#almost 1.5k

[blyszczopies]

commission for @hoodiedeer thank you so much again!!

[waterwindow]

Need me a medic main who loves playing medic as much as I love playing soldier

[s0fter-sin]

new poll time lads

[katt1281]

Stole this from Reddit because. Yeah.

[sleep-nurse]

am i really still considered popular in the voca space???? and by that i mean my main because this is just a shitpost sideblog

[summercourtship]

I have almost 2k words of a cooper howard/reader thing written that i need to get out of my system

[planet4546b]

i am one and a half scenes out from finishing this fic that has been beguiling me for like 2 months. ive almost made it

[fuckinmemesman]

once again SURE i am forgetting some bill or other

[neriyon]

For the FFXIV ask thingy: 8, 14 & 20~

Ohh nice, a triple~

8. Biggest Accomplishment?

This is a hard one since I don't do any savages or extremes or any of the "hard" endgame content people usually say as their big accomplisments haha. So I guess uhh, idk, getting all jobs to 90 during EW? (six to go till all jobs at 100) Or that 5000th commendation I got last month? Figuring out how to do old content (and maps) with just the 3 of us? Still playing this game after 5 years?

14. Favorite Raid?

Alliance one? One of the Nier raids, probably Copied. Ridorana, Orbonne and Aglaia are good too, but there's just something that sparks joy whenever I see Nier raids come up in roulette.

8-man ones? Uhhh..... Pandae 9 (Kokytos) or 11 (Themis)? P4 (Hesperos), 6 (Hegemone) and 7 (tree) were nice too, and I kinda still like getting Eden Titan on rouls.

20. Favorite Limit Break?

Hmm, summoner one is very neat! Not that you get to use it that often, but it's fun to finally become Bahamut.

Fav tank one is drk, melee on is ninja (*angrily does really fast hand signs at you*), ranged is bard (its the bow at the end) and healer is whm. Almost all of them are good tho, only ones I'm meh about are the more "boring", non flashy ones (pld, mnk, sam)

[write-kin]

Turning.

Cal is stolen away, and gives up his humanity.

CWs: death

[note: this is a rewrite of an actual scene from the campaign cal is from! i wrote this from memory and kinda went into cal's mental state.]

-

He’d just wanted a breath of fresh air.

Calamine had felt like he was about to suffocate, the grief and his own struggle and fear making the air thick and making it hard to breathe. 

It wasn’t anyone else’s fault. Nobody had expected the boxes to contain bones. Much less ones that small. Nobody would have faulted Calamine for slipping away. The black bird that stared at him from outside the window, its beady eyes boring into him uncomfortably, didn’t help. 

So he made his way down the trapdoor, and then slipped out of the windmill, stumbling into the woods. Bryn and Sh’han were busy talking to each other, anyways. They wouldn’t miss him. He felt his heart beat in his chest like it was trying to escape. The woods soothed him, though. Back ‘Home’, there’d always been birdsong, or something going on outside even when the stone walls were silent.

But here, the only noise was his own footsteps. The eerie silence wrapped around him like a comforting blanket. At least, it did for the few steps he took before the same bird fluttered down again, landing on a branch in front of him. This close, its large size made it clear that he was staring down a raven. 

Those dark, beady eyes stared at him again. Unblinking- did birds blink? It looked at him like it wanted something. 

Knowing this place, it probably did.

He barely had time to wonder, much less act, before another raven landed near him. And then another. And another. There were tens, maybe even hundreds of ravens around him, approaching and fluttering and twisting around him so that the forest was obscured, and all he could see was their dark feathers and beady eyes. And in mere moments, in a flash of dark wings and confusion, Calamine was gone. 

The birds surrounded him, and he put his arms up to protect his face, his long braid whipping around him in the wind the birds created around him.

When they dissipated, and when Calamine slowly lowered his arms down, the forest was nowhere to be seen. 

Instead, he found himself standing on what felt like an endless plane of smooth, glassy obsidian. Looking down, he saw his reflection, scared brown eyes staring back up at him. 

He steeled himself before he looked up. 

And there, lounging in a throne, sat Strahd von Zarovich himself. 

The throne was ornate, a deep red velvet and wood so dark it was almost black, hewn in intricate patterns. A raven sat on the back of the throne, tilting its head in unsettling, twitchy motions as it examined Calamine. He felt like he was being scrutinized for any signs of weakness.

In Strahd’s clawed hand sat a goblet. Silvery metal held crystal portions, which showed that it held a thick red liquid. Even in the dim light, there was no mistaking what it held for wine. Especially not with how Strahd held eye contact as he raised the glass to his lips. 

Almost like a halo, a full solar eclipse sat behind Strahd’s head, the sky fading from an uneasy scarlet into black, with no stars to be seen. Even the star embroidery on Calamine’s coat felt drowned by the void, like the clouds that framed the scene he found himself in were swallowing up anything that dared even pretend to illuminate the world outside of the dim light the eclipse offered. 

With how smooth the ground was, Calamine almost felt like he’d slip and fall, like he was standing on a sheer cliff face and one step would send him hurtling down. It was a strange type of vertigo, where everything was perfectly still and yet he felt as if he were about to go hurtling down into the nothingness above him. 

