will you write something vampire themed for spooky season?
The coffin was luxurious, as far as coffins went. The protagonist had half-expected just a plain wood box, scratchy and full of splinters. They supposed, if they had to die, they could at least do so in style.
It didn't really make them feel better.
And it didn't make the coffin fit two people any better either.
"Stop squirming," the secret love of their life snapped. "You're just going to get us more stuck."
"I don't think it's possible to get more stuck." Their voice was only a little, reasonably, hysterical. "We're buried alive in a bloody coffin!"
The secret love of their life looked awful beneath them. Pallid, even in the crowded gloom of their shared grave. They felt clammy and cold beneath the protagonist's limbs.
The protagonist swallowed. They tried to stop squirming. There were no comfortable positions.
The love of their life hissed between their teeth with irritation, and if the protagonist could see properly, they were sure that a terrifying and wrathful and gorgeous glare would be pointed in their direction.
"I'm sorry," the protagonist said. For the squirming, sure, but mostly for everything else. For somehow getting them into this mess. For being the last idiot that the love of their short life would ever see. For not knowing how to save either of them.
"You should stop talking and conserve your air."
"You should stop talking and conserve your air," the protagonist mumbled. They closed their eyes. They tried not to panic. The panic closed in on them on every side, just like the too close suffocating padded walls, and the steady weight of six or so feet of packed soil crushing them on all sides.
"Someone's going to rescue us," the love of their life said. "Your friends - someone - will figure out where we are."
"Coffin. My first guess too."
"They'll get us out." The growl in their friend's voice was almost inhuman. Quite impressive.
The protagonist bit down hard on their lip, and the rather unhelpful response of 'before or after we die from the lack of oxygen? Because, you know, I read that people can survive five hours locked in a coffin. Tops. If they're not hyperventilating. But who's hyperventilating! I'm not hyperventilating! Are you?'
Their friend drew a sharp breath. Then they squirmed, hypocritically, before managing to place cool hands on either side of the protagonist's whirling brain.
"Easy," they murmured, abruptly far more gentle. "You're okay. You're going to be okay. I'm not - I won't let anything bad happen to you."
The protagonist felt tears prick the corners of their eyes. Absurd.
One of their friend’s thumbs grazed over their lip, wiping away the bead of blood there.
"Match your breathing to mine," their friend murmured, voice a little hoarse and trying-to-keep-it-together. "Concentrate on me."
The protagonist did their best. Their friend breathed very slowly, admirably calm really, given the circumstances.
"I won't hurt you," their friend said. "I love you. I won't."
"It's not you I'm worried about. Wait - you love me?"
It was impossible to see the love of their life's face, and really, a coffin was the worst place for a confession. Because the protagonist would very much have liked to have seen their face. At least if they were hanging over a lava pit, the protagonist would have been able to see their face, and make a judgment on if they meant that platonically or romantically.
God. They hated their brain.
Their friend didn't say anything and the silence was surely almost as agonising as dying. Almost. They brushed a tear away from the protagonist's cheek, feather-light.
"More than anything," their friend said. "Now shut. up. Please. And please, please, stop moving."
The protagonist shut up. Somehow. They rested their head against their friend's chest, letting the knowledge of that confession fill them with warmth, or try to.
At least they were dying in a coffin with someone they loved. Who loved them back. Someone's whose heart was so...
The protagonist stopped. It was a trick. A mistake. Something. But it felt, beneath their ear, like their friend's heart wasn't beating. Actually, when the protagonist really thought about it, now that their breathing was more or less steady, even in the squashed space they couldn't hear their friend's breathing at all. They couldn't feel it against their cheek and...
They didn't think the love of their life had always been so cold.
"Why." The protagonist resisted the urge to shift again. "Why do you think you're going to hurt me? Worst you're going to do is elbow me in the face?"
Their friend was silent a second time.
"Right?" The protagonist pressed.
"Someone will find us. They'll get us out. It's not a problem. It won't be a problem."
"What...what won't be a problem?" But the protagonist, with a dreadful twist in their stomach, knew. It should have been obvious, maybe, in the last twenty four hours.
The stomach bug. The dark glasses. The cringing from the sunlight.
"I won't hurt you." A mantra. Not a reassurance; a mantra, a plea. "I love you. I won't hurt you. You're going to be fine."
Five hours, suddenly, seemed like a lifetime.
The coffin was luxurious, as far as coffins went. Excellent quality. Top notch.
Nothing else, after all, would keep in a newly turned and starving vampire locked up.
"Shit," the protagonist whispered.
And that about summed up their current predicament.
