New Testament was conceived and written in the light of the Resurrection. The gift of certain faith in the Resurrection turned the world upside down. Without it, it would have been pointless to found a Christian community, write a Pauline letter, or compose a Gospel. The Resurrection casts its light backward on the enigmatic, peculiar existence of the man from Nazareth— above all on the failure of his career, the Crucifixion, which at the time seemed to have defeated all his expectations and promises. The light falls backward on this catastrophic event that had occurred only three days before, creating almost out of nothing, in a kind of primordial generative act, the nucleus of the Christian faith. This nucleus is summed up in the two words “for us”, already a firm conviction of the primitive Church when Paul arrived on the scene: “[He] was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom 4:25).

Now, if someone wanted to freeze faith’s ongoing reflection once it had arrived at this insight, he would already be too late, for everything that comes later is already contained in this first germ. The light falls on what Jesus did the night before he suffered: “Eat the flesh that is broken for you, drink the blood that is spilled for you.” Indeed, the light falls even farther back on the inexplicable shape of his life, which could only create perplexity. On the one side, this terrible majesty, this superhuman claim in all that he did and said; on the other side, this equally terrible abasement and defenselessness, the feeling (of which he made no secret) that he was going to meet an ignominious death; and immediately afterward the renewed promise that he would come on the clouds of heaven to judge the world. Nothing in this existence seemed to round itself out; behind every final verdict one might try to reach there lurked a contradiction. “When they heard these words, some of the people said, ‘This is really the prophet.’ Others said, ‘This is the Christ.’ But some said, Ts the Christ to come from Galilee?’ So there was a division among the people over him” (Jn 7:40-41, 43). Even the elect disciples who knew him more intimately understood nothing, as they themselves confess. Nor could they have understood anything even if they had been much smarter than they actually were. You could explain the mysteries to them as much as you wanted—but what, in the end, was this kingdom of God they were always talking about and that had supposedly drawn near, no, had already completely come? The sick were healed; bread could be distributed to famished crowds; demons could even be expelled. Was this the kingdom of God? But whenever they thought they had found a clue to solving the puzzle, they would be rebuffed again: “Nevertheless do not rejoice in this” (Lk 10:20), Once only did he promise some of those standing by that they would see the kingdom of God coming in power before their death (Mk 9:1), but then we read that, because “they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately” (Lk 19:11), Jesus told them the parable of the man who went into a far country and told his servants to trade with his goods.

No, the puzzles were insoluble. The best one could do (so far as one did not, like bis relatives, think he was crazy) was to stick by him and hope that at some point he would resolve his own enigma. And he did resolve it—in the unity of defeat and victory, of Crucifixion and Resurrection. Now the unity of majesty and lowliness became clear: it was the unity of a mission from God and perfect obedience to the will of the Father. The unity of present and future, of the already now and the not yet, of restless activity and patient waiting for the Father’s hour, also became clear. The story of the disciples from Emmaus wonderfully illustrates how the sun of the Resurrection rises over the twilight landscape of Jesus’ life: “O foolish men. . . . Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?. . . Everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled” (Lk 24:25-26; 44).

And Jesus expressly (Lk 24:46) includes the Resurrection, the surpassing fulfillment of all God’s promises that the covenant between his eternal life and man’s mortal life would one day be perfectly fulfilled and that mortal man would become a partaker in his eternal life.

Once this immense paschal light had risen to illuminate Jesus’ life, there was no more stopping. The question simply had to be asked: Who really was this man; where did he come from originally? We thus arrive at the question of his provenance, to which the line from the Creed we are going to consider is the answer: “Conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary”.

II

Now, running through Jesus’ life there was a very clear motif that, like Ariadne, gives us the guiding thread we need to venture forward into the mystery: Jesus’ unique, all-determining relationship to his heavenly Father. It is already the Synoptics, not John, who first give us the powerful words: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” It is with this Father, whom Jesus customarily called Abba, Papa (the early Church handed on this word forever in Aramaic), that he wrestled in his most difficult hour: “ ‘Abba [Papa], Father, all things are possible to you; remove this chalice from me; yet not what I will, but what you will’ ” (Mk 14:36).,

In view of texts like these, which stand for many others, let us go abruptly to the question: Could this man, who had such a unique relationship to the “Father in heaven”, to whom he owed his existence, entrusted himself, and unreservedly gave himself back—could he owe his existence to another father at the same time? Could he, putting it crudely, have two fathers? Did he have to acknowledge two fathers as the source of his existence? After all, he did not live in our supposedly “fatherless society”, in which the fourth commandment seems to have faded to the point of total disappearance, in which the parent-child relationship no longer rests upon a holistic, fully human relationship of care and reverent love, but is reduced to a chance sex act that does not oblige the child toward its parents in any essential way. No, this man was a Jew who was part of his people’s intergenerational continuity. And in this continuity—precisely because of messianic hope, but also because of descent from Abraham, the first father—the parent-child relationship was the sustaining ground of one’s whole existence. Would not Jesus’ exclusive relation to his heavenly Father have deeply offended Joseph the carpenter if Joseph had been his physical father? And could Jesus, who, after all, enjoined the observance of the Ten Commandments (Mk 10:19), have himself transgressed against one that was so vital to all ancient cultures? And supposing he owed his existence as much to the man Joseph as he did to his heavenly Father, and so had to keep the commandment, would not this double paternity have led to certain schizophrenia? The only way out of the dilemma would be to say that he owes his existence to his heavenly Father like any other man whose immortal soul comes from the Creator, who plants this soul in the new being at the moment of the parents’ procreative act. If this were the case, Jesus would be, to be sure, a pious man who honors his parents and in doing so also thinks of his Creator, but he would be in no respect better or worse than we are, and he would have been just as incapable as we are of saying “no one knows the Father but the Son.” Nor would he have any special ability to mediate bis fellow men into a completely new relationship to their heavenly Father. He could do only what Harnack says he can: make them see a bit more clearly what they already know and are. For this reason I must for once contradict a statement of Joseph Ratzinger that has been repeated eagerly everywhere: “The doctrine of Jesus’ divinity would not be affected if Jesus had been the product of a normal Christian marriage.”1 But the point is that the human parent-child relationship is more than a mere physiological event.

If this claim is mistaken—and Jesus’ entire life, especially when seen in the light of the Resurrection, proves that it is—then it makes sense to see Jesus as the high point of a trajectory beginning in the Old Testament, as the superabundant fulfillment of a promise, toward which the Old Testament had already built the ladder.

The history of faith began with Abraham. He first obtained an ordinary son, Ishmael, by the fruitful Hagar, but God promised him another son when he was a hundred years old. This was the son of the promise, Isaac, whom Abraham’s sterile wife, Sarah, would bear. The same sign is repeated with the birth of Samson and, once again, with the birth of Samuel from Hannah, who until that time had been sterile. It occurred one last time with Elizabeth, who, also sterile, conceived the Forerunner, John, by an express divine miracle. “ ‘And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible’ ” (Lk 1:36-37). This motif, which spans the entire Old Testament, haunted Jewish thought. Reflection brought more and more clearly to light that it was God himself who played the principal role in these begettings and conceptions. God’s power quickened the dead seed and the barren womb. Paul says that Abraham fathered Isaac in faith in “the God . . . who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. . . . He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead because he was a hundred years old, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb” (Rom 4:17, 19). Paul likewise says that Isaac was “born . . . through promise” (Gal 4:23), “born according to the Spirit” (Gal 4:29).

However, so long as we stay within the horizon of the Old Testament, the human father’s relation to his son continues to play a decisive role despite everything that God does. Not the Holy Spirit, but Abraham is, in an eminent way, Isaac’s father. When they journey together to Mount Moriah, “Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘My Father!’ And he said, ‘Here am I, my son.’ He said, ‘Behold, the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ ” (Gen 22:7). Before Samson’s birth, the angel first appears to the woman, who remains anonymous, but the decisive negotiations take place with Manoah of Zorah, from the tribe of Dan (Judg 13:2-24). The story of the barren Hannah also begins with a detailed description of her husband, Elkanah, son of Jeroham, and so forth, from Ramathaim-zophim, who makes a pilgrimage with his wife to sacrifice in Shiloh. And upon Hannah’s entreaty that a son be granted, we read of the two that “they rose early in the morning and worshiped before the LORD; then they went back to their house at Ramah. And Elkanah knew Hannah his wife, and the LORDremembered her” (1 Sam 1:1-19; citation, 19), And how clearly the priest Zechariah, of the division of Abijah, predominates over his wife in the first chapter of Luke. It is he whom the angel meets at the hour of incense, he who receives the detailed promise about the son who, filled with the Holy Spirit, will prepare the ways of the Lord in the power of Elijah.

It is Zechariah who, after having been struck dumb on account of his unbelief, is asked what name his son shall be given and finally sings the Benedictus: “And his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit, and prophesied, saying, ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel’ ” (Lk 1:67-68).

After these preliminaries, we would expect to learn a great deal about Joseph, the man descended from David on whom the whole promise depends. But the entire scene of the Annunciation, both in Matthew and in Luke, passes over him and concentrates entirely on Mary. Here for the first time the angel of the Lord addresses a woman, and it is she who transmits the Spirit whom she has received to another woman, her cousin Elizabeth, who only then is filled with the Holy Spirit and receives the sign of the child leaping in her womb. Mary alone sings the Magnificat. It is quite clear that something much more than “biological generation” is going on here, namely, the decisive appearance of God as the sole Father, an appearance that excludes a relation to another father to the same degree that Jesus’ spousal relation to his bride, the Church, rules out any other marital relation for him.

Abraham’s loins had been blessed by the Holy Spirit, who reawakened their life-giving powers. The old servant Eliezer had to touch them in order to seal his oath to provide Isaac with a bride. Surely Joseph’s life-giving powers would have received much more praise if they had finally brought forth the long-awaited scion of David.

But no. The whole process of bodily begetting, in fact, the whole question of whether a man or woman is fruitful or not, loses its importance in the New Covenant. Joseph crosses the threshold of the New Covenant by an act of renunciation. In this way he becomes the foster father of the one who himself will be a virgin and through a most radical renunciation will open a completely different source of life. His crucified body as a whole will be endowed with power to beget and, according to Paul, will produce his immaculate bride without spot or wrinkle, the Church.

The predominance of renunciation over human begetting places us before the very threshold of our Creed. To be sure, we have not yet crossed the threshold, for we must still make the step from the barren Elizabeth to the virginal Mary. But it surely bespeaks the biblical origin of the motif of the virginal birth that the angel of the Annunciation puts Mary’s hand in that of her cousin Elizabeth, thereby unequivocally deriving the motif from, and legitimating it in terms of, the Old Testament promise. Everything that Matthew and Luke say in their accounts of Jesus’ conception and birth can be understood, without exception, against the background of the Old Testament, whereas there is no trace in pagan mythology, in Egyptian or Hellenistic stories, of pharaohs or heroes being divinely begotten of a virgin. The very most one might concede here is that such distant parallels (but the differences are greater!) suggest a vague expectation that a great man could come directly from the divine world. But we must immediately introduce a correction here: According to the Jewish conception of God, there can be no question of a divine filiation in any physical sense.

On the one hand, Luke’s account directly cites the promise in Isaiah that the young woman (almah) will conceive and bear a son whom they will call Emmanuel (Is 7:14). The Hebrew word “young woman” is translated as parthenos in the Greek Bible. This term means “virgin”, and it thus builds a bridge to Nazareth. However, there was nothing particularly splendid about virginity in the Jewish world. On the contrary, all the light fell on the fruitful woman. For this reason, Mary’s allusion to the fact that God “has looked upon the lowliness of his handmaid” is another Old Testament echo.

Furthermore, the expression “Holy Spirit will come upon you, and power of the Most High will overshadow you” also refers, in its entirety, to the Old Testament. Nowhere in the Old Testament does God couple himself in a “sacred marriage” with a human being; rather, he always sends the power of his Spirit from his inaccessible height to enact his will. And yet here, too, we cross the threshold from the Old Covenant to the New—we are talking about the Virgin Birth, after all!—and we should not hesitate to see this “Holy Spirit” as divine power that Christian reflection on the events came to call the third Divine Person, or hypostasis. That fact that the word pneuma has no article here (as is often the case in the New Testament), whereas in other passages it does (“to pneuma”), is not a decisive argument against our claim the texts sometimes add or drop the article from one verse to another, for example at Jesus’ baptism: “He will baptize you with Holy Spirit. . . . Then [Jesus] saw the heavens open and the Spirit descending like a dove. . . . The Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness” (Mt 1:8, 10, 12). What is much weightier is that it is precisely in the scene of the Annunciation that the angel’s threefold speech is the first explicit mention of the three hypostases of the Godhead: “The Lord is with you” (Yahweh, the God of Israel, whom Jesus will call his Father); “you will bear the Son of the Most High”; “Holy Spirit will overshadow you.” If the Father, as the Almighty, remains on high, if, on the other hand, the Son allows himself to be borne into the womb of the Virgin, thus allowing his Incarnation to occur, rather than actively carrying it out, it is, and always will be, the Holy Spirit, as the third divine hypostasis, who is the real agent in the Church’s prayers and sacraments and charisms.

III

And now just one point remains: the vessel that receives the power of the Most High, the Virgin. The text has told us that she is betrothed to a man named Joseph, which, according to Jewish law, means that she is already legally married to him but is not yet living with him. The Jews considered it a disgrace to consummate marriage during the time of betrothal. For this reason, Mary also asks the angel: “How can this be, since I [for the time being] have no husband?” However, Mary’s connection with Joseph is absolutely decisive for New Testament theology, because only Joseph was of the Davidic stock that bore the messianic promise, and it was the legal father who decided which lineage a child belonged to. If we reflect on this tapestry of subtly calibrated interconnections, we cannot help observing that Jesus’ divine sonship is a much better founded, much more essential fact than his messiahship, to which he actually attached little importance, at least in its then conventional meaning. When Peter proclaimed him as the Messiah, he directed attention instead to the Son of Man and the suffering servant who would have much to suffer; but a Messiah that really suffered like the servant of God was unimaginable to a Jew of the time.

The Virgin, harboring a mystery under her heart, remains in profound solitude. In a silence that almost causes the perplexed Joseph to despair. Incarnation of God means condescension, abasement, and, because we are sinners, humiliation. And he already draws his Mother into these humiliations. Where did she get this child? People must have talked at the time, and they probably never stopped. It must have been a sorry state of affairs if Joseph could find no better way out than to divorce his bride quietly. God’s humanism at once begins drastically. Those whose lives God enters, those who enter into his, are not protected. They have to go along into a suspicion and ambiguity they cannot talk their way out of. And the ambiguity will only get worse, until, at the Cross, the Mother will get to see what her Yes has caused and will have to hear the vitriolic ridicule to which the Son is forced to listen.

In Greek tragedy there is the chorus that comments on the events, and it can be either sad or celebratory. In the Christian drama of Christmas, the angels of the gloria are the chorus; they comment on the heavenly truth of this poor earthly scene in the manger. Glory is due God in heaven, but joy is given on earth to those men who delight in his good pleasure. In the first place, that means this new man, his Son. And then around the Son, those who are placed at his side: the Virgin who gave herself to be his Mother; the man who for the sake of God’s will renounced being his father; the shepherds watching at night who are granted the favor of being the first to see the sign of salvation. The Son will appoint his own shepherds and his own sheep. May these shepherds, too, pass the Christmas season watching over their flocks (Lk 2:8) and announcing to all those entrusted to them the sign that the God of grace has worked for us all.

________

1 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (Communio Books; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 274-75.

[viesolivagant]

Dionysos (Bacchus)

"It is an oversimplification to make this god simply the symbol of zestful, sexual passion. The personality of Dionysos, the divine youth or twice-born god, is infinitely complex, as the many names given to him show, although it is true that the earliest, 'Raging' or 'Breaker in Pieces', derive from the 'wild shouts of the orgy' (SECQ p. 285).

He was the son of Zeus and of Semele, originally either a Phyrgian mother-goddess or a mortal woman, daughter of Cadmus and of Harmony. Wishing to entertain her divine lover in all his glory, she was consumed by lightning. Abstracted from the lightning-blasted body of his mother, the unborn Dionysos completed his term in his father's thigh. This is the clear echo of a simple nature-myth: Mother Earth, impregnated by the lightning of the sky-god, bears a young god whose essence mingles with the life which springs from Earth's entrails....Creating the fable of the double birth served two purposes. It preserved the lightning-flash which originally symbolized the coupling of Earth and Heaven and it increased the prestige of the new god by deriving his descent from Zeus himself. (SECG ibid.)

This double birth, implying as it does double gestation, re-echoes the classic pattern of initiation - birth, death and rebirth. Zeus' thigh - a hollow like the hollow tree - gave symbolically to the initiatory powers possessed by Dionysos the exceptional strength which, again symbolically, lay within the thighs of the father of the gods.

He married Ariadne, originally an 'Aegean vegetation- or more specifically a tree-goddess'. Their marriage provided the theme for much Dionysiac art, the scene often symbolizing the union of the god with the initiate into his mysteries. According to Jean Beaujeu:

'These motifs were so frequently repeated and so widely disseminated as to lose a great deal of their significance, since it was not because the purchaser had been initiated into or attached to the cult that he bought or commissioned from an artist or a studio a Dionysiac subject. On the other hand there are instances - and the whole group of paintings depicting the principal scenes of an initiation, on the walls of the main room in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, is one -- which display a definite purpose and a genuine devotion'.

Dionysos may be seen clasped by Ariadne and yielding to her in ecstasy. His wife, Ariadne, and his mother, Semele, are images of the salvation freely wrought by Dionysos' love (JEAD p. 345).

As a vegetation-god of vine, wine, fruit and seasonal renewal, Plutarch's 'Lord of the Trees', it is he who, Hesiod tells us, 'scatters joy in profusion'. As 'genius of sap and budding shoots', Dionysos controls human and animal fertility. In any case, he bears the name of Phallenos and a phallic procession was the high point of many of his festivals. (In the Villa of the Mysteries there is one among many examples of wall paintings of the initiations depicting the 'unveiling' of the phallus.) In Dionysiac legends and worship such prolific beasts as goats and bulls often occur, bulls and goats being his favourite sacrificial victims, in earlier times torn to pieces by his worshippers in a bloody communion (SECG p. 290).

Both the social effects of his worship and the forms which it took provide some justification for calling him the god of liberation, of the destruction of inhibitions and taboos, the god of unbridled licence. 'The purpose of Dionysiac purification', says Boyance, 'was to give ultimate expression to that from which the soul needed to be freed.'

Because he saved his mother Semele from the Underworld when she was blasted by Zeus' lightning and guided her to the abode of the Immortals, Dionysos was also regarded as a chthonian god, who initiated and guided souls and freed them from the Underworld. Aristophanes has depicted, under the name of Iacchos (see shout), an infernal Dionysos who leads the dance of his initiates, dances of the dead in the meadows of the Underworld.

However, the part which he played in the Eleusinian Mysteries reveals his passage through the depths of Earth as a phase of germination and as a pledge of fecundity, 'All things growing upon Earth ultimately originate in the depths of the Underworld' (SECG p. 294). His descent into that Underworld, whether in search of his mother or to make it his temporary abode, would therefore symbolize the round of seasons, Winter and Summer, death and resurrection. Once again this displays the structural pattern of gods who die and are brought back to life common to religions and mysteries which flourished throughout the Greco-Roman world at the beginning of the Christian era.

In a more deeply religious sense, despite its perversities and even through their medium, the cult of Dionysus bears witness to the tremendous effort made by human beings to break the barriers which separate them from the divine and to set their souls free from the trammels of Earth. Sexual excess and giving full rein to the irrational were rather clumsy efforts to grasp the superhuman. As paradoxical as this may seem, if we consider his myth in its entirety, Dionysos symbolizes the attempt to spiritualize life-forms, from the plant to the ecstatic, since he is the tree- and goat-god, the god of religious enthusiasm and the mystic marriage. In his myth he synthesizes a whole cycle of evolution.

Before his time, as has been said, there were two worlds, the human and the divine, and two races, that of gods and that of mortals. Humans were to accept the risk of alienation in the hope of transfiguration.

Every devotee of Dionysos hoped to escape from the body through ecstasy and, at the highest pitch of fervour, to achieve intimate union with the god by whom he or she was temporarily possessed.... The worship of Dionysos was a major source of Greek spirituality in helping to define and to propagate the notion of the soul....Thanks to the Dionysiac movement, the notion dawned of a soul related to the godhead and, in one sense, more real than the body itself (SECG pp. 291, 300).

Since he had led his mother (the Earth) from the Underworld to Olympus, it was legitimate to believe that he meant to open the doors of immortality to all the children of Earth. That at least is one of the meanings and vectors of the Dionysos symbol.

In psychoanalysis - and as a reminder of the main primitive aspects of the god - Dionysos symbolizes the shattering of inhibitions, repressions and regressions. He is a Nietzschean figure of the life force confronting Apollonian restraint.

He symbolizes those dark forces which well up from the unconscious. He is the god who presides over the outbursts inspired by intoxication in all its forms, that of the drunkard or of the crowd gripped by music or dance, and even that of the very madness with which he afflicts those who have not paid him due honour. He endowed mankind with the gifts of the natural world and, in particular, with that of the vine. He is a god of many shapes, creator of illusions and worker of miracles (Defradas in BEAG).

He would, therefore, symbolize the forces which bring the destruction of the personality, his 'orgies' promoting regression to life-forms reflecting primordial chaos and the drowning of the conscious in the lava of the unconscious. His appearance in dreams denotes very severe psychic tension and the imminence of breakdown. The ambivalence of his symbol may be perceived as a Dionysiac liberation which may lead to either to spiritualization or to materialization, a factor causing the personality either to develop or to regress. Deep down, he symbolizes the life force which tends to break free of all bounds and restraint. "

"The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols" by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant Translated from the French by John Buchananan-Brown

[nequittezpaswrites]

Trivia

Pairing: CrowleyxOC

Word Count: 1,753

Summary:  Trivia was the goddess of crossroads, death, and magic. She wasn't sure how she felt about demons dealing in her domain, let alone the upstart who crowned himself 'King'.

A/N: first time posting fanfic on Tumblr, but this is under 2,000 words so I figured I’d give it a try. If you like it, I have longer fics on AO3 and FFnet, where I am NeQuittezPas

She wasn't sure how old she was.

At the beginning, there were no crossroads. There were no roads at all. But then animals came, and their tracks wore paths into the earth, and wherever those paths crossed there was a spark of Trivia.

She didn't know how long that time lasted. It was a kind of not-life, as if she were on the cusp of waking. Either something would wake her into life, or the power would disperse, and she would sink into the sleep of death.

She woke.

It was the humans who woke her at last. For a long time they were little more than apes, but over the centuries they learned and grew. They walked upright. They made tools. They hunted and traveled and learned to speak. And as they grew, she took form—a form not unlike the humans whose travels and beliefs gave her power.

She was Trivia, and she was of the crossroads.

In those early days, the crossroads were more peaceful. They represented the future, the unknown, paths unexplored. They were the doorways to new worlds, and Trivia was revered as a symbol of hope and possibility.

But the humans grew, and they grew dark. Greedy, and hungry, and violent. The crossroads became dangerous. They laid traps for animals, first, and then for their fellow man. Humans rushed through her crossroads in the day and avoided them at night. Her domain became a place of danger and death, and so Trivia became a goddess of death. The humans prayed to her and gave her tribute in hopes of safe travels through the crossroads. The more they prayed and the more they sacrificed, the more powerful Trivia grew. She added sorcery and witchcraft to her domain.

By the time the humans began to build homes and plant crops and cobble together something resembling civilization, she was truly alive, and powerful. She was the ruler of the crossroads, and of graveyards, sorcery, and witchcraft. She was the queen of ghosts. She was Trivia.

There was something of a ruckus, then. Trivia was only distantly aware of the God who created a garden for two humans—the first true humans, they said, unlike the proto-humans whose soul-deep superstition and minor sacrifices had brought her to life. Trivia kept her distance, because this God and his angels had more power than she and others like her, and no respect for their lives. But she also kept her ear to the ground, because she could sense that the events this God and his ilk set into motion would shape the world in ways no one could imagine.

She was right.

The humans were corrupted and cast out. One of the strongest angels, too, was cast out, and caged in the underworld where Trivia had sometimes traveled, which had once been part of her domain. She visited less, after that, unnerved by the rattling of that terrible cage.

But time went on, and humans prospered. Their numbers grew, and they built great cities. Those cities traded with each other, and for every new metropolis there were a dozen more roads and trade routes, and where they intersected, Trivia thrived.

For thousands of years she had watched animals and early man travel the world, had witnessed their journeys and lives and deaths. But soon after the dust-up with God and his angels and his chosen, something curious began to happen at her crossroads.

One of the souls that Lucifer had dragged down to the pit, that had been twisted and tortured until it was a flayed, withered, hurting thing, possessed a human body. It met with a human man at Trivia's crossroads. They made a deal, and sealed it with a kiss. At first it was infrequent, but soon word spread, and many demons were making deals for countless souls.

Sometimes the demons would bring with them massive dogs. They were invisible to human eyes, vicious, and stank of death. Trivia was immediately fond of them, so much that she made a special journey to the underworld to acquire one. Soon all who believed in her knew that Trivia's presence was preceded by the barking of dogs.

And then Trivia watched, intrigued, allowing her domain to become this macabre bartering place. It was interesting to see what humans loved and valued enough that they found it worth trading their immortal souls for. Mostly it was worthless, temporary things. Wealth, health, fame and glory. Many a king and conqueror visited Trivia's crossroads and walked away with a 10 year deadline. Sometimes it was obsession, the mad determination that their unrequited love be returned, or the search for vengeance against an unfaithful partner. Sometimes the humans were sick, soon to die, and so they traded their eternal life for an extension on their mortal one.

Trivia could understand all of these things, and even respect some of them, although she doubted many of the mortals who traded at her crossroads knew exactly what they were getting into when they died. But sometimes a human would come to her crossroads for something else. To raise a loved one they couldn't bear to live without, or to save the life of a dying child. These were the humans who surprise Trivia the most. They, more than the others, seemed fully aware of what the price of their treasures was. But still, they made their deals with weary, determined faces, because their love was stronger than their own sense of self-preservation.

Trivia couldn't really understand why they would make such deals, but she developed a fondness for these sorts of dealers. And while she couldn't, wouldn't ever tample with a demon's deal, Trivia did sometimes send the humans away with a touch more good luck than they'd had before.

Times changed. Civilizations rose and fell, rose and fell again. Cities grew. The deals changed little over time, and eventually Trivia turned up to view them less and less. Instead she watched her expanding domain of roads on roads on roads, amazed at how far the humans had come, and how quickly. And even though they forgot her, she still drew power from their crossings, from their sense of unease about roads not taken and highways at night. For a time, Nell forgot her interest in demons and deals.

And then, hundreds and hundreds of years on, Trivia heard something interesting. One of the demons, those foul, twisted, upstart little human souls, began to call himself a king. A king of the crossroads.

Trivia was amazed at the audacity. She and those like her had been ignored and nearly-forgotten by man, yes, but they still had power. She still had power. Who was this frail, demented little soul to lay claim to her domain?

And so she watched.

His soul wasn't like other demons. It wasn't just the red color—that had become common among demons of the crossroads—but the shape of it. Other demons' souls lashed and writhed, like they were still being tortured, like they were screaming and pain and wanting desperately to feel relief, even if only a little, by inflicting that pain on others. This demon's soul was calmer, more controlled. Like waves on the sea. And Trivia guessed, when riled, that he could be far for dangerous and vengeful than those others, because his fury was not rabid. It was tightly leashed, finely focused.

He wore a man, not too young but not quite middle aged, with dark hair and gleaming, intelligent brown eyes that seemed to be always laughing at some private joke. Trivia watched from shadow as he dealt, deal after deal, night after night. Grudgingly she could see why he was called the king, however presumptuous it might be. He was good at what he did, better than any other demon she had ever seen.

After weeks, Trivia watched as he suavely traded away a woman's life and love and free will in exchange for a balding older man's soul. Trivia had always had rather a soft spot for women, and a disdain for the men who traded their souls to subjugate them, and so she cursed the man as he strode away so that bad luck would dog him like one of her beloved hounds.

The demon seemed to sense the magic as it passed him by, and he turned to Trivia as if she'd called his name. Few demons ever noticed her minor magics, let alone located the source. A peculiar demon, indeed, this 'King'.

She stepped from the shadows at last. "You're the so-called King of the Crossroads?"

A red tendril of soul wavers in barest curiosity, and the demon smiles disarmingly. "You have me at a disadvantage, love."

"Trivia." She had hoped her name would be sufficient, but at the demon's lack of reaction she added, a little irritated, "Goddess of the Crossroads. And death, and magic."

Now he looked interested. "I thought that was Hecate."

Trivia shrugged. "We're related." She paused, then corrected, "Or, we were. She was too flashy, drew the attention of some hunters."

He accepted that easily. He strolled closer, so they met in the middle of her crossroads. He did not seem afraid of her, though she could kill him if she wanted. She had considered it, for the audacity of a demon to lay claim to her realm, but she found she rather liked this demon. She liked the quiet malice of his soul.

"Well, goddess of the crossroads," he greeted, "To what do I owe the honor?"

"I just wanted to get a look at you," she said easily. "The stain who has the audacity to declare himself king of my crossroads." She paused, looking him up and down. "Figured you'd be taller."

He doesn't miss a beat. "I measure up where it counts."

And Trivia is surprised into laughter. She doesn't laugh often, and it is like bells in a graveyard, and the howling of dogs, and the touch of magic. His vessel smiles a demon's smile, all teeth and red eyes, and the demon behind the flesh quivers in anticipation and a sort of question.

Trivia ponders that question, but not for long. She is interested, engaged in the world much more deeply than she has been in a long time. She wants to see what road this demon takes, and where it leads him.

And she discovers that when you are a goddess of the crossroads, you need not make a deal to kiss a demon.

[tipsycad147]

The Elemental Spirits

By shirleytwofeathers

Elementals and the Elemental Kingdom contain such creatures (often considered to be mythical) as fairies, goblins, gnomes and elves, leprechauns, tree people, brownies, undines, mermaids and sylphs. They are known as ‘Elementals’ because they are made up of the ‘ethers’ and are ‘ethereal’ and therefore invisible to (most) of us.

Their job is to build and maintain the plant kingdom while working in conjunction with the devas and other earth spirits. They are said to have been here since the beginning of time, have created the landscape of reality, which we return to for different reasons as guided.

Elementals live among plants and animals. They are responsible for the therapeutic effects you feel when outdoors amongst nature, at the beach and sea, at lakes and rivers, in parks and nature reserves, national parks and bushland.

Elemental spirits possess supernatural powers and are usually invisible to humans, living among the trees, rivers, plants, swamps, and mountains. They attach themselves to practically every natural thing. Elementals are the metaphysical; they are the cause of earthquakes, floods, gales, thunderstorms, and wildfires. More importantly, Elementals are responsible for creating, sustaining, and renewing life on Earth.

Elementals particularly do not like the busy and lower vibrations of the inner city life, they tend to stay away. Notice when you are in a busy city, you feel the energy and the vibrations are lower and how everything seems accelerated; it does not feel relaxing or stress free. But when you’re in the country you will notice the energy has a high vibration. It feels comforting, relaxing, quiet, and serene. That is where the Elementals dwell, spend their time, and protecting and loving Mother Earth.

Classical Ideas About Elementals

From the classical Paracelsian perspective there are four elemental categories which correspond to the four elements:

Gnomes – Earth

Undines – Water

Sylphs – Air

Salamanders – Fire

The classical concept of elementals seems to have been conceived by Paracelsus in the 16th century. He regarded them not so much as spirits but as beings between creatures and spirits, generally being invisible to mankind but having physical and commonly humanoid bodies, as well as eating, sleeping, and wearing clothes like humans.

The Sprites of fiery Termagants in Flame Mount up, and take a Salamander’s name. Soft yielding minds to Water glide away, And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea. The graver Prude sinks downward to a Gnome, In search of mischief still on Earth to roam. The light Coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair, And sport and flutter in the fields of Air.

— Alexander Pope

Paracelsus gave common names for the elemental types, as well as correct names, which he seems to have considered somewhat more proper, “recht namen”. He also referred to them by purely German terms which are roughly equivalent to “water people,” “mountain people,” and so on, using all the different forms interchangeably.

He noted that undines are similar to humans in size, while sylphs are rougher, coarser, longer, and stronger. Gnomes are short, while salamanders are long, narrow, and lean. The elementals are said to be able to move through their own elements as human beings move through air.

Gnomes, for example, can move through rocks, walls, and soil. Sylphs are the closest to humans in his conception because they move through air like we do, while in fire they burn, in water they drown, and in earth, they get stuck. Paracelsus states that each one stays healthy in its particular “chaos,” as he terms it, but dies in the others.

Paracelsus conceived human beings to be composed of three parts, an elemental body, a sidereal spirit, and an immortal divine soul. Elementals lacked this last part, the immortal soul. However, by marriage with a human being, the elemental and its offspring could gain a soul.

Other Ideas About Elementals

In his influential De Occulta Philosophia, published in 1531-33, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa also wrote of four classes of spirits corresponding to the four elements. However, he did not give special names for the classes: “In like manner they distribute these into more orders, so as some are fiery, some watery, some aerial, some terrestrial.” Agrippa did however give an extensive list of various mythological beings of this type, although without clarifying which belongs to which elemental class.

The Rosicrucians claimed to be able to see such elemental spirits. To be admitted to their society, it was previously necessary for the eyes to be purged with the Panacea or “Universal Medicine,” a legendary alchemical substance with miraculous curative powers. As well, glass globes would be prepared with one of the four elements and for one month exposed to beams of sunlight. With these steps the initiated would see innumerable beings immediately.

These beings, known as elementals, were said to be longer lived than man but ceased to exist upon death. However, if the elemental were to wed a mortal, they would become immortal. This exception seemed to work in reverse when it came to immortals, though, for if an elemental were to wed an immortal being, the immortal would gain the mortality of the elemental. One of the conditions of joining the Rosicrucians however, was a vow of chastity in hopes of marrying an elemental.

In Jainism, there is a superficially similar concept within its general cosmology, the ekendriya jiva, “one-sensed beings” with bodies (kaya) that are composed of a single element, albeit with a 5-element system (earth, water, air, fire, and plant), but these beings are actual physical objects and phenomena such as rocks, rain, fires and so on which are endowed with souls (jiva).

In the Paracelsian concept, elementals are conceived more as supernatural humanoid beings which are much like human beings except for lacking souls. This is quite the opposite from the Jain conception which rather than positing soulless elementals is positing that physical objects have some type of soul and that what are commonly considered inanimate objects have this particular type of soul.

Gnomes – Tending the Earth

The nature spirits who serve at the physical level are collectively called gnomes. Billions of gnomes tend the earth through the cycles of the four seasons and see to it that all living things are supplied with their daily needs.

Note: Garden Gnomes serve a slightly different purpose.

They also process the waste and by-products that are an inevitable part of our everyday existence and purge the earth of poisons and pollutants that are dangerous to the physical bodies of man, animal and plant life—including toxic wastes, industrial effluvia, pesticides, acid rain, nuclear radiation and every abuse of the earth.

On spiritual levels, the gnomes have an even heavier chore. They must clean up the imprints of man kind’s discord and negativity that remain at energetic levels in the earth.

War, murder, rape, child abuse, the senseless killing and torture of animals, profit seeking at the expense of the environment as well as hatred, anger, discord, gossip—all these create an accumulation of negatively charged energy that becomes a weight on the earth body and on the nature spirits.

Undines – Guarding the Gardens of the Seas

The elementals whose domain is the water element are collectively known as undines. These beautiful, supple mermaid-like beings are subtle and swift in their movements and can change form rapidly. The undines control the tides and have much to do with the climate as well as oxygenation and precipitation.

The undines also cleanse waters that have been poisoned by sewage, industrial waste, chemicals, pesticides and other substances. They work ceaselessly to heal the polluted seas as they recharge the electromagnetic field of the waters with currents of the Spirit. Their bodies are conductors of cosmic currents resounding through the chambers of submarine life.

The undines cleanse not only the physical waters, but also that aspect of mankind’s life that relates to the water element—our emotional and subconscious world.

They carry on their backs the weight of mankind’s emotional pollution—feelings that are not at peace, such as anger, emotional abuse, unloving speech, selfishness, anxiety and indulgence.

Sylphs – Aerating Life with the Sacred Breath

The sylphs tend the air element, directing the flow of air currents and atmospheric conditions. They purify the atmosphere and aerate every cell of life with the sacred breath of Spirit. They are bearers of the life-sustaining prana that nourishes all living things. On subtle levels, the sylphs transmit the currents of the Spirit from heaven to earth.

The sylphs often have thin, ethereal bodies that transform gracefully into myriad shapes as they soar through the air. Sylphs are able to travel at great distances very quickly, and giant sylphs can actually span the skies and interpenetrate the earth, the water and the fire elements.

Like giant transformers, sylphs conduct the currents of the mind of God unto the mind of man. They also work to purify the air of pollutants—everything from car exhaust to toxic fumes emitted from factories and other industrial processes—before these can pollute the water and the earth.

The air element corresponds to the mental level of existence, and thus the sylphs also have the job of purifying the mental plane. The mental plane can become polluted by negative thoughts that feed hatred, anger, racial prejudice, religious bigotry, resentment, pride, ambition, greed, jealousy and other poisons of the spirit.

Salamanders – Infusing Matter with the Fires of Creation

The fourth group of elementals work with the fire element and are collectively known as salamanders. Their job is crucial, for they serve at the atomic level of all organic and inorganic life, infusing the molecules of matter with the spiritual fires of creation.

The salamanders imbue the entire creation with the energies of the Spirit necessary to sustain life on earth. Capable of wielding both the most intense fires of the physical atom and the purifying, spiritual fires of Spirit, they control the spiritual-material oscillation of light within the nucleus of every atom.

Whether in electricity, firelight or the flame of a candle, the salamanders are agents for the transfer of the fires of the subtle world for mankind’s daily use. Without the spark of life sustained by the salamanders, life and matter begin to decay, corrode and disintegrate.

The burdens upon the salamanders range from the weight of mankind’s hatred to irresponsible uses of nuclear energy. Were it not for the fiery salamanders absorbing and transmuting the huge conglomerates of negativity over the large cities of the world, crime and darkness would be much more advanced than it is today.

The very sustaining of life—the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink—is something most of us take for granted. Yet at the most basic level, we are utterly dependent on the selfless service of the nature spirits. The miracle of life is the miracle of the gnomes, sylphs, undines and salamanders.

How To See Elementals

From Melanie the Medium, we have this nice little article about how to see Elemental Spirits:

Mark and I were having fun skipping rocks in the creek by our house when I saw a Nature Spirit in the rocks smiling at us. I was so startled when I saw him, and then of course I was so happy! I love to see Nature Spirits! I’ve seen more of them since I’ve been increasing my connection to nature over the past few years. Today I’m going to share with you a few things I’ve learned about Nature Spirits that can help you see them as well!

There are Nature Spirits in trees, rocks, water, around flowers…wonderful loving spirits all around you. To connect with them, start spending more time in nature. Go for walks and talk to the trees, rocks, water, wind…whatever appeals to you. You can even sit in your garden and do this. It also helps when you show the natural spaces around you love and appreciation.

Become aware of the energy of nature and open your mind to the possibility that you can communicate with these wonderful Spirits.

The first time I saw Nature Spirits was when I saw Tree Spirits in Ireland. The faces weren’t physical indentations on the bark of the trees. They appeared as whitish outlines of faces superimposed on the tree trunks. Mark and I both saw them, and it was very exciting!

Then, I asked my Spirit Guides to help me see gnomes and fairies. I saw my first gnome in Scotland. Mark and I were on a walk, and suddenly I was startled by the image of a face on the ground in front of me. It was about the size of a quarter, and I saw it superimposed over a leaf on the ground. It used the physical object of the leaf to help me see what it looked like. It was a brown, wrinkled leaf. In my mind I saw the full image of the gnome, and his face was deeply wrinkled like the leaf.

I’ve seen several more gnomes and a fairy since then, and each time they have appeared using some of the natural objects around me to help me see what they look like. That’s what my rock friend did! He helped me become aware of his presence using a rock that looks like a face.

Sometimes Nature Spirits appear in ways that anyone can look at and notice a clear face (like my rock friend), and other times they are more hidden and you can see them in your mind, as if you are seeing their image superimposed over a natural object.

Just like people, some Nature Spirits don’t want their picture taken. If I see one that I think will show up in a photo, I always ask if it is okay to take a picture. Sometimes those special moments with them are meant just for you.

When you see a Nature Spirit, it will stand out to you. You will feel its presence when you see it. You don’t have to try to see faces in every little pebble and leaf. A Nature Spirit will make itself known to you and you will feel its presence.

Feeling a Nature Spirit’s presence is just as valid and wonderful as seeing it, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t see one at first. Focus on feeling the energy of the plants, nature, and Nature Spirits around you when you are spending time in nature.

Tell your Spirit Guides you would like to become aware of the Nature Spirits, and then spend more time appreciating the natural environment around you. Care for it and nurture it. If you see trash on the ground, pick it up as an act of love. If you have an area of your garden that could use some extra attention, spend time tending it while feeling your love and appreciation for the nature around you. Be patient, and with time, you will start to become aware of Nature Spirits as well!

I hope this inspires you to spend more time in nature and feel your connection to the energy around you and the wonderful Nature Spirits!

Sending you love, Melanie Jade

Prayer to Heal Millions of Elementals

In the name of my mighty I AM Presence and my Higher Self and by the love, wisdom and power of the flame within my heart, I call forth the action of transmutation by the fire of my being, multiplied by the violet flame. I call forth this action on behalf of all elemental life.

I call for that portion of the flame I invoke and all that I AM to go forth now to heal millions upon millions of elementals in the earth!

I dedicate my lifestream to the liberation of all elemental life. And I accept it done this hour in full power according to the will of God. Amen.

Sources:

Om Times

Summit Light House

Crystal Links

Wikipedia

Melanie The Medium

https://shirleytwofeathers.com/The_Blog/powers-that-be/tag/water/

[honest-character-review]

Some world stuff

Alright! So This is a Lore review, I’ll be seeing how original everything is and if there’s any gaping logic or plot holes. Mod Jibs will be bold text

.:~The First Song~:.

..A song of Light, of Darkness, of Fire, of Earth and Water and Wind.. Of the Beginning, the End, and all things in between.. A song of Eternity, and a moment in time, forever lost..

Alright so we’re already got the elements present. This isn’t always a bad thing but it’s been done to death. Avatar did it, final fantasy did it, Chrono Trigger did it. Everyone and their dog has something to do with the elements so just make sure you don’t end up in a cliche pitfall. 

A single eye, the color of the sea at night, the waves crashing upon the sand, starlight twinkling upon the water’s surface. It blinked, and became the color of stone, rust, dirt, and hard work. Again, it blinked, this time becoming a milky white color, with swirls of wind inside it. It glowed briefly, then blinked, and again it changed, into purest black, even blacker than the surrounding empty space around it. The eye blinked yet again, becoming the depths of fire, the radiant glow of the forge, of volcanos, the flames fluttering in an unseen wind. Again the eye changed, turning into a beacon of light, a prism, unseen rainbows dancing in the void. The eye split into six eyes, each of them one of the forms the single eye had been before. A flash of light, then where the eyes had been were dragons. The one who had been the black eye was a smooth skinned dragon, its entire surface as black as deepest night. It had four webbed wings, longer than the entire body, a large, fin-like crest that extended down the entire body, and four large fins upon the tail. It opened its eyes, yellow, with a slit pupil and no sclera.

From this story it would be reasonable to assume this is a creation story and that dragons play an important role in this world or at least considered holy beings. You could use the dragons to do something different with this lore but right now it feels pretty stock or first draft. 

Its name was Darkness.

Please don’t let the darkness dragon be evil I beg of you. That would be like a two for one cliche special if you did. 

The milky eye had turned into a slender, white, furred dragon, with a long, lustrous gray mane, paws, a tuft of fur at the end of the tail, and four white, feathered wings. It opened its eyes, solid ice blue and glowing faintly.

Its name was Wind.

Describing all these dragons is sort of fluff for this review because there’s no real meat here. you’re telling me how they look and that’s fine but I’m here to judge the lore not the character design. The important thing that makes lore interesting is having these larger than life characters fighting or being born togehter. tell the reader how they look does nothing to help establish a sense of awe or epic sense of scale to the events you want to have an impact. If there were bits about each of their personalities I would give more advice but because it’s all looks, there’s not a lot I can say and it’s making your lore a little boring unfortunately. 

The rust and hard work eye had become a hulking beast, with the top growing grass and other plants on it. The underside was brown and dusty, seeming to drop bits of dirt and rocks. It had no wings, for no wings could lift this giant. Its eyes were a beautiful emerald green, with a round pupil in the middle.

Its name was Earth.

The eye that was a beacon of light had become a dragon with a long beak lined with small, sharp teeth, a crest like a sulphur-crested cockatoo, the body covered with white scales edged in black and the occasional yellow scale edged in white, and two long, narrow, feathered wings. Its eyes were like prisms, shifting in the light, reflecting a rainbow of colors.

Its name was Light.

The eye that had been like the sea at night became a dragon that was a deep blue, the scales shimmering, and the underbelly was a beautiful navy blue. It had two legs at the front, with extremely long toes on the feet that were webbed, while the tail had a large fin at the end, like a fish. Its eyes were sea green, with a white pupil in the center.

Its name was Water.

Finally, the fiery eye became a dragon with the scales seeming to shift color between deep red, orange, and gold, and its underbelly was a cream color. It had four horns upon its head that were black, and a few more on the neck that became a single row of spikes along the back and tail, ending at the tip of the tail. Its eyes were deepest black, and in certain lights seemed to have fire inside.

Its name was Fire.

If they all combined like the chaos emerald can, I’m going to say that’s pretty cliched.

The six dragons hovered in mid-air, then whirled around each other, breaking away from one another and coming back together again in a beautiful dance. 

That’s pretty cliche

The dance sped up faster and faster, the dragons a blur, and continued, never stopping. The entire time they danced, a beautiful, ethereal song flowed in liquid tones into the abyss, telling of Light, of Darkness, of Fire, of Earth and Water and Wind. Of the Beginning, the End, and all things in between. A song of Eternity, and a moment in time, forever lost.

Eventually, the dragons stopped dancing and began to create the world. These dragons are the six Ancients, the gods of the dragon world.

Dragon world I’m assuming is a working title. If not think of revising.

That was how the Ancients came into being. I also got info about the Clans and subclans + a rock-paper-scissors dynamic thing for weaknesses. Weaknesses thingy

Light is weak against Air, strong against Darkness Air is weak against Darkness, strong against Light Darkness is weak against Light, strong against Air Water is weak against Earth, strong against Fire Earth is weak against Fire, strong against Water Fire is weak against Water, strong against Earth

It’s like pokemon. that’s fine.

Some context or something

Or something. Context is important in these kind of reviews because it allows me to see how the lore relates to the rest of the events in the story. If the lore ultimately relates only a little bit to what’s happening, it  needs to be changed to fit the story better.

Ancients: The six Ancients are the gods of the dragons. They are Light, Water, Air, Earth, Fire, and Darkness.

Okay, we got this from the intro but okay. 

Elders: They rule the subclans and advise the Ancients. It is believed that they were once normal dragons but were blessed with long life or perhaps even immortality by the Ancients themselves.

Hi, Do you mean the ancients talk to the elders? That would make more sense than a god asking a mortal for advice. I’m guessing the clans are split up based on their element?

Clans: There is a clan for each Ancient, as following: the Clan of Light, the Clan of Water, the Clan of Wind, the Clan of Earth, the Clan of Fire, and the Clan of Darkness.

Yep. Alright moving on. 

Clan of Light subclans: Clan of the Sun, Clan of the Day.

Clan of Water subclans: Clan of the Sea, Clan of the Rivers, Clan of Rain. The Clan of Rain a subclan of the Clan of Water, however the dragons in the Clan of Rain are also related to the dragons in the Clan of Air. They are more closely related to the dragons in the Clan of Water.

Clan of Air subclans: Clan of the Winds (this or Clan of Wind? Idk which is better), Clan of the Sky.

Clan of Earth subclans: Clan of Stone, Clan of the Forest.

Clan of Fire subclans: Clan of the Forge, Clan of the Volcano. These subclans are related to the Clan of Stone, but are more closely related to the Clan of Fire, so are grouped in the Clan of Fire subclans, in a case similar to the Clan of Rain.

Clan of Darkness subclans: Clan of the Moon, Clan of the Night, Clan of Shadows.

So this is interesting and different. I like the idea of subclans, it adds a small twist on the elements thing. 

But, overall, your idea has kind of been done. I’m not really seeing anything that makes this terribly different from other media I’ve seen besides the dragon’s. This elements idea can still work but I feel this just needs a little more character added to your gods and world to set it apart. Make this creation story seem bigger. In the bible, it took the figure of god seven days. Think of religious texts when you write your lore. it’ll help you figure out how to make things more grand. I would love to see this resubmitted when some changes have been made.

-Mod Jibs