And yet when, on shaky legs, he stepped forwards, Calamine didn’t fall. His boots met the stone and didn’t slip. He took step after step, gaining confidence as he approached, stopping a few feet away from Strahd. Even with the vampire lord sitting, Cal still felt dwarfed by him. 

The look Strahd gave him was scrutinizing, yet gentle. He looked Calamine over, expression stern. There were an agonizing few seconds before he spoke. 

“Why are you here?” The question filled Calamine with a dread he couldn’t place the exact source of. When he spoke, he was quiet, and his voice strained with the struggle to get the words out of his throat.

“The- the birds brought me here, I don’t-” “You know what I mean.” Strahd’s interruption makes him feel like he’s just failed some sort of test. Like he’s a child in trouble again. Calamine took in a deep breath, and tried once more.

“I came here because of you. Because I- I want to be strong. Like you are.” “Strong?” The response came, full of vitriol. “You think I am merely strong? I am the ancient. I am the land, and you come to me and say I am simply strong’.” “Perhaps,” Strahd continued, and Calamine felt like a prey animal as he did so, “I was wrong to bring you here. Perhaps you are not as interesting as I thought.” 

No. No, he couldn’t. No. Not after everything Calamine had done, had given up to get here. No. He couldn’t fail now, not here. He took another step forwards, tears threatening to spill from his eyes. He almost didn’t care.

“No! I, I- I want to be powerful. Not just strong. I want to be powerful, if I- if I had even a fraction of your power, I could- I could hurt them. Like they hurt me. Please. I came here to find you, to speak to you, to-” He exhaled. “I don’t have anything else. This is my only chance.” Strahd raised an eyebrow, a smile across his face. While Calamine was pleading his case, begging and almost crying, he’d finished his drink. Calamine noticed that, the light of the eclipse filtering through the crystal, glinting on his eyes and reflecting on his face. Strahd held the goblet out, and with that satisfied grin, he took one clawed finger and dragged it across the palm of the hand holding the glass. It bled, dripping into the glass below.

Calamine stared, transfixed, watching Strahd’s blood fill the goblet. Slowly. When it was full so that the crystal segments were once again crimson, the cut seemed to simply sew itself back up, like it had never been there.

Strahd’s hand shifted. Wordlessly, he held the goblet out to Calamine. 

The few steps it took to be close enough to take the goblet felt like miles. Slowly, he reached out, taking it in his hands. The blood glistened, almost beckoning to him. His mouth felt dry. He stared, watching the light dance across the red. 

“Go on.” Strahd coaxed. 

Vividly, in Calamine’s mind, a crossroads appeared. He was holding the key to his own future. He wasn’t sure what that was, and yet he knew, he knew with his entire being that if he were to refuse this, whatever it may be, he may as well turn around, tuck himself back into that dark little room and stay there, no revenge, no fulfillment, until death took him. 

And yet.

Calamine tipped the goblet to his lips, the blood metallic and strangely warm on his tongue, choking down half the goblet before he pulled it away. His eyes flickered up to Strahd, whose smile was smug, confident in the lazy way one can only have when they know for a fact they are entirely in control. 

“Oh, no no no,” he chided gently. “On the road you have set yourself down, there will be no doing things in halves.” And so Calamine took the glass back to his lips, drinking down the rest of the blood, which became less and less sickening as he did so. 

When it was gone, and his lips were stained with red, the goblet fell to the glassy ground. Calamine felt a sharp crack of pain tear through his head, like he was being torn apart, and it wrapped through to the rest of his body. It was agonizing, and his legs went out under him. He couldn’t even catch himself as he fell to the floor, body wracked with pain. 

He thought he might have screamed at one point. If he did, it was an alien sound, swallowed by the fog that crept in. He knew that he fell into silence at some point, the world fading to black as a chill began to overtake him.

“Very good,” Strahd mused, standing over him somewhere. “You might be more interesting than I thought.” 

And there, collapsed in a heap, with Strahd von Zarovich as the only witness, Calamine drew his last breath. 

[briefle]

"What's this I hear about a whole lot of 'Nothing', then?" Martyn's voice travels from across the room. Or at least he thinks so. He can't quite see that far, with the... everything around him... much too bright. "I'm not quite sure you know what this is yet, but rest assured it is 'Something' alright." Scar doesn't have much else to do. So he bites.

or: woof. emotions. hmmmm. what if we pretended not to for half the ficlet. i hear guessing games are a wonderful team activity this time of year.

[teddybeartoji]

❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗

[darby-rowe]

hii we defos need a part 2 to the non-con reader touching coryo in his sleep, love ur writing!! 😩🫶

oh dw anon it’s coming!! gonna work on asks for the rest of the work week and then during the weekend i’ll work on my actual fics 😊 thank u btw!!

[erabundus]

good evening, i have apparently run the desert pavilion domain 1.5k times and i still do not have a satisfactory artifact set.

[epsilontauri]

hold up you know what i’m mad as hell.

[dragonanne]

I...I think I might be able to finish draft 1 of Jade Torch book 2 by the end of the month...if not sooner 👀