833 notes
·
View notes
also on the topic of meaningful consequences re: character death I don't understand the take that death in fantasy requires physical permanency to matter or give a story "stakes". death is permanent regardless. Do you really think that if they get her back, they'll just go back to normal? That these characters are not forever fundamentally changed from this, that Laudna will not be fundamentally changed from this?
That Imogen's world will be less fractured, that she won't be even more of an anxious wreck now that what she stands to lose has been put into vivid clarity? That Orym won't still carry the guilt of being the chosen, that he will be less haunted by the connections he drew to his own grief with Will to Imogen's with Laudna? That Fearne won't look at Laudna and think of that coin flip, of her choice, and what that means for her and how she loves? That FCG and Ashton won't think to this and be reminded of the people they've hurt or been hurt by, and what this effort and what this grief means for how they view the hells?
That Laudna, who has been so blasé about life and if she's alive and what being alive even means for someone like her, won't wake up surrounded by family and by love and be driven to reexamine everything she's taught herself in 28 years of isolation to cope with the trauma of Whitestone? That this, maybe, will be the driving force she needed to realize that there are things she wants to live for?
It might be that I'm just biased, but I'm not sure what stakes Laudna perma-dying adds aside from just presenting the characters with the knowledge they all already have that they can, in fact, die. that what they're up against is incomprehensibly powerful and dangerous. The stakes already feel so impossibly high when you think of what and who they are preparing to face. frankly the aftermath of this combat alone, even if everything had gone perfect and everyone had gotten back up a-okay, would have set that tone.
I don't know, regardless I'll be happy to watch whatever story they choose to tell unfold as it does, but it strikes me that so many people seem to think that death only matters if there is a physical absence.
905 notes
·
View notes
I think it's very interesting--and I mean that genuinely--that overwhelmingly in the past week or two, the responses I've seen about Relvin have centered around the idea that "he should have fought" for Imogen or that "he should FIGHT" for Imogen. I've seen this particular line pop up quite a few times in slightly different ways, and I think maybe we should unpack this a little.
Because in the physical sense, Relvin can't really fight. By that, I mean his stats probably look like Gilear Faeths and like, yeah, you can argue that Gilear tagged along during Sophomore Year and therefore, so could Relvin. But Gilear also *spoilers* died three separate times in a 20 episode span, and is only alive at the end because Emily loves him so fucking much and Brennan's resurrection rules in FHSY are more lax than Matt's. Particularly post-Solstice, where there is no resurrection to be had at all if Relvin were to die. If you want Relvin to join the Hells and Fight The Moon And Ludinus Too, it's really not feasible even on just a physical level. That's not even engaging with the question of "why would the Hells even want him there?" They wouldn't. He'd be a nuisance at best and a liability at worst.
If you want to him to Fight The Moon sans the Hells on his own, he's really not capable of that either! He's not a scholar, he's not a magic user, he's--he's a groom. A stablehand. He can't "pick up his pitchfork" (that he shovels manure with) and stand defiantly against the forces that face Imogen & Co. He's really, truly Just A Dude. Which is kind of the point I've been trying to make about him. He's lived his life around extraordinary people, and he is not extraordinary. He doesn't have the tools to fight something like this, which is part of his tragedy. Is there a world where he quits his job, leaves his horses and his home and his life and tries to become a warrior for the sake of his absentee wife and the daughter he loves but doesn't know how to love the right way? I suppose. But wouldn't that be a different story than this one? And isn't it worth finding the meaning in the one we're experiencing now?
If this argument is that he should have fought for Imogen on an emotional level i.e. having been there for her more or more outwardly shown her affection, we kind of run aground of the same problems. The ask here is that we fundamentally change Relvin's character to make him something that he is not. He is a man who struggles with emotions, and was probably desperately scared about what Imogen was experiencing when it happened and didn't want her to feel his fear. Or his thoughts about her mother. And so, yes, he pulls away (for a variety of reasons). And there is a conversation to be had about his choice to withhold information about Liliana--it's questionable. But, then, every option he was presented with was questionable. What do you tell Imogen, who was abandoned by her mother when she was two? That her mother is dead, or that her mother abandoned her? You pray Imogen never develops the same debilitating powers as her mother, but when she does? Do you give her the comfort of knowing someone else had the same powers, the same struggles, at the expense of prompting more questions about her mother? Do you take the chance to be peppered with questions about how these powers work only to helplessly look on and say "I don't know," and maybe send Imogen down the same road as her mother even sooner than she actually did?
There is no good option. There is no heroic version of Relvin that makes all the right choices and becomes Imogen's white knight father, endlessly supportive and wholly committed to her. The situation is too complicated, and Relvin, frankly, is far too much Just Some Guy to be able to really grasp what Imogen is going through or to fight it in an active way. But I do think it's interesting that this seems to be the version of Relvin that the fandom would have found acceptable.
134 notes
·
View